The Shimmers in the Night Read online

  THE

  SHIMMERS

  IN

  THE

  NIGHT

  THE

  SHIMMERS

  IN

  THE

  NIGHT

  a novel

  LYDIA MILLET

  Big Mouth House

  Easthampton, MA

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2012 by Lydia Millet (lydiamillet.net). All rights reserved.

  Cover art © 2012 Sharon McGill (sharonmcgill.net). All rights reserved.

  Big Mouth House

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  bigmouthhouse.net

  weightlessbooks.com

  [email protected]

  Distributed to the trade by Consortium.

  First Edition

  September 2012

  Library of Congress Control Number on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-931520-78-2 (trade cloth); 978-1-931520-79-9 (ebook)

  Text set in Minion Pro.

  Printed on 50# Natures Natural 30% PCR Recycled Paper by C-M Books in Ann Arbor, MI.

  For Mrs. Merry and Mrs. B.

  One

  It was a Sunday in late October, the week before Halloween. Long drifts of red and yellow leaves covered the front yard of the Sykes’s rambling house next to Cape Cod Bay. A couple of days ago it had been crisp outside, an average fall day—just chilly enough so you could breathe in the cold air and notice it had its own clean taste—but today it was warm. Cara wore nothing but a cotton shirt, and even so she was sweating as she raked. This must be what her dad called Indian summer.

  But still, it was strangely warm.

  She tramped through the piles of leaves around to the side of the house, where a rusty thermometer stuck out of the gray wooden shingles. The red line of mercury hovered at seventy-four.

  It was Jax’s job to rake and bag the leaves; he got paid a big five bucks, which their dad seemed to think was a windfall. “When I was ten years old,” he said sternly, “I mowed the lawn for a nickel. And I was happy to do it.” But Jax was in Cambridge for two weeks at some kind of genius-kid camp run by an institute her older brother, Max, called “a think tank.”

  Max said he wouldn’t trust those think-tank people as far as he could throw them. He said “think tank” basically meant place full of evil smart people, because a place full of harmless smart people was called “a university.”

  Max (being a rebel, or at least liking to look like one) thought there were conspiracies all around them. The night before Jax left, Max had spun out a few paranoid scenarios for their baby brother’s benefit as the three of them sat in Max’s chaotic bedroom, littered with dirty vintage T-shirts, Ramones and Clash posters pinned messily to the walls. It was entirely possible, he’d told Jax, that the people who worked at the think tank only pretended they were going to teach him how to “optimize the skills associated with his eidetic memory” as they’d said in their letter. Whatever that meant.

  In fact, said Max, they were planning to mold Jax into a brainiac supersoldier.

  It was nothing new; they’d practically made a habit of it in the previous century, according to Max—for example with mind-altering drugs in the Vietnam War.

  “Come on,” Cara had said. “Get serious. Jax the Terminator? His biceps are smaller than mine!”

  “They are not,” Jax had squeaked, and lifted his arm up to make a muscle.

  It looked pale and flimsy, not unlike a frog’s leg.

  Max patted him on the head.

  “It’s OK, small dude,” he said. “These days the wars are mostly fought by geeks like you, on computers.”

  “I’ll definitely take a pass on the supersoldier option,” said Jax.

  “But maybe you won’t be able to,” said Max. “You feel me? Mind control. Electric wires into your eyeballs. Stuff like that. Did you ever see Clockwork Orange?”

  Jax shook his head.

  “It’s not exactly PG,” conceded Max. “Word to the wise: once they’ve got you cornered in their high-tech facility, all bets are off. You might come back to us with a chip in your head that communicates with NORAD Central Command.”

  “What’s norad?” asked Cara.

  Jax rolled his eyes at Max’s dire warnings and went off the next morning anyway, though Cara heard him asking their dad a few faintly anxious questions as they packed his bags into the back of their new used Subaru.

  The people at the Advancement Institute couldn’t know that Jax could read minds (ping them, as he and Cara called it; Max preferred not to discuss it). The Sykes kids kept that one to themselves, although their mother understood. It was even a secret from their father. All that the Institute people knew—Jax claimed and Cara hoped—was that he had a photographic memory and “accelerated learning skills.”

  Still, Cara was worried that with all their prying and testing, they’d find out about Jax’s hidden abilities and the whole thing would turn into a circus. Before they knew it Jax would be kidnapped and locked up in a secret compound at an undisclosed location. “Some hyped-up ESP freak show,” as Max had helpfully put it.

  But Jax had promised he wouldn’t let anyone else find out about the pinging.

  Their mother knew. But she didn’t really count.

  And, of course, she was gone.

  So now the raking of leaves fell to Cara. It’d had to wait for the weekend, because on weekdays she was busy with swim team, debate, and even the annoying dance committee, which her best friend Hayley had forced her to join. Hayley, who lived a few doors down, was intent on becoming popular (“So what? It’s a value.”) and chose her extracurriculars based on what she saw as their status with the in crowd. Debate team, for instance, got a two out of ten. Not good. Hayley would have stopped Cara from debating at all, if she could. And probably from all activities requiring an IQ score above moron.

  Hayley was smart, but she didn’t like to admit it in public.

  This afternoon Max had gone out with his girlfriend, Zee, and Cara’s dad, who taught religious history, was hunkered down in his study writing a paper about some medieval guy who wore scratchy shirts for the glory of God. The professor loved those old-fashioned kooks. He used to teach at Harvard, taking the ferry in from Provincetown three days a week, but he’d gone on sabbatical from there to turn some of his writings on medieval God fans into a book, and as a favor to some other professor was teaching a class at 4 C’s in the meantime. In the four months since Cara’s mother had been gone, he’d thrown himself into his work even more than usual. He slept on the couch in his study and sometimes got up and paced in the middle of the night, drinking instant coffee that tasted, as far as Cara could tell, like an old shoe.

  True, he was slightly more cheerful about the situation since Cara had told him she’d talked to her mom on the phone—but only slightly. Obviously there was still plenty for him to worry about. But at least he was reassured that his wife wasn’t hurt or kidnapped or wanting a divorce (as the police had seemed to think).

  What had really happened was far more complicated, and the kids had decided to keep it to themselves. Max didn’t approve of keeping the truth from their dad, but their mother had asked them to, and in the end even Max had grudgingly agreed. What had happened was this: at the beginning of September they’d talked to their mother once, in the backyard, in the middle of the night, before she flew off into the sky. And the last time they saw her she was rising over the ocean on the back of a beast Jax said looked like a pterosaur—which should have been extinct for about sixty-five-million years.

  Later he’d looked it up and claimed it fit
the profile of a Quetzalcoatlus northropi, the only ancient winged reptile he figured might have been big enough to carry a full-grown adult. But “the data were insufficient,” as he put it.

  Cara thought of that part as something she’d dreamed. It was just easier.

  Back then her mother had claimed Cara had the gift of “vision,” that she could see what other people couldn’t. Cara wasn’t so sure, though in the summer she had felt she was getting glimpses of hidden things once or twice. And after her mother went away again—and their old dog, Rufus, fell in battle—Cara had made a conscious effort not to think about the war she’d said was coming, not to think about the hidden world that lay beneath the visible one. She’d tried to forget the Pouring Man who had attacked them, with water from nowhere coursing steadily down his white face. The beginning of the new school year had been a great distraction, and she’d pushed the summer to the back of her mind—the summer and the dark clouds gathering.

  But over the past few days she’d started to feel restless, and sometimes, when Hayley droned on about dances or clothes, her thoughts drifted. Maybe it was just that she wasn’t distracted by the newness of school anymore. She knew the routine: she had swim team early in the mornings, then homeroom, then three classes and a spare before lunch, then forty minutes eating at the corner table in the cafeteria with Hayley and her other best friend, Jaye, before her afternoon classes started; it was predictable and unsurprising.

  Or maybe she was impatient for Jax to come home. The brainiac boot camp was probably good for him—maybe he was meeting other smart kids and not feeling like such an oddball for once. He’d been adopted when he was two and Cara was five, so she could barely remember life without him; but Jax was so different, with his abilities, that she always worried about him feeling like the odd one out.

  Anyway, it was a good idea for him to connect with other kids; she knew that. Outside the family, he had only one real friend: Kubler, another high-IQer in Jax’s grade. She’d wondered what kind of parent would name their kid Kubler—until she met Kubler’s parents. The entire family was a card-carrying dweebfest, each one more socially inept than the last. They were tall, skinny, and gawky as ostriches. The dad was a nerd cliché: he sported toes that turned inward and actually wore terrycloth tennis sweatbands in daily life, right smack around the middle of his forehead. The mom, a math whiz, had giant buckteeth, wore stretchy pants, and had won a famous prize for geniuses that always seemed to make Cara’s father grumble. The parents got agitated when Cara tried to say hello and always shepherded Kubler into their aging Volvo without much conversation. But still, she liked them.

  Anyway, with Jax and her mom both gone and Max out practically all the time with Zee, the house was depressingly empty. She had Hayley and Jaye, but at the end of the day they went home to their own families, even if those families got on their nerves half the time. Hayley had her doting mom and some cousins who lived in Hyannis and came out on weekends; Jaye had her parents and a little sister in kindergarten who worshiped her.

  Whereas Cara…well, lately she sometimes felt, in the empty house, that she hardly had a family at all.

  Plus, she’d been having nightmares. They woke her up in the small hours of the morning, but once she was awake, she couldn’t remember their details at all and it was hard to get back to sleep. Then all day long she felt there was something she should remember, a forgotten thing that might be important hovering just out of view.

  She trudged into the dingy garage and grabbed a trashcan, which she dragged along the driveway of broken white seashells, making an abrasive noise as the can bumped over the shells with its hard, black-plastic wheels. Just as she laid it down in a corner of the yard and started raking in some maple leaves, her cell rang.

  “Max should be doing that,” said Hayley, when Cara hit answer.

  “Doing what?” asked Cara.

  “The yard work,” said Hayley, and Cara looked up to see she was standing not ten feet away.

  Hayley grinned and flipped her pink phone closed. She lived four houses down the street and was a chronic cellphone abuser.

  “Gotta use all those free weekend minutes,” she said by way of explanation.

  “Free except for the tumor you’re going to get in your head from using that thing 24-7, you mean,” said Cara.

  “Hey, if I’m gonna die for something, it might as well be, like, communicating too much with my fellow humans,” said Hayley. “Sue me.”

  “You just give, give, give,” said Cara.

  That was an expression Hayley’s mom liked to use. “I give, give, give,” she’d say, sighing. “I’m a giver.”

  “So is it crazy warm out or what? I mean, it’s almost November!”

  “If you’re going to stand there doing nothing, you could always help me,” said Cara, turning back to her pile of leaves.

  “Are you kidding? Max gets to go out with that Zee chick, and then I have to grub around in the dirt while they’re out there living it up?”

  Hayley had had a crush on Max forever, even though she was almost three years younger than he was.

  “Zee’s nice,” said Cara. “You’d like her if you gave her a chance.”

  “Um, she’s my mortal enemy,” said Hayley. “I don’t want to like my enemy. That’s the whole point of having one.”

  Cara thought about some quote her dad liked to use—keep your friends close and your enemies closer, or something. Actually, she didn’t get it.

  “So listen,” said Hayley. “You want to do some wardrobe planning with me?”

  “Uh, no?”

  “For the trip!”

  They had their first away-meet of the season tomorrow, a regional that would take the swim team to Boston. They’d get to miss two days of classes.

  “OK, then here’s my wardrobe planning,” said Cara. “Jeans and sweaters.”

  “You can help me, then,” said Hayley. “I mean, we’re going to the big city. People have style there, Cara. You have to outdress the Joneses.”

  “In Boston? You told me it was the worst-dressed major city on the East Coast!”

  “We don’t live in the USA anymore, babe. We live on the internet.”

  Hayley had recently told the school’s guidance counselor that, for her career, she planned to be a celebrity. Since they’d just started eighth grade, they all had to have a meeting with the counselor, a pasty lady who wore glasses and blobby orange earrings that looked like her kid had made them out of Model Magic. She favored multiple-choice questionnaires and made the students write out their “Interests and Goals” on a long, annoying form. It bore headings like GOALS FOR THIS YEAR. LONG-TERM GOALS.

  Cara felt like saying, Hey. I’m in eighth grade here! So under LONG-TERM GOALS she’d just written TBA.

  But Hayley didn’t suffer from those doubts. On her questionnaire, which she filled out at the lunch table sitting at Cara’s elbow, she’d written Celebrity/Pop Star/Actress.

  Hayley wasn’t stuck up; she just knew what she wanted. Anyone could do it, she said. It was a matter of willpower. And luck.

  Currently, however, her plans for fame were being flouted. In fact, she didn’t personally “live on the internet” at all. Her mom wouldn’t even let her onto basic social networking sites due to their being the gateway, as she put it, to molesters, abductors, and general perverts.

  “Oh, fine,” sighed Hayley finally, and stooped down to hold the trash can steady on its side so that Cara could rake the leaves in. “But after this, seriously. Let’s go to my room, and I’ll do a runway walk for you. You can rate my outfits.”

  “Big thrills.”

  That night dinner was just Cara, Max, and her dad, and Max was fifteen minutes late. He came banging through the front door and when he sat down at the table Cara could see he had a hickey on his neck.

  Gross.

  Or, as Jax would say, because he talked like their dad, “unsavory.”

  She did like Zee, but the thought of how the mark got there wa
s disgusting anyway. How did Zee not get grossed out by Max, too? He picked the wax from his ears right in public. And scrutinized it.

  She glanced at her dad to see if he’d noticed. But luckily for her older brother, it wasn’t the kind of thing their dad would ever pay attention to.

  “Tardy again, Max,” he said, and lifted his wine glass. “This is becoming a habit.”

  “Sorry,” said Max, and reached for a roll. Recently most of their dinners were prepared by Lolly, an older lady who often brought her toddler grandson along; tonight she’d served the square dinner rolls you bought unbaked in white cardboard trays at the Stop & Shop. Max could eat about eight of them in a row, so it was fortunate they came by the dozen.

  “Next time make sure you’re here at six on the dot,” said their dad sternly.

  “Yes, sir,” said Max, only half joking.

  “So, Cara,” said her father. “I understand you’re getting on a bus tomorrow morning with the swim team. You’ll be away through Tuesday?”

  “We’re coming back Wednesday morning,” said Cara. “Then we go to school for the rest of the day like usual. So I’ll be home Wednesday night.”

  “Zee’s going, too,” said Max to their dad. “She’s one of the best on the team at the hundred I.M.”

  “I.M.,” mused their dad, lifting his fork to his mouth and looking preoccupied. The way he said it, it sounded like he thought it was a foreign language.

  “Individual medley?” said Cara.

  “Ah,” said their dad, and nodded sagely to suggest he’d already known.

  Cara remembered watching the Beijing Olympics a few years back; her dad had put his feet up in an armchair nearby and buried his nose in a thick book about the trial of Joan of Arc. He’d grumbled that spectator sports were “… primitive rituals. In the days of the Roman empire, in the games at the Coliseum, tens of thousands watched greedily as slaves tore each other limb from limb.”

  She wasn’t sure what that had to do with Michael Phelps.

  “So what’s your event, Car?” asked Max.

  “I’m just on a relay, is all,” said Cara. She wasn’t a star swimmer or anything; she just liked being in the water, which always made her feel calm. “Hayley’s doing one of the big races, though. She qualified for freestyle.”