Part One
The boy is late.
Not that his tardiness surprises me. I expected it. From the moment I heard the half-interest in his young voice, I knew he would drag his feet coming here.
But he will come. Because he is interested, even if he doesn't want to admit it.
I sit absolutely still, not even my breath disturbing the quiet air of the apartment. I can hear the city street outside, far below me, the sound of car horns and voices and engines. So much time has passed and yet so much as remained the same.
I sit still until the room falls into darkness, then I slowly reach over and flip on the lamp beside the couch. Moving makes my bones ache. I don't care much for growing old. I don't care much for being alone.
I know he has arrived even before he knocks on the door. My senses have not diminished - I can still hear things other creatures cannot, I can still sense things. No one can sneak up on me.
I push myself to my feet and open the door to greet him. He looks surprised, his right hand raised as if to knock. In his left, a small attaché case.
"Mr. Robinson," I say, and I'm sure that my voice isn't as old and smoke- filled as he'd expected.
His expression of surprise fades away quickly and he drops his hand, offering it in greeting. "Yes," he replies, his words hanging there without an ending because I have not told him my name.
I take his hand and shake, and I'm sure once again he's surprised that my grip is strong and that I'm not some decrepit old codger. I step aside and make a sweeping motion with my hand. "Please, come in."
He gives a smile of courtesy and side-steps me in a light breeze of cologne. As I close the door, I watch him give the apartment a quick once- over. Like a bloodhound. I hope he's hungry. I hope he wants blood. Because I have it to give. He turns to look at me and I can see it in his face - he's not hungry, he's not on the trail of anything. He came here to do me a favor because he has a favorite grandpa who passed away and patronizing some old fart might make him miss him less.
"Have a seat," I say, motioning toward the sitting area.
He picks the easy chair and perches on the very edge of it, so I claim the couch. Which is fine because I prefer the couch. His grandpa probably did, too. Immediately, in a the-sooner-I-do-this-the-sooner-I'll-be-out-of- here kind of way, he digs in the attaché and comes out with a yellow pad of paper and a pen.
"Can I get you something to drink?" I ask him. Lots of years, still haven't lost my hospitality.
"No, thanks," he replies with a quick glance and the same patronizing smile. He appears to go over his notes, then looks at me with a somewhat amused expression on his young face. "So, you called my office."
"I did," I agree.
"To talk about aliens." He manages to get it out without laughing. I'm proud of him.
"Yes."
He checks the pad again. "Specifically, the 1947 crash."
"Yes."
He scratches his full head of dark hair and I have the feeling he's trying to cover his smile. "Sir, that was over one hundred years ago."
"Yes," I respond, my words slow and steady. I will not argue with him. I'm done fighting. With anybody. "Yes, it was that long ago. But people are still interested in aliens, aren't they?"
He doesn't respond but I can tell that he is listening.
"And they're still interested in UFOs. They're still afraid of them."
He snorts a little laugh. "I don't know if afraid is the word I'd use."
I shrug. "Okay, then they're paranoid."
He nods. "Better." I think maybe he's surprised I'm quicker on my feet mentally than he's given me credit for. I've probably surprised him enough for the next ten years in three short minutes. "So, what about the 1947 crash?"
"It was real," I tell him casually.
He does laugh this time. "Really? How can you be sure?" He's got just a tinge of attitude in his voice. He's a cynic, a skeptic. He reminds me of Michael.
I clear my throat. "I know because I was in the crash."
He stops, his mouth agape, and I think one more surprise and I may have to perform CPR. Poor kid. I should have broken it a little more gently. I'm pretty blunt these days. I don't have time or patience for sugar-coating.
"You," he says, his voice a bit choked. "You were in the crash?" I nod. "Over one hundred years ago?" I nod again. "But.you don't look like someone who is over one hundred years of age."
I shake my head. "I'm not. I wasn't born until almost fifty years after the crash."
Now he's looking at me like I'm a lunatic. No creature on earth has a gestation period that long, and most creatures would be out of their child- bearing years in that amount of time. And therein lies the proof, sonny.
"Riiight," he says slowly, the word stretched out. "So you're what? An alien?"
I nod.
There is complete silence in the room. He simply stares at me and I stare back without blinking. I can hear his thoughts - a power I developed in my forties. He wants to make the quickest exit possible, but his curiosity is piqued. If nothing else, he could have a wonderful story about the hospitable crack pot he met Friday night. It's the kind of crap movies are made out of.
"So, can you prove you're an alien?" he finally asks. He's suddenly picturing himself as the reporter in Interview with the Vampire. I smile at the analogy. "Are you going to make yourself disappear or talk to me in my head or make objects levitate or something?"
"No," I tell him and he practically deflates before me. "Anything I would do right now you would debunk as a cheap parlor trick. I want to tell you my story first. Then you'll see that I'm not a fraud."
He frowns. His Friday night out with the boys just dissipated right before his eyes. "Why me?" he asks, a hint of whininess in his voice and I'm reminded of Kyle.
"I picked you," I tell him quietly, then reach to the coffee table and pick up a pack of cigarettes. I offer him one that he declines, but I know he's a smoker - I can smell it on his clothes. I light the cigarette and draw in a long breath. "I wanted to tell you my story."
"Why?"
"Because you're young," I say simply. "The young have more open minds." I smile at him. "Even if they are somewhat cynical."
He looks away for a moment, embarrassed that I have seen through him. He flips the pad to a blank page, having decided to indulge me. "Okay, I guess I could hear you out."
I nod. "Thank you."
He scribbles something - perhaps a cartoon drawn out of boredom - then looks up at me. "What is your name?"
"Max Evans."
He writes it down, but as the pen moves across the paper, he mutters, "Names have been changed to protect the innocent."
"There are no innocents."
His head snaps up and he looks at me silently.
"There is no one to protect. I am the last of my kind."
I think I see his lips purse as he returns to his scribbling. In my head, I imagine what he has written - Crack pot thinks he's the last. He's the last because he's crazy and there are no aliens and there never were. "So, you're really Max Evans?"
I nod.
"And since you brought up that you were the last, how many of you were there?"
That is such a tricky question. I consider there to have been four of us. But then there are the duplicates to consider. And our enemies. And then what happened to Liz and Kyle. I'm not sure how to put a number to it.
He's looking at me, puzzled. "How many?"
"There were four of us," I settle on that number, assuming the rest will come out later.
"Four."
"Yes. Myself. My sister. My friend whom I considered a brother. And my.wife." I hesitate on that last word and I'm sure he picked up on it. He's trained to detect stuff like that.
"A regular family affair, huh?" he jokes, too jovially. He's still thinking I'm crazy.
I nod my head slowly.
"Why don't you look any different than me?" He's smirking. Arrogant young man.
"Because I'm a hybrid."
"A what? I thought you said you were an alien."
"I am. I'm half alien, half human. I'm a hybrid of the two."
I can hear the comparison in his head. Half tangerine, half grapefruit - he's a tangelo. The guy is a fruit.
"I assure you I'm not," I say, my gazed fixed on his.
"What?" he asks, startled.
"A tangelo."
His mouth gapes open. I didn't want to use a power so soon, but he was starting to get on my nerves. I've lost patience for the doubters of the world.
"I didn't say you were," he stammers.
"Of course not," I agree and take another drag on my cigarette.
He clears his throat and shuffles his papers. "So, uh, tell me, Mr.-" he has to check his notes because he has already forgotten my name "-Evans. Mr. Evans, why do you want to tell me your story?"
"Like I said, I'm the last of my kind. No one has ever documented our lives. My time is drawing near. I don't want to leave this earth without the truth being told."
"Okay," he says, suddenly more cooperative. "Where do we start?" His smile looks a little more sincere now.
"At the beginning, where it is natural to start," I tell him. "But in the end, it's a story about a girl."
His shoulders sag. Romances don't sell. No one is interested in reading about happiness. But they are interested in reading about tragedies. This young man should not be disappointed - he will get his best seller in the end.
"It's about consequences," I tell him, take a slow drag on the cigarette. "It's about the best laid plans and good intentions. Do you know what they say about good intentions, Mr. Robinson?"
He nods. "Something about the road to Hell being paved with them?"
I nod and adjust my aching body on the couch, stuff a pillow behind my back. "I promise you it will be worth your time. If you have a tape recorder, you might want to get it out. I have a lot to tell. You're going to be here awhile."
Part Two
The boy shuffles through his notes, scribbled on that yellow pad in a nearly unreadable script. He's using a recording device as well, probably something digital since magnetic tape has been obsolete for decades and I'm sure my mention of it earlier amused him endlessly, but he has still written notes on the pad, perhaps to occupy his hands, perhaps so he can ask questions to fill in the gaps of the story.
Two hours have passed, time I used to relay to him the events of my first year with Liz. It may seem extreme to have taken that much time, but it is imperative that he understand the nature of our relationship, of what she meant to me. Without that understanding, I will seem but a monster in the end. And I don't want to believe I am a monster. Not then, not now.
He has accepted a few cigarettes and a cup of coffee, and he's even managed to shed his overcoat and loosen his tie. He's becoming comfortable with me, which pleases me. I picked the right person for this job.
"So you healed the girl in the café," he says, his blue eyes scanning the page.
"Liz," I correct. I want him to get the details correct.
He smiles. "Yes, Liz. Liz Parker. By healing her, you drew the attention of not only the local sheriff but the FBI?" He raises an eyebrow.
I nod.
"You're aware that the FBI disbanded over twenty years ago, right?"
I nod again. "They lost their potency," I tell him. "Their effectiveness. It was only a matter of time."
"Tell me about this group that took you, that experimented on you." Pen poised above the paper.
"They were called the Special Unit," I explain to him. I haven't thought of them or the White Room in many, many years. Odd that so much time has passed and yet I can still feel their torturous effects all the way down to my bones. "I think perhaps they didn't think I had feelings - physical feelings - like other creatures on this planet."
Young Mr. Robinson wants to ask the question but fears it will offend me.
I smile at him. "Yes, I do have feelings. Physical and emotional." I hold up my hand, study my palm. "Physiologically, I'm all human." I drop my hand back into my lap. "But they didn't think so, possibly since they'd studied the other aliens they'd recovered from the crash site."
Another check of the pad. "Nasedo." He says the word slowly, making sure he pronounces it correctly.
"Yes."
"What does the word mean?"
"It's a Mesaliko word."
He looks puzzled and it somewhat hurts that River Dog's people have fallen so far into obscurity.
"They are a New Mexico native American tribe," I explain. "They named him Nasedo because it means visitor."
The young man smiles. "You must have been in heaven finding someone who was one hundred percent alien, who had been on earth all this time just waiting to find and protect you."
I can't smile back at him. I know what Nasedo's true agenda was, but it is too soon to reveal that to him. I need to explain other things first. "In truth, Nasedo made most of us uncomfortable. Especially my sister."
"Isabel."
"Yes, Isabel." At the mere mention of her name, I get a flash of her golden hair and her perfume seems to drift to my nose. In my mind, Isabel will be forever young, and it has been so long since I've seen her that my soul aches with the memories.
"What was she like?"
"Isabel?"
"Yes."
I can smile at that. "She was beautiful. In body and spirit. She had a horrible temper sometimes, very much the princess she was engineered to be." I chuckle. "But I loved her more than anyone except Liz Parker. For a very long time, she was all I had to depend on. I would have done anything for Isabel."
He's writing on the pad. "What became of her? You said you were the last of your kind here." When I don't answer, he looks up at me.
I shake my head. "In good time."
He doesn't push, probably because he knows I will hold true to my promise of completing the story. I appreciate his patience.
"What about." He flips the page on the pad. "Tess. What about her?"
I swallow, then reach for another cigarette.
"I mean, here you'd thought you'd found the love of your life and then someone else comes along and throws a wrench into that theory. Based on the information your mother gave you, did you know then that she was your destiny?"
I light the cigarette and nod my head. "I knew that I was intended to be with her."
"Did you remember her from your previous life? Did you fall back in love with her?"
"I didn't remember her right away." I don't tell him that even when I did receive "memories" of my former life, I had no way to tell if they were true memories or if they were planted in my head as the result of a mindwarp. "But eventually I recalled a few things, just snippets of time, that had to deal with her. No, I never fell in love with her again."
He nods in that yes-I'm-listening kind of way as he makes notes on the pad. "What became of her?" He catches my smile and nods knowingly. "Yeah, I know, all in good time."
I laugh at him. He really is an entertaining individual, now that his attitude was checked at the door.
He holds the pad up. "Okay, so this is what we have so far. You heal the girl - Liz - in the café and risk exposing yourself and the others. As a result the FBI and the local law enforcement -"
"Jim Valenti," I correct. Jim deserves credit and recognition.
"Yes, Jim Valenti. As a result, the FBI and Valenti are suspicious. By the end of that year, you're in a relationship with Liz, Michael is in a relationship with Maria Deluca, your sister is dancing around Alex Whitman and long-lost Tess Harding appears. The FBI holds you prisoner in a white room and the sheriff becomes an ally. You discover you were once Antarian royalty and that Tess was your wife. Liz Parker walks away from you." He puts the pad down on the ottoman. "What was that like?"
I watch him silently for a few long moments, my fingers toying with the lighter. "It was like having my heart ripped out and stomped on," I say honestly, the vision of Liz running down that hillside still fresh in my mind. "A little piece of me died that day."
"Did you hate her for that?"
"No. I couldn't. I could never hate Liz, Mr. Robinson. She did what she did because she thought it was the best thing. She'd heard the words herself - I was meant to be some noble king on a world I'd never seen. She didn't want to be a deterrent to that."
"Did you try to stop her?"
I nod. "Of course I did. But I had to let her make up her own mind. I couldn't hold Liz prisoner. I needed to respect her choice." I see doubt on his young face. "You have to understand, there is nothing I wouldn't have done for Liz Parker. If I could have given my life for hers, I would've. Do you understand that kind of love, Mr. Robinson?"
He nods his head slowly. "Yes sir, I do." From the look in his eyes, I have to wonder if there is an unrequited Liz Parker lurking somewhere in his past. But I feel he does indeed understand, which is a blessing. At least for me. "What happened with the sheriff's son?"
My mind is still back on Liz, so he has taken me a bit off guard. "Sorry?"
"The sheriff's son." He glances sideways at the pad. "Kyle. You healed him as well?"
I nod. "Yes. That was the true turning point for the sheriff, I believe. Although I came to believe that he never would have turned us in."
"No?"
"No. I think he wanted the proof that we existed, just to prove that his father wasn't some alien-crazed lunatic. But when I healed Kyle, I knew then that he'd never turn on us."
"And he helped you dispose of the body of a federal agent."
"Yes."
"Strange behavior for a lawman."
I nod in agreement. "The sheriff would pay for that eventually," I reveal and the young man's eyebrows shoot upward. "He became an ally to us, as you stated. He did many things that would be misconstrued as unbecoming an official."
"But what about the son? Did he become an ally also or did he want to turn you in?"
"Kyle was afraid of us at first," I sigh. "But Tess became friends with him and he became one of us eventually." I leave off the part that if Kyle wanted to be afraid of us, he should have trusted Tess last of anyone. I also don't explain to him what exactly 'he became one of us eventually' entails.
"So, there were four of you. And five outsiders who knew the truth."
"Yes."
"You know the old adage - the more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to get out. Especially if you've got the FBI on your tail."
"It was hard to maintain the secret."
"But you were successful?"
"Partially." I smile cautiously. "The next year brought many changes, and some of us made choices that would expose our secret eventually."
He looks surprised again. "But you're still here."
"I am. None of us paid immediately."
"But eventually.?"
My smile widens. "The best of intentions, Mr. Robinson. As I stated before, the road to hell is paved with them. You better check your recorder, we still have much ground to cover."
Part Three
I have stunned him into silence.
And from the look on his face, my junior year of high school was as traumatic for him as it was for me.
We've moved out to the balcony of my apartment, perched several stories above the street below. The breeze is cool in the late-summer air and toys with a stray strand of his hair. That is the only movement coming from poor Mr. Robinson.
Finally he closes his mouth and clears his throat, adjusts his pad of paper which had been balancing precariously on one knee. "I don't know where to begin," he confesses, his voice a bit hoarse.
"I know," I sympathize. "But all of those things truly did happen."
He lights a cigarette and stares at the floor of the balcony as he shakes his head. "She murdered your friend Alex?"
I nod my head.
"She used him to get what she needed and then she just killed him?"
"She used everyone, Mr. Robinson. But Alex was the only one she killed."
"And you didn't see it?"
I shake my head slowly. I still don't like admitting that one. "I didn't want to see it."
"But Liz did."
"Yes. I should have listened to her from the beginning. But it was so easy to mark her behaviors up to jealousy."
"Was she? Jealous?"
I think about that for a moment. "No, I don't believe Liz was petty enough to be jealous. My relationship with Tess was just so painful that jealousy would have been a wasted emotion."
He raises one eyebrow. "But she couldn't blame you for that.I mean, not with what she did with Kyle."
"She did what she had to do."
He scratches his head - I've learned this isn't a defensive mechanism but rather an indication that he is thinking hard about something. "How did you know that your visit from the future was not just a mind trick?"
"Mind warp," I correct him. I watch him silently and draw in a long breath. "For a long time it didn't matter. Once Tess was out of the picture and the Skins were defeated, it didn't really have much relevance. If it had been a mind warp, then it was a shitty trick to play but not much else."
After a heavy pause, he holds up one of his hands, palm-up. "But?"
"Years down the road, I realized that maybe I should have paid more attention to that visit. That maybe it meant something after all."
He withdraws, almost seems to turn pale. "The end of the world," he breathes and I can practically hear him doing the math in his head.
I chuckle at him even though the situation is anything but funny. "That time has long passed," I reassure him. As my smile fades away, I pick up the pack of cigarettes we've nearly consumed and pull one out. "But when you travel back in time to warn yourself of something, maybe you should listen."
I think about how ridiculous that sentence sounds and eventually I realize he is looking at me strangely. Surely I've been speaking cryptically.
"It did mean something," I tell him, flicking ashes into the ashtray. "But we'll get to that."
He nods slowly, a deer in the headlights. Then he picks up the pad and scribbles a few things on it. "You.you slept with Tess."
"I did." I don't like admitting that, either, but it is the truth.
"Even though you loved Liz."
I nod and prop my feet up on the chair opposite of me. "I thought I'd lost Liz. For good this time."
"Over her researching who'd killed Alex?"
"Yes. We'd never had a fight that bitter. Never had I felt like we were throwing it all away. And Isabel had withdrawn into herself, looking for an escape from everything that was going on around her. She and I fought and I made some pretty asinine threats in her direction. So two of the people I trusted most in the world were gone." I watch the city lights twinkling against the horizon. "At the time Tess seemed like the only thing that was real."
"You were ready to be an alien," he says simply and I have to wonder if he has reached a similar crossroads in his life.
"I thought so. But in the morning I just wanted to be with Liz again."
"But Tess was pregnant."
I nod. "There wasn't much time to think of Liz. I went straight into Alien King mode to try to get us off this planet. It was all a trick, as you now know."
"She took your only means of getting back to your home planet. What did that mean to you?"
I shrug. "I didn't care. I was here, Liz had flushed out Alex's killer. I wanted to stay here."
"But Tess was carrying your baby."
"Yes." I think of my brief one-week stay with my son, of handing him over to my parents to be put up for adoption. I haven't seen him since, but in my heart I know he's still out there somewhere. "She would return one day with him, but that story is yet to come."
He smiles at the tidbit of information and scribbles it on the paper. "What happened between you and Isabel? She must've been pretty hot at you."
"She was. I felt it was better to keep us together, that we'd be stronger that way." I finger the lighter, can almost hear her laughter in my ears. "I should have let her go." I let out a sigh and ignore the boy's inquisitive expression. "I think once she realized there was a good chance we'd be separated - she wanted to stay on earth and I had to leave with Tess and the baby - I think then she gave up on the fight between us for good."
"Do you think she forgave you?"
I nod, because Isabel always forgave me my trespasses.
"And what was happening with Michael at that point?"
I smile at him. "Michael didn't want to leave earth. After all of his years of searching for answers, he couldn't leave this life behind. Because of Maria. If he hadn't had her in his life, I know he would have gone in an instant."
"Was knowing the truth that important to him?"
"Always. He had a bad childhood, an abusive foster father. Michael wanted to escape to some place so far away that he'd never be able to come back."
"Until he met Maria."
"Yes. And they were perfect for one another. They bickered, they fought, but they were cut from the same cloth and they kept each other honest."
"What happened to them?"
I don't want to confront that issue right now. I know he can see that much in my eyes, and I know he can also see the sorrow there. "In good time. We'll cover that in good time." Then I add, "They're together now, wherever they are. They were never apart again after we left Roswell. Not even in the end."
I can practically see his ears perk up like a watch dog. "You left Roswell?"
I laugh, make a sweeping gesture to the city that surrounds us. "Obviously."
He laughs with me, a bit embarrassed. "Well, yes, obviously, but I mean when did you leave Roswell for the first time?"
My laugh fades away. "And the last time."
"You've never been back?"
I shake my head slowly. "There was no reason to go back. Roswell turned out to be nothing but a place of bad memories, of bad people. Once we left, there was never a need to return."
"And when was it that you left?"
"After graduation." I draw in a long breath, expel smoke into the sky.
"You've been away from home that long?" He sounds surprised.
But not as surprised as he looks when I deliver my answer. "I have no home."
"Sir?"
I look up at the stars. "Somewhere out there is a planet we thought was our home. It is full of treachery and deceit. I know nothing of that world, and I don't want to know." I drop my gaze back to his. "I've found that here, on this earth, home is not a place. You can live many places, but it's still all just geography. Who you have around you determines your home." I look away from him, flick ash onto the floor. "They're all gone now. I have no home."
He gives a nervous little grunt of sorts. "Sir, surely you have friends -"
"No."
"Family?"
I shake my head. "Not any more. I learned my lesson about letting people in, about letting them know the secret."
Another nervous grunt. "But no one should spend their life alone."
I give him a half smile. "Spending your life alone is much easier than dealing with the guilt that comes from knowing someone is dead because of you."
Part Four
"So you left Roswell as fugitives, all six of you."
From my location before the coffee pot, I nod in his direction. I drop more coffee into the machine and click it on. This is our second pot.
"That must have been an adventure."
As the coffee perks, I walk back to the dining area and sit at the table across from him. "That's one word for it."
"And Liz had powers." He seems to have livened up a bit, even though it's now the very wee hours of the morning. "She could see the future."
"She could." I'm sure my slight frown puzzles him.
"How did she handle that?"
I draw in a breath and give a little shrug. "She was so freaked at first. She thought she was dying."
He laughs lightly. "Why?"
"When she started to." I search for the right word. "When she started to change, she was lighting up like a night sky in a thunderstorm."
He's looking at me curiously.
To demonstrate, I hold up my hand and force all of my power to it. Within a second, green veins of electricity crackle across my skin. It hurts and I can only maintain it for a few seconds. I can only image how it felt to Liz.
His mouth drops open. I'd forgotten I hadn't used a power in front of him yet, so I blow it off like nothing happened.
"That kept happening to her," I explain. "It was worse when she was around me."
"Because you were the catalyst?"
"You could look at it that way. But I think it was because Liz's powers were very much affected by her emotions. When we were together, all emotions were to the extreme and she couldn't control what the powers were doing to her."
"Did she adjust?"
"Eventually." I swallow. "For awhile."
He's writing on the pad and misses my hesitation. "So Isabel left her husband behind."
"Jesse Ramirez."
"Did she ever see him again?"
"She did."
Young Mr. Robinson smiles widely. "Did they get back together?" Obviously he likes happy endings.
I shake my head and his smile fades away. "She ran into him by chance. They both happened to be in Miami at the same time."
"Were you there?"
"No."
"What happened?"
"They had dinner together." I smile at him. "Maybe they spent the night together. I don't know for sure. But she said goodbye to him again. It was the last time she saw him."
"She never tried to contact him after that?"
I frown. I don't want to talk about this. "She wasn't able to."
He raises an eyebrow and I realize I can't keep putting him off.
"Isabel passed away shortly after that."
I can almost see the sorrow in his eyes. Sorrow for someone he never even met. He's a compassionate man. "I'm sorry."
I wave a hand in his direction, letting him know he hasn't tread into uncharted waters. I rise and retrieve the coffee pot and two fresh cups. While I'm in the kitchen, I get another pack of smokes and take them back with me.
"What was it like traveling in the van?"
I snort a little laugh. "Sounds like a dream to most young people, doesn't it? Nothing but the open highway, your best friends, nowhere to be, no one to answer to."
He smiles. "Yeah. Like back packing through Europe."
"Exactly. But in reality how long do you think that's fun?"
His eyebrows knit together.
"It took a week," I say. "A week before we started to get on one another's nerves. Now, you have to understand that I loved all of those people very much. But when you're riding in tight quarters with the same people day in and day out, the party quickly loses its appeal."
"What were the problems?"
I shrug. "Everything. Money. Driving responsibilities. Destinations. Some people wanted to make a vacation of it and some did not."
"For instance?"
I shift my weight in the chair. I've always hated these wrought-iron things - they're hard on the back. "The intent was that we were to be out in the world helping others. 'Doing good' as Liz put it."
"And that didn't happen?"
"It did. But not nearly as much as we thought it would. For some, our journey was a frat party. For others, a prison."
"To whom was it a prison?"
"Isabel," I say. "She missed Jesse so much. I had Liz, Michael had Maria and it kind of forced Isabel to Kyle. But Isabel didn't love Kyle in that way. Like a brother, yes, but nothing more. She ached too much for Jesse. I'm sure when we stopped in that chapel and Liz and I finally got married it must have made her very lonely for her husband."
Another spark of interest. Weddings equate to happily ever after. "You married?"
"Of course. I wanted no one else. I had the opportunity to be with Liz and I took it."
He's out of paper. Excusing himself politely, he walks back to the living room, digs in his bag and produces another pad. I'm amused at the way he carefully tucks the full pad back into the bag, like it's precious and fragile. I'm amused and yet touched - I know after I'm gone he'll write his book like I wanted to.
Reclaiming his seat, he positions the pen over the paper. "Did you ever have contact with people back in Roswell?"
I pick up the cigarettes, give him one and take one for myself. "Not for quite awhile."
"How long?"
"Two years."
"That's a long time."
I nod. "It is. It was difficult to not have contact with people we missed." I sigh. "When we did finally contact someone, we found out the consequences of our actions."
"Consequences?"
I drag on the cigarette. "Every action has a consequence, Mr. Robinson. We were young and naïve to believe that if we fled Roswell so would everyone who was trying to kill us. That may have worked if the people who were looking for us had actually known we left."
"What do you mean?"
"They assumed we were being kept by someone harboring us as fugitives. They started with our families."
He swallows visibly.
"They had my father disbarred." It hurts to talk about this. I know what my dad's career meant to him, and to be stripped of all he had worked for had to have crushed him. "Being a lawyer meant everything to my father. He lost everything - his practice, our home. And eventually my mother."
"She divorced him?!" he gasps incredulously.
"She would have. She couldn't live with him, not with the person he became after they took everything from him."
"What happened to them?" His eyes are very wide, very blue.
I try to keep the bitter tone out of my voice. "My father died mysteriously. A supposed heart attack, but there are many ways to cover up that one."
"And your mom?"
"Hit and run driver."
He looks like he's going to be sick. To give him a break, I refill his coffee cup, toss two sugar cubes into it like I've seen him do with previous cups.
"They killed them," he says, his voice sounding far off.
"I suppose once they'd interrogated them and found that they knew nothing, they had to do something about the fact that they now knew who the members of the Special Unit were."
He looks up at me, worried. "And what about the others?"
"Jim Valenti was eventually locked away. Too much alien talk. Stuck in a mental institution for the remainder of his life."
He tries to smile. "Please tell me that he lived to be an old man."
Rattling out the death toll has almost become comic. "Another patient beat him to death four months after he was committed."
He swallows again and looks no less ill. "What about the Parkers? And Maria's mom?"
"The Crashdown burned late one night, killing the Parkers, who were sleeping in the apartment upstairs. Amy Deluca simply disappeared. Speculation was that her body had been weighted down and thrown into the rock quarry."
He sits back in his chair, one hand on his stomach, the other over his mouth. "Good God."
I inhale cigarette smoke and let the room fall into silence. I can hear the gears turning in his head. He's thinking about what a broad, wide- sweeping power the FBI used to have. I think he's frightened.
"You don't need to worry," I tell him after awhile. "There's no one left to come after you now that you know. You'll be safe."
He looks up at me, his eyes devastated. "I believe you. It's just.wow. All of those people. Just gone. Who did you talk to that filled you in on all of that?"
I snuff the cigarette in the ashtray. "We tried everyone, and of course got no one. As a last resort, I contacted Brody Davis, my old boss at the UFO Center."
"Why didn't they kill him?"
"He was a crack pot," I explain. "As Agent Topolsky once said, they all get tracked. He was useful to them still. He could blather about aliens and no one would pay him much mind, but the FBI could also track his findings."
He lights his cigarette with shaking fingers. "To find out all of those people died must have been devastating for you."
"It was," I assure him. "But the worst was yet to come."
Part Five
"This was taken before the prom, only days before Alex's death," I say, handing him a picture. I've retrieved a collection of pictures I've sheltered over the years. Despite their many travels and the ravages of time, they look pretty good.
He takes the picture and I can tell he's trying to put names to faces based on what I have already told him. I save him the torture by pointing to each person and telling him who they are. I show him Tess last.
"Before you lost contact with everyone in Roswell, did you find out what happened to your son?" he asks, his eyes fixed on Tess's pretty likeness.
I shake my head and settle back in my seat. "No. My father took him to New York and had a colleague of his put the baby up for adoption. I never knew what happened to him."
He looks uncertain about his next question. "Did it.um, did it bother you that Tess was his mother?"
I smile at that. A natural question. "No, because I never really saw him that way. You would think I would hate that baby because he was conceived out of trickery and deceit and born to a woman I loathed. But I didn't feel that way about him. In my mind, he was mine and mine alone. It probably sounds arrogant, but that's the way I envisioned him. Like I alone had created him."
"It must have been difficult to give him up."
I frown. I'm not sure how I can ever make anyone understand why that action was justified. "You need to know that I loved him."
He nods. "I do."
"I was nineteen. I'm an alien. My friends and family were in constant, real danger. I wanted him to live, to do everything he wanted in life. You see, he was human."
His eyebrows rise slightly.
"His mother was half human. I'm half human. The two halves together made a whole human." I pause for a second. "It's frightening, really, to think what may have happened if the two alien halves had made a whole alien."
I shake the thoughts of that from my head and give him a smile. I reach into the portfolio and pull out some more photos, pictures from Roswell, pictures from after we left. The Grand Canyon. The Grand Tetons. Mount Rushmore. Key West. The site of the Salem Witch Trials.
He looks at all of them with interest, a light smile on his lips.
"Keep them," I say, and he looks at me in surprise. "Use them for the book, if you write it." I know he will write it, but I don't tell him that. I want him to believe he hasn't made up his mind yet, but he already has.
"Thank you," he says and tucks the pictures carefully back into the portfolio. Then he retrieves his pen and he's back into investigator mode. "So what happened after you found out all of your parents were dead?"
I draw in a breath, lace my hands behind my head. "We split up. We figured they may still be looking for us and if they found us together they'd wipe us all out at once."
"It must have been hard to say goodbye again."
I nod. "It was. Part of me was happy to be free of the van, happy to get some privacy. But another part of me knew that I may never see them again."
"Did you? See them again?"
"Some of them. Not all." I drop my hands to the table and pick up another cigarette. I've never been a chain smoker, but this evening it just seems to fit with the mood. "Liz and I left together, of course. And Michael and Maria."
"And Kyle and Isabel?" There's a little twinkle in his eye and I think secretly he's hoping those two got together.
I shake my head. "No. Kyle wanted to go with Isabel, but she had to be honest with him and tell him that she wasn't in love with him. It crushed him. They both ended up going their separate ways." I think about the look on Kyle's face as he'd boarded a Greyhound bus, his duffle bag over his shoulder. On the bottom step, he'd turned around, his lips curved into a frown, a tear in his eye, and just met Isabel's gaze for an eternity. After awhile, she shook her head no and he boarded the bus without another look back. I will never forget that look on his face, that look of utter devastation. "I never saw Kyle again."
He stops writing, his expression curious. "You didn't? Then how do you know Kyle is dead?"
"I don't," I sigh. "Well, I do and I don't. I have no physical proof of it, but because of certain events that transpired, I'm almost certain he is." I wave him on with a hand. "We'll get to that."
"Okay," he says, returning to his writing. "So, where did the others go?"
"I don't know where they went at first. I know that Isabel ended up in Miami at some point, where she ran into Jesse, but I don't know where she went immediately. I only heard from Michael and Maria once after we parted."
"How did you communicate?"
I smile. "Isabel dreamwalked me every now and then. There was no wire tap the FBI could put on that one."
He laughs lightly. "And Michael?"
"Michael was more creative. He placed an ad in USA Today with a time and payphone number where I could call him. Luckily I saw it and did phone him. There was no important message - he just wanted to touch base. He needed to let us know that he and Maria got married."
A bright smile. He does like happy endings. "What about you and Liz?"
I look at the table top for a moment, then draw in a deep breath. "Around the time we split.I think that's when Liz started to change."
"Change?"
"Her behavior started to change. She sometimes went days without sleeping. She seemed depressed."
He lays his pen down to give me his full attention. "Did she see something bad in the future?"
I shrug slightly. "Maybe. Having the gift of foresight in an onus thing, Mr. Robinson. She never told me as much, but it's a definite possibility. But you also have to consider that she and Maria had been together since they were small children. They were like sisters. Then Maria was gone and I think Liz was grieving, both for her friend and her parents."
"I can understand that."
"She seemed to withdraw a little more each day and there was nothing I could do about it."
"How long did that go on?"
I look to the ceiling, thinking. "Three years. Then one day I went out to pick up some supplies and when I came back, I found her huddled in a corner of the hotel room, crying uncontrollably." I can still see her and I have to will the tears away from my eyes. "I asked her what was wrong and she said that her body hurt everywhere. Well, I have the ability to heal and there was no way I was going to let her suffer. But when I connected with her."
His blue eyes are round, worried. "What?"
"Her body was in disarray. Nothing was sound. It was like all of her organs were mutating or something.""
His eyes grow even wider. "What was happening to her?"
I shake my head. "My guess is that she was transforming into a truer alien life form. I tried to stop it, but I couldn't." I know my voice has caught in my throat and I pause a moment to let the lump there dissipate. "I think that maybe by saving her and changing her body, I did that to her, I made her molecular structure distort like it was." It is so hard to admit this, so hard to admit that I only delayed her death.
"But you had to save her," he says compassionately. "You couldn't just let her die."
"I should have," I tell him and he looks surprised. "Her death in the Crashdown would have been quick. She'd lost so much blood, it would have been somewhat painless." I work my lips, not really wanting to talk about this. "But her real death was so much worse. She lingered for days, in pain, and there was nothing I could do. At the end, she was barraged with visions of what would be. Or maybe they were hallucinations, I'm not sure. She lost her mind." I can't help it this time. The tears feel wet and warm against my cheeks. "By the time she died, she was no longer Liz Parker, the smart, bright girl I fell in love with. She was crazed with pain and tortured by the visions she couldn't stop."
He reaches over and puts a comforting hand on my arm. "I'm sorry, Mr. Evans." His voice is a little choked, too.
I pat his hand, thankful for the gesture. "I held her tight against me as she drew her last breath," I reveal. "She was still so young, so beautiful, and she was just gone. Nearly literally. Her body disintegrated in my arms, falling into a pile of dust."
He watches me silently. I think he just realized why there was never a real alien autopsy video made - there were never any corpses. Finally he clears his throat. "Is that why you think Kyle died, too?"
I wipe my cheeks and nod. "Yes. After Liz died and I grieved, I went looking for Kyle. I don't know why. There probably wasn't anything I could do to save him and I'm not sure if he would have wanted to know what fate awaited him. I looked for him for a long time, and then I had to give up."
He flips back through his notes. "What about all of those kids in that hospital?" His voice has risen in pitch. He's starting to understand the horror that is my conscience.
When he looks up at me, I shrug. "I don't know. I can only guess what fate came to them." I try to smile at him to relinquish some of his pain, but I can't. "It's a horrible thing to carry around - the guilt. Liz and I had a conversation right after that incident with the children and she told me that maybe I wasn't meant to do the things I had done, that maybe there was a greater plan. Maybe those kids were meant to die. Looking back on it, I know she was right. In her case, she was meant to die from a bullet wound at sixteen. I messed with that plan and she suffered for it. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Mr. Robinson."
He doesn't like this unhappy ending. I can tell by the way he's staring at the table top. "What is the point of having a gift to heal if it's temporary and the results are disastrous?"
"I don't know. Maybe it's not a gift. Maybe it's a curse."
A heavy silence fills my apartment - I can hear the clock ticking above the fireplace. It takes him awhile to pull himself together and I wonder if he thinks I'm a monster for what I have done. I try to read his thoughts, but there are so many in his head none of them are coherent.
Finally, he picks up his pen again. "What did you do after Liz died?"
"I went back to the desert," I say. "With her ashes."
"You said you never returned to Roswell," he counters and I wonder if he's trying to cross-examine me now. But then again, maybe I'm being defensive.
"I didn't return to Roswell. New Mexico is full of desert, Mr. Robinson. I didn't have to go anywhere near Roswell. Anyway, I took Liz's ashes to the desert and stayed there for a long time. Each night I would watch the stars come out. The first night, it was as if they had all gone blue. There was no life up there, no hope. Liz was my only reason for living. Then I realized that I had an obligation to try to help Kyle. I spread Liz's ashes in the desert near the pod chamber, said goodbye to her and went looking for Kyle."
"Did you try to find the others?"
I shake my head. "Not immediately. But the time soon came when finding them became a necessity."
Part Six
"Why was finding them a necessity?"
I sit back in my chair. "What Liz had told me came true - our enemies did return to earth, fourteen years after that day, as predicted."
His eyes are round. "But the world is still here."
I nod. "True. There was no world war. There was only death to those I loved, which in a way was the end of the world for me."
He scratches his head. "But Liz was alive at that time. In reality, she'd already passed away. Why do you think that was?"
I shrug. "I had thought of that. My guess is that her powers and her progression into a more alien life form were tied to her emotional well- being. In the first reality, she was happy and I think perhaps the change was somewhat stunted. In the real reality, she was in emotional turmoil due to things that didn't happen in the first reality - our fleeing Roswell, the death of her parents, her separation from her friends."
He nods as he makes notes. "Makes sense. Tell me about the enemies coming back to earth."
"They were much fewer in numbers, since our destruction of the husks in Copper Summit. But they were still here, looking for revenge." I swallow hard, tell myself that soon this will be over, soon I will have told my story in its entirety. "They found Michael first. I was on the road, looking for Kyle, when I felt like someone had ripped part of my soul out." I touch my chest, still able to feel the pain. "It was like a giant cry for help, then nothing. I felt.empty inside. I didn't know why, but I did."
"How did you find out what had happened?"
"That night I received a frantic dreamwalk from Isabel. She'd felt it, too, and had been trying unsuccessfully to dreamwalk both Michael and Maria all night. When I awoke, I went outside and looked up at the stars. They had that same strange blue quality to them and I knew then that they were dead."
He swallows visibly. "And what about Isabel?"
"She gave me her whereabouts, and I hurried to her." I look down at my hands, work my jaw. "I didn't get to her in time. By the time I found her, she was hurt badly, hurt beyond repair. It was like the night that Nasedo came to my window injured - there was nothing I could do to help her." I feel the familiar tears in my eyes and will them away. "But I got to see her again, I got to say goodbye. I held her while she died. And then I was alone."
He studies me for a moment, then runs a hand through his dark hair. "How long ago was that?" It's a stupid question, but I know it's just to break me from my memories of my sister dying.
"Fifty years ago."
"Fifty? Have you been alone for fifty years?"
I nod, give him a wan smile. "It's not as bad as it sounds. I stayed on the road, doing what Liz had intended for us to do - running from the law and helping people." Like the Incredible Hulk, I laugh to myself. "I met a ton of people, interesting people. And at night I would dream of the ones I lost. I was never alone Mr. Robinson."
A little dent appears between his eyebrows as he thinks. "Why did they spare you?"
I shrug. "As punishment, I guess. Stripping me of all that mattered was a worse fate than dying, I suppose."
He looks sad as he glances down at the table top.
I suddenly feel very weary. "That's the end of my story," I tell him. "Nothing after that matters."
As the early morning light is creeping through the curtains, he leafs back through his notes, probably looking for holes. He does a lot of head scratching, then I see his eyebrows shoot upward. Marking his place in his notes with his pen, he looks up at me.
"Yes?" I say, slightly amused. He has such interesting facial expressions when he's thinking hard about something.
"You said the FBI killed all of your relatives."
"Yes."
"But what about Jesse Ramirez? Surely they would have interrogated him, since he was married to one of the aliens."
I smile and shake my head. "Maybe they did interrogate him. I don't know."
"But they didn't kill him because you said he and Isabel met up again in Miami." He's leading me right down the path I wanted him on.
"That's true. Jesse is still alive to this day."
He looks surprised by that revelation. "Why did they let him live?"
I search for an explanation because I have none. "Maybe Liz was right," I say finally. "Maybe there is a larger plan at work in the universe and Jesse was going to be needed eventually for some other purpose."
He watches me silently. "For what?"
I'm nervous about this. About revealing the truth. But I've known all along that this was how our meeting would end. "When we first met, many hours ago now, you asked me why I had chosen you."
He nods. "Yes, I did. And you said it was because I was young."
"That was part of the reason." I study his young face, find no hint in his blue eyes that he is catching on. "The other reason is because everyone should know their history. I know what it's like to know nothing about my ancestry."
His expression is blank. The light still has not dawned on him.
"I had Jesse Ramirez find you," I admit.
The blank expression is gone and replaced by one of confusion and surprise. "You did? Why?"
I draw in a breath and resist the urge to pick up the pack of cigarettes. "Tell me about your father."
"My fath -why?" His voice has risen in pitch.
I remain calm. It's necessary that I remain calm. "Just tell me about him. What is he like?"
He clears his throat and has apparently decided to indulge me. "He's fine. He was raised in New York - he lives there still."
"And what of your grandparents?"
He gives an exasperated sigh. "I don't have any grandparents. My father was." His mouth drops open and I can see every human emotion possible flood his eyes. ".adopted."
I smile gently at him and nod my head. "That's right. He was. In 2002, right?"
He nods numbly.
I let the silence weigh heavily in the room as he processes the information.
Finally, he speaks. "My father was.Zan? My father was born on another planet?"
I nod in his direction and allow myself that cigarette now that the most stressful part of this is over. "Yes. I had Jesse use some of his contacts to access adoption records. He traced your father to New York, and then to you."
"Why didn't you contact him?" He sounds a little panicked.
"I said before, the young are more open-minded. And your father is not a writer. I wanted to meet you, tell you my story, so that you could understand it and write it. I have the feeling if I'd confronted your father, he wouldn't have been as objective as you and this meeting would never have happened."
He's staring at the table top, his eyes darting nervously as he's trying to put the puzzle pieces together. I can practically see his heart thudding through his shirt. I hope this information hasn't been too much for him. "You're my grandfather?" he finally asks.
I nod. "I believe so, yes."
He looks at me in wonder and I think about how he looked at me when he first walked through my door. My, how things can change in such a short period of time. "Do I have powers?" he asks excitedly.
I have to laugh. I laugh because it's a funny question. I laugh because of the excited, little-boy-with-a-new-toy look on his face. I laugh because I know he's not afraid of me. "Only if your father married an alien hybrid. I told you, he's one hundred percent human."
Now I laugh because he looks disappointed.
"I don't know what to say to you," he says, his voice holding wonder.
"Say you'll write the book."
"I will. I promise. I will. Can I take you to meet my father?"
I shake my head. "As I said earlier, my time on this earth is almost over. But share your experiences with him, let him know what I was like." A thought crosses my mind and I rise from my chair. "I forgot - I have something else for you."
I retrieve the box from the bedroom and bring it back to him. Inside are the healing stones, the communication orbs, the book, and Liz's journal. Being a true scribe, he bypasses all of the other-worldly items and picks up the journal. His fingers touch the aged writing.
"It was Liz's," I explain. "You should read her point of view, also. It's good to have more than one perspective when you're writing a book."
"It is," he says, smiling as he closes the journal. "Especially non- fiction."
"So, you believe me then?"
He nods. "I do." He rises to gather his things, pulls on his jacket. "Will I see you again?"
I shake my head. "I don't think so."
He frowns, grieving for something he never had. Then he reaches over and gives me a hug, holding me tightly. When he pulls away, I see just the slightest hint of tears in his eyes. "I promise I will make you proud."
I smile back at him. "You already have."
After he leaves, the apartment is empty again and I go about the task of tidying up. I dump the ashtrays, wash our coffee cups. I spend most of the day sitting in the sun on my balcony. I stay there until night falls once again, just thinking about the last twenty-four hours and how lucky I am to have met him. I wish for a moment I have Liz's gift of foresight so I can read the finished book, but I have no doubt he will do a wonderful job.
As the sun sets, the stars begin to peek through the evening clouds. Gazing up at them, I smile lightly because I know soon I will be with the ones I love again. I can't wait to see them. The sky darkens and I can see that I won't have to wait long, because the stars have once again gone blue.
The End
The boy is late.
Not that his tardiness surprises me. I expected it. From the moment I heard the half-interest in his young voice, I knew he would drag his feet coming here.
But he will come. Because he is interested, even if he doesn't want to admit it.
I sit absolutely still, not even my breath disturbing the quiet air of the apartment. I can hear the city street outside, far below me, the sound of car horns and voices and engines. So much time has passed and yet so much as remained the same.
I sit still until the room falls into darkness, then I slowly reach over and flip on the lamp beside the couch. Moving makes my bones ache. I don't care much for growing old. I don't care much for being alone.
I know he has arrived even before he knocks on the door. My senses have not diminished - I can still hear things other creatures cannot, I can still sense things. No one can sneak up on me.
I push myself to my feet and open the door to greet him. He looks surprised, his right hand raised as if to knock. In his left, a small attaché case.
"Mr. Robinson," I say, and I'm sure that my voice isn't as old and smoke- filled as he'd expected.
His expression of surprise fades away quickly and he drops his hand, offering it in greeting. "Yes," he replies, his words hanging there without an ending because I have not told him my name.
I take his hand and shake, and I'm sure once again he's surprised that my grip is strong and that I'm not some decrepit old codger. I step aside and make a sweeping motion with my hand. "Please, come in."
He gives a smile of courtesy and side-steps me in a light breeze of cologne. As I close the door, I watch him give the apartment a quick once- over. Like a bloodhound. I hope he's hungry. I hope he wants blood. Because I have it to give. He turns to look at me and I can see it in his face - he's not hungry, he's not on the trail of anything. He came here to do me a favor because he has a favorite grandpa who passed away and patronizing some old fart might make him miss him less.
"Have a seat," I say, motioning toward the sitting area.
He picks the easy chair and perches on the very edge of it, so I claim the couch. Which is fine because I prefer the couch. His grandpa probably did, too. Immediately, in a the-sooner-I-do-this-the-sooner-I'll-be-out-of- here kind of way, he digs in the attaché and comes out with a yellow pad of paper and a pen.
"Can I get you something to drink?" I ask him. Lots of years, still haven't lost my hospitality.
"No, thanks," he replies with a quick glance and the same patronizing smile. He appears to go over his notes, then looks at me with a somewhat amused expression on his young face. "So, you called my office."
"I did," I agree.
"To talk about aliens." He manages to get it out without laughing. I'm proud of him.
"Yes."
He checks the pad again. "Specifically, the 1947 crash."
"Yes."
He scratches his full head of dark hair and I have the feeling he's trying to cover his smile. "Sir, that was over one hundred years ago."
"Yes," I respond, my words slow and steady. I will not argue with him. I'm done fighting. With anybody. "Yes, it was that long ago. But people are still interested in aliens, aren't they?"
He doesn't respond but I can tell that he is listening.
"And they're still interested in UFOs. They're still afraid of them."
He snorts a little laugh. "I don't know if afraid is the word I'd use."
I shrug. "Okay, then they're paranoid."
He nods. "Better." I think maybe he's surprised I'm quicker on my feet mentally than he's given me credit for. I've probably surprised him enough for the next ten years in three short minutes. "So, what about the 1947 crash?"
"It was real," I tell him casually.
He does laugh this time. "Really? How can you be sure?" He's got just a tinge of attitude in his voice. He's a cynic, a skeptic. He reminds me of Michael.
I clear my throat. "I know because I was in the crash."
He stops, his mouth agape, and I think one more surprise and I may have to perform CPR. Poor kid. I should have broken it a little more gently. I'm pretty blunt these days. I don't have time or patience for sugar-coating.
"You," he says, his voice a bit choked. "You were in the crash?" I nod. "Over one hundred years ago?" I nod again. "But.you don't look like someone who is over one hundred years of age."
I shake my head. "I'm not. I wasn't born until almost fifty years after the crash."
Now he's looking at me like I'm a lunatic. No creature on earth has a gestation period that long, and most creatures would be out of their child- bearing years in that amount of time. And therein lies the proof, sonny.
"Riiight," he says slowly, the word stretched out. "So you're what? An alien?"
I nod.
There is complete silence in the room. He simply stares at me and I stare back without blinking. I can hear his thoughts - a power I developed in my forties. He wants to make the quickest exit possible, but his curiosity is piqued. If nothing else, he could have a wonderful story about the hospitable crack pot he met Friday night. It's the kind of crap movies are made out of.
"So, can you prove you're an alien?" he finally asks. He's suddenly picturing himself as the reporter in Interview with the Vampire. I smile at the analogy. "Are you going to make yourself disappear or talk to me in my head or make objects levitate or something?"
"No," I tell him and he practically deflates before me. "Anything I would do right now you would debunk as a cheap parlor trick. I want to tell you my story first. Then you'll see that I'm not a fraud."
He frowns. His Friday night out with the boys just dissipated right before his eyes. "Why me?" he asks, a hint of whininess in his voice and I'm reminded of Kyle.
"I picked you," I tell him quietly, then reach to the coffee table and pick up a pack of cigarettes. I offer him one that he declines, but I know he's a smoker - I can smell it on his clothes. I light the cigarette and draw in a long breath. "I wanted to tell you my story."
"Why?"
"Because you're young," I say simply. "The young have more open minds." I smile at him. "Even if they are somewhat cynical."
He looks away for a moment, embarrassed that I have seen through him. He flips the pad to a blank page, having decided to indulge me. "Okay, I guess I could hear you out."
I nod. "Thank you."
He scribbles something - perhaps a cartoon drawn out of boredom - then looks up at me. "What is your name?"
"Max Evans."
He writes it down, but as the pen moves across the paper, he mutters, "Names have been changed to protect the innocent."
"There are no innocents."
His head snaps up and he looks at me silently.
"There is no one to protect. I am the last of my kind."
I think I see his lips purse as he returns to his scribbling. In my head, I imagine what he has written - Crack pot thinks he's the last. He's the last because he's crazy and there are no aliens and there never were. "So, you're really Max Evans?"
I nod.
"And since you brought up that you were the last, how many of you were there?"
That is such a tricky question. I consider there to have been four of us. But then there are the duplicates to consider. And our enemies. And then what happened to Liz and Kyle. I'm not sure how to put a number to it.
He's looking at me, puzzled. "How many?"
"There were four of us," I settle on that number, assuming the rest will come out later.
"Four."
"Yes. Myself. My sister. My friend whom I considered a brother. And my.wife." I hesitate on that last word and I'm sure he picked up on it. He's trained to detect stuff like that.
"A regular family affair, huh?" he jokes, too jovially. He's still thinking I'm crazy.
I nod my head slowly.
"Why don't you look any different than me?" He's smirking. Arrogant young man.
"Because I'm a hybrid."
"A what? I thought you said you were an alien."
"I am. I'm half alien, half human. I'm a hybrid of the two."
I can hear the comparison in his head. Half tangerine, half grapefruit - he's a tangelo. The guy is a fruit.
"I assure you I'm not," I say, my gazed fixed on his.
"What?" he asks, startled.
"A tangelo."
His mouth gapes open. I didn't want to use a power so soon, but he was starting to get on my nerves. I've lost patience for the doubters of the world.
"I didn't say you were," he stammers.
"Of course not," I agree and take another drag on my cigarette.
He clears his throat and shuffles his papers. "So, uh, tell me, Mr.-" he has to check his notes because he has already forgotten my name "-Evans. Mr. Evans, why do you want to tell me your story?"
"Like I said, I'm the last of my kind. No one has ever documented our lives. My time is drawing near. I don't want to leave this earth without the truth being told."
"Okay," he says, suddenly more cooperative. "Where do we start?" His smile looks a little more sincere now.
"At the beginning, where it is natural to start," I tell him. "But in the end, it's a story about a girl."
His shoulders sag. Romances don't sell. No one is interested in reading about happiness. But they are interested in reading about tragedies. This young man should not be disappointed - he will get his best seller in the end.
"It's about consequences," I tell him, take a slow drag on the cigarette. "It's about the best laid plans and good intentions. Do you know what they say about good intentions, Mr. Robinson?"
He nods. "Something about the road to Hell being paved with them?"
I nod and adjust my aching body on the couch, stuff a pillow behind my back. "I promise you it will be worth your time. If you have a tape recorder, you might want to get it out. I have a lot to tell. You're going to be here awhile."
Part Two
The boy shuffles through his notes, scribbled on that yellow pad in a nearly unreadable script. He's using a recording device as well, probably something digital since magnetic tape has been obsolete for decades and I'm sure my mention of it earlier amused him endlessly, but he has still written notes on the pad, perhaps to occupy his hands, perhaps so he can ask questions to fill in the gaps of the story.
Two hours have passed, time I used to relay to him the events of my first year with Liz. It may seem extreme to have taken that much time, but it is imperative that he understand the nature of our relationship, of what she meant to me. Without that understanding, I will seem but a monster in the end. And I don't want to believe I am a monster. Not then, not now.
He has accepted a few cigarettes and a cup of coffee, and he's even managed to shed his overcoat and loosen his tie. He's becoming comfortable with me, which pleases me. I picked the right person for this job.
"So you healed the girl in the café," he says, his blue eyes scanning the page.
"Liz," I correct. I want him to get the details correct.
He smiles. "Yes, Liz. Liz Parker. By healing her, you drew the attention of not only the local sheriff but the FBI?" He raises an eyebrow.
I nod.
"You're aware that the FBI disbanded over twenty years ago, right?"
I nod again. "They lost their potency," I tell him. "Their effectiveness. It was only a matter of time."
"Tell me about this group that took you, that experimented on you." Pen poised above the paper.
"They were called the Special Unit," I explain to him. I haven't thought of them or the White Room in many, many years. Odd that so much time has passed and yet I can still feel their torturous effects all the way down to my bones. "I think perhaps they didn't think I had feelings - physical feelings - like other creatures on this planet."
Young Mr. Robinson wants to ask the question but fears it will offend me.
I smile at him. "Yes, I do have feelings. Physical and emotional." I hold up my hand, study my palm. "Physiologically, I'm all human." I drop my hand back into my lap. "But they didn't think so, possibly since they'd studied the other aliens they'd recovered from the crash site."
Another check of the pad. "Nasedo." He says the word slowly, making sure he pronounces it correctly.
"Yes."
"What does the word mean?"
"It's a Mesaliko word."
He looks puzzled and it somewhat hurts that River Dog's people have fallen so far into obscurity.
"They are a New Mexico native American tribe," I explain. "They named him Nasedo because it means visitor."
The young man smiles. "You must have been in heaven finding someone who was one hundred percent alien, who had been on earth all this time just waiting to find and protect you."
I can't smile back at him. I know what Nasedo's true agenda was, but it is too soon to reveal that to him. I need to explain other things first. "In truth, Nasedo made most of us uncomfortable. Especially my sister."
"Isabel."
"Yes, Isabel." At the mere mention of her name, I get a flash of her golden hair and her perfume seems to drift to my nose. In my mind, Isabel will be forever young, and it has been so long since I've seen her that my soul aches with the memories.
"What was she like?"
"Isabel?"
"Yes."
I can smile at that. "She was beautiful. In body and spirit. She had a horrible temper sometimes, very much the princess she was engineered to be." I chuckle. "But I loved her more than anyone except Liz Parker. For a very long time, she was all I had to depend on. I would have done anything for Isabel."
He's writing on the pad. "What became of her? You said you were the last of your kind here." When I don't answer, he looks up at me.
I shake my head. "In good time."
He doesn't push, probably because he knows I will hold true to my promise of completing the story. I appreciate his patience.
"What about." He flips the page on the pad. "Tess. What about her?"
I swallow, then reach for another cigarette.
"I mean, here you'd thought you'd found the love of your life and then someone else comes along and throws a wrench into that theory. Based on the information your mother gave you, did you know then that she was your destiny?"
I light the cigarette and nod my head. "I knew that I was intended to be with her."
"Did you remember her from your previous life? Did you fall back in love with her?"
"I didn't remember her right away." I don't tell him that even when I did receive "memories" of my former life, I had no way to tell if they were true memories or if they were planted in my head as the result of a mindwarp. "But eventually I recalled a few things, just snippets of time, that had to deal with her. No, I never fell in love with her again."
He nods in that yes-I'm-listening kind of way as he makes notes on the pad. "What became of her?" He catches my smile and nods knowingly. "Yeah, I know, all in good time."
I laugh at him. He really is an entertaining individual, now that his attitude was checked at the door.
He holds the pad up. "Okay, so this is what we have so far. You heal the girl - Liz - in the café and risk exposing yourself and the others. As a result the FBI and the local law enforcement -"
"Jim Valenti," I correct. Jim deserves credit and recognition.
"Yes, Jim Valenti. As a result, the FBI and Valenti are suspicious. By the end of that year, you're in a relationship with Liz, Michael is in a relationship with Maria Deluca, your sister is dancing around Alex Whitman and long-lost Tess Harding appears. The FBI holds you prisoner in a white room and the sheriff becomes an ally. You discover you were once Antarian royalty and that Tess was your wife. Liz Parker walks away from you." He puts the pad down on the ottoman. "What was that like?"
I watch him silently for a few long moments, my fingers toying with the lighter. "It was like having my heart ripped out and stomped on," I say honestly, the vision of Liz running down that hillside still fresh in my mind. "A little piece of me died that day."
"Did you hate her for that?"
"No. I couldn't. I could never hate Liz, Mr. Robinson. She did what she did because she thought it was the best thing. She'd heard the words herself - I was meant to be some noble king on a world I'd never seen. She didn't want to be a deterrent to that."
"Did you try to stop her?"
I nod. "Of course I did. But I had to let her make up her own mind. I couldn't hold Liz prisoner. I needed to respect her choice." I see doubt on his young face. "You have to understand, there is nothing I wouldn't have done for Liz Parker. If I could have given my life for hers, I would've. Do you understand that kind of love, Mr. Robinson?"
He nods his head slowly. "Yes sir, I do." From the look in his eyes, I have to wonder if there is an unrequited Liz Parker lurking somewhere in his past. But I feel he does indeed understand, which is a blessing. At least for me. "What happened with the sheriff's son?"
My mind is still back on Liz, so he has taken me a bit off guard. "Sorry?"
"The sheriff's son." He glances sideways at the pad. "Kyle. You healed him as well?"
I nod. "Yes. That was the true turning point for the sheriff, I believe. Although I came to believe that he never would have turned us in."
"No?"
"No. I think he wanted the proof that we existed, just to prove that his father wasn't some alien-crazed lunatic. But when I healed Kyle, I knew then that he'd never turn on us."
"And he helped you dispose of the body of a federal agent."
"Yes."
"Strange behavior for a lawman."
I nod in agreement. "The sheriff would pay for that eventually," I reveal and the young man's eyebrows shoot upward. "He became an ally to us, as you stated. He did many things that would be misconstrued as unbecoming an official."
"But what about the son? Did he become an ally also or did he want to turn you in?"
"Kyle was afraid of us at first," I sigh. "But Tess became friends with him and he became one of us eventually." I leave off the part that if Kyle wanted to be afraid of us, he should have trusted Tess last of anyone. I also don't explain to him what exactly 'he became one of us eventually' entails.
"So, there were four of you. And five outsiders who knew the truth."
"Yes."
"You know the old adage - the more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to get out. Especially if you've got the FBI on your tail."
"It was hard to maintain the secret."
"But you were successful?"
"Partially." I smile cautiously. "The next year brought many changes, and some of us made choices that would expose our secret eventually."
He looks surprised again. "But you're still here."
"I am. None of us paid immediately."
"But eventually.?"
My smile widens. "The best of intentions, Mr. Robinson. As I stated before, the road to hell is paved with them. You better check your recorder, we still have much ground to cover."
Part Three
I have stunned him into silence.
And from the look on his face, my junior year of high school was as traumatic for him as it was for me.
We've moved out to the balcony of my apartment, perched several stories above the street below. The breeze is cool in the late-summer air and toys with a stray strand of his hair. That is the only movement coming from poor Mr. Robinson.
Finally he closes his mouth and clears his throat, adjusts his pad of paper which had been balancing precariously on one knee. "I don't know where to begin," he confesses, his voice a bit hoarse.
"I know," I sympathize. "But all of those things truly did happen."
He lights a cigarette and stares at the floor of the balcony as he shakes his head. "She murdered your friend Alex?"
I nod my head.
"She used him to get what she needed and then she just killed him?"
"She used everyone, Mr. Robinson. But Alex was the only one she killed."
"And you didn't see it?"
I shake my head slowly. I still don't like admitting that one. "I didn't want to see it."
"But Liz did."
"Yes. I should have listened to her from the beginning. But it was so easy to mark her behaviors up to jealousy."
"Was she? Jealous?"
I think about that for a moment. "No, I don't believe Liz was petty enough to be jealous. My relationship with Tess was just so painful that jealousy would have been a wasted emotion."
He raises one eyebrow. "But she couldn't blame you for that.I mean, not with what she did with Kyle."
"She did what she had to do."
He scratches his head - I've learned this isn't a defensive mechanism but rather an indication that he is thinking hard about something. "How did you know that your visit from the future was not just a mind trick?"
"Mind warp," I correct him. I watch him silently and draw in a long breath. "For a long time it didn't matter. Once Tess was out of the picture and the Skins were defeated, it didn't really have much relevance. If it had been a mind warp, then it was a shitty trick to play but not much else."
After a heavy pause, he holds up one of his hands, palm-up. "But?"
"Years down the road, I realized that maybe I should have paid more attention to that visit. That maybe it meant something after all."
He withdraws, almost seems to turn pale. "The end of the world," he breathes and I can practically hear him doing the math in his head.
I chuckle at him even though the situation is anything but funny. "That time has long passed," I reassure him. As my smile fades away, I pick up the pack of cigarettes we've nearly consumed and pull one out. "But when you travel back in time to warn yourself of something, maybe you should listen."
I think about how ridiculous that sentence sounds and eventually I realize he is looking at me strangely. Surely I've been speaking cryptically.
"It did mean something," I tell him, flicking ashes into the ashtray. "But we'll get to that."
He nods slowly, a deer in the headlights. Then he picks up the pad and scribbles a few things on it. "You.you slept with Tess."
"I did." I don't like admitting that, either, but it is the truth.
"Even though you loved Liz."
I nod and prop my feet up on the chair opposite of me. "I thought I'd lost Liz. For good this time."
"Over her researching who'd killed Alex?"
"Yes. We'd never had a fight that bitter. Never had I felt like we were throwing it all away. And Isabel had withdrawn into herself, looking for an escape from everything that was going on around her. She and I fought and I made some pretty asinine threats in her direction. So two of the people I trusted most in the world were gone." I watch the city lights twinkling against the horizon. "At the time Tess seemed like the only thing that was real."
"You were ready to be an alien," he says simply and I have to wonder if he has reached a similar crossroads in his life.
"I thought so. But in the morning I just wanted to be with Liz again."
"But Tess was pregnant."
I nod. "There wasn't much time to think of Liz. I went straight into Alien King mode to try to get us off this planet. It was all a trick, as you now know."
"She took your only means of getting back to your home planet. What did that mean to you?"
I shrug. "I didn't care. I was here, Liz had flushed out Alex's killer. I wanted to stay here."
"But Tess was carrying your baby."
"Yes." I think of my brief one-week stay with my son, of handing him over to my parents to be put up for adoption. I haven't seen him since, but in my heart I know he's still out there somewhere. "She would return one day with him, but that story is yet to come."
He smiles at the tidbit of information and scribbles it on the paper. "What happened between you and Isabel? She must've been pretty hot at you."
"She was. I felt it was better to keep us together, that we'd be stronger that way." I finger the lighter, can almost hear her laughter in my ears. "I should have let her go." I let out a sigh and ignore the boy's inquisitive expression. "I think once she realized there was a good chance we'd be separated - she wanted to stay on earth and I had to leave with Tess and the baby - I think then she gave up on the fight between us for good."
"Do you think she forgave you?"
I nod, because Isabel always forgave me my trespasses.
"And what was happening with Michael at that point?"
I smile at him. "Michael didn't want to leave earth. After all of his years of searching for answers, he couldn't leave this life behind. Because of Maria. If he hadn't had her in his life, I know he would have gone in an instant."
"Was knowing the truth that important to him?"
"Always. He had a bad childhood, an abusive foster father. Michael wanted to escape to some place so far away that he'd never be able to come back."
"Until he met Maria."
"Yes. And they were perfect for one another. They bickered, they fought, but they were cut from the same cloth and they kept each other honest."
"What happened to them?"
I don't want to confront that issue right now. I know he can see that much in my eyes, and I know he can also see the sorrow there. "In good time. We'll cover that in good time." Then I add, "They're together now, wherever they are. They were never apart again after we left Roswell. Not even in the end."
I can practically see his ears perk up like a watch dog. "You left Roswell?"
I laugh, make a sweeping gesture to the city that surrounds us. "Obviously."
He laughs with me, a bit embarrassed. "Well, yes, obviously, but I mean when did you leave Roswell for the first time?"
My laugh fades away. "And the last time."
"You've never been back?"
I shake my head slowly. "There was no reason to go back. Roswell turned out to be nothing but a place of bad memories, of bad people. Once we left, there was never a need to return."
"And when was it that you left?"
"After graduation." I draw in a long breath, expel smoke into the sky.
"You've been away from home that long?" He sounds surprised.
But not as surprised as he looks when I deliver my answer. "I have no home."
"Sir?"
I look up at the stars. "Somewhere out there is a planet we thought was our home. It is full of treachery and deceit. I know nothing of that world, and I don't want to know." I drop my gaze back to his. "I've found that here, on this earth, home is not a place. You can live many places, but it's still all just geography. Who you have around you determines your home." I look away from him, flick ash onto the floor. "They're all gone now. I have no home."
He gives a nervous little grunt of sorts. "Sir, surely you have friends -"
"No."
"Family?"
I shake my head. "Not any more. I learned my lesson about letting people in, about letting them know the secret."
Another nervous grunt. "But no one should spend their life alone."
I give him a half smile. "Spending your life alone is much easier than dealing with the guilt that comes from knowing someone is dead because of you."
Part Four
"So you left Roswell as fugitives, all six of you."
From my location before the coffee pot, I nod in his direction. I drop more coffee into the machine and click it on. This is our second pot.
"That must have been an adventure."
As the coffee perks, I walk back to the dining area and sit at the table across from him. "That's one word for it."
"And Liz had powers." He seems to have livened up a bit, even though it's now the very wee hours of the morning. "She could see the future."
"She could." I'm sure my slight frown puzzles him.
"How did she handle that?"
I draw in a breath and give a little shrug. "She was so freaked at first. She thought she was dying."
He laughs lightly. "Why?"
"When she started to." I search for the right word. "When she started to change, she was lighting up like a night sky in a thunderstorm."
He's looking at me curiously.
To demonstrate, I hold up my hand and force all of my power to it. Within a second, green veins of electricity crackle across my skin. It hurts and I can only maintain it for a few seconds. I can only image how it felt to Liz.
His mouth drops open. I'd forgotten I hadn't used a power in front of him yet, so I blow it off like nothing happened.
"That kept happening to her," I explain. "It was worse when she was around me."
"Because you were the catalyst?"
"You could look at it that way. But I think it was because Liz's powers were very much affected by her emotions. When we were together, all emotions were to the extreme and she couldn't control what the powers were doing to her."
"Did she adjust?"
"Eventually." I swallow. "For awhile."
He's writing on the pad and misses my hesitation. "So Isabel left her husband behind."
"Jesse Ramirez."
"Did she ever see him again?"
"She did."
Young Mr. Robinson smiles widely. "Did they get back together?" Obviously he likes happy endings.
I shake my head and his smile fades away. "She ran into him by chance. They both happened to be in Miami at the same time."
"Were you there?"
"No."
"What happened?"
"They had dinner together." I smile at him. "Maybe they spent the night together. I don't know for sure. But she said goodbye to him again. It was the last time she saw him."
"She never tried to contact him after that?"
I frown. I don't want to talk about this. "She wasn't able to."
He raises an eyebrow and I realize I can't keep putting him off.
"Isabel passed away shortly after that."
I can almost see the sorrow in his eyes. Sorrow for someone he never even met. He's a compassionate man. "I'm sorry."
I wave a hand in his direction, letting him know he hasn't tread into uncharted waters. I rise and retrieve the coffee pot and two fresh cups. While I'm in the kitchen, I get another pack of smokes and take them back with me.
"What was it like traveling in the van?"
I snort a little laugh. "Sounds like a dream to most young people, doesn't it? Nothing but the open highway, your best friends, nowhere to be, no one to answer to."
He smiles. "Yeah. Like back packing through Europe."
"Exactly. But in reality how long do you think that's fun?"
His eyebrows knit together.
"It took a week," I say. "A week before we started to get on one another's nerves. Now, you have to understand that I loved all of those people very much. But when you're riding in tight quarters with the same people day in and day out, the party quickly loses its appeal."
"What were the problems?"
I shrug. "Everything. Money. Driving responsibilities. Destinations. Some people wanted to make a vacation of it and some did not."
"For instance?"
I shift my weight in the chair. I've always hated these wrought-iron things - they're hard on the back. "The intent was that we were to be out in the world helping others. 'Doing good' as Liz put it."
"And that didn't happen?"
"It did. But not nearly as much as we thought it would. For some, our journey was a frat party. For others, a prison."
"To whom was it a prison?"
"Isabel," I say. "She missed Jesse so much. I had Liz, Michael had Maria and it kind of forced Isabel to Kyle. But Isabel didn't love Kyle in that way. Like a brother, yes, but nothing more. She ached too much for Jesse. I'm sure when we stopped in that chapel and Liz and I finally got married it must have made her very lonely for her husband."
Another spark of interest. Weddings equate to happily ever after. "You married?"
"Of course. I wanted no one else. I had the opportunity to be with Liz and I took it."
He's out of paper. Excusing himself politely, he walks back to the living room, digs in his bag and produces another pad. I'm amused at the way he carefully tucks the full pad back into the bag, like it's precious and fragile. I'm amused and yet touched - I know after I'm gone he'll write his book like I wanted to.
Reclaiming his seat, he positions the pen over the paper. "Did you ever have contact with people back in Roswell?"
I pick up the cigarettes, give him one and take one for myself. "Not for quite awhile."
"How long?"
"Two years."
"That's a long time."
I nod. "It is. It was difficult to not have contact with people we missed." I sigh. "When we did finally contact someone, we found out the consequences of our actions."
"Consequences?"
I drag on the cigarette. "Every action has a consequence, Mr. Robinson. We were young and naïve to believe that if we fled Roswell so would everyone who was trying to kill us. That may have worked if the people who were looking for us had actually known we left."
"What do you mean?"
"They assumed we were being kept by someone harboring us as fugitives. They started with our families."
He swallows visibly.
"They had my father disbarred." It hurts to talk about this. I know what my dad's career meant to him, and to be stripped of all he had worked for had to have crushed him. "Being a lawyer meant everything to my father. He lost everything - his practice, our home. And eventually my mother."
"She divorced him?!" he gasps incredulously.
"She would have. She couldn't live with him, not with the person he became after they took everything from him."
"What happened to them?" His eyes are very wide, very blue.
I try to keep the bitter tone out of my voice. "My father died mysteriously. A supposed heart attack, but there are many ways to cover up that one."
"And your mom?"
"Hit and run driver."
He looks like he's going to be sick. To give him a break, I refill his coffee cup, toss two sugar cubes into it like I've seen him do with previous cups.
"They killed them," he says, his voice sounding far off.
"I suppose once they'd interrogated them and found that they knew nothing, they had to do something about the fact that they now knew who the members of the Special Unit were."
He looks up at me, worried. "And what about the others?"
"Jim Valenti was eventually locked away. Too much alien talk. Stuck in a mental institution for the remainder of his life."
He tries to smile. "Please tell me that he lived to be an old man."
Rattling out the death toll has almost become comic. "Another patient beat him to death four months after he was committed."
He swallows again and looks no less ill. "What about the Parkers? And Maria's mom?"
"The Crashdown burned late one night, killing the Parkers, who were sleeping in the apartment upstairs. Amy Deluca simply disappeared. Speculation was that her body had been weighted down and thrown into the rock quarry."
He sits back in his chair, one hand on his stomach, the other over his mouth. "Good God."
I inhale cigarette smoke and let the room fall into silence. I can hear the gears turning in his head. He's thinking about what a broad, wide- sweeping power the FBI used to have. I think he's frightened.
"You don't need to worry," I tell him after awhile. "There's no one left to come after you now that you know. You'll be safe."
He looks up at me, his eyes devastated. "I believe you. It's just.wow. All of those people. Just gone. Who did you talk to that filled you in on all of that?"
I snuff the cigarette in the ashtray. "We tried everyone, and of course got no one. As a last resort, I contacted Brody Davis, my old boss at the UFO Center."
"Why didn't they kill him?"
"He was a crack pot," I explain. "As Agent Topolsky once said, they all get tracked. He was useful to them still. He could blather about aliens and no one would pay him much mind, but the FBI could also track his findings."
He lights his cigarette with shaking fingers. "To find out all of those people died must have been devastating for you."
"It was," I assure him. "But the worst was yet to come."
Part Five
"This was taken before the prom, only days before Alex's death," I say, handing him a picture. I've retrieved a collection of pictures I've sheltered over the years. Despite their many travels and the ravages of time, they look pretty good.
He takes the picture and I can tell he's trying to put names to faces based on what I have already told him. I save him the torture by pointing to each person and telling him who they are. I show him Tess last.
"Before you lost contact with everyone in Roswell, did you find out what happened to your son?" he asks, his eyes fixed on Tess's pretty likeness.
I shake my head and settle back in my seat. "No. My father took him to New York and had a colleague of his put the baby up for adoption. I never knew what happened to him."
He looks uncertain about his next question. "Did it.um, did it bother you that Tess was his mother?"
I smile at that. A natural question. "No, because I never really saw him that way. You would think I would hate that baby because he was conceived out of trickery and deceit and born to a woman I loathed. But I didn't feel that way about him. In my mind, he was mine and mine alone. It probably sounds arrogant, but that's the way I envisioned him. Like I alone had created him."
"It must have been difficult to give him up."
I frown. I'm not sure how I can ever make anyone understand why that action was justified. "You need to know that I loved him."
He nods. "I do."
"I was nineteen. I'm an alien. My friends and family were in constant, real danger. I wanted him to live, to do everything he wanted in life. You see, he was human."
His eyebrows rise slightly.
"His mother was half human. I'm half human. The two halves together made a whole human." I pause for a second. "It's frightening, really, to think what may have happened if the two alien halves had made a whole alien."
I shake the thoughts of that from my head and give him a smile. I reach into the portfolio and pull out some more photos, pictures from Roswell, pictures from after we left. The Grand Canyon. The Grand Tetons. Mount Rushmore. Key West. The site of the Salem Witch Trials.
He looks at all of them with interest, a light smile on his lips.
"Keep them," I say, and he looks at me in surprise. "Use them for the book, if you write it." I know he will write it, but I don't tell him that. I want him to believe he hasn't made up his mind yet, but he already has.
"Thank you," he says and tucks the pictures carefully back into the portfolio. Then he retrieves his pen and he's back into investigator mode. "So what happened after you found out all of your parents were dead?"
I draw in a breath, lace my hands behind my head. "We split up. We figured they may still be looking for us and if they found us together they'd wipe us all out at once."
"It must have been hard to say goodbye again."
I nod. "It was. Part of me was happy to be free of the van, happy to get some privacy. But another part of me knew that I may never see them again."
"Did you? See them again?"
"Some of them. Not all." I drop my hands to the table and pick up another cigarette. I've never been a chain smoker, but this evening it just seems to fit with the mood. "Liz and I left together, of course. And Michael and Maria."
"And Kyle and Isabel?" There's a little twinkle in his eye and I think secretly he's hoping those two got together.
I shake my head. "No. Kyle wanted to go with Isabel, but she had to be honest with him and tell him that she wasn't in love with him. It crushed him. They both ended up going their separate ways." I think about the look on Kyle's face as he'd boarded a Greyhound bus, his duffle bag over his shoulder. On the bottom step, he'd turned around, his lips curved into a frown, a tear in his eye, and just met Isabel's gaze for an eternity. After awhile, she shook her head no and he boarded the bus without another look back. I will never forget that look on his face, that look of utter devastation. "I never saw Kyle again."
He stops writing, his expression curious. "You didn't? Then how do you know Kyle is dead?"
"I don't," I sigh. "Well, I do and I don't. I have no physical proof of it, but because of certain events that transpired, I'm almost certain he is." I wave him on with a hand. "We'll get to that."
"Okay," he says, returning to his writing. "So, where did the others go?"
"I don't know where they went at first. I know that Isabel ended up in Miami at some point, where she ran into Jesse, but I don't know where she went immediately. I only heard from Michael and Maria once after we parted."
"How did you communicate?"
I smile. "Isabel dreamwalked me every now and then. There was no wire tap the FBI could put on that one."
He laughs lightly. "And Michael?"
"Michael was more creative. He placed an ad in USA Today with a time and payphone number where I could call him. Luckily I saw it and did phone him. There was no important message - he just wanted to touch base. He needed to let us know that he and Maria got married."
A bright smile. He does like happy endings. "What about you and Liz?"
I look at the table top for a moment, then draw in a deep breath. "Around the time we split.I think that's when Liz started to change."
"Change?"
"Her behavior started to change. She sometimes went days without sleeping. She seemed depressed."
He lays his pen down to give me his full attention. "Did she see something bad in the future?"
I shrug slightly. "Maybe. Having the gift of foresight in an onus thing, Mr. Robinson. She never told me as much, but it's a definite possibility. But you also have to consider that she and Maria had been together since they were small children. They were like sisters. Then Maria was gone and I think Liz was grieving, both for her friend and her parents."
"I can understand that."
"She seemed to withdraw a little more each day and there was nothing I could do about it."
"How long did that go on?"
I look to the ceiling, thinking. "Three years. Then one day I went out to pick up some supplies and when I came back, I found her huddled in a corner of the hotel room, crying uncontrollably." I can still see her and I have to will the tears away from my eyes. "I asked her what was wrong and she said that her body hurt everywhere. Well, I have the ability to heal and there was no way I was going to let her suffer. But when I connected with her."
His blue eyes are round, worried. "What?"
"Her body was in disarray. Nothing was sound. It was like all of her organs were mutating or something.""
His eyes grow even wider. "What was happening to her?"
I shake my head. "My guess is that she was transforming into a truer alien life form. I tried to stop it, but I couldn't." I know my voice has caught in my throat and I pause a moment to let the lump there dissipate. "I think that maybe by saving her and changing her body, I did that to her, I made her molecular structure distort like it was." It is so hard to admit this, so hard to admit that I only delayed her death.
"But you had to save her," he says compassionately. "You couldn't just let her die."
"I should have," I tell him and he looks surprised. "Her death in the Crashdown would have been quick. She'd lost so much blood, it would have been somewhat painless." I work my lips, not really wanting to talk about this. "But her real death was so much worse. She lingered for days, in pain, and there was nothing I could do. At the end, she was barraged with visions of what would be. Or maybe they were hallucinations, I'm not sure. She lost her mind." I can't help it this time. The tears feel wet and warm against my cheeks. "By the time she died, she was no longer Liz Parker, the smart, bright girl I fell in love with. She was crazed with pain and tortured by the visions she couldn't stop."
He reaches over and puts a comforting hand on my arm. "I'm sorry, Mr. Evans." His voice is a little choked, too.
I pat his hand, thankful for the gesture. "I held her tight against me as she drew her last breath," I reveal. "She was still so young, so beautiful, and she was just gone. Nearly literally. Her body disintegrated in my arms, falling into a pile of dust."
He watches me silently. I think he just realized why there was never a real alien autopsy video made - there were never any corpses. Finally he clears his throat. "Is that why you think Kyle died, too?"
I wipe my cheeks and nod. "Yes. After Liz died and I grieved, I went looking for Kyle. I don't know why. There probably wasn't anything I could do to save him and I'm not sure if he would have wanted to know what fate awaited him. I looked for him for a long time, and then I had to give up."
He flips back through his notes. "What about all of those kids in that hospital?" His voice has risen in pitch. He's starting to understand the horror that is my conscience.
When he looks up at me, I shrug. "I don't know. I can only guess what fate came to them." I try to smile at him to relinquish some of his pain, but I can't. "It's a horrible thing to carry around - the guilt. Liz and I had a conversation right after that incident with the children and she told me that maybe I wasn't meant to do the things I had done, that maybe there was a greater plan. Maybe those kids were meant to die. Looking back on it, I know she was right. In her case, she was meant to die from a bullet wound at sixteen. I messed with that plan and she suffered for it. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Mr. Robinson."
He doesn't like this unhappy ending. I can tell by the way he's staring at the table top. "What is the point of having a gift to heal if it's temporary and the results are disastrous?"
"I don't know. Maybe it's not a gift. Maybe it's a curse."
A heavy silence fills my apartment - I can hear the clock ticking above the fireplace. It takes him awhile to pull himself together and I wonder if he thinks I'm a monster for what I have done. I try to read his thoughts, but there are so many in his head none of them are coherent.
Finally, he picks up his pen again. "What did you do after Liz died?"
"I went back to the desert," I say. "With her ashes."
"You said you never returned to Roswell," he counters and I wonder if he's trying to cross-examine me now. But then again, maybe I'm being defensive.
"I didn't return to Roswell. New Mexico is full of desert, Mr. Robinson. I didn't have to go anywhere near Roswell. Anyway, I took Liz's ashes to the desert and stayed there for a long time. Each night I would watch the stars come out. The first night, it was as if they had all gone blue. There was no life up there, no hope. Liz was my only reason for living. Then I realized that I had an obligation to try to help Kyle. I spread Liz's ashes in the desert near the pod chamber, said goodbye to her and went looking for Kyle."
"Did you try to find the others?"
I shake my head. "Not immediately. But the time soon came when finding them became a necessity."
Part Six
"Why was finding them a necessity?"
I sit back in my chair. "What Liz had told me came true - our enemies did return to earth, fourteen years after that day, as predicted."
His eyes are round. "But the world is still here."
I nod. "True. There was no world war. There was only death to those I loved, which in a way was the end of the world for me."
He scratches his head. "But Liz was alive at that time. In reality, she'd already passed away. Why do you think that was?"
I shrug. "I had thought of that. My guess is that her powers and her progression into a more alien life form were tied to her emotional well- being. In the first reality, she was happy and I think perhaps the change was somewhat stunted. In the real reality, she was in emotional turmoil due to things that didn't happen in the first reality - our fleeing Roswell, the death of her parents, her separation from her friends."
He nods as he makes notes. "Makes sense. Tell me about the enemies coming back to earth."
"They were much fewer in numbers, since our destruction of the husks in Copper Summit. But they were still here, looking for revenge." I swallow hard, tell myself that soon this will be over, soon I will have told my story in its entirety. "They found Michael first. I was on the road, looking for Kyle, when I felt like someone had ripped part of my soul out." I touch my chest, still able to feel the pain. "It was like a giant cry for help, then nothing. I felt.empty inside. I didn't know why, but I did."
"How did you find out what had happened?"
"That night I received a frantic dreamwalk from Isabel. She'd felt it, too, and had been trying unsuccessfully to dreamwalk both Michael and Maria all night. When I awoke, I went outside and looked up at the stars. They had that same strange blue quality to them and I knew then that they were dead."
He swallows visibly. "And what about Isabel?"
"She gave me her whereabouts, and I hurried to her." I look down at my hands, work my jaw. "I didn't get to her in time. By the time I found her, she was hurt badly, hurt beyond repair. It was like the night that Nasedo came to my window injured - there was nothing I could do to help her." I feel the familiar tears in my eyes and will them away. "But I got to see her again, I got to say goodbye. I held her while she died. And then I was alone."
He studies me for a moment, then runs a hand through his dark hair. "How long ago was that?" It's a stupid question, but I know it's just to break me from my memories of my sister dying.
"Fifty years ago."
"Fifty? Have you been alone for fifty years?"
I nod, give him a wan smile. "It's not as bad as it sounds. I stayed on the road, doing what Liz had intended for us to do - running from the law and helping people." Like the Incredible Hulk, I laugh to myself. "I met a ton of people, interesting people. And at night I would dream of the ones I lost. I was never alone Mr. Robinson."
A little dent appears between his eyebrows as he thinks. "Why did they spare you?"
I shrug. "As punishment, I guess. Stripping me of all that mattered was a worse fate than dying, I suppose."
He looks sad as he glances down at the table top.
I suddenly feel very weary. "That's the end of my story," I tell him. "Nothing after that matters."
As the early morning light is creeping through the curtains, he leafs back through his notes, probably looking for holes. He does a lot of head scratching, then I see his eyebrows shoot upward. Marking his place in his notes with his pen, he looks up at me.
"Yes?" I say, slightly amused. He has such interesting facial expressions when he's thinking hard about something.
"You said the FBI killed all of your relatives."
"Yes."
"But what about Jesse Ramirez? Surely they would have interrogated him, since he was married to one of the aliens."
I smile and shake my head. "Maybe they did interrogate him. I don't know."
"But they didn't kill him because you said he and Isabel met up again in Miami." He's leading me right down the path I wanted him on.
"That's true. Jesse is still alive to this day."
He looks surprised by that revelation. "Why did they let him live?"
I search for an explanation because I have none. "Maybe Liz was right," I say finally. "Maybe there is a larger plan at work in the universe and Jesse was going to be needed eventually for some other purpose."
He watches me silently. "For what?"
I'm nervous about this. About revealing the truth. But I've known all along that this was how our meeting would end. "When we first met, many hours ago now, you asked me why I had chosen you."
He nods. "Yes, I did. And you said it was because I was young."
"That was part of the reason." I study his young face, find no hint in his blue eyes that he is catching on. "The other reason is because everyone should know their history. I know what it's like to know nothing about my ancestry."
His expression is blank. The light still has not dawned on him.
"I had Jesse Ramirez find you," I admit.
The blank expression is gone and replaced by one of confusion and surprise. "You did? Why?"
I draw in a breath and resist the urge to pick up the pack of cigarettes. "Tell me about your father."
"My fath -why?" His voice has risen in pitch.
I remain calm. It's necessary that I remain calm. "Just tell me about him. What is he like?"
He clears his throat and has apparently decided to indulge me. "He's fine. He was raised in New York - he lives there still."
"And what of your grandparents?"
He gives an exasperated sigh. "I don't have any grandparents. My father was." His mouth drops open and I can see every human emotion possible flood his eyes. ".adopted."
I smile gently at him and nod my head. "That's right. He was. In 2002, right?"
He nods numbly.
I let the silence weigh heavily in the room as he processes the information.
Finally, he speaks. "My father was.Zan? My father was born on another planet?"
I nod in his direction and allow myself that cigarette now that the most stressful part of this is over. "Yes. I had Jesse use some of his contacts to access adoption records. He traced your father to New York, and then to you."
"Why didn't you contact him?" He sounds a little panicked.
"I said before, the young are more open-minded. And your father is not a writer. I wanted to meet you, tell you my story, so that you could understand it and write it. I have the feeling if I'd confronted your father, he wouldn't have been as objective as you and this meeting would never have happened."
He's staring at the table top, his eyes darting nervously as he's trying to put the puzzle pieces together. I can practically see his heart thudding through his shirt. I hope this information hasn't been too much for him. "You're my grandfather?" he finally asks.
I nod. "I believe so, yes."
He looks at me in wonder and I think about how he looked at me when he first walked through my door. My, how things can change in such a short period of time. "Do I have powers?" he asks excitedly.
I have to laugh. I laugh because it's a funny question. I laugh because of the excited, little-boy-with-a-new-toy look on his face. I laugh because I know he's not afraid of me. "Only if your father married an alien hybrid. I told you, he's one hundred percent human."
Now I laugh because he looks disappointed.
"I don't know what to say to you," he says, his voice holding wonder.
"Say you'll write the book."
"I will. I promise. I will. Can I take you to meet my father?"
I shake my head. "As I said earlier, my time on this earth is almost over. But share your experiences with him, let him know what I was like." A thought crosses my mind and I rise from my chair. "I forgot - I have something else for you."
I retrieve the box from the bedroom and bring it back to him. Inside are the healing stones, the communication orbs, the book, and Liz's journal. Being a true scribe, he bypasses all of the other-worldly items and picks up the journal. His fingers touch the aged writing.
"It was Liz's," I explain. "You should read her point of view, also. It's good to have more than one perspective when you're writing a book."
"It is," he says, smiling as he closes the journal. "Especially non- fiction."
"So, you believe me then?"
He nods. "I do." He rises to gather his things, pulls on his jacket. "Will I see you again?"
I shake my head. "I don't think so."
He frowns, grieving for something he never had. Then he reaches over and gives me a hug, holding me tightly. When he pulls away, I see just the slightest hint of tears in his eyes. "I promise I will make you proud."
I smile back at him. "You already have."
After he leaves, the apartment is empty again and I go about the task of tidying up. I dump the ashtrays, wash our coffee cups. I spend most of the day sitting in the sun on my balcony. I stay there until night falls once again, just thinking about the last twenty-four hours and how lucky I am to have met him. I wish for a moment I have Liz's gift of foresight so I can read the finished book, but I have no doubt he will do a wonderful job.
As the sun sets, the stars begin to peek through the evening clouds. Gazing up at them, I smile lightly because I know soon I will be with the ones I love again. I can't wait to see them. The sky darkens and I can see that I won't have to wait long, because the stars have once again gone blue.
The End