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After the dust settled, Sheriff Valenti called Max into her office.
“Deputy Evans,” she began, a strange, sympathetic look in her eyes. “I got some bad news.”
As it turned out, the New Mexico Sheriff’s Department didn’t cover three months of unannounced vacation. Even if you spent that vacation being dead.
And that was how Max, newly resurrected, found himself in need of a new job.
Mary, she thought. That’s who I am.
That was the important part. The where could come later. There was burning cold sand beneath her feet. She looked up at the wide, dark sky. The galaxy, green and purple and shining silver, spun out into the distance like smoke.
Somewhere out there, her planet was looking back.
“You alright, Evans?”
Alex Manes was about the last person Max had expected to find at the Crashdown at midday on a Tuesday.
Max had been there since opening, curled up in one of the booths with his notebook, trying not to think about sight lines and escape routes. Not being a cop anymore hadn’t broken any bad habits.
He nodded, anyway. “Fine. Just getting used to the new routine.” He gestured at the table, only recently cleared of a half-dozen empty coffee cups.
“Right,” said Alex. He slid into the seat across from Max with an audible sigh. “You still working on that novel?”
“Sure am,” Max replied. He glanced down at the notebook page he’d had open all morning. It was only half full, most of that crossed out. “It’s, uh, a little slow going. I think dying was the ultimate writer’s block.”
Alex snorted. He looked tired, but Max was starting to notice that everyone did, these days. He hadn’t meant to die, but, as it turned out, that didn’t stop his death from having consequences.
“I can’t say I understand writer’s block,” Alex offered, running a hand through his hair. He’d cut it short again while Max was gone, shaved sides but longer on top, ready for civilian life. “But whenever I had trouble with a song, back in high school, I’d try it from… another angle, I guess.”
“Well, it can’t hurt,” said Max. He smiled, a twitch of one, and ran a hand over his face. “I think I might try some sci-fi.”
“Write what you know, right?” Alex said, looking extremely pleased with himself. Max rolled his eyes. No wonder Michael liked this guy.
He tapped his pen against the page. “I don’t know if Star Trek is quite my style, though. I’m not great at naming stuff.”
“Self-evident,” said Alex. He looked amused, eyes crinkling. “I hear your parents banned you from naming family pets.”
“Isobel –”
“Oh, I didn’t hear it from her,” Alex interrupted. “Maria’s the one getting me all the good Evans family scoops.”
Max sighed. “You’d think people would have the decency not to speak ill of the dead.”
Alex snorted, then leaned across the booth to pat Max’s hand. “Should’ve thought of that before you died.”
The nights were long on this new planet. Mary could remember, half-dreaming, the way nights had melted into days back home. A purple sky above, red sun cresting the horizon to chase away the moon.
It was good that they were long, though, because it gave her time to find her brothers. The silver-white light of this new satellite above shone steadily down, the pods holding them safe like gemstones in the sand.
It took several long weeks for things in Roswell to go back to something approaching normal. Nothing would ever be quite the same, of course, not with Rosa back in town and half the Manes family in jail or comatose at Roswell General.
Max’s family had got a hell of a lot done without him.
The first major change he got a say in, post-resurrection, was asking Liz to move in.
“It’s a big decision, I know,” he said, hurriedly, taking in the look of blank panic on her face. “I just – I want – I want you there. But if you don’t want to now, or ever, that’s fine. You know I would respect whatever –”
“Shut up, Max,” said Liz. She blinked rapidly, tears starting to spill over. Max cupped her cheek, felt her press into the touch as he swept his thumb back and forth. “Of course I’ll move in with you.” She squared her jaw, gaze determined. “I forgot what a nightmare it is sharing a bathroom with Rosa.”
Max felt gutpunched, like always, by just how much he loved her. It was dug into the foundations of his life, now, something structural. Not even death could change it.
Rather than do something drastic, like cry, or do his new-and-improved lightning rod act, he tugged her closer, wrapped his arms around her waist and curled his fingers into the soft fabric of her blouse. His chin came to rest, as easy as breathing, just at the crown of her head. Her hair smelled like honey.
“Thanks,” he mumbled, muffled by her hair and unwilling to move to fix it. “It’s lonely here.”
That was only one part of it, of course. It was the silence, and the darkness in the dead of night when he woke up gasping, and the way the sun shone through the windows at dawn, cold and bright. But it was the part that he could talk about without choking on it, so it was enough for now.
The second major change was buying a new notebook.
Cam sent him a lot of Amazon links when he texted her for advice; most of them were probably jokes. Unless Cam seriously liked Minions that much.
He ended up with something pretty similar to his first one, this time in red, with a monogrammed M.E. on the cover.
He didn’t let Michael see that part. He could admit, at least to himself, that it was kind of pretentious.
The first page filled up easily, a description of the desert that stretched all the way to the horizon. Max could still remember the first time he’d seen it, the way he’d wanted to scream.
The first thing the humans gave Mary was a blanket, one big enough that she could wrap it around herself twice with a little left to cushion her head with, as she leaned against the window of the strange vehicle they’d arrived in.
It was loud, and it smelled bad, and Mary liked it.
Her brothers had blankets too, James and Jack, bundled up like newborns, and the sight made Mary smile. It felt odd, wasted muscles waking after a long sleep.
“What a pretty smile,” said one of the humans. She had long brown hair and bushy eyebrows and brown eyes that held secrets. “You keep doing that, you’ll get adopted like –” She snapped her fingers, grinned with all her teeth.
Mary stopped smiling, and tugged James closer.
Move-in day was complicated.
Arturo insisted on helping chaperone Liz’s belongings on the drive out to Max’s house, boxes stacked into Michael’s truck and held in place, presumably, exclusively by Michael’s firm belief that they wouldn’t fall out.
“You didn’t have to come, dad,” said Liz, a box labelled ‘Hair Stuff’ in her arms and her new keychain dangling out of her jacket pocket. She was wearing old clothes, stuff Max was pretty sure he recognised from high school gym class. “You should be resting.”
Max glanced at Arturo, who was rocking the cane Kyle had insisted he start using. His most recent heart murmur had occurred halfway up the stairs from the Crashdown, and Arturo’s knee and hip had taken a battering in the ensuing fall.
Arturo sighed, fond. “Who else will direct the moving crew, mija?” He looked pointedly at Maria, who was sat smoking a cigarette on the porch, and Michael, who was halfway across the property squinting at an overhanging tree.
“It’s kind of you to come out, Mister Ortecho,” offered Max. He hadn’t spoken to Arturo much since he and Liz had got back together, after an argument Max thought genuinely could’ve been heard in Alpha Centauri. “Once we’ve got a few more boxes in I’ll make you a coffee, then you can set up on the rocking chair and yell directions in comfort.”
“Sounds good,” said Arturo. He made his way towards the house, pausing as he passed Max. He leaned in, slipping into Spanish: “You know, if you hurt her again, Liz will have no end of help hiding your body.”
“Lo sé,” replied Max, spine straight. “Uh, I’ll do my best.”
“See that you do.” Arturo turned, apparently satisfied, and disappeared into the house.
Max raised his eyebrows at Liz. “Your dad is terrifying.”
Liz snorted. “Oh, yeah. He lures you in with the hugs and the pep talks, and then it’s steel all the way down.”
With a sigh, Max hefted another box off the truck. It was full of books, he was fairly sure, books he was going to have to find space for among the… other books. Liz had already made fun of him for that while they were packing, and he anticipated plenty more teasing when he tried to explain his shelving system.
He set the box down by his dining table and contemplated the empty photo hooks that had once held Isobel’s wedding photos. There was a lot of space to fill.
“Hey, Liz,” he called.
She popped her head in the doorway, balancing her current box on one hip. Her hair was pulled back into a high ponytail. “Yeah?”
“You got any pictures to hang up? I got just the place.”
“Hey,” came a soft voice, somewhere close by. Mary opened her eyes, just a little, and saw a pair of kind brown eyes.
It had been way too noisy, out on the playground. She’d never seen this many kids in one place, before. It was safe under the climbing frame, though, the firetruck red metal shielding her from the sun and the shouting.
Mary nodded at the stranger. On her home planet, nobody spoke except to their closest loves. It was so strange, being in this new place where anyone would speak to anyone, like it wasn’t something special, something to be kept safe.
“You look sad,” said the stranger. She was kneeling down, holding out something thin and wiry. “Wanna listen to music? That’s what my sister told me to do when I’m sad.”
Mary narrowed her eyes.
“It’s really good, I promise,” said the stranger. Her long hair was tied back behind her neck, only a few strands falling loose around her face. Mary’s own hair was still cut short, barely long enough to bother brushing.
What could it hurt, thought Mary. She took the wire, and pressed it into her own ear, just like the stranger had.
Sounds like nothing she’d heard before washed over her. It made her think, suddenly, of the last time she’d seen her pod-mother, the sapphire sand beneath their feet, the way the rippling waves left their feet tinted with silver. Her chest felt tight. She could see the birds circling above, the way silver feathers gleamed in the sunlight.
It was the last peaceful day she could remember. She blinked back to herself, the music still playing in her ear. A tear slid down her cheek.
She pressed her fingertips to her chin, then pulled her hand away until it brushed the wood-chip floor. Thank you, she thought, hoped the repetition would come through.
The stranger smiled. “You’re welcome.” She held up the music player, offered it on an open palm. “I’m Sarah. Nice to meet you.”
“You know,” said Michael. “I hear they invented this machine with perfect handwriting and a spell checker. I think they call it a computer. You should look into it.”
Max rolled his eyes. They were both sitting in folding chairs outside the airstream, a little ways away from the campfire, each attending to their own hobbies. Max was writing in his notebook, Michael frowning at a page of differential equations.
Max had very good memories of pestering Michael into helping him with algebra homework, back when they’d first found each other.
“I like writing by hand,” he replied, at length. He closed the notebook around his thumb, saving the page. “It’s more… visceral, I guess. Getting to fill up pages right to the edge. And then when I do copy it up on my computer it’s like first-pass editing.”
He’d been working on something new, while his bildungsroman went on the backburner. It had always been kind of derivative, anyway. Kind of a curse of starting it in high school and never being willing to let it evolve. He hadn’t shared the new thing with anyone as of yet, though. It felt too fragile, like he might lose the thread if he didn’t keep it close.
“You’re the writer, man,” said Michael. He stretched, the sound of his spine cracking loud in the still night air. “Me, I can’t get more than a couple pages into anything. Reading’s one thing, sure, but writing takes it outta me.”
“Takes it outta me too,” said Max, honest to the core. “But I like the feeling.”
Michael rubbed his hands together. “What’s the story about, anyway? A man of the law brought low by circumstance? Whiny teen falls in love with a girl who’s way out of his league? Yet more odes to Dostoyevsky?”
Max told him.
It took ten full minutes for Michael to stop laughing.
“Don’t,” said Mary. She stood up from the floor, splinters in her fingers, and got between Jack and the man. She held out her hands, palms out. “Don’t hurt him.”
Her voice was scratchy and unfamiliar. She hadn’t used it since the last time they saw their parents, a pair of frantic hands pressing her into her pod. She couldn’t remember their faces that well anymore. There was a big, angry feeling inside her chest. It felt like she was going to explode.
The man lifted the hammer. His mouth was turned up at the corners, but he wasn’t smiling. “You gonna try and stop me?”
“Yes,” said Mary. Lightning struck.
Kid’s books, as it turned out, were a bitch to write.
Max chewed on the end of his pen, a habit he’d been trying to break since high school, and frowned down at the page.
Never thought I’d regret learning all those SAT words, he thought wryly. The page was littered with crossed out words and the ever-smaller words replacing them.
He also didn’t have a whole lot of existing knowledge to draw on. Back at the group home, before the Evanses had whisked him and Iz into a new life, there’d been mostly board books and bilingual early reading stuff, useful for younger kids but not very inspiring to Max, who’d picked up reading faster than either of his siblings. He’d torn through all the books available in the first few weeks, re-read a few of them often enough that he could still recite them word for word.
The first time he got to read a real book, one written for grown-ups, he’d been nine, and he’d never turned back. So while he could reliably answer any literature question on Jeopardy within a few seconds, and laugh when Liz threw a throw pillow at his head for beating her to it, he didn’t really know that much about books for actual kids.
He’d never read Harry Potter, although given how the author had turned out he was starting to be kind of grateful for it.
So he went back through the story as it unfolded, changing out the longer words, and ended up with something he at least hoped was kid-friendly.
Liz, thankfully, had a solution for that.
“You realise I literally have a thousand cousins, right?” She offered one night over dinner, twirling spaghetti onto her fork. “At least some of them are kid-sized. I could ask around, see if any of them would read it for you.”
He’d only told Liz about the story under duress, which in their case meant she asked him twice and he cracked within a day.
Max found it very difficult to keep secrets around Liz. It was probably good for their relationship.
“Sounds like a plan,” he said after a moment. “It’s almost done, I think. Kid’s books aren’t meant to be that long, right?”
“No,” said Liz. “Half the stuff I read in grade school is stuff I could knock out in an hour or two these days. In third grade I took a week to read the first Little House book.”
“You learn a lot about homesteading from that?”
“Oh, of course,” she said. “I can fist-fight a bear while cooking enough salt pork for the whole winter.”
Max grinned. “What are you keeping me around for, if not fighting any stray bears?”
“The sex, obviously,” said Liz. “You’re pretty good at that. It makes up for you not building me a log cabin with your bare hands.”
A few weeks later, Liz handed him a stack of kid’s books and a much smaller stack of print-outs.
“They had some feedback,” she said. “But they liked it.”
“What are the books for?” asked Max, still half asleep, his morning coffee only just starting to cool off.
“Research,” said Liz, smugly. “The kids said they liked all your fancy writer words, but it’s not funny enough yet. You wanna start with Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Captain Underpants?”
Middle school was weird.
Her desk squeaked every time she moved, eek-eek-eek like the music in a horror movie. Her head was hurting enough that she felt herself frown.
“Mary,” said the teacher. Mary hadn’t learned his name yet, but she knew she would remember his face. He had the biggest ears she’d seen outside of the elephants at the zoo, and big bushy eyebrows like two caterpillars had crawled up his face.
“Yes?” she said, with a slow blink in his direction. It was math class, and she hated math. Her textbook was already half covered in doodles.
“Thank you for joining us, Mary,” he said with a smirk. It reminded Mary of way too many grown ups she’d met. “You’d look much nicer if you stopped with that snarl and smiled.”
She glanced over the man’s shoulder, catching Jack’s eye. He had an eraser in his free hand, weighing it up.
She nodded. Immediately, the eraser flew up into the air, hovered for just a moment behind the teacher’s ear, and hammered him in the back of the head.
There was a moment of stunned silence.
As the teacher spun around to find the culprit, Mary felt herself smile. She covered it with one hand, kept it for herself.
“You wrote… a whole book. About aliens. A kid’s book.”
Isobel looked at Max, the same way she had when they were twelve and he floated the idea of getting frosted tips.
Max shrugged, one-shouldered. “One way to put it.”
She’d cornered him at the Crashdown, just after opening. It was empty aside from Rosa, mopping behind the counter while Vampire Weekend played over the sound system.
“And you don’t think that might, oh, I don’t know, make yet more humans guess that you are, in fact, an alien?”
It was a little rich of Isobel to say that, considering that she’d been the one who’d brought Maria and Arturo in while Max wasn’t around to have a say in the matter.
Not that he would’ve said no. It was just weird to realise how many things he hadn’t had a say in.
“We live in Roswell, Isobel. If anyone asks where I got the idea I can just point at literally anything at the Crashdown for evidence.” He nodded at the neon sign behind her head, a classic little green alien holding a milkshake.
Isobel shook her head and shut her eyes tight for a moment. “And you’re trying to get it published?”
“Sure,” said Max. He’d typed up the whole manuscript, double-spaced and correctly formatted, ready to be sent out. He just figured he should tell his sister about it first. “Look, Iz, I get it. But I’m proud of this thing, and – if anything, this is gonna make us less suspicious.”
Isobel huffed. She set her chin against the knuckles on her left hand, a wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. “You don’t know that.”
“I promise you, Iz, the last question any of these agents might ask is whether I’m writing the alien stuff from experience.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I understand, I promise. It’s just what I ended up writing about, I guess. If I coulda written something else I would’ve.”
“Right,” said Isobel. She crossed her arms, fingers digging into her elbows. “Can I at least read it before you bring Area 51 down on our heads?”
“You gonna blow up my brain if you don’t like it? I saw what you did to those pictures, sis.” He smiled at her, one sided. “But yeah, I’ll send it to you.”
“Thanks, Max,” she replied, more quietly. “I’m sure it’s great. Am I gonna need a dictionary ready for the long words?”
“No,” said Max, instantly defensive. “I know how reading levels work, Isobel.”
“Sure,” she said, sly. “But I seem to remember somebody annoying the hell out of our seventh grade English teacher because he wouldn’t stop going on about Jane Austen.”
“Pride and Prejudice is great,” said Max. “I don’t need to defend myself here.”
“Well, Keira Knightley is hot, I’ll give you that,” said Isobel. “But I don’t know if I can get behind all the pining.” She winked.
Max threw a sugar packet at her.
“There was another alien?” James asked, incredulous. His wide blue eyes got, somehow, even wider. “You’re kidding.”
Mary shook her head. “I saw her. She looked right at me and got in my head, just like you can.”
“Yeesh,” said James. He put a hand on Mary’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah,” said Mary. Her hands made fists. “I fought her off. She’s long gone.”
Something inside of her settled down to wait. Dormant, like a hibernating bear, or a volcano.
Something dangerous, either way.
There weren’t that many bookstores in Roswell.
This had never bothered Max that much before, since he bought books either online or, if he wanted something straight away, from Books Again downtown, but when it came to Isobel pestering him about a launch party he really didn’t have much to offer.
“If there was a Barnes and Noble we wouldn’t even need to have this conversation,” Isobel grumbled. “But no, Roswell had to settle for a Christian megastore and ENMU.”
Max shrugged. He was still kind of stuck on the box of books sat unopened on his kitchen table.
Resigned, Isobel set her phone on the table and lifted up the box, both hands on her hips.
“You gonna open this or what, Max?” She shook the box menacingly as it floated towards him. “I need a photo for Insta.”
Isobel had reacted to the news that he’d actually found an agent and was getting shopped to publishers by immediately setting up an instagram for him, then refusing to give him access to it. As far as he could tell it was mostly made up of quotes from children’s books he still hadn’t read and very occasional photos of him writing, eyes always out of frame.
Isobel shook the box again, harder. He got a pair of scissors out of the drawer, wincing at the rattle, and sliced the tape open.
The box dropped onto the table with a soft thump.
Max looked into it with an odd feeling in his chest. He’d seen the thing before, obviously, seen the cover proofs and the reader’s copies they’d sent out for reviews, but it was different having the final version in front of him.
“I’m gonna leave you two alone,” said Isobel, patting him on the shoulder before she disappeared, probably to tell Maria that he looked like he was about to cry.
Liz came in a little while later, once Max had blinked a couple times and sat down with the book in his hands, still unopened.
“Oh, hey,” she said, resting her chin on his shoulder, left hand loose around his elbow. “Looks good.”
“I sure hope so,” said Max. He turned his head to kiss her on the cheek, press himself a little closer. “You think the kids are gonna like it?”
“If they don’t, I’m sure we can just bribe them,” she replied cheerfully. “We’ve got resources.” She squinted at the cover. “You gonna read me some of that, or are we just gonna sit like this?”
“Right,” said Max. He turned back to the book, grinned at the cover, and opened to a page about halfway through. He cleared his throat.
It was a very long time before Mary realised exactly what it was that she’d discovered. It’s in the nature of most people, human or alien, to reach for answers to things without really knowing what they’re asking. That’s why it took her such a long time to realise that she’d stopped thinking about blue sand and a red sky when she thought about home.
Home could be a person. Could be a few people, actually, could be a brother who wouldn’t stop doing guitar practice when she was studying. Another brother giving her a piggyback after school because her shoes pinched and their foster parents hadn’t noticed yet.
A girl who gave music to strangers.
That was what Mary had figured out.
“Damn,” said Liz. She sounded hoarse, all of a sudden. Max found himself with her weight settled in his lap, side-saddle, her arms around his shoulders. “You don’t do things by halves, huh?”
Max smiled. "Sure don't.”