The Host(97)

I also learned more about my neighbors.

Ian and Kyle shared the cave on my hallway with the two real doors propped over the entrance. Ian had begun bunking with Wes in another corridor in protest of my presence here, but he’d moved back after just two nights. The other nearby caves had also gone vacant for a while. Jeb told me the occupants were afraid of me, which made me laugh. Were twenty-nine rattlesnakes afraid of a lone field mouse?

Now Paige was back, next door, in the cave she shared with her partner, Andy, whose absence she mourned. Lily was with Heidi in the first cave, with the flowered sheets; Heath was in the second, with the duct-taped cardboard; and Trudy and Geoffrey were in the third, with a striped quilt. Reid and Violetta were one cave farther down the hall than mine, their privacy protected by a stained and threadbare oriental carpet.

The fourth cave in this corridor belonged to Doc and Sharon, and the fifth to Maggie, but none of these three had returned.

Doc and Sharon were partnered, and Maggie, in her rare moments of sarcastic humor, teased Sharon that it had taken the end of humanity for Sharon to find the perfect man: every mother wanted a doctor for her daughter.

Sharon was not the girl I’d seen in Melanie’s memories. Was it the years of living alone with the dour Maggie that had changed her into a more brightly colored version of her mother? Though her relationship with Doc was newer to this world than I was, she showed none of the softening effects of new love.

I knew the duration of that relationship from Jamie—Sharon and Maggie rarely forgot when I was in a room with them, and their conversation was guarded. They were still the strongest opposition, the only people here whose ignoring me continued to feel aggressively hostile.

I’d asked Jamie how Sharon and Maggie had gotten here. Had they found Jeb on their own, beaten Jared and Jamie here? He seemed to understand the real question: had Melanie’s last effort to find them been entirely a waste?

Jamie told me no. When Jared had showed him Melanie’s last note, explained that she was gone—it took him a moment to be able to speak again after that word, and I could see in his face what this moment had done to them both—they’d gone to look for Sharon themselves. Maggie had held Jared at the point of an antique sword while he tried to explain; it had been a close thing.

It had not taken long with Maggie and Jared working together for them to decipher Jeb’s riddle. The four of them had gotten to the caves before I’d moved from Chicago to San Diego.

When Jamie and I spoke of Melanie, it was not as difficult as it should have been. She was always a part of these conversations—soothing his pain, smoothing my awkwardness—though she had little to say. She rarely spoke to me anymore, and when she did it was muted; now and then I wasn’t sure if I really heard her or just my own idea of what she might think. But she made an effort for Jamie. When I heard her, it was always with him. When she didn’t speak, we both felt her there.

“Why is Melanie so quiet now?” Jamie asked me late one night. For once, he wasn’t grilling me about Spiders and Fire-Tasters. We were both tired—it had been a long day pulling carrots. The small of my back was in knots.

“It’s hard for her to talk. It takes so much more effort than it takes you and me. She doesn’t have anything she wants to say that badly.”

“What does she do all the time?”

“She listens, I think. I guess I don’t know.”

“Can you hear her now?”

“No.”

I yawned, and he was quiet. I thought he was asleep. I drifted in that direction, too.

“Do you think she’ll go away? Really gone?” Jamie suddenly whispered. His voice caught on the last word.

I was not a liar, and I don’t think I could have lied to Jamie if I were. I tried not to think about the implications of my feelings for him. Because what did it mean if the greatest love I’d ever felt in my nine lives, the first true sense of family, of maternal instinct, was for an alien life-form? I shoved the thought away.

“I don’t know,” I told him. And then, because it was true, I added, “I hope not.”

“Do you like her like you like me? Did you used to hate her, like she hated you?”

“It’s different than how I like you. And I never really hated her, not even in the beginning. I was very afraid of her, and I was angry that because of her I couldn’t be like everyone else. But I’ve always, always admired strength, and Melanie is the strongest person I’ve ever known.”

Jamie laughed. “You were afraid of her?”

“You don’t think your sister can be scary? Remember the time you went too far up the canyon, and when you came home late she ‘threw a raging hissy fit,’ according to Jared?”