Chapter 38

Joyce went to tie up a few loose ends and close the store, perhaps forever. They didn't love losing what they'd invested, but it was better than losing their daughter. After much debate, they decided Alexei would drop Lily off at school. She would be as safe there as anywhere, and he needed to pack up their house.

For now, the plan was to drive to Michigan, get a hotel room for a few days and hope Lily believed they were on vacation. Nancy had talked about ice skating and something called luging – perhaps that would keep Lily busy? Then they would assess if they could return home, or if he and Jonathan would need to rent a truck and come back for their furniture. He tried to go to make a mental list of what they would need for a week or so: clothes, toiletries, a few toys for Lily, their important documents. He wrote it all out, then began packing the most important items first. If all went according to plan, he'd have all afternoon to get ready, but nothing had been going according to plan lately.

He'd barely gotten started when someone knocked on the door. He looked out, and couldn't decide whether to open it. Maybe the woman on the other side wasn't a threat – though he wasn't sure – but he'd certainly hoped never to see her again.

"Oh, come on, Medvedev, you're not still scared of me, are you?" Tanya yelled through the door.

He sighed, then opened it. "What do you want?"

"What really happened yesterday?"

He ushered her in. Not that the neighbors could speak Russian, but he didn't really want to have the conversation on his front porch. He told her most of what had happened, leaving out what they saw.

"And this happened totally out of nowhere? You weren't trying anything?"

"No. All we do is watch the portal and write grant proposals to keep our jobs funded."

"Boring life."

He didn't argue the point. "Who are you working for now?"

"Why do you want to know?" He shrugged. "Deciding if you'll tell me what's really going on? Fine. I work for a branch that doesn't officially exist, dealing with things that never happened. Like your little tunnel. So nothing you say is going to faze me."

He still didn't tell her everything – he'd never trust someone who had worked for the police with his daughter's secret, or the Jacksons'. But he laid out the theory he and Joyce had been tossing around. "If the girl was number Eleven, are there ten others out there, maybe with powers?"

"What's that got to do with your lab?"

"Revenge, for the experiments? Maybe everybody in a white coat looks the same to them."

"Then why a bomb? That girl never would have needed that."

"I have no idea."

She threw up her hands. "Great, so we have magical children and nothing else to go on. You have anything to drink?"

He pulled the vodka bottle from the top of the refrigerator and blew off the dust. "Joyce doesn't like this stuff," he said.

"Why not drink it yourself?"

"Americans think there's something wrong with you if you drink a whole bottle by yourself."

"Puritans." He poured them both glasses and they downed them, a bit too easily. She sniffed the bottle. "Water?"

"The teenagers must have taken it." He shook his head.

She sighed. "Well, thanks for the drink. Call me if you learn anything we can use." She wrote a phone number on a napkin and was gone.

He wasn't sure why he found the whole thing amusing – maybe he just needed something small to laugh at, so he took pulls from the bottle of vodka-flavored water while he kept packing. The teenagers had left just enough for him to feel a bit relaxed by the time he needed to find something for lunch, and throw out any leftovers they couldn't take with them. Why did they have plastic containers with a few spoonfuls of rice saved, he wondered, but his mother would have saved them too, if she'd had the icebox space. Maybe all mothers worried their child would someday starve if there was nothing to heat up quickly.

He turned on the mid-day news while he ate his mixed plate, then wished he hadn't. The top story was that a third child had disappeared, and another parent was in the hospital. Darren Jackson had been taking his daughter home from dance class, pulled over for an unknown reason and been savagely beaten. No one knew where the little girl had gone. Alexei turned off the TV and immediately called Gloria. It went to the answering machine – no surprise – so he just asked her to call if they could help. He couldn't bring himself to eat after that, so he dove back into their packing.

It didn't look like he'd accomplished much, but he was exhausted by the time he needed to pick up Lily from school. She got into the car silently. She knew, one way or another. And there was nothing he could say to make it right.

When they got home, she asked him to watch The Little Mermaid with her. He put the tape in the VCR and they curled up on the couch, Lily pressed against his chest.

When he woke up, the purple octopus was turning everyone into worm-like creatures, and he didn't feel Lily's warmth. He sat up with a jerk, then told himself to calm down. Check the bathroom. No. In the kitchen, getting a snack. No. Her room. Her parents' room. Basement. Backyard. Nowhere.

Panic was rising in his throat, but he forced himself to work logically. He started at the couch and spiraled out, checking under all the furniture, in the cabinets, even if she'd somehow crawled into the trunk of his car. Then he ran to the neighbors and begged them to help search the entire neighborhood. Then he ran back to his yard to start there.

The backyard was a muddy mess, from last week's snowmelt. He felt it sucking at his shoes, then got down on the ground looking for any clues. It wasn't long before he found a line of child-sized boot prints, leading from their back door to the fence. Then a pair of adult-sized prints joined them. He followed them, opening gates and jumping fences until he got to the road. Then there was nothing but a set of tire tracks where they had sped off. He dropped to his knees and wept there, on the sidewalk, until someone found him and led him home.

Hopper was already there. "Try to tell me what happened," he said.

"Ve vere just lying on de couch," Alexei said. "I just fell asleep for a minute." He buried his head in his hands.

"Anything to go on at all?"

He showed Hopper the footprints, but what good could they do? Even if they could tell what shoe the man wore, thousands of people could have the same shoe. Hopper sighed. "It's more than we got from the last two scenes. You got any coffee?"

Alexei made the coffee without being quite aware of what he was doing. It was only when he went to get the cream that he stopped in his tracks. There was a new drawing on the refrigerator. The squiggly-haired man was on the floor, covered in red crayon. So was the woman with brown lines down to where a stick figure's shoulders would be. And a frowning man was taking away the little girl.

"How's that coffee coming?" Hopper said. He turned and showed Hopper the drawing. "You and Joyce?" Alexei nodded. "You think that's blood?" He nodded again. "Well, it didn't happen that way-"

"Because she left," Alexei said. "She vent vid him, so he vouldn't kill her mom and dad." And then he started crying again, and he didn't care what Hopper thought. What did anything matter?

"Oh Jesus, okay. Come on. Pull it together." Hopper patted his back, a little too hard.

Then they heard yelling outside. Joyce, wanting to know why there was crime scene tape around her house. Alexei took a few deep breaths to still his sobbing, then went out. He didn't have to say anything. She understood the drawing perfectly. And they collapsed into each other's arms and cried there, on their front porch.

"I'm sorry," Hopper said. "We're doing everything we can."

"No, you're not," Alexei said, and he didn't care what Hopper did if he didn't like the words. "Dere's one person you need to talk to, but you von't."

"Don't bring my daughter into this-"

"What about our daughter?" Joyce demanded. "Do you have any leads at all? On her? Manny? LaTisha? Conner?"

Hopper shook his head. "And you think El's just going to lead you to your kid?"

"I don't know," Alexei said. "But I vill go find her if you von't."

"Fine," Hopper grunted. "Let me use your phone."

Alexei and Joyce hovered by while Hopper listened to it ring. They heard him sigh. "Listen kid, I know why you let it go to the machine. I know you're mad at me. I promise, this isn't about that. We need your help. I do. And at least four kids. You don't want to see me, fine. Call Joyce. She needs you." He slammed down the phone. "Look, I did what I could."

The phone rang before he'd finished his sentence. Joyce jumped to pick it up. Her face broke into a smile. "Oh, thank God. El, please get down here as soon as you can. You know what, never mind, I'll come pick you up. Thank you so, so much." She grabbed her keys and was out the door.

"Vat should I do?" Alexei asked Hopper.

"I don't know," Hopper started to answer, but the phone rang again. Alexei picked it up.

"Byers residence," he said, because he wasn't sure El would have any good feelings for him.

"Alexei?" It wasn't El, it was Gloria. "Can you come down to the hospital? I think I'm ready to hear whatever paranoid shit you were selling me yesterday."