Blind Lake

And it might explain Mirror Girl, Chris thought.

He looked for Tess, worried that she had overheard this remark about her father, but Tess had abandoned her wooden car next to the swinging doors marked HOSPITAL PERSONNEL ONLY and disappeared down the corridor.

He stood and called her name. No answer.

Tess was looking for her mother when she opened the door into the sleeping man’s room.

At first she thought the room was empty. It was only dimly lit, but from the doorway she could make out the bed, the window, a silently blinking medical monitor, the skeletal shape of an IV tree. She was about to retreat when the sleeping man said, “Hey there. Don’t go.”

She hesitated.

The sleeping man lay motionless in his bed, but apparently he wasn’t sleeping after all. He sounded friendly. But you could never tell.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” the man said. He said “hafta” for “have to,” Tess noticed. Somehow, that made him less frightening.

She took a cautious step closer. She said, “You’re the man from the airplane.”

“That’s right. The airplane. My name is Adam. Like the palindrome. ‘Madam, I’m Adam.’” His voice was an old man’s voice, gravelly and slow, but it sounded sleepy, too. “I’ve had my pilot’s license for fifteen years,” he said. “But I’m a weekend flier mostly. I own a hardware store in Loveland, Colorado. Adam Sandoval. The man from the airplane. That’s me. What’s your name?”

“Tessa.”

“And this must be Blind Lake.”

“Yes.”

“Sounds like it’s cold outside.”

“It’s snowing. You can hear the snow blowing against the window.”

“Poor visibility,” Adam Sandoval mused, as if he were taxiing down some imaginary runway.

“Are you badly hurt?” Tess asked. He still hadn’t moved.

“Well, I don’t know. I’m not in pain. I’m not sure I’m even altogether awake. Are you a dream, Tessa?”

“I don’t think so.” She thought about what this man had done. He had literally fallen out of the sky. Like Dorothy. He had come to Blind Lake on a whirlwind. “What’s it like outside?”

“Snowing, you said. And it seems to be nighttime.”

“No, I mean outside of Blind Lake.”

The man paused. It was as if he was rummaging around in a box of memories, a box that had been locked up so long he was no longer sure what he might have left inside it.

“It was hard to get in the air that day,” he said at last. “There was National Guard at the airports, even the local strips. Everybody worried about the starfish.” He paused again. “The Crossbank starfish took my wife. Or she took it, maybe that’s a better way of saying the same thing.”

Tess didn’t understand this, not even a little, but she was patient while the man kept talking. It would be rude to interrupt. She hoped at least some of what he said might sooner or later make sense.

“Karen, that’s my wife, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer six years ago. They couldn’t cure it because of some quirk of her immune system. The treatment would have killed her as quick as the disease. So she had some surgery and took a handful of pills every four hours to inhibit metastasis and she would have lived another twenty years, no problem, and so what if you have to choke down a few capsules of this and that now and then? But Karen said the pills made her sick — and I have to admit, she was ru

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tess said.

“She watched a lot of video when she was home by herself. So when that Crossbank starfish popped up she saw it right away on the panel. Made me print out the newsmagazines for her, too.”

“I was at Crossbank,” Tess declared. “Last year. I don’t remember a starfish.”

“Yeah, but that was before. Even at the time there weren’t a lot of pictures. At first they tried to keep it out of the press. But there was amateur video circulating, and then another one popped up in Georgia and suddenly the whole world knew it was happening, even if they didn’t know what was happening. There was a faction in congress wanted to nuke the starfish outright. Karen was horrified by that idea. So help me, she thought they were beautiful.”

“Beautiful?”

“The starfish. Especially the Crossbank starfish. The size of it, like the biggest and most perfect thing you ever saw, and all the spines and arches made of whatever they’re made of, like mother-of-pearl, with rainbows built in. You knew you were looking at something special, but some people thought it was holy and the rest of us figured it was 666 and the Four Horsemen put together. Karen fell into the first category and I fell into the second. Maybe if you’re depressed something like that begins to look like salvation. But if all you want is to hang on to your life and wrestle it back to normal, it’s just another threat and a distraction.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I guess you had to see it from the begi

Tess walked to the window, which was dark and obscure with snow. She could imagine Mr. Sandoval’s “starfish” surprisingly clearly. A cloistered maze, like a snowflake, she thought, unfolded in three dimensions. She could almost see it in the clouded window glass. She looked away hastily.

“What happened to Mrs. Sandoval?” she asked.

“Karen took off one day in our old Ford. No explanation, no note, nothing. Of course, I was frantic about it. I talked to the police several times, but I guess the police had their hands full what with all the people heading west before the Mississippi roadblocks came down. Eventually I got word she’d been arrested with a handful of so-called pilgrims trying to cross into the no-go zone around Crossbank. Then the police called back and said it was a mistake, she hadn’t been arrested, although she’d been with that group; she was one of a dozen or so who managed to get through the blockade on an old Ozark hiking trail. It’s strange to me, picturing Karen out in the woods climbing rocks and drinking out of streams. She never even liked a backyard barbecue, for Christ’s sake. Complained about the mosquitos. I swear I don’t know why she wanted to be out in the woods like that.”

“Did she go inside the starfish?”

“So they tell me. I wasn’t there.”

“And she didn’t come out?”

“She didn’t come out.” Mr. Sandoval’s voice had gone flat.

Tess thought about this. “Did she die?”

“Well, she didn’t come out. That’s all I know. That’s what made me a little crazy, I guess.”

Tess was vaguely alarmed that he was still motionless in his bed. “Mr. Sandoval, if you can’t move, maybe I should call a doctor.”