Chapter Twenty-Nine
Suella loved the tea times she shared with Jillian, face-to-face, during the brief days she was able to visit. Each morning her friend walked from her hotel to the house and when she arrived her eyes blinked rapidly and the back of her hand constantly brushed against the tip of her nose. She seemed continually ready to sneeze. “You okay?” Suella asked, on what would be the last day of the visit.
“Sure,” Jillian said, regaining her equilibrium as soon as she walked into the house. “I’ve just spent so many years in wet climates it’s tough to get used to things out here. Every morning my throat feels parched and I have to gulp down three glasses of water before I can do anything else.”
Shortly after they walked through the door, Natalie descended the stairs from her bedroom like a marionette with the strings cut. It was ten a.m. “Hi,” she said, weakly waving a hand at both her mother and Jillian.
While her mother and Jillian helped themselves to a mid morning tea, Natalie vacantly ate from a cereal bowl filled with soy-milk soaked wheat squares. A short while later, she returned to her bedroom to dress herself for the day. “She’s awfully lethargic,” Jillian commented.
Suella started to rise: “Maybe I should go up there and see what’s the matter.”
Jillian reached out with her wrist, stopping her. “No, you two will have lots of time to talk after I’m gone,” she said.
The next morning Jillian had to leave early so she and Suella said all their good-byes the night before. “We should do this more often,” Suella said, wistfully.
After Jillian’s visit and all the hoopla from Natalie’s homecoming had died down, Suella thought long and hard about the matters at hand. Joyfully, she had the rest of her life to spend with her daughter, to make up for her horrendous lapses of judgment from years earlier. Another part of her knew that in one way or another, she might not have Natalie with her for much longer.
If she could wave a magic wand and make a wish, it would be to make the rest of their years together happy ones.
Still, Natalie’s morning malaise bothered her. Closer to the weekend, she said “Is everything okay?”
The innocent question seemed to catch Natalie off guard. Her eyes widened, and she stammered, saying “Oh yeah, sure mom. I guess I’m still recovering from all the finals, the move, the partying and everything.”
Suella smiled. “I guess it was kind of overwhelming, huh?”
Natalie smiled wryly. “Yes.”
Her mother snapped her fingers as if she had a grand revelation. “I’ve got an idea! Let’s go to the beach!”
She allowed her daughter the luxury of vedging out for the next few days. By the time they were getting ready for their weekend, her spirits had lifted. Natalie smiled as she bounded back and forth between the car and her bedroom, bringing a whole wardrobe of clothes for just a few days at the beach house. By the time she finished, the whole back seat of Suella’s car had become filled with suitcases and bags. Like any girl her age, Suella reflected, Natalie often changed her clothes several times in the same day.
Since the last time she’d taken any kind of a long auto trip, they’d completed the solar strip between San Diego and San Francisco. She’d made sure that her latest car contained the undercarriage connects. Giddily, she realized that she could latch onto strip at the interchange and after the menu setup, they could ride free together most of the way to the beach house. They could even sit on the back seat if they wanted to.
It was a foggy, late spring morning and she knew that the temperature would barely rise above sweater weather. No matter, she decided, since they weren’t going there to bask on the beach anyway. She had five years of quality mother and daughter time to make up for.
Nathan had once said that the whole concept of operating a car electronically from a solar powered strip reminded him of toy racecar sets from his youth. “We would always race ‘em too fast and they would fly off the track,” he said.
Suella flipped the switch and let the circuitry take over as her car eased itself onto the ramp and swerved a couple of lanes to merge them in with the traffic. Her heart raced when she felt they loomed too close to other cars. She must have flashed one of her classic “scared” looks, she realized because Natalie laughed at her. “It’s okay, mom,” she said. “It’s a hundred times safer to ride a solar lane than drive yourself.”
“It still feels weird,” her mother replied. Gradually, she allowed herself to ease back into the comfortable seat, enjoy the scenery passing by and have a leisurely, relaxed conversation with Natalie.
“You know, I think I should tell you something before much longer,” she began. “David and I want to get our own place soon.”
The prospect caused a knot in Suella’s gut and for a few moments her thoughts swam, clouding her mind, so that for a moment she could not think of a response. Finally, she said “Why?”
Natalie shrugged, though her jaw seemed set and tense. “Well, I love him. We want to be together.”
Suella nodded. She knew that the rental market was horrendously expense, as it had always been, and she hoped her daughter would stay in the area. Many people’s children she knew had had to move to less expensive cities and places to start their lives, like the Dakotas, Michigan, or northern Alabama. “Well, where will you go?” she asked, hoping to feel out whether Natalie and her beau had plans to relocate.
“Around here,” she replied. “He and I already have a few places picked out, sort of.”
Suella sighed, and allowed herself to close her eyes for a moment.
Natalie laughed. “What? Did you think we were going to move to Okey-homa or someplace like that?”
Suella patted Natalie’s hand. “Well of course. You know how mothers worry.”
“Nah. That’d be more trouble than it’s worth. Besides, I hate the cold and snow.”
Her mother nodded then paused for a moment to reflect. So far Natalie had not admitted to any grandiose career plans other than possibly becoming a barrista. But those folks still barely made a living wage. David seemed to be in the same boat, unless he’d majored in engineering while at school. “Okay, now I hate to be a killjoy here, but how are you going to pay for all that?”
“Easy,” she said. “Especially with both of us.”
“Easy? Well, you don’t even have a job yet. And David…”
“Mom,” Natalie interrupted, turning to face her full on. “It’s going to be okay. We’re still going to be near you, and we can more than afford to live on our own.”
God, she was so willful, Suella reflected. Where had that come from? She wanted their little trip to the beach to be peaceful and carefree, she decided. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll make you a deal. We’ll talk about it when we get back. But I want a sit down with both you and David. Is that clear?”
Natalie smiled wistfully, sighing and shaking her head. “Yes mom.”
When they reached San Diego, Suella had to disengage to enter the freeway for the beach. As they arrived, they stopped at a supermarket to get groceries they would need for their short stay. Even though the self-serve lines were quicker, Suella always stood on the line with a cashier and a bagger at the end. She liked the personal attention and opportunities for chit-chat.
This time, a tall young man with auburn hair styled retro in a short, feathered shag, happily scanned their purchases and bagged their items for them. As he worked, he kept on looking back and forth between Suella and Natalie, with his brow furrowing slightly. Suella could guess what he was going to say next. “I don’t mean to embarrass you,” he said, the features on his pock-marked face softening, “but I’ve got to ask, you’re mother and daughter, right?”
Suella and Natalie looked at each other. She was a little taller, since Suella noticed she’d lost a couple of centimeters in height from her youth. “Yes, we are.”
The ca
shier shook his head. “This is just uncanny,” he went on. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mother and daughter who looked so alike! I mean, it’s like you could be twins except you’re maybe twenty years older than her.”
Natalie giggled.
Suella said “You’re very kind. And yes, we get that all the time.”
When they arrived at the beach house, Suella once again marveled at how well the cleaning and maintenance staff kept the place looking fresh and well manicured. It constantly looked like a model home. The hard wood floors always felt welcoming to her yet the living room and kitchen smelled of disinfectant and cleaning fluids. She and Natalie opened a few windows to get cross-ventilation and fresh air flowing through the little bungalow.
Once they had put away all the groceries and their weekend bags, Suella said “Put on a sweater, sweetie. Let’s go for a walk.”
For the walk, Natalie chose a slick, black jacket with fuchsia piping over what appeared to be one of her bikini tops. While Suella favored capris for activities like walking on the beach, Natalie liked to show off her legs with shorts that ended in a cute cuff high on her thighs.
Suella wondered what that meant. If she had been pregnant, she supposed, she would have worn a baggy hoody or a long shirt, billowing out to disguise her contours. As they exited the front door, she decided against giving the matter another minute of thought. They emerged into an unseasonably cool San Diego afternoon, where the low, gloomy clouds still hung over them. Suella hoped it wasn’t a foreboding premonition.
Natalie seemed to like it, however, spring in her step lifting her with buoyant spirits as they crossed the asphalt and stepped onto the concrete path leading to the beach. They both wore beach sneakers with uppers that clung to their insteps and kept sand out yet at the same time could get wet and worked like a neoprene wetsuit in keeping their feet warm.
Few others had braved the beach that day, since the weather was so cloudy, gloomy, and cool. This made Suella feel grateful because it seemed as if they had all the miles of sand and dunes and gently crashing surf to themselves. A light breeze ruffled wisps of Suella’s hair into her eyes and caused Natalie’s long hair to stream back away from her head in a festive way.
“Did you make it to the beach much, in all the years you were at school?” Suella asked.
Natalie shrugged, kicking lightly at a shell in her path. “Here and there,” she replied. “They would never let us surf or stay out in the sun too long, so it was never any fun.”
“So that Knockwurst guy chaperoned you to the beach, too?”
“Him and others. I would have rather practiced soccer. That was about the only place we could run around and be ourselves. On the soccer field.”
Suella nodded. “I always knew there had to be a good reason you enjoyed it so much.” She glanced at her daughter and felt an ache in her heart over Natalie’s beauty. It was tragic that so much of her youth had been spent in a kind of lockdown, all the more so because she felt she had put her there. No wonder the girl wanted a place of her own.
As they drew near to the cool ocean, the breezes invigorated her, and as she looked back at the sand, the kitschy looking houses on the shoreline, and the billowy clouds in the sky, she felt that she had escaped all her problems. Right now there was just her and her very special, beautiful daughter.
Whenever she’d been to the beach in the past, she’d always had difficulty hearing whoever she was talking to because of the rushing, pounding surf. To compensate for this she shouted to Natalie “Let’s go walk in the water,” and they angled toward the surf swelling up onto the sand, lapping up onto the sand. After this she no longer tried to communicate by the spoken word. If they were going to do that, she reasoned, they may as well go back to the house. Instead, she reached out for her daughter’s hand.
Natalie froze for a moment, when she felt her mother’s fingertips brush her own. She looked up at her, quizzically for a moment, but then she smiled and her whole face warmed, causing a feeling greater in Suella than any she’d ever been able to achieve through melding with her. When they held hands they both looked forward, along the beach, at the roller coaster and other carnival type rides in the distance, at the pier, at people atop blankets on the sand who’d braved the cool weather to enjoy the ocean.
While they walked along, the sun in the mid-day sky peeked out through crevices in the clouds, showering warm rays and a telepathic sense that Natalie was able to sense what she was thinking.
Time stood still. The only way she was able to tell that any time had passed at all was by checking the location of the approaching roller coaster. Just a few hundred yards more and they’d be able to ride on it if they wanted. She wanted to turn back, so she stopped and hoped Natalie would take the lead. Silently again they looked at one another, and for Suella it was always like going back in time and looking at herself in the mirror. Natalie said “Do you want to go back?”
Her mother just nodded.
In what seemed like less time that it had taken for them to get out there, Suella and Natalie walked back the way they came and soon arrived at the house. As they walked in the front door, Natalie said “That was nice.” While Suella slipped out of her sweater, curiously Natalie kept her jacket on. She decided to let it pass as she shuffled her feet along the hard wood, wondering what to do next.
Natalie looked at the two rocking chairs in the front room, as if she wanted to sit down on the comfortably cushioned wood and while away the rest of the afternoon talking. Suella suddenly had another idea. She stepped closer to Natalie, and reached down to take both of her hands in hers. “I realized something recently,” she said, speaking slowly, measuring her words carefully. “I never have asked for your forgiveness.”
Her daughter laughed a little, and shifted from one foot to the other. “Mom! I had forgiven you for that years ago. Why don’t we forgive and forget, and move on? I know I want to.”
She swung their hands from side to side, playfully, the way she did when Natalie was little. The next thing she knew, they might be playing “patty-cake.” “You’re right,” she said. “We’ve got the whole rest of our lives. Let’s have some fun!” She let go of her daughter’s hands so that they could go on to the next thing. For a moment though, the two of them stood there, silently regarding each other, as faint traffic noise and the sounds of people talking out in the street filtered in through the opened windows.
“I know!” She pointed a finger heavenward as if she’d just reached some glorious revelation. “I can play guitar!”
“You can? I didn’t see you bring one into the car.”
Natalie walked out of the room toward the bedroom toward her luggage on the bed. “It’s virtual,” she said, over her shoulder. “Everything is nowadays.”
When she returned, she indicated one of the cushy rocking chairs for her mother to sit in. Natalie tugged the other rocking chair from the corner so it would face the one where her mother sat. Suella watched her maneuver a small, glossy, purple box with hinges that contained a few small gadgets in it. “Is your guitar in there?” she asked. “It must be a pretty small one. Like how we would play the smallest violin in the world, whenever someone complained too much.” To illustrate her point, Suella rubbed her fingertip and thumb together.
“Yes, it is.” She glanced around at the chair and the floor and placed a small purple plastic plaque on the floor, positioning her chair to face it. One of the metal gadgets, which looked like a small reading light that Suella used to use in the days when she still read old-fashioned books with pages, got affixed to the armrest of the rocking chair. When Natalie was satisfied that she’d positioned herself properly, she smiled at her mother and lifted her arms as if she were playing an imaginary guitar.
“Air guitar?” Suella asked. “Are you going to play an air guitar? Is that it?”
“Yes and no,” Natalie replied, grinning misc
hievously. She tapped something on the reading light-looking gadget and to Suella’s amazement, a hologram of a slick, turquoise electric guitar materialized on Natalie’s lap, fitting perfectly into her cradling arms. It contained a neck that Natalie grasped, frets, and shining strings.
“Does that really work? Can you really strum on those strings?”
In the next moment, Natalie demonstrated for her, touching the plaque on the floor with her foot and strumming the strings with one quick, loud “zount” type of sound. “Does that answer your question?”
Taken aback, Suella’s chair rocked when her weight shifted backward. “Wow! That’s way cooler than Guitar Hero.”
“I know,” she replied. “There’s this really cool song I just learned. I want to play it for you.” Natalie tensed and relaxed herself and also cleared her throat, the way Suella had seen countless musicians do before.
For a moment everything was silent and the noise from cars and talking people filtered in through the curtains again. Suella considered getting up to close some of the windows, but decided it would ruin the mood. At first she heard violins, or a keyboard instrument play, as if a whole band or orchestra accompanied Natalie on her guitar playing.
After the intro, Natalie started strumming the vacuous, ethereal looking guitar, using a wraparound pick on her ring finger to pluck the diaphanous strings. Her other hand worked the frets at the top of the neck. Together all the sounds produced a vaguely familiar, mellow guitar riff. Once she started smiling and swinging the guitar back and forth (it amazingly moved with her), Suella recognized the song. “I know this one,” she said, snapping her finger, to try to flick the title of it into her mind. “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“It’s And You and I by a group called Yes.”
“That’s it!” Suella said, while her daughter still strummed out what sounded like an intro. “Gosh, that’s an old song, probably older than me.”
“But it’s really cool, though. The singing part is coming up.”
Here, Natalie plays the guitar and sings the old Yes song “And You and I.” Suella gets overwhelmed with how beautiful her daughter’s voice sounds. She had never heard her sing before. And the words to the old Yes song sum up perfectly what their outing to the beach means, and how they have the rest of their lives to work out their differences with each other. I will write out the lyrics as Natalie sings them, and note her mother’s heartfelt reaction as she leans forward, sitting on the edge of the rocking chair seat, until it slides out from under her and she hits the floor, butt-first, just as Natalie has finished singing the song.
They both laughed, but Natalie rushed forward. She pushed the gadget button, extinguishing the guitar as she leaped up and lent a hand to help her mother pick herself up off the floor. When they both stood they still laughed slightly, but Suella reached out for her daughter once again, bringing her in for a warm, heartfelt embraced. “That was so beautiful,” she said, a tear splashing her cheek. “I’m so proud of you.”
Later they sat together in the den watching television after a nice dinner of stir-fry. Neither one of them watched the movie very closely, which was a tired old heist caper story with too many twists and turns. “So I hope I’m not opening Pandora’s Box here,” Suella said, “But just how are you and David going to pay for this apartment you’re planning on getting?”
“I’ve got plenty of money,” Natalie murmured, still looking at the television screen.
“Doing what? Do you take that thing around and do concerts with it?”
Natalie smiled and looked at her. “In a way, kind of. I’ve played it on a few casts before.”
“Casts? What’s that?”
“Little videos on the net,” she replied. “If you want to see one, I could probably find it…”
“That’s okay. Maybe another time.” She gazed at her intelligent daughter as if seeing her for the first time, on a net-cast. “So you’re on those social sites, that pay, I take it? I thought that was one big scam.”
Natalie shrugged as she stared straight ahead at the screen. “Maybe when I was a little kid it was. They’ve got all the bugs worked out now, though.”
“Oh, do they?”
Her daughter was much more interested in the movie they were watching than she was. When Suella checked the image on the screen, she saw a teenage girl with a boy and arrow shoot it at another teenager on what appeared to be a sandy beach.
When they stayed at the beach house, they always went to bed early. The events of that day had exhausted Suella more than a whole day of helping solve client’s security problems. As a result, she fell into a deep sleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow. Quickly, she drifted off into her dreams, one of which featured her as a soccer player on an impossibly green checker-boarded field, deftly pushing the ball along with her foot, weaving in and around other young girls.
She had only played soccer as a ten year old, having lost interest in it by the time she reached junior high.
Hours later she woke up, still remembering the dream. Had she and Natalie shared a dream? Someone who learned that Natalie was a clone asked her if they shared dreams at night, or if someone hit Natalie whether she felt it too.
Suella had drunk a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. Wine always made her have to pee, so she lifted herself from bed and lumbered off toward the bathroom. There was only one bathroom in the small house, and she passed the opened door of Natalie’s room on the way there. She stopped for a moment to gaze at her daughter’s peacefully sleeping face, enhanced by the glow of unusually bright moonlight. So precious, she reflected.
She went back to sleep and woke up hours later. Should she tell Natalie about the dream? Only if it came up through the course of normal conversation, she resolved, as she promptly went to work making omelets with low cholesterol eggs.
With tousled hair but bright eyes, Natalie walked into the kitchen a short time later, giving her mother a quick hug.
If she’d been pregnant, Suella supposed, it would have been much harder for her to lift herself out of bed, especially at the beginning of the pregnancy. Together they finished cooking the omelets and potatoes and getting the morning coffee ready. Natalie squeezed a few juice oranges in a strange electric juicer the size of a soda can.
Moments after they sat down to eat, Natalie said “I had the strangest dream last night. I was playing soccer against a bunch of other girls, but the field was…like a checkerboard.”
The tiny hairs on Suella’s arms tingled. She smiled and took Natalie’s hand. “I had the same dream.”
Natalie nodded, continuing to cut bits of omelet and feed them to herself as if nothing was wrong. “Then I guess they’re right. Clones share dreams with their parents.”
“Yes, I guess they’re right.”
Suella decided it was best for them to focus on enjoying the scrumptious food and fresh juice. She’d noticed over the years that children in Natalie’s generation and just a bit older took supernatural things in stride. It seemed as if she’d heard of such children described as “Crystal” and “Indigo” before.
Suddenly her daughter tilted her head slightly and jerked her neck a little. Then she started talking to an unseen third party. “Good morning Sunny-smile! No, we’re just eating breakfast.”
“Who is that?” Suella asked. “You have an implantable now, too?”
She nodded in reply while listening to whoever had called her. “I don’t know, let me ask her. Hey mom, are we going home later today, or tomorrow?”
“First thing tomorrow.” She dreaded the workload that had piled up for the last couple of days. “Who is that?”
“David.”
“Did you tell him that I want to have a talk with the both of you when we get back?”
“You want to talk to him? You could tell him yourself.”
Suella backed away. “How the hel
l am I supposed to do that? He’s in your head.”
“I can flash him over to your phone.”
“It’s in my purse, in the bedroom. Can you flash him on the screen?”
Natalie sighed hard and glanced up at the ceiling for a moment. “Mom, not everyone likes to talk on the phone that way.”
She waved a hand at her dismissively. “Just tell him we’ll all talk when we get back. For now he gets a reprieve.”
Suella and Natalie spent the rest of that morning and early afternoon at the beach, where the sun had come out and the temperature had climbed fifteen degrees from the day before. That night they decided to treat themselves to a dinner out with fancy sundresses and makeup at a nice Mexican restaurant where the margaritas poured freely. The waiter, who was a tall, clean-cut Asian man with a warm smile and impeccable grooming, greeted them by saying “And how are you beautiful young ladies doing today?”
Suella ordered a Margarita and when it arrived before their food, asked Natalie whether she wanted any. “No, I’m not much of a drinker,” was her reply.
On the other hand, her mother did occasionally enjoy a drink and since they had walked to the restaurant, she decided she wanted another. And another. When they had finished their enchilada suiza dinners, they sat and giggled like elementary school girls. Suella took her daughter’s hand at one point and slurred the words “I just want you to know that I’m so terribly sorry. I’ve hurt you so bad.”
Natalie hugged her by putting both of her slender arms around her neck, the way she did when she was five. “I love you mom.”