Chapter 22

 

Jared

 

 

Once upon a time – Jared thought he had been about thirteen – he had gotten the idea that he could get Ava to lay off the drugs if he just got rid of her stash. It wasn’t, he had learned later, an uncommon illusion, although just that, an illusion. But he was young and ignorant, and he had tried, and that was the only time Ava had ever used to him language like the kind he heard from the back bedroom of Cara’s house.

"She’s always talked like that," said Cara, lying on her back beside him on the bed, trying, he thought, to sound indifferent, but she gripped his hand very tightly.

"You said she had brain damage from the stroke," he said. "That can cause a personality change. And it could affect speech control. I remember the case of an Earthian Prime preacher; he sustained brain damage in a fall, and he couldn’t speak without screaming obscenities. He didn't mean to, but he couldn't help it."

Cara rolled to her side in the bed and looked at him. "There wasn't a personality change, not ever," she said. "It's nice of you to try to make me feel better. But Mother always talked like that. I was a big disappointment to her, you see. She went all the way back to old Earth to buy the proper sperm. I saw the records; he had a genius-level IQ and no genetic defects, and he was a scientific prodigy like Mother. And at the Alliance Institute for Genetic Improvement she selected me as the strongest and most viable fetus and had all the others destroyed, because she only wanted one child, a girl, just like her. And instead she got me."

So much for affection, if not devotion. "Hell," said Jared, his opinion of Mother dropping yet another few notches, and he closed her into his arms and held her while the storm roared on at the end of the hall. "She was like this when you were growing up?"

"She wasn't home a lot when I was a kid," she said, settled against him; it felt good to have her there. "I was with Granny all the time until – and Mother would visit during breaks in her project; and then later when I was in her apartment in town here, Mother still was off-world most of the time. There was a housekeeper, and tutors, of course."

"You didn't go to school?"

"Mother thought schools stifled genius-level intelligence; she was still," said Cara with faint amusement, "hoping. And she didn't want me contaminated by students of ordinary intellect. That's exactly how she put it."

"So you stayed in her apartment and studied with tutors. Good god," said Jared, wondering if the housekeeper were allowed to walk her charge on a leash on nice days. "No social life, I suppose, all that contamination."

"I read," said Cara. "I read a lot. I guess that's where I got into classical literature. Such wonderfully different worlds; so many people; so many ideas. I loved it. When I look back I see it was an escape, but at the time I think it was the most important part of my life."

"You had to have an escape," he said. "And that's one of the better ones. At least you got the idea of a world beyond the apartment. What about your grandmother?"

She sighed. "I left Granny when I was old enough for lessons. About six, I think. Mother said I should not allow dependencies to develop. She said I should learn not to lean on other people."

"At the age of six?" he protested. "Of course you should lean on other people; children are entitled. Hell, adults need to lean on other people. It's just part of life."

"Not Mother's," said Cara, and the fly in the back bedroom switched into a string of Bahtan curses, by way of variety.

"So she took you away from your grandmother," he said, "and installed you in her apartment. Is your grandmother still –"

"No, she died years ago," said Cara. "She saved me anyway; she made me her sole heir, and I was able to go to the university with her money. Once I declared my major, of course, Mother washed her hands of me."

"Of course. Since you didn't major in the sciences."

"Maybe I was rebelling," said Cara. "I thought of that. But I liked what I was doing, and I still like it, and I think it was the right choice for me, no matter why I made it. And it was Granny's credits that let me buy this house. Which," she added, "was fortunate for Mother, whether she knew it or not, because I had the second bedroom and I could take care of her here when she was brought home. She would have hated a nursing home."

"Not so lucky for you," he murmured, thinking how a nursing home would have hated her mother.

"I felt I had to," she said. "And, anyway, you always think if you do the right thing, you know, if you handle it properly, if you work hard enough . . . " Her voice trailed off. "She was my mother," she said. "Mothers and daughters; you know. They're supposed to –" She broke off.

"Love each other," he said, holding her, and after a moment she nodded.

"Foolishness," she said. "Because obviously she couldn't, could she."

"That's right," said Jared gently, "and it was her failing, not yours, but it isn't easy to really believe that, is it."

"No, it isn't," she admitted.

The shrieking rose again, making conversation difficult and sleep impossible and she still looked tired, he thought, and she rubbed at her head when she thought he wasn't noticing. The headache was better, but it was still there.

"Let's try the living room," he said, thinking she could lie on that ugly brown couch, so they gathered up blankets and pillows and moved out into the living room, walking around the pillow that Cara had thrown at the fly. They both looked at it, and neither of them touched it. He saw the end of the swatter sticking out from under the recliner; it must have fallen on the floor. Perhaps he had knocked it down in his sleep. It was surely too big for the fly to move.

The yelling in the back bedroom continued without pause.

"It opens," Cara said. "Sometimes one of the night nurses slept here." She dumped her load of blankets on the couch, and Jared found the control buttons and got the back to lower to make a bumpy bed. It didn’t look all that comfortable, but the closed doors and the distance between the living room and the back bedroom took some of the edge off the uproar. And Cara was looking pale and tired, and still a little feverish, but she paused, standing on the couch bed, to let the front window down a few centimeters at the top. "I like real outside air," she explained. "It smells good."

It did, and he preferred it himself to anything from Climate Control, but he hoped it wasn't going to make the room too chilly for her. "You shouldn’t even be out of bed," he reminded her. "You don’t want to start bleeding again. I would have to wake Frank up, which would make him grouchy. And I warn you; if I get you into my car again I will never bring you back here. We will leave the doctor’s office and drive off into the sunset – or the sunrise," he amended. "And never be seen here again." He smiled, but he was only half joking, he realized.

"That," she said, "sounds like heaven."

But she obediently sat down on the improvised bed and took the pill bottles while Jared went back to the bedroom for the pitcher. She balked at two pain killers, but she took one, and the antibiotic, too, without complaint, and lay down on the side of the couch bed nearest to the wall. He lay down on the outside half of the bed and gathered her against him again. It felt natural to have her there. It felt good.

They lay together, listening to the noise, watching as the sky outside the windows lightened by a shade or two. "Maybe she’ll get tired after awhile," said Cara hopefully.

"Maybe we’ll get deaf," said Jared, and she giggled.

"Did you know I was inviting you home to meet my mother?" she asked him.

"Did you know?"

"No, if I had I would have gone to your place instead." She lifted her head to look at him. "Jared, what about your family?" she asked. "The bio said you were born, where, on a mining colony planet?"

"Danmira. It's still domed; you can look up on a sunny day and see the dome glittering between you and the sky. There aren't that many sunny days. Lots of very violent storms; you didn't want to be outside the dome even in a suit."

"Haivran's entirely different."

"Yes. I thought it was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. I still do."

"Do you have family back there?"

"No. My mother's been gone for many years."

She noted the omission. "You didn't have a father," she said, lifting herself on her elbows to look at him.

"Some big beautiful black guy." Stock answer; he smiled at her and pulled her back down against him.

"You don't want to talk about it?"

"There isn't that much to talk about. My mother was very young when I was born; Gram – that was my mother's grandmother, my great grandmother – took care of me when I was small. When she died, I lived full-time with my mother. She passed away when I was in my teens."

"What happened?"

Coming home from school; the familiar scene, Ava on the floor in a pool of vomit and blood, and he needed to wake her up, needed to get her cleaned up, needed to get food into her, get her half straight. And reaching for her, touching her, cold and wet and stinking and this time she didn't move, this time she didn't breathe, this time –

"She overdosed," he said. "She was an addict. Drugs and booze. This isn't the kind of thing you want to hear, sweetheart; let's – "

She pulled away from him and sat up. "No," she said. "My mother was – I don't know what. Brilliant. Horrible. I want to know about yours. And how you got here, and good god, you have a doctorate, how did you do that?"

"Work," he said. "Desire. And, if you want to know, I made very good credits at the Agency; I could afford the Institute."

"Is that why you went to work for the Agency?"

"Yes, part of the reason." She looked at him, waiting. He had not talked about this with very many people. With Maud, of course. Once a night of shared memories with Issio, who had his own past. And this little girl, whose traumatic memories at least didn't include the slums of Danmira.

"My mother was abused and molested by her stepfather," he said. "Apparently her mother didn't care. Ava was on the streets by the time she was thirteen, probably earlier, a runaway. Gram gave her a place to stay when she had one, but Gram had her own problems." And he remembered those problems well, mostly in cloudy brown bottles that to a child held an ugly smell which was the smell of home and security. The odor made him a little sick now. "Ava made her living as a prostitute. Independent, no Agency, no license. She had problems with authority figures. So she wasn't really legal. She was just sixteen, I think by a week, when she gave birth to me. A trick baby; do you know what that means? With a john, no telling which one. The black one," he added, trying a smile. Cara, leaning above him, regarded him seriously.

"So your Gram raised you."

"Yes, and Ava was in and out. Brought credits when she had any. Gram got sick, I'm not sure what, we went to the free clinic sometimes but I don't remember if they ever gave us a diagnosis. I was seven when she died."

"And you lived with your mother. Ava. And she –"

"Well, she worked nights," he said, trying for a lighter note; she blinked and then smiled. "Saw me off to school when she could. I don't know where she got the idea. She could barely read herself, but she felt that the way out was for me to be educated, so she gave me that, the feeling that it was important, that I could escape and even bring her with me. She saw me in a very nice clean desk job. In a bank, maybe, or as a mine supervisor. So she insisted, and I guess I got the urge from her. And I hung on and finished secondary."

"How old were you? When she died?"

"Fifteen," he said, and moved on quickly. "There was a girl in the same block, Cindy; her mother turned her out – prostituted her – when she was about eleven, I think. Her mother needed the credits," he explained when Cara grimaced. "In those days, Cindy's mother was further into the drugs than Ava was. Cindy was a smart girl; she ran away. She came back for a visit when her mother died and I ran into her; she was groomed and dressed and she had credits. Somehow she had ended up here, in Haivran, at Premier Escort, and she talked me into trying it myself. There's a call for young men, she said, all those love-starved lady professors." He touched Cara's hair and smiled at her.

"Men, too?"

"No. I never could; it didn't work for me. But I did very well with women. I suppose it seemed a reasonable enough thing to be doing, given my background, and I knew Ava would have been so pleased for me being here, doing anything. All these schools and colleges and universities."

"She would be so proud of you now," said Cara. "Even if you aren't a mine supervisor."

"I do sit behind a desk sometimes," he agreed.

"Do you realize how much we have in common?" said Cara. "We were both born to single mothers, and not what they wanted. I mean, I don't suppose Ava really wanted any baby at sixteen, and my mother didn't want the baby I turned out to be. We were both raised by our grandmothers when we were small, until they died. We both had absent mothers. Busy with other things. You lost your mother much earlier, and in such a horrible way – "

"You lost your mother," said Jared, "in a horrible way too."

"But later in life. And we both worked hard to go on to school, to get degrees, to work at things we enjoyed, that mattered to us."

And his earlier thoughts had centered on what they did not have in common, and there was a great deal, but perhaps she was right, he thought, gazing at her. Perhaps they shared the important things that crossed class and income; perhaps their coming together was not quite as far-fetched an occurrence as he had believed.

Speaking of far-fetched occurrences, the fly in the back bedroom screamed out her opinion of her situation in fluent, if mind-curdling Zamuaon, always an excellent language for cursing, and they both looked up, distracted. "We still have to do something about that problem," he said.

"We can't kill her," said Cara. "I can't kill my mother."

"We can't kill her whether she's your mother or not," he said. "I've never run into a talking fly before, let alone one who claims to be an Earthian. She should be studied."

"Like at the Institute or something?"

He did not think that the Institute was the best place to study an insect who claimed to be the late Dr. Margo Lindstrom, someone they had known in a much different body. "They would find it confusing," he said, and surprised a smile out of her. "For starters, I think I'd like to catch her and let Issio look at her. I told you he and Sofi teach at Multicultural; he's a biologist. He actually has a Masters; I'd love to hear what he thought about this."

"That's a good idea. And I should call Saizy," said Cara. "Her specialty is terraforming, but she certainly knows biology. She knew my mother, too. She's up north in the mountains, writing; I haven't heard from her in weeks."

"I love this," he said, laughing. "All we have in common, but you call Dr. p'Anotta 'Saizy', as if she were the woman across the street. Her holo is hanging at the Institute too, you know, and I have read her survey reader, although it isn't my field."

"She would have been my godmother, only neither she nor my mother believed in that sort of thing. But she was one of the most important people in my childhood. She gave me my favorite doll when I was little. She would take me around with her everywhere; she paid more attention to me than Mother ever did. She always had time to listen to me. She was married I think three times, but she never did have any children. I read her reader too. I didn't understand it all, but I read it. You see her in a holo on the wall, but to me she's a special person I always loved."

"I'm glad you had someone like that, sweetheart." And someone not at all like the fly, who was displaying the extent of her Trade vocabulary. It was a manufactured language, created without obscenities or standard swear words, but it was spoken by travelers and traders and laborers throughout the Alliance, very creative people, who devised expletives as needed.

"If she were here," said Cara, "I'd contact her. But she isn't, so if you think your friend might be able to figure out what's going on, I think we should try. Only it's early to call him, isn't it?"

"Yes, and Sofi has a ma/hifez match at ten; she won't thank us for taking away her cheering section. Besides," he said, "you need some rest, Cara, if you can get it. How's your head?" Her color wasn't much better, and she had shadows under her eyes; it worried him.

"Better, really better, it's just if I move suddenly."

"Well, come here and let me hold you," he said, "and don't move at all. Close your eyes, sweetheart, and don't think about anything for a little while." She wouldn't be able to sleep, with all that yelling, but if she could rest a little, it would be good.

"You don't think we should – " She ran a lingering finger over his lips. He caught her hand and kissed it.

"I think," he said, "that you need some sleep. You need to get rid of that headache. And then I will take you out to the best restaurant I can find in Bridgeton, and feed you wine and chocolate, and buy you roses and ryei flowers and petals to scatter on your pillow, and find candles to light, and music on the player – "

"How lovely and romantic," she sighed. "Would you really do all of that?"

"Of course I would."

"But all I really want," she said, "is you."

And that was without doubt the nicest thing anyone had said to him in a long time, and he might have been tempted to see just how bad her headache was, if it was as much better as she said, but the fly began to scream – it could have been an attempt to sing a charming little ditty sometimes heard in dark odoriferous dives patronized by space crews – and the accompanying sounds suggested that she was throwing things. He had no idea how so small and frail a body could do such things, could move objects many times her own weight, not to mention how she could not only speak but scream and shout, and he wanted a chance to think about that in more detail at a later time, but right now he'd settle for a few hours of quiet instead.