X closed the door behind her, but she pushed her way back in.
“Do you want music?” she said. “I can get you music, but if you dance you might fall.”
“I don’t think I require music,” said X. “Or dancing.”
“Okay,” she said. “Just checking. You be you.”
When he was sure Zoe had run out of questions, X sloughed off his clothes and stepped—carefully—into the tub. The water stung as it found the bruises on his chest and back, but slowly his muscles relaxed. Everything loosened, everything calmed. He soaped himself until he felt like he was covered in sea foam—he’d overdone it, probably—then watched dirt from the Lowlands run down his legs, and into the drain, away from him forever. He lifted his face to the water. He let it pound his eyelids and cheeks. He washed his hair, but he must have overdone this, too, because he found he could make clumps of it stick straight out from his head, like sunshine in a drawing of the sun. When he was clean, X found he wasn’t ready to leave the comfort of the shower.
He thought about how improbably, how profoundly, how absurdly lucky he was to be free.
He turned to the shower curtain, rubbed the condensation off with his hand, and tried to memorize a little bit of the world.
X found clean clothes of Rufus’s folded in a pile outside the bathroom door, and the Bissell family around the kitchen table, waiting for him. When he asked how long he’d been in the shower, everyone laughed, but in a warm, rather than mean-spirited, way.
“An hour and a half,” said Zoe.
Her mother had tended to Zoe’s cuts and abrasions in the interim. She told X to take off his shirt and sit, so she could do the same for him. When he hesitated, she said, “It’s okay. I went to medical school for three semesters.”
X removed his shirt. He saw Zoe’s mother look at the sleeves of tattoos that ran up his arms and at the damage that had been done to his body during 20 years in the Lowlands. He worried that it would be too much for her. He worried that she’d turn him out after all.
Instead, the sorry state of X’s skin seemed to deepen her sympathy. She opened a metal box on the table, took out a tube of ointment, and squeezed some into her palm.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s fix you.”
Later, X lay in the plastic lounge chair in the shed in the backyard, with Zoe curled on top of him.
The shed was decrepit, and leaned so far left that it seemed to be in the midst of falling. Tools hung on the wall above the workbench. Zoe had told X their names, but he’d already forgotten them all. He was thrilled to be among the living, but daunted by the ten million things he didn’t know. Zoe had once said she couldn’t comprehend how big the Lowlands were. X couldn’t comprehend how big freedom was. He thought of the little orange boat in the vast black sea.
“I want to be of use somehow,” he said.
Zoe stroked the muscle that ran along the back of his arm.
“Oh, I’m definitely gonna use you,” she said.
“I am in earnest, Zoe,” he said. “I want to be more than some tree stump you must drag behind you. Else one day you will wake, and wonder why on earth you saved me.”
Zoe sighed.
“I shall ne’er wonder that, goodly sir,” she said. “I shall ne’er ere wonder it.”
“ ‘Ere’ means before, not ever,” said X. “And therein lies another problem. I must alter the way I speak, the way I dress—the way I move, for all I know.”
“Please don’t change the way you move,” said Zoe. “Look, I’ll show you some YouTube videos, and you’ll start picking stuff up. That’s what would happen in a movie. You’d watch YouTube while I was at school, and after two days you’d be playing Mario Kart.” She kissed him. “Please don’t worry. I’ll explain everything to you bit by bit, and it’ll be like I’m seeing it for the first time, too. It’s like that with Jonah, and I love it. That kid is still amazed by yogurt.”
“What is yogurt?” said X.
“See!” said Zoe. “This is gonna be awesome. There are so many good yogurts.”
They fell asleep without intending to, and woke when Rufus knocked on the door. The shed was dark except for the heaters, which gave off an orange light. It took X a few seconds to remember where he was.
Zoe sat up groggily in his lap.
“Come in,” she said.
“Cool if I shed some light on the … shed?” said Rufus.
“Sure,” said Zoe.
Rufus pulled a string. A bare bulb came to life, and swung back and forth. X squinted up at Rufus, who held a bottle of water, a new toothbrush, and a pair of moccasin-style slippers.
“A couple offerings,” he said. “Nothing epic. I wasn’t sure what you needed.”
X remembered Rufus’s bright eyes and his dense red beard, which seemed to be waging a military campaign to take over his face. But he was surprised by how tentative he seemed now. Rufus set the things on the workbench, and went to leave. Only then did the obvious occur to X: Rufus might not love the idea of a bounty hunter from hell sleeping in his shed. The fact that X was actually a former bounty hunter from hell … Who knew if that made it any easier?
X stood to shake his hand. He hated the idea that he’d made Rufus uncomfortable in his own home.
“Thank you for sheltering me,” said X. “And thank you for these clothes I wear. I’m embarrassed by how needy I am. I have nothing but my name, and even that Zoe had to give me.”
“It’s all good, man,” said Rufus, almost, but not quite, looking at him. “None of us really own anything anyway, you know? How long’d you wear that ratty shirt and stuff?”
“Years,” said X.
“Ooof,” said Zoe.
“Yes, now that I hear it aloud, it does sound unappealing,” said X.
“No judgment,” said Rufus. “I’ve still got socks from high school. Well, one sock.”
Rufus tried again to leave, but X stopped him.
“Zoe’s mother has told you my story, I think?” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” said Rufus. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He mimed his head exploding. “My whole thing is going with the flow. But I’ve got to admit, I’m sorta surprised by where the flow is going.”
“But you do believe my story, fantastical as it is?” said X.
“Yes, I believe it,” said Rufus. “I do. I mean—Zoe’ll tell you—I believe some pretty weird shit anyway. I believe trees talk—to each other and to us. I think some Dr. Seuss books are real. I think they’re actually nonfiction. Not all of them, but a couple.”
“What do trees say?” said X.
Rufus laughed.
“I’m still working on that,” he said. He looked straight at X finally, then took the slippers from the workbench.
“Try these on,” he said. “Let’s see if they fit.”
The slippers were lined with fur—and so comfortable that they seemed to warm X’s entire body.
“I will never take them off,” he said.
“Rad,” said Rufus. “They’re yours.”
X could see that Rufus wanted to say more. He wished he was as good at putting people at ease as Zoe was.
“Here’s the deal,” Rufus said finally. “I can’t have Zoe or her family getting hurt. If this whole thing is Horton Hears a Who!—and we’re protecting somebody that nobody else believes in or cares about—that’s great. I am so down for that. But if it turns out to be The Cat in the Hat, and you just trash everybody’s lives …”
“The Cat in the Hat comes back, and fixes everything,” said Zoe.
“I know, I know,” said Rufus. “But that part’s made-up. They had to tack it on at the end because it’s a kids’ book.”
“I’m sorry,” said X. “I’m not following this conversation. The cat has a hat?”
“I just mean I care about this family,” said Rufus. “Zoe, I know you think I have a thing for your mom.”
“I have never, ever said that,” said Zoe. “Okay, now that I think about it, I’ve said it a lot.”
“It’s cool,” said Rufus. “I can see why you’d think it. But I care about you and Jonah, too. I’m like X—I don’t really have a family of my own. So I can’t have any negative stuff happen to you guys. It’d demolish me, man. I’d be roadkill.”