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Save The Reaper
The game they played was almost the same one that Eve had played with Sophie, on long dull car trips when Sophie was a little girl. Then it was spies-now it was aliens. Sophie’s children, Philip and Daisy, were sitting in the backseat. Daisy was barely three and could not understand what was going on. Philip was seven, and in control. He was the one who picked the car they were to follow, in which there were newly arrived space travellers on their way to the secret headquarters, the invaders’ lair. They got their directions from the signals offered by plausible-looking people in other cars or from somebody standing by a mailbox or even riding a tractor in a field. Many aliens had already arrived on earth and been translated-this was Philip’s word-so that anybody might be one. Gas station attendants or women pushing baby carriages or even the babies riding in the carriages. They could be giving signals.
Usually Eve and Sophie had played this game on a busy highway where there was enough traffic that they wouldn’t be detected.
(Though once they had got carried away and ended up in a suburban drive.) On the country roads that Eve was taking today that wasn’t so easy. She tried to solve the problem by saying that they might have to switch from following one vehicle to another because some were only decoys, not heading for the hideaway at all, but leading you astray.
“No, that isn’t it,” said Philip. “What they do, they suck the people out of one car into another car, just in case anybody is following. They can be like inside one body and then they go schlup through the air into another body in another car. They go into different people all the time and the people never know what was in them.”
“Really?” Eve said. “So how do we know which car?”
“The code’s on the license plate,” said Philip. “It’s changed by the electrical field they create in the car. So their trackers in space can follow them. It’s just one simple little thing, but I can’t tell you.
“Well no,” said Eve. “I suppose very few people know it.”
Philip said, “I am the only one right now in Ontario.”
He sat as far forward as he could with his seat belt on, tapping his teeth sometimes in urgent concentration and making light whistling noises as he cautioned her.
“Unh-unh, watch out here,” he said. “I think you’re going to have to turn around. Yeah. Yeah. I think this may be it.”
They had been following a white Mazda, and were now, apparently, to follow an old green pickup truck, a Ford. Eve said, “Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
“You felt them sucked through the air?” “They’re translated simultaneously,” Philip said. “I might have said ‘sucked,’ but that’s just to help people understand it.”
What Eve had originally pla
“You’re positive this is it?” said Eve. “It’s only one man by himself, you know. I thought they never travelled alone.”
“The dog,” said Philip.
For there was a dog riding in the open back of the truck, ru
“The dog’s one too,” Philip said.
That morning, when Sophie was leaving to meet Ian at the Toronto airport, Philip had kept Daisy occupied in the children’s bedroom. Daisy had settled down pretty well in the strange house-except for wetting her bed every night of the holiday- but this was the first time that her mother had gone off and left her behind. So Sophie had asked Philip to distract her, and he did so with enthusiasm (happy at the new turn events had taken?). He shot the toy cars across the floor with angry engine noises to cover up the sound of Sophie’s starting the real rented car and driving away. Shortly after that he shouted to Eve, “Has the B.M. gone?”
Eve was in the kitchen, clearing up the remains of breakfast and disciplining herself. She walked into the living room. There was the boxed tape of the movie that she and Sophie had been watching last night.
The Bridges of Madison County.
“What does mean ‘B.M.’?” said Daisy.
The children’s room opened off the living room. This was a cramped little house, fixed up on the cheap for summer rental. Eve’s idea had been to get a lakeside cottage for the holiday- Sophie’s and Philip’s first visit with her in nearly five years and Daisy’s first ever. She had picked this stretch of the Lake Huron shore because her parents used to bring her here with her brother when they were children. Things had changed-the cottages were all as substantial as suburban houses, and the rents were out of sight. This house half a mile inland from the rocky, unfavored north end of the usable beach had been the best she could manage. It stood in the middle of a cornfield. She had told the children what her father had once told her-that at night you could hear the corn growing.
Every day when Sophie took Daisy’s hand-washed sheets off the line, she had to shake out the corn bugs.
“It means ‘bowel movement,’ ” said Philip with a look of sly challenge at Eve.
Eve halted in the doorway. Last night she and Sophie had watched Meryl Streep sitting in the husband’s truck, in the rain, pressing down on the door handle, choking with longing, as her lover drove away. Then they had turned and had seen each other’s eyes full of tears and shook their heads and started laughing.
“Also it means ‘Big Mama,’ ” Philip said in a more conciliatory tone. “Sometimes that’s what Dad calls her.”
“Well then,” said Eve. “If that’s your question, the answer to your question is yes.”
She wondered if he thought of Ian as his real father. She hadn’t asked Sophie what they’d told him. She wouldn’t, of course. His real father had been an Irish boy who was travelling around North America trying to decide what to do now that he had decided not to be a priest. Eve had thought of him as a casual friend of Sophie’s, and it seemed that Sophie had thought of him that way too, until she seduced him. (“He was so shy I never dreamed it would take,” she said.) It wasn’t until Eve saw Philip that Eve could really picture what the boy had looked like. Then she saw him faithfully reproduced-the bright-eyed, pedantic, sensitive, scornful, fault-finding, blushing, shrinking, arguing young Irishman. Something like Samuel Beckett, she said, even to the wrinkles. Of course as the baby got older, the wrinkles tended to disappear.
Sophie was a full-time archaeology student then. Eve took care of Philip while she was off at her classes. Eve was an actress-she still was, when she could get work. Even in those days there were times when she wasn’t working, or if she had daytime rehearsals she could take Philip along. For a couple of years they all lived together-Eve and Sophie and Philip-in Eve’s apartment in Toronto. It was Eve who wheeled Philip in his baby carriage- and, later on, in his stroller-along all the streets between Queen and College and Spadina and Ossington, and during these walks she would sometimes discover a perfect, though neglected, little house for sale in a previously unknown to her two-block-long, tree-shaded, dead-end street. She would send Sophie to look at it; they would go round with the real-estate agent, talk about a mortgage, discuss what renovations they would have to pay for, and which they could do themselves. Dithering and fantasizing until the house was sold to somebody else, or until Eve had one of her periodic but intense fits of financial prudence, or until somebody-persuaded them that these charming little side streets were not half so safe for women and children as the bright, ugly, brash, and noisy street that they continued to live on.