Chapter 21
When Tean left the DWR, the sky had gone blue with cold, and a Subaru Outback was waiting at the curb. It took him half a moment to recognize Jem behind the wheel.
“You bought a new car?” Tean asked as he got in the passenger seat. The car smelled new, anyway, and it was spotless inside. Spotless and warm. Even the seat was warm, which meant Jem must have turned on the seat warmer for him before Tean even came out of the building.
Jem rolled toward the parking lot’s exit. “Borrowed.”
“Um.” Tean tried to think of the right way to ask his next question.
With a laugh, Jem settled into his seat—it wasn’t until the tension was gone that Tean realized it had been there. “I didn’t steal it.”
“I didn’t say that!”
“You were wondering, though.”
“No. But I know you have friends, and I thought maybe, well, you know how sometimes you— Not that it’s anything bad, but—” Tean found himself reaching for his hair. He blurted, “Please help me.”
Jem was grinning. “It’s a loaner from the dealership. I figured you weren’t up for two-plus hours on a motorcycle at the end of October.”
“Thank goodness,” Tean said.
Which, for some reason, made Jem laugh again. “Hannah’s still good to take Scipio tonight?”
“She left work early because she said, quote, ‘He’s my baby now.’”
“Over my dead body,” Jem growled. Then, in a completely normal voice, “So, first stop: the UFOlogist who found Brennon?”
“I suppose. Although I’m not sure how we’re supposed to track down every UFOlogist in the Uinta Basin. Or any of them, for that matter.”
“We don’t have to track down every single one. At least, not by ourselves. What do you say we start here?”
On his phone, the Maps app displayed directions to the Strange Lights campground. When Tean tapped the link to the website, the banner at the top said, Uinta Basin’s Experts on the Unexplained!
“If it’s unexplained,” Tean said, “how can they be experts on it?”
“Give me that.”
They drove out of the city, fighting rush hour traffic again, the sky’s blue lowering until it lay over everything in the valley.
Jem stopped at McDonald’s to pick up dinner.
Tean wasn’t hungry, which meant Jem ordered for both of them, and that was how Tean found himself cradling a salad in his lap as they inched along in traffic again.
“But what if I spill it?”
“We’re going about five miles an hour.”
“But what if you have to stop suddenly?”
“I’ll clean the car tomorrow.”
“But what if—”
“Tean, sweetheart, it’s been a really long day. Eat the salad, please.”
So, Tean picked at the salad. It wasn’t bad. The lettuce was crisp. The chicken was fried, which added unnecessary calories and likely some trans fats, and Tean had read a study about the impact of fried food—
Jem’s groan started suddenly and grew louder.
“What?” Tean bolted up in his seat—almost spilling the salad in the process. He glanced around. “What happened? Was there an accident?”
“With the dressing.”
“What?”
“With the dressing! Eat the salad with the dressing!”
It took Tean a moment to remember the packet he’d set aside. “Oh. Well, see, it’s mostly sugar—”
“Teanthony Mortimer Leon!”
Tean added the dressing. It did have a lot of sugar, but it also made the salad taste significantly better.
They crawled out of the city on I-80. Traffic eased when they reached the canyon, and then they turned south and followed US 40 toward Heber.
It was a drive Tean had done plenty of times—many of them with Jem.
And it was easy, after their garbage was packed away, to settle in and relax.
Scrub oak flamed red on the flanks of the mountains, mixed with the dense, vibrant green of pine and fir, but all of it was quickly being swallowed up by shadow as the sun disappeared behind the ridge.
A two-minute snarl of traffic caught them around Heber, and then they were moving south steadily again.
The valley widened. Other vehicles became fewer and farther between.
The white ribs of snow fences gleamed orange where they caught the last daylight.
Hog-wire panels threw nets of diagonal shadow.
To the south, the reservoir was as thin as the lead of a pencil, and with the same smeared shine.
The hum of the engine, the familiarity of the drive, the warmth of the heated seat, Jem’s confident handling of the car, and, of course, the exhaustion of another sleepless night—Tean’s head dipped once, and he caught himself. The second time, it was too late, and he was already gone.
He didn’t know he’d slept until something tugged on him. He stirred, and Jem made a disgusted noise and said, “I’m just fixing your seatbelt. Go back to sleep.”
But Tean removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
Jem gave up on the seatbelt and said, “Damn it.”
“It’s fine. I should be awake.”
“Right. You don’t need to sleep.”
The tone was surprisingly grumpy, so Tean didn’t respond. He wiped his eyes some more and tried to blink away the gumminess. Finally he resorted to a drink of Jem’s Coke, which sent a rush of sugar and caffeine to his head and made his teeth throb.
When he settled back into his seat, long shadows striped the road. To their right, the waters of the reservoir spread out smoothly until they dissolved into the growing dark.
Maybe it was because Tean was still waking up. Maybe it was because the memory startled him, breaking the deep waters of his own mind.
“We used to camp here.”
Jem unwrapped his hands from around the steering wheel, then closed them again. “Yeah?”
“Gosh, it was a long time ago. Before my grandma died.” Clumps of sedge looked like ink brushes as shadow fell over them. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”
Jem spared him a quick, sidelong glance. “I’ve heard lots of people talk about Strawberry Reservoir. I’ve never been.”
“Lots of people come during the summer. In the winter, too—they have a snowkite launch up here—but the summer is when it’s most popular.
The rangers stock it with rainbow trout, and people come from all over to fish.
There’s other stuff you can do too, of course.
We’d go on hikes. You can swim. My grandparents stayed at the campground most of the time; my grandfather was getting too old to get around much, and my grandmother liked to do word puzzles. ”
“What about your parents?”
“My dad liked to fish. Liked to tell people he fished, I think. My mom was just happy to do anything that got her out of the house—seven kids made an already small house feel much smaller during the summer.” Tean thought about it. “The last time we went was before my mission.”
And they hadn’t gone again—or, if they had, they hadn’t invited him—because it was on his mission to Peru that he’d come out, come home, decided to be honest about who he was.
At the time, it had seemed like a fairy tale.
All those years of wanting Ammon, and then, those nights in the apartment in Lima, when Ammon had given him everything, and Tean had given him everything in turn.
And Tean had come home, had faced his family, and the people he’d grown up with, and endured the sneers and the jabs and the disappointment.
Because he knew that when Ammon came home, they’d be together, and the fairy tale would continue.
It hadn’t, of course. Ammon had finished his mission.
He’d come home, yes, but still Ammon Young, still everyone’s golden boy.
He hadn’t come out. And what he’d wanted from Tean, he’d taken with false promises and stillborn hope, until finally they’d ended up here.
Ammon in jail, Daniel on the run, two families destroyed because Ammon was a coward.
To distract himself, he said the first thing that came to mind: “I decided I wanted to be a ranger the first time I saw them stocking the lake.”
Jem burst out laughing. “What?”
A smile curved Tean’s mouth. “I don’t know why.
I mean, I loved camping, even as a child.
I didn’t love hunting, but I loved hiking and being outdoors.
And I think, even then, I knew there was some way I was different from the people around me.
I saw these guys having fun, being outside—” A trace of embarrassment entered his voice.
“And I might have thought they lived at the lake all year, in cabins, you know.”
“God, that’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever heard.”
“No, it’s not adorable. It’s sad.”
“It’s like if someone founded a Junior Hermits guild, and you were the first Junior Hermit.”
“It’s not like that at all. It was based on a completely mistaken assumption.”
“Was one of them hot?”
One of them wore his hair pushed back under a DWR ball cap, long enough to curl behind his ears, and it had been red-gold when the sun touched it. But Tean didn’t say that out loud.
“Oh my God,” Jem said.
“No!”
“One of them was super hot.”
“No, they were—they were old. They were grizzled.” Tean latched on to the words because he had the vague sense they would inspire horror in Jem. “They were probably forty!”
Jem dissolved with laughter. He sank down in his seat. His grip on the steering wheel slackened. The Subaru drifted across double yellow lines.
“It’s not that funny,” Tean snapped and grabbed the wheel.
“Oh my God,” Jem said again—wheezed, really, through his laughter. “You have to tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell. Obviously I didn’t become a ranger.”
Jem’s voice became pleading. “Tean.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say. They were shooting fish out of a cannon. What ten-year-old boy isn’t going to find that fascinating?”
“Literally millions of them,” Jem said. But he recovered enough to sit up and take control of the car again. “What do you mean shooting fish out of a cannon? That sounds awesome. Why haven’t we ever done it before?”
“Because—”
“Scipio wants to do it.”
“It’s not really—”
“Scipio wants to push the button that fires the cannon.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Hey, I’ve been super good on this drive.”
“You yelled at me about the salad dressing.”