Chapter 13

 

Gina

 

 

Very early the morning after the neighborhood party for Willis, Gina woke abruptly, feeling as if she had heard someone cry out in great pain, although the house lay sleeping quietly around her. She sat up and looked out her window at the early summer dawn, and she saw a light come on in Jared's house. She reached out and touched his mind, since he was already awake, and there was Maud, his primary thought, surrounded with pain and a sense of irretrievable loss.

Maud was gone, she realized. She was dead.

After a few moments, Jared came out his front door, headed for the car port; there were things to do, business things, personal things, and there was one other person who also cared about Maud and needed Jared's help, and Jared didn't have time for much of anything else, but he glanced up at her window as he strode across the lawn, proving that he was aware of her; he lifted a hand in greeting, and then he got into his car and backed out of the car port and headed off down the street, fast, but not as fast as the day before. Maud no longer needed him.

Jared was gone the next day, and the next. Gina thought about what he had told her, how his friend Helen had gone away where he could not find her; so had Maud gone, she thought, and wondered how and where and if, wherever she was, she still loved Jared. Gina knew that Jared still loved her.

Terry and Gina and Willis discussed summer plans; none of them felt especially anxious to visit Mom, having just seen her, and Gina suspected Mom wasn't all that anxious to see them again, especially Terry. They should, perhaps, spend a week or two on Linden's World, Willis said, but he did not seem thrilled at the prospect and they put off decisions for awhile. Willis was busy on Haivran. He was down to one girl friend now, and he wanted to spend some time with her before he left for the Academy; also he wanted to hang out with his old teammates this summer. All of them were off to different colleges in the fall, and it would be a long time before they got together again.

Issio and Jared had planned to take Terry hiking in the northern mountains, where there were some good trails to explore on a day trip, but since Jared was still not home, Issio and Terry went with Sofi instead. Phyllis sent along a first aid kit and made sure they had Dr. Frank's number.

Gina, not in the mood for a long hike through serious forest, went over to Mimi's instead and helped make cinnamon rolls. While the rolls were rising, fragrant in Mimi's kitchen, she and Mimi sat out on the back porch drinking lemonade and talking about recipes and space flight and Willis' girlfriend, who Mimi said was pretty enough but kind of fussy. "I don't see him," she said, "with a girl who doesn't want him with his hands dirty messing around with a motor."

Mimi went to check the rolls and get more lemonade, and Gina sat comfortably looking out over the long back lawn to the trees. She could see the mass of wild flowers and weeds behind the low D'ubian fence, and on the other side, Jared's back porch, surrounded by an old-fashioned metal screen erected by the previous owner, too cheap, Mimi said, to pay for a private generator or to buy enough city power to maintain the bug repellers. The big hot tub hulked in the middle of the porch. Mimi and Clyde, Al, Phyllis and Lillian, and the Bahtan girls all used the hot tub; Jared said it was community property.

The phone chimed inside and Mimi answered, and Gina gazed across the sweeping back lawn and caught a glimpse of movement just inside the line of trees. It was a person, she thought, but with the screen of trees she could not see who. She put out her mind and felt white, the smooth white surface she had felt before, telling her who it was. She wondered if she wanted to see him, and she hesitated, but curiosity won out; she put down her lemonade glass and slipped down the back steps. She thought he was going deeper into the woods, and she hurried, cutting around Clyde's flowering bushes and under the first of the trees.

But it wasn't one person; it was two, the pale man from Linden's World, with a name that wasn't quite Charles, and the pale woman Maud, the woman Jared believed was dead, the woman whose passing had brought that cry of pain from him, loud enough to waken Gina.

Gina stopped short; the impression of Maud's death had been so clear, and her presence here in the woods was so unexpected that she thought for a moment about ghost stories. Could there be some mistake in what Jared had heard?

The man and Maud were standing with their backs to her, looking across the grass at Jared's house. They stood side by side, not touching, but the cool white around them overlapped and joined. Gina stood very still, almost afraid to be noticed, but they heard something; they both turned and saw her.

"Ah," said the man, surprised, and Maud swept an assessing glance over Gina. She did not, Gina saw, have her jewels today; her hands were free of rings, and there was no flash of fire at her ear lobes, but they both wore the silver pendants.

"You're Gina," said Maud, like her companion speaking in Trade and unlike him, opening the conversation.

"Yes," said Gina. "Your name is Maud."

Maud looked amused. "Yes, it is," she said.

"Jared," said Gina, "thinks you're dead."

"Yes," said Maud. "I know."

There was a stir of sound on the street; a car pulled into Jared's carport, and after a moment the car door opened and shut. From this angle Gina couldn't see over the half wall at the back of the carport, nor could the man and Maud.

Jared's front door opened and closed. A window opened, the big bedroom window that looked onto the back porch, and then Jared came through the back door, dim behind the metal mesh screen, pausing by the hot tub for a moment looking out on the lawn and Gina wondered if he saw the three of them in the woods. She hadn't felt his mind searching, and she didn't reach out to him, because if she did he would see who she was with, and she didn't want him hurt, and she thought he would be. But he was closed into himself, not seeing, not feeling. He stood there for a moment and then, using his thumb on the lock, went on into the small bedroom which he had set up as a study.

The pale man and the pale woman shared a single speaking glance and then Maud turned to Gina again. "This is a secret," she said. "My being here. It's time for him to go on with his own life. Don't tell him you've seen us."

"It hurt him," said Gina, "thinking you were dead."

"I know," said Maud, "but he'll get over it. He will," she said, as if Gina were arguing with her, "and so will I." She looked once more toward Jared's house and then she turned away, and then she and her companion were gone in their usual complete fashion, fading into the trees and out of Gina's awareness as if they had not been there.

 

Wearing a new dress shirt, Jared went to the Institute, where he had some special project going. He came home at the usual time, sat down at the picnic table with Clyde and Mimi and Al and played pinochle until the daylight faded away; he seemed like himself, perhaps a little quieter, a little absent-minded. He still wore the dress shirt, buttoned down the front. Mimi asked him where his T-shirt was, and he laughed. He apologized for having missed the hike, and promised to take Terry fishing with whoever else wanted to come the following weekend.

Gina went to see Sofi and Issio the next day. Maud had told her not to tell Jared, but she had said nothing about anyone else, and Gina could no longer keep it all to herself. She was much too confused.

The three of them sat around the breakfast bar that divided the kitchen and the living room areas and she told them everything, from that very first glimpse of the pale man in Terry's nursery to the strange visit in the woods behind Jared's house. And she tried her best to project her memories, too, so that they could see as well as hear.

Afterwards the three of them sat around the breakfast bar in silence for some time, weighing the information, and then Issio got up and passed over a plate of Al's cookies, several of them already eaten, which was funny because Zamuaons were said not to like sweet things. "I have not heard of anything like this," he said. "I do not know what to say. The woman died – "

"The morning after Willis' party," said Sofi. "I Heard Jared." She touched her ear. "He grieves," she said. "He saw to the final arrangements, with the man who was her housekeeper. Carter. She wished to be scattered in the ocean. That is where he has been. He and Carter took a small flyer out and released her ashes two days after her death."

"Yet she was in the woods a day later with this man who said he was your father," said Issio, sitting across the breakfast bar from Gina.

"And that," said Sofi, "needs to be considered also. You believe this is true," she said to Gina, and Gina nodded.

"What I saw with Mother that night," she said, "and Terry looks just like him."

"And you and Terry and Willis look like one another," said Sofi. "Brothers and sister."

"Gina and Terry and Willis," said Issio, "do not vanish into thin air in the woods. Or elsewhere."

"But Gina and Terry and Willis are Earthian," said Sofi. "I saw this man when Terry first played in the band at his school. I had no thought that this man was Earthian. I do not know what he is, but I did not think he was Earthian."

"If he isn't Earthian," said Gina, feeling frightened, "that means that Terry and Willis and I are half not-Earthian."

Issio made a negating noise in his throat. "You and Terry are like everyone else here," he said, waving a hand to take in the neighborhood. "No one here is a usual Earthian, or Bahtan or D'ubian. But you are not – whatever this may be. I do not see this. I do not feel this."

"How are we all unusual?" asked Gina.

"The Little Ears, for one thing," said Sofi. "That is unusual. And we all have similar backgrounds. Broken homes, homes with only one parent or no parent at all. Even our D'ubians do not have family as is usual with their people. And there is something about the way we all come together here. Something that binds us. I do not know how to say it. We all belong here, and we all belong with one another. This I have known for a long time. But I do not know how or why. I do not think there is harm in it," she said, and Issio nodded.

"Not harm," he agreed, "but it is all very strange."

So they had no answers either, but Gina felt better, sharing what she knew, not being alone with the strangeness any longer.