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Epilogue — 2029

 

 

M

assachusetts was one of those few states not fully committed to the dictates of Real-America, and, for some reason, the regime looked the other way. Perhaps they tolerated the Commonwealth because it was more like a recalcitrant child and not the threat that California had posed. So Boston was a good, safe place for me, Tricia and Emily to settle during the triage of putting our life back together—minus two.

Tricia cried openly for days, and then for the next week in private over Steven’s death; first because he was dead, and then because he had been so helpless when he needed his parents most. Emily took the news with pursed lipped strength, preferring not to let any anguish show. Michael? Well at least he was still alive, though most likely by now brainwashed by BlueShirt rhetoric. We knew he’d be eventually swallowed deeper into the system, that in my heart I vowed to continue to fight. However I might.

My wife and my daughter’s reactions to Steven’s death served up metaphors for their changed emotional states. Tricia, once so strong and committed to her commitments, would have expressed her fiery temperament through a thrown plate, or even an occasional slap on the face; all countered by a visceral passion that only a deluge may douse. Now she had turned in the opposite direction.

Emily, once so emotive and shy, given even that she was a teenager, had grown stronger from her captivity. She, not me, was Tricia’s anchor, perhaps because of their shared horrors. Of course I knew what hell she had been through, and I think she knew I knew. Some things are best left closeted away, at least that’s what I thought was most convenient.

Emily had helped see Tricia through her recovery first in the hospital and then in the rehab. I was there all the time, but two doors down. There were times, in the rehab, and even now at home, I’d walk by the closed door of their room and hear them crying together; sharing their grief to strengthen their hopes into a conviction of faith in themselves. Not getting involved was the best I could do for them.

It took a few months for Tricia’s voice to strengthen back to it’s full timbre, and for her to knit her words together. Even so, she might break into tears over the smallest thing, and, though she was getting better, would recoil at any hint of my intimacy. I respected her wishes never to talk about what she had been through at Dalaxuma. There would be time for that on her terms. Finally, after six months, she came to the room I’d set up as my own.

“Robert?”

I looked up over the book I’d been reading myself to sleep with. I sensed her apprehension as much as my own. “Trish?”

Her tone seemed constricted. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” Sweetheart—a word I hadn’t heard directed from her toward me in three years. “I’m so ashamed for—well, for what I’d had allowed to happen to me back…back there.”

I put the book down and sat up against the headboard. “Oh, Trish, hon, please. You don’t have to be ashamed of anything.”

“No, Robert,” she said as she tenuously approached the bed, and sat. She took my hand. “Can I lie next to you?”

“Of course.”

She lay next to me, though above the covers. “You need to know what happened. And I’m ready to tell you. You have to know.” She nestled close to me.

I’d gotten to a point where I never wanted to have this conversation. She reservedly told me about it into the next few hours—probably not all of it, but enough. “So, can you see why I’ve been avoiding you so? It wasn’t because of you; it was me. I didn’t trust myself to be able to express how I really felt about you; how there was never a time when I didn’t…love you.” She sniffled. “You saw me through it, Robert—you, and Emily, and Michael…and…and Steven; dear, sweet, Steven. You kept me alive and gave me hope. And I felt so...filthy and ugly. I was afraid that if some miracle happened—the one that finally did—you wouldn’t accept me.” She looked meaningfully at me. “Can you ever forgive me?”

I stroked her hair. Kissed it. “Oh, sweetheart. Of course I can.”

“Really? Robert! I love you so much!” She collapsed into my arms.

I caught my breath. I had hoped for this moment, but I wasn’t prepared for it.

She positioned herself under the covers, then embraced me again. “I could lie here like this with you all night. Just holding you,” she said. She sniffed some tears back. “Will you make love to me?” She smiled ruefully. “It may be awkward, but I really need this now.”

I tried to find my voice. “So do I, Trish.”

________________________________________________

Turning to more superficial matters I had been able to get that marketing manager’s job in the satellite office of Sloane and Jacobson in the Prudential Center. It was an easy commute from our place in Beacon Hill; a posh address filled with threadbare furniture. Tricia’s uncle had once owned the brownstone townhouse when he’d been a banker in pre-Millennial Boston, and when he died, passed it down to Tricia’s Dad as a white elephant. We lived in the first two floors and were able to collect a little income from renting the two above us. Life wasn’t totally great, yet, but is was getting a hell of a lot better.

Emily went back to repeat her junior year in high school. She was looking to get into U-Mass or Boston College to study sociology, then to get a PhD as a psychologist working with and counseling abused women. This had become her passion. It was her way of working things out, not just for herself but, naively —in her words—for every tortured woman in the world. I believed she’d do it.

Alexander Kenton Senior’s funeral had been one fit for a Tzar, with three repeat days of pomp, circumstance, services and homilies filling Madison Square Garden each time. Naturally, it was televised on the Kenton/Fox News and Entertainment Network, and naturally I didn’t watch it. To me the thing had no more significance than a Skee-ball championship.

Alexander Junior’s Coronation came nine months later, after Randy Montefiore found that ruling a nation was not for him. Just like his attitude about Putin controlling the failed New Soviet Republic, he preferred the roll of puppeteer over that of puppet. Alex Junior was a perfect figurehead for him, and Alex excitedly accepted the opportunity of walking in his father’s footsteps, but in a much grander context. Thus, the Coronation. It was all about optics over substance. Leave that to Randy Montefiore.

Montefiore was so impressed over how Tom Roebling and Dan Hastings had done their job in trying to protect Premier Kenton at the New Orleans rally, he promoted Tom to head of PRICE. Tom knew why. PRICE had become a lost leader through their sloppy gulag management, and Montefiore wanted to build up his cherished force, the brutal and clandestine Real-American Coalition Army.

But through this, Tom had leverage. As he once told me when we got together for lunch and martinis at Tavern on the Green at Central Park, “Neo-Publica was not dead. Just resting.”

Aileen smuggled some messages from Sylvia through her California channels in Canada. The Neo Publica for a New America movement she’d begun in San Francisco was had gained some momentum. “First,” she’d written, “we’ll mend California into the Constitutional Democracy it had wanted to be. Then, we’ll fight to take it east.”

Aileen told me that Sylvia would have liked to spend more time on the Cause, but she had been busy taking care of her infant daughter, Michelle, born October 8, 2029.

 

END