Chapter 30.

 

Gina

 

 

The rain on Saturday was the start of a week of rain, a weather system, Phyllis said, settled over Bridgeton, and it was going to be so good for the lawns and the woods, she said, but it was dark and grey, which Gina found depressing, and it was cold, and it no longer seemed like summer was coming.

Gina wanted to see the fly in Issio's basement, but he wouldn't let her. He wouldn't let Sofi go downstairs either; he took over the laundry himself, which Sofi said was fine, and very funny.

They did figure out how to feed the fly; Issio began to bring home a small amount of animal blood from the butcher where he shopped for their groceries every day. He used an eyedropper to squirt a little blood into the bottom of the jar. She liked that; she perked up and screamed loudly enough that she could be heard upstairs. A pair of Earthian Prime missionaries working the neighborhood heard the voice coming out of Sofi's open kitchen window and apparently assumed the fly's description of her captors and what she planned to do to them was directed at the missionaries themselves. They left, at a dead run.

Mimi said there was always a silver lining.

The D'ubians stayed in the neighborhood all week, and Terry and his second-hand guitar spent a lot of time with them, but, since they mostly slept during the day, he had a few hours to fix the Hardesty front door; now whenever someone touched the thumb pad it played an ear-splitting trumpet fanfare and banged violently open and shut and open before slamming and locking again. Al and Lillian agreed they had never seen anything quite like it; it took them the better part of Thursday to return the door to more normal behavior and they couldn't silence the trumpet completely, although they toned it down. Phyllis said it was fun to have a truly unique front door.

Jared spread the word through the neighborhood that he was locating a truck and planning to bring over whatever Cara wanted from her own house before she shut it down; he was going to do this next Sunday, before, he said, she changed her mind. It was a joke, of course. Neither he nor Cara were about to change their minds. They were so happy together that they lit up the neighborhood. They had both, Sofi said, been very lonely for a very long time. Cara had had no one, and Jared – well, Sofi said, he had been lonely even when he had Maud, and anyway it wasn't the same thing with Maud. He couldn't ever really be with Maud, not the way he was with Cara. They liked to see Cara and Jared together.

For the first time, Gina felt a little shy with Jared, as if she would be interrupting and bothering him if she Spoke to him, but after the first few days, she found she liked Cara, who was friendly and very interested in all of them. It seemed as if she actually belonged here. Gina couldn't read her, but she felt something from her, some sense of power she couldn't quite pin down, that seemed to fit here with the rest of them. Sofi agreed; she said Cara had no Ears but she had other things, and in time they would find out what those things were.

There was no shortage of volunteers to get her officially moved into Jared's house.

Cara and Jared came together to the Project Open House at Gina's school Friday evening, where the students in the upper class wing displayed the results of their special work during the year, the metal work class, and the art class, and the shop class, and the Science Club and the Math Club and the Drama Club. The band from the upper classes strolled about the halls and classrooms like a street band, and so did the chorus.

Gina had gotten involved during the winter with a writing project; she had thought up a story, one for young kids, she thought, and her Language teacher had talked with the art teacher and got Lena Jenkins to make illustrations. Lena, who was very talented, Gina thought, had consulted with her at length and had drawn and painted beautiful pictures, and then they had both written the story out, using large decorative type fonts, and had posted it with pictures over the wall of the Language Arts room to make an exhibit of it. People seemed to like it, even people Gina didn’t know, and Cara and Jared, who knew about stories and writing, said it was excellent. So did Mimi and Clyde and Al, who came in a clump right after Terry and the D'ubians, who caught a ride with the Bahtan girls in their van. Phyllis and Lillian, looking very pleased and proud, spent a long time talking with Gina's teacher, who was recommending classes Gina ought to take at the Secondary where she was starting next fall.

That was a strange feeling, to be leaving the school she was familiar with, to be entering an entirely new one, but Sofi and Issio assured her that she would like it. She had hoped she would be able to take their classes, but both of them told her it would be like taking a class from a relative; they were too close to her for a classroom situation, although they would both help her after school if she needed them.

Phyllis and Lillian wandered off to the shop exhibits with Al, and Mimi and Clyde explored the skills of the metal workers, and Terry and the D'ubians were caught up in the music, of course. Three of the Bahtan girls went off to the Science Club classroom, and Ollie and Evvie and Cara and Jared drifted toward the little theater, where the Drama Club had short presentations going on. Gina stayed with Sofi and Issio, looking at the art exhibits and keeping an eye on the groups of parents and friends drifting by the wall of the Language Arts room, reading her story, admiring Lena's pictures. It was kind of fun, seeing other people's reactions.

So she noticed, toward the end of the evening, when a man in extremely new blue jeans traced the story all the way from beginning to end and then went back to the beginning and started over, going slower and paying very close attention to it. She might, at a casual glance, have let him pass, but there was something about his pale hair, tucked back behind his ears – Sofi and Issio were looking at the holos on the far wall, and Gina slipped away from them.

She stopped just a few feet away from him, not quite sure how to proceed, and he almost ran into her before he noticed her; clear blue eyes registered her presence with faint dismay and then looked over her head to scan the crowd behind her. She wasn't sure if he was looking to see if she was alone, or if he was looking for a way to escape – maybe both, she thought.

Behind her, in the art exhibit, she felt Sofi's attention abruptly shift to her, followed almost at once by Issio's; don't come yet, stay out of sight, she sent to them, with a quick view of the man, and she felt their agreement, but they were both moving closer, just in case she needed them. Was he aware of this? He looked toward the art exhibit warily, but he didn't back away and vanish in the crowd, and he didn't clutch his pendant and vanish in front of her.

Instead, for the first time actually initiating the conversation, he cleared his throat and said to Gina, "Your story is good."

"Thank you," she said. It was just a silly little story, about an elf prince who had tried to drive away an irritable dragon disturbing his people; he had finally gathered his five friends – Gina had been thinking of Terry at the time, of course – and they had sat down and played a lullaby to the dragon. It turned out that the dragon was irritable because he couldn't sleep, and the lullaby soothed him, and after he had a nice rest he had been very happy and had joined in with the musicians, playing the drums. Lena had drawn a very cute picture of a smiling dragon banging with the drumsticks while the elf and his friends played instruments.

The man turned back to the wall. "Our people," he said, in a making-conversation voice, "excel in the arts. Music. Poetry. Dance, painting; telling stories. My people and yours. Your brother Terry is a musician. Perhaps you are a teller of stories."

"Willis –" she said, not sure how he fit into this catalog of abilities.

"We also excel in martial arts," he said. "Poet warriors."

Sofi and Issio were just on the other side of the open doorway, not quite in sight but stealing small peeks, ready to step in at a moment's notice.

"You were there when we caught the fly," said Gina, "last week."

"Yes. Terry was hurt."

"Ollie and Clena brought him some of their stuff. He's fine now."

"They caught the fly," he said. "Am I right? Sofi and Issio, is that it? It's in their basement?"

"Yes, in a jar on their laundry appliance."

He gave a little laugh. "Interesting," he said. He turned to face Gina; he looked remarkably ordinary, a tall pale Earthian who was dressed a little lightly for the weather, a very unremarkable white shirt, jeans so new they were still stiff, and, of course, the silver Celtic knot pendant; it showed in the open shirt collar. "You should be careful. It did damage at, uh, Dr. Lindstrom's house. It isn't exactly a fly."

Ask him his name, said Sofi in her head. Ask him if you can see him again, talk with him.

Ask him if we can, said Issio, and Sofi seemed to protest, being afraid of scaring the man away, but Issio held firm. And Gina felt a faint stir behind Issio and became aware of Cara and Jared returning to the art exhibit, their presence somehow magnified by being together, as if their clasped hands closed a circuit somewhere, she thought. Issio turned toward them, signaling them to silence and caution; Gina felt Jared brush her mind to satisfy himself that she was all right.

She opened her mouth to ask the pale man, as Sofi suggested, what his name was, but he was looking around again, a little nervous, and he spoke quickly, before she could. "I'll see you," he said, "another time. This isn't the right – go with your friends; they're coming, I think."

"But –"

"No, really, later," he said, and glanced at the strangers moving through the room, and started to turn away and then turned back. "Would you," he said, "deliver a message?"

"Sure," said Gina.

"To your friend Jared," he said, dropping his voice and leaning a little closer. "In private, please, just for him. Tell him that Maud is happy that he has found Rapunzel. Can you remember that?"

Aside from a flash of irritation – she wasn't Terry's age, apt to be distracted at any moment by some passing attraction – she was struck by the name Rapunzel, and the odd story Jared had told, Maud asking him to rescue her daughter from the witch and the ivory tower, which was the heart of the fairytale. "Of course I can remember," she said, and he nodded. "But Maud – Jared is really sure she's dead."

"You saw her," he said. "You know better. Look, it was kind of – but it had to be that way, it really did, and she didn't have a choice, and now, this fly thing – because we're all going to have to do something, we're pretty sure about that. So we need to – look, we'll talk later," he said, and started to step away and turned back, remembering something. "Oh, and tell Jared Carter says hello," he said, and then he slid behind a clump of people entering the classroom by the other door and was gone. Gina ran to the door, and Jared with Issio behind him hurried into the hall, but while there were plenty of parents and aunts and uncles and a few grandparents and many younger brothers and sisters, there was no pale man in a white shirt and blue jeans and a silver pendant. Issio headed down the hall and around the corner to the front door and Jared came down the hall as far as Gina's door and stood there with her, as Sofi and Cara cut through the Language Arts room, all of them searching. Issio reappeared, shaking his head.

"He is not there," he said, and Gina could feel the sense of frustration in the group around her.

"I don't know why we're surprised," said Jared. "He changes vibrations, remember?"

"If we knew what that meant," said Cara.

"He said later," Gina told them. "Another time." She kept the message to herself right now, away from Jared; she would wait until no one else was around. She still hesitated to reach out to his mind, but she knew he was feeling very confused about Maud right now, and irritated, because he wanted to be just with Cara, and he didn't want her upset with a lot of talk about another woman he had loved. There were other feelings, too, but they were more deeply buried and Gina didn't want to go digging for them.

"Interesting," said Sofi, touching Gina's mind lightly, pausing to consider what she found there. Gina didn't feel she needed to hide from Sofi, or from Issio. And then the older Bahtan sisters came down the hall with Terry and the D'ubians trailing after them, and people looking at them with curiosity. There were Bahtans at the school, and Zamuaons, but there were no D'ubians. Their children, their progeny, as Dural called them, were schooled at home.

It was getting late; the open house was nearly over.

 

Saturday dawned clear and sunny and warm, tempting everyone out of their houses. The neighborhood emptied. Three of the Bahtan girls took their van and went, Gina suspected, hunting. Mimi and Clyde and Al took Terry to an antique vehicle show, featuring an ancient rocket engine. Sofi and Ollie and Cara met Cara's friend from the University, Ann Swift, and they went shopping. Issio said he had papers to grade and retired to their study, which was going to turn into a nursery, Sofi said; they would move the study downstairs, although they would have to think of something to do with the fly first.

Phyllis said she had some errands to run and Lillian said she was going to take advantage of the Terry-less quiet and get a nap. Gina got the Tolkien reader Cara had loaned her and took it out on the porch, where she could sit in the porch swing. She brought the Arthur and the Round Table reader with her. She could take it back to Jared when he came home – he had gone down to the Institute for a couple of hours – and it would be a good excuse to deliver the message from – well, whoever he was.

She had been in the swing for about half an hour when Jared's car came down the street and parked in the carport, over to the right to leave the left side for Cara. Jared came out looking at his noter with a frown, but he glanced toward the Hardesty house before he went up on his porch and, seeing Gina, smiled. Want company? he asked, and he put the noter down on the top porch step and walked up the street to her instead of going into his house. "You look very comfortable," he greeted her, and she moved over on the swing and he sat down beside her and took the reader from her and looked at the page she had open. "Oh, yes," he said, and gave it back. "Like it?"

"It's wonderful," she said, and handed him the other reader. "That was too; thank you for letting me read it."

"Where is everyone?" he asked. "I know Cara and Ollie and Sofi were going shopping with Ann."

"Phyllis is running errands. Mimi and Clyde and Al took Terry to the vehicle show." He grinned, having much the same vision she had of what Terry could do at a vehicle show. "Lillian said she was lying down. I think," Gina confided, "she has a headache. The door is awfully loud."

"It is," agreed Jared. "Your brother does good work." He smiled at her. "So. I gather that our tall pale acquaintance approves of his music and your writing."

"He said," said Gina, feeling uncomfortable, as she always did approaching this subject, "that our people excel in the arts. Also, he said, in the martial arts. That," she added, "sounds like Sofi and ma/hifez, but I know what he meant, and he was talking about Willis. Poet warriors, he said."

"'Our' people?"

"His and mine, he said." Gina fidgeted with the page turn button on the reader. "He gave me a message for you," she said. "Private, he said, so I didn't tell anyone, although Sofi –"

"Sofi is all right," said Jared. "Secrets are safe with Sofi. What can he possibly have to say to me?" Gina paused, trying to get the wording just right, not looking forward to his reaction, and he brushed her mind, catching her hesitation. "Tell me," he said.

"He said to tell you that Maud is happy that you found Rapunzel," she said.

He turned his head quickly and looked away from Gina, down the street; he was trying to mute his mind, she knew, but she felt a great rush of emotion. There was disbelief, there was confusion, there was a flash of anger, and even a little amusement, all at the same time. "Very good," he said. "I have her approval. Or is that her permission?"

"I don't think he meant that way; I thought," said Gina, "it felt sort of like what Sofi says. That you and Cara are right together, and that's good."

He was still irritated, but the amusement was taking over. "Maybe you're right," he said. "And now if he could tell me how he knew about Rapunzel . . . it was something between Maud and me," he said on an explanatory note.

"Did you love her?" Gina ventured. "Maud?"

"Yes," he said. "I always will. It isn't something you turn off and on, like a coffee maker or a vid player. But our relationship is over. A story," he said, looking at the King Arthur reader, "that is finished. We were out of sync," he said.

"She didn't feel all that much older," said Gina, interpreting this as a reference to the age difference, and he nodded.

"Someone once told me that she had a young soul. And I had an old one. So we met in the middle, I suppose," he said. "But of course we came from very different worlds, literally and figuratively." He touched Gina's mind quickly to see that Gina understood him. "She was very powerful. In a material sense. She could have anything, and people jumped to do whatever she wanted. I've seen that. I didn't want to be in anyone's power like that, and I didn't want to have that sort of power."

Gina weighed it. "You didn't want to be in her power; you didn't want her to be in yours?"

"I wanted to eliminate the power thing altogether," he said. "I wanted us – alone together, just us – to be equal."

Sofi and Issio balanced like that; sometimes one was a little stronger, and sometimes the other was, but mostly they were pretty equal, Gina thought. So were Mimi and Clyde, even smoother with the practice of many years. And those were the long-term relationships she knew and understood the best, and felt were the happiest; so Jared was right. She nodded as he watched, trying to feel, she saw, how she was handling what he was saying.

"So you and Cara," she said, "are more in sync?"

"Yes," he said. "We are. Profoundly."

"I think," said Gina, "that's what Maud meant by that message. Why did she call Cara Rapunzel, though?"

"Honey," he said, "Maud is dead. This man, whoever he is – the woman you saw – I don't know what it's all about, but I know Maud is dead." If she's not, he was thinking, and Gina ran into it without meaning to, but it was very loud just behind his other thoughts. If she's not, if she threw what we had away like that, if she threw me away –

But he wasn't willing to concede that Maud had originated the message, although he wasn't going to argue with the messenger. "What she said, about her daughter in an ivory tower. I made a joke, asked her if the girl's name was Rapunzel. You remember the story."

"The witch took her from her parents and raised her in a tower all alone," said Gina, "and when the witch wanted to visit her, she would call and Rapunzel would let her hair down; it was very long, and the witch would climb up the side of the tower on the hair. That must have pulled," she added, and Jared laughed.

"And if I remember," he said, "Rapunzel never was rescued, as such. She let down her hair and the prince climbed up, but when the witch found out, she cut off Rapunzel's hair and tied it on the window sill, and cast her out into the wilderness. And the prince, climbing the cut-off hair, found himself facing the witch instead of the girl, and he jumped off the tower. Which you can understand. I don't think I much care for the role of the prince."

"I think they got together again in the end. And Maud said you were supposed to rescue her," said Gina, "and I guess she thinks you did. You found Rapunzel, she said." She weighed it. "Do you think she really meant it? That she is Cara's mother? Like – that man – is our father?"

"I am inclined to think," said Jared, "that she was speaking figuratively when she talked with me. And I doubt she knows anything about it now, honey, wherever she is."

Gina thought otherwise, but she left it alone for now. Anyway there was another message to deliver, and this one was simpler. "He said to tell you something else," she said, "my, uh, father; he said to tell you Carter says hello."

For a moment Jared stared at her, and then she could feel his mind moving, making connections; Carter, Maud, the pale blond people and death certificates and ashes cast into the ocean and someone saying on the phone, this was the way she wanted it. "Oh, hell," said Jared, and put the reader down abruptly. "Was that all he said?" he inquired. "Nothing about where Carter is or what he's doing or why – oh, hell, I should have known."

"Known what?" asked Gina, surprised at his reaction. Jared reached for her hand and, holding it, opened his own mind. And she saw clearly the picture of an elderly man, white shirt like the man last night, black pants and shoes, very pale skin, very white bushy hair, very clear sharp blue eyes; he was standing in a hallway in, she thought, a hospital, just outside a lift door, and Maud was somewhere down the hall. "Her housekeeper?" she said, remembering the name now; Jared had mentioned it.

"Oh, yes," said Jared. "Who better? One of – these people, whoever they are. This whole thing –" He fell silent, staring out into the street, still holding Gina's hand absent-mindedly. She could feel his confusion, anger, hurt, the sense of having been used. He was grappling with the possibility that Gina had, indeed, seen Maud, that she was still alive after all. It wasn't a thought that he welcomed now, under these circumstances. And he was thinking of practical things, too, of trying to find out about who issued the death certificate, of the tissue samples the hospital had taken; he could see how it might be possible that she was not dead at all, but he wasn't sure how he felt about that; not good, Gina saw.

"Jared?" said Gina tentatively, and he turned back to her and managed a smile, although his heart wasn't in it, she knew. "Jared, she really did love you," she said, and tried to send to him, Maud with the pale man behind Jared's house, looking across the lawn at what little she could see of him as he got out of his car behind the half-wall of the car port, her face, the cool whiteness between her and her companion and something – yearning, Gina thought, exploring the word. "He said, the man, he said she didn't have a choice. He said it had to be that way."

"Did he say anything else?"

"That we'd talk later. And then he left."

Jared made a small disgusted sound. "Later," he muttered, and shook his head. "Well." He let go of her hand and hugged her quickly, one-armed. "Don't worry about it, honey," he said. "It isn't your problem. I'll deal with it. And thank you for telling me. How about you? This man who says he's your father; how are you doing with that? It's got to be unsettling."

And it was, but Gina had been searching out her own ways of dealing with it. "I don't know about mothers and fathers," she said. "But since we came here – I mean, there's Sofi and Issio, and you and Cara, and Phyllis and Lillian, and – well, all up and down the street, it feels like everyone cares about us. And it seems to me like that's the most important thing."

"It's true," said Jared, "and I'm glad you know that. And don't forget it," he added, and hugged her again. Around the corner by the D'ubian house, Gina saw Cara's car heading down the street. Seeing this, Jared got up from the swing at once, smiled at Gina once more, and headed down the steps. The matter of Maud went to the back of his mind, out of the way, and his pleasure at seeing Cara came to the front as Cara pulled the car into the driveway and her passengers began to get out, holding packages with the logos of dress stores and shoe stores.