Chapter Twenty-Four
That night Suella again cried herself to sleep. She also stayed in bed too late the next morning. Natalie spent the day playing on her screens and her accounts. She spent some time in-world on a game she liked to play. When she finally raised herself from bed, Suella still wore her bathrobe, shuffling from one place in the house to the other, wondering when the ax was going to fall. By the latter part of the afternoon, when the sun cast long shadows through the windows, she decided that she’d been neglecting clients for far too long. Keeping herself off cam, she signed in and helped people with their security issues, quashing viruses and malware.
Nathan left the house early in the morning and returned around the time Suella went back to work. “I spent the whole day with Fisk,” he explained. “He says we’re in a whole lot of trouble, but only if Lifewind decides to press the matter. Has anyone from there called today?”
“No,” Suella said, vaguely reassured that her husband seemed to be exploring all their legal options.
No one called throughout the weekend either, though to Suella, that was not surprising. On Monday morning, Natalie returned to school, and Suella returned to her regular schedule of helping clients. For a couple of days she fooled herself into thinking that things had gone back to normal, that she was just another woman with a marriage and a child to raise. Lifewind still had not called by Wednesday. “They may wait all the way until Natalie’s annual physical,” Nathan said that night at dinner.
“That’s still three weeks away,” Suella said. In three weeks time, she told herself, maybe they would forget the matter. Maybe heaven had granted her a reprieve.
On Thursday night when she returned home from school, however, Natalie dragged herself through the front door listlessly, allowing her backpack to drop off her shoulder onto the couch. “Did you have a bad day at school? I’ve got cookies. That’ll help cheer you up. Oatmeal and raisin. Your favorite.” Suella held up a platter for her.
“I’m not hungry,” Natalie said, slumping down into a chair at the kitchen table. After a moment to pause for reflection, she looked up at her mother. “What’s wrong with me?”
Suella set the platter of cookies down, for fear of dropping them. “Well, nothing, sweetheart, the doctors say you’ll be fine. The cast will come off before you know it.”
She noticed that a few of Natalie’s friends had signed the cast, using neon ink and expressive pen strokes.
“Well, how come we had to come home so early from the baseball camp?”
Suella shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant, desperately searching her mind for another topic she could divert the conversation towards. “We want to make sure that you get well, that you heal completely. That’s why we came home early, so you’d be near your friends, your doctors. Dr. Allende is also very concerned about you.”
“Well, why have you and dad been whispering to each other so much?”
She shrugged again, turning away from Natalie so she could search her mind for what to say next. “And that first night we got back, you were crying so much.”
Just the mention of it was enough to make Suella want to cry again. She turned around slowly to Natalie, lowered down, and reached for a chair so that she could sit beside her. She positioned herself so that their bodies angled toward each other.
Before speaking, she reached out to take both of her daughter’s small, smooth hands in her own. “Now, honey, you know how much I love you, don’t you?”
Natalie nodded, silently.
“You’re me, my own flesh and blood. Sometimes I feel like we both become one and the same. It happened the first time at one of your soccer games.”
With a confused expression on her face, Natalie repeated “My soccer games?”
Suella nodded. The room around them was soothingly quiet. Even the refrigerator and range matrix had stopped its clicking reset cycles while they sat there.
“You were running on the field, kicking the ball the way you do, when you came running toward us, where we were standing. As you drew near, I started to black out, and get dizzy. I thought I was going blind, having a stroke or a heart attack or something. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was you, I was inside your body. I felt how you feel when you run around the field and kick the ball the way you do. And it was wonderful, glorious. We were one for a few moments.”
She had expected Natalie to be gazing back at her with wide-eyed wonder, smiling, wanting to know what happened next. Instead, she’d recoiled slightly, narrowing her eyes as she watched her closely. She blinked, rapidly. “Mom, are you okay?”
“Of course I am, sweetheart! Don’t you see? That feeling was so wonderful to me, that I wanted to feel it all the time. It happened again one morning when I hugged you, first thing in the morning. When we went to the beach and you got me to go into the water, that was another time.”
“Mom, you’re scaring me. That’s so weird.” She tugged her hands away.
“Stop it! How could you come inside me like that? We’re two different people! You can’t do that, it’s impossible.”
“But it’s true,” Suella said, softly.
Natalie pushed herself away from the table and sprang up from her chair. “Mommy, what’s wrong with you? Why are you acting this way? Are you and dad getting a divorce?”
“No, honey. We love each other.”
Natalie put her hands on her hips and glared down at Suella. “Well, what is it, then? Why are you acting so weird?”
Suella’s lip trembled, and for a moment, she could not speak. She could feel the tears return, welling in her eyes, distorting her vision. “If I tell you, you’ll hate me forever.”
“No I won’t. Tell me.”
“Natalie, please.”
She raised her voice. “TELL ME. Someone is going to tell me, sooner or later. I’d rather have it be you. So what is it?”
Seulla told her all about the medication, the laser tap, the pills dissolved in hot chocolate, and her trips to Mexico to get them refilled. When she finished speaking, Natalie’s face took on a dazed, expressionless look, and she slumped down, plopping into the chair once again. They sat together silently for several minutes. Natalie finally said “Now I know why I always feel so tired.”
Through the rest of the month of March, no one from Lifewind called the house or Suella’s phone. She heard nothing from them over the web, either. She was wary.
Like an IRS matter, the trouble, the problem always lurked under the surface. Suella decided that it was best to continue on with job and keep herself busy with the house, her tea times with Jillian and making sure Nathan was happy. A week after they returned from the fantasy camp, Nathan’s twinkling smile returned and they’d been able to enjoy sex the way they did when they were newlyweds.
She also supported Natalie by driving her and her friends to soccer games and practices, enjoying the sight of her daughter playing with abandon. At first she balked at the idea, thinking it would be better for Natalie to devote the time to healing. After much wailing, pleading, and showing her a screen of protective sleeves for wrist casts, Suella gave in. She also felt better about things when she witnessed the coach sternly warning Natalie to protect her arm.
Without the medication, Natalie was more bright eyed and alert than she’d been recently. Her coach even noticed this, saying “That trip to the desert must have done you good!” When Natalie scored the winning goal in a game against a tough opponent, one of the all-girl’s parochial schools, her friends jumped on her, lifting her to their shoulders and carrying her off the field. Suella realized that she was happier seeing that than getting to meld with her daughter once every other blue moon.
Still, Natalie’s birthday loomed. Lifewind was clearly waiting for Natalie’s yearly appointment to take any action. While she and Nathan lie in bed basking in each other’s afterglow, she asked him. ??
?Can you come with me to the center this time?”
He shrugged. “I’m kind of busy. The publishers might have something planned.”
“Please,” she said softly, rolling over, kissing his chest, his neck and working her way down. “I really need you.” She perched herself atop him and delicately touched his straining essence before kissing it. “You’re her father.” She basted him with a warm, smooth lick.
He groaned. “Hey now, you know that’s not fair.”
“I need you there, Nathan. You know why.” She looked up at him.
Her soft words must have vibrated deliciously against him because he gazed down at her with emotion, with awe. “Okay,” he said.
She continued, finishing what she started.
The week before Natalie’s appointment finally arrived. Suella wondered whether she should pack extra clothes in case the center decided to keep her. She decided that doing so would tempt fate. Would it help to prepare her daughter? That weekend before they would take the trip to Lifewind, Suella and Natalie rode the train to Oceanside. Natalie had jumped up and down for joy when her mother suggested it over dinner one night, but Suella added one condition: “Please don’t make me go into the water this time.”
“Why not?” Natalie asked. “Why waste a trip to the beach if you’re not even going to go into the water?”
“Because it’s COLD, silly. Remember? We just got through winter?”
Natalie agreed to her mother’s condition. “But I’m still going in,” she added. They rode the train on an early Saturday morning, and by that afternoon, Suella sat in a beach chair under her umbrella, reading a new novel on the tablet display. Natalie, wearing a teal floral bikini over her developed body (which made her look much older than fourteen), She made it out to the breakers, the ocean foam kissing the edges of her bikini bottom, before she hugged herself and shouted “Holy tish, it’s freezing!”
“Mama knows best,” Suella called out from under the umbrella.
The only people hardy enough to take to the water that day were young surfer boys and girls. Every one of them wore a wetsuit, probably with piping that added extra warmth, like an old-style electric blanket. For awhile, Natalie built a sandcastle.
Suella had taught her how years before, showing her how to cup ocean water in her hands to wet the sand and mold it into walls and moats. She smiled when she saw her drip wet sand through her parted fingertips, creating towers out of sand droplets. A short distance away, some kids her age got together for an impromptu game of sand volleyball. Suella took a moment from her reading to watch and to plan how and when she would tell Natalie.
She decided she would discuss it with her the next day, a Sunday. While they ate dinner at a casual seaside diner, she chewed her food in silent dread. “You’re quiet,” Natalie said. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh, just fine,” she said, reaching for her glass of wine, forcing a smile. “Just thinking about work. You know. It’s always something!”
“Maybe you should have brought your gear along,” Natalie said glumly.
Suella was unceasingly amazed at her daughter’s depth of heart. “No,” she said. “I left it home for a reason. This is our time. I needed a break from all that anyway.”
Natalie shrugged and resumed eating. “You could access at the house anyway, right? Unless you took out the point.”
“No, it’s still there.”
Natalie paused, looking up for a moment. “Aren’t you worried about renters?”
Suella shook her head. “No, silly. Who are you talking to? They’d have to go in under a different port. To get to mine they’d need to figure out a page of codes.”
Natalie laughed. “Your such a geek.” They dropped the subject and finished their dinner.
That night Suella tried to get comfortable and fall into blissful sleep, to no avail.
She kept thinking of the scene from the old Meryl Streep movie Sophie’s Choice when Sophie stands in a processing line at the death camp with her little boy and her little girl. A gestapo guard points a gun at her and tells her that she can only take one child with her. “I want to take both,” she says.
The guard brusquely retorts. “One. Or neither. You choose.”
When two nearby guards point their weapons at both of her children, Sophie screams “Take my little girl!” She watches in horror while one of the soldiers grabs her daughter, hoists her over his shoulder and carries her off, kicking and screaming.
“They’re not going to do that,” she kept repeating to herself, over and over. “They’re not going to do that.” Gradually, her mantra worked and she soon slipped into a deep, restful sleep.
The next morning, she made omelets. With her hair tousled, and wearing her favorite anime nightshirt, Natalie sliced mushrooms and onions for her. “You’re quiet again. What’s wrong?”
Suella tried to force a smile, wave her hand in dismissal and put on a brave front. “Later,” she said. “After we’ve had breakfast.”
“No mom,” Natalie said, standing firm. “Now.”
She turned off the range beneath the sizzling and crackling eggs. “I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
Suella tried to say the words but she started to tremble and quake. “That…when we go to the center…” and she couldn’t bring herself to finish.
“That they won’t let me go home?”
Suella could only nod.
“Mom, they won’t do that.”
“They won’t?”
“No.”
Suella’s mind swirled with a tempest of thoughts and images that caused her to feel queasy and light-headed. Before she fell, she decided to sit. “But I’m in trouble. I voided the contract. I put you in danger.”
Reminded of this, Natalie gazed down at the floor, deep in thought, the corners of her lips turning down. A moment later she raised herself, clenching her fists. “Well they’re not going to just keep me.” She paused for a moment, allowing herself to relax, and for her fists to loosen. Turning away from her mother, she added “They’re probably going to say I should go to Waldheim, or Brooksville.”
To Suella, they sounded like institutional names. “What’s that?”
“They’re schools. Especially for kids like me.”
She knew the answer to this before she even asked, since she knew that Natalie was bright and a good web researcher. But she asked anyway. “How did you find out about them?”
“They told me about them, during my last two checkups. They said it’s a good thing for kids like me.”
Suella felt suddenly relieved. If Natalie was sent away to a form of boarding school, then both she and Nathan would be able to visit her. They might even allow her to come home for weekends and holidays. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I knew you’d be against it. I know you’d want to keep me at home and have me continue regular school.” Natalie smiled.
The outpouring of love that Suella felt for this child was almost frightening. She stood up slowly, and Natalie moved toward her. They hugged each other tightly. “I guess I won’t have that luxury now, will I?”