***
“Gracie, will you show me how to build that card castle again?” Penny asked Grace excitedly.
It had been James’s brilliant idea that we all sit around together as frequently as we could and play “happy family.” When it was just James, Penny, and me, we were not playing at anything; we really were a happy family, albeit one that was fractured, missing several of the other members. But when it was us and Grace, everything felt so forced, so uncomfortable. James and Penny were impervious to the awkwardness of it, but I was not; the entire time, I found myself sitting up straighter, behaving more primly and prickly than I normally did around my boyfriend and daughter. I was still in Brynna Elohimson-mode, while Penny and James expected Brynna Olivier.
Not to mention, that particular night, I was reeling from the moment earlier, when the Warden had finally called on me, when he had confronted the situation in a way that was so deceptively calm, “Well, if you no longer wished to continue our tryst, you could have come to me…” and I had known he was gearing himself up, I had seen how unlike Tyre, his rage did not come in a seemingly random outburst of violence, but how it slowly built, and then finally, it exploded into this almost jocular, almost ridiculous, and yet totally terrifying show of theatrical fury, rage with a flourish of drama… I remembered how our conversation had ended with him dismissing me, and how as I walked to the door, I heard him toying with his gun, and I had almost known that he was going to shoot me in the back, but instead, he had blurred to me, grasped my wrist, spun me around, held me to the wall, and told me something that had made me sick then, and would make me vomit all over myself right there in Penny’s room if I dwelled on it… So I did not dwell.
“Of course I will!” Grace told Penny in regards to the card castle, “Where did we put the cards last time? I don’t remember.”
As usual, Penny had won Grace over in one visit. I watched them, trying not to think how very much like sisters they were already.
“Eat your peas, Penelope Sylvia. Do so by your own hand, or you will do so by mine.” I told her, and I was not trying to disrupt their fun or bring the attention back onto me at all, though by the look Grace gave me she thought one or both of those scenarios were my motivation in keeping Penny with us.
“I don’t like peas.” She whined, which James immediately mimicked in his typical high-pitched rendering of her voice before rolling onto his stomach, picking up her fork, and scooping up a forkful of peas.
“Come on, Punky Monkey.” He told her, “Mom says ‘eat up,’ so eat up.”
She sighed heavily and rolled her eyes, which made James grin at how adorably precocious she was but made my skin prickle. My mother had never tolerated us rolling our eyes at her, and as many times as I had promised myself that I would not become my mother, the sight of Penny rolling her eyes made me want to scream. James reached out and patted my knee, still beaming like a buffoon at our daughter’s insolence, and when he looked at me, I scowled at him only somewhat seriously.
“She’s just so cute.” He told me, as Penny finished the last of her peas and scampered off with Grace, “And she’s the only one we’re going to have, so she’s my firstborn and my only, and in those circumstances, how am I supposed to help the fact that I find everything she does so utterly adorable and wonderful and perfect?”
“She can hear you, and she will use this to her advantage. You just wait. When she starts telling you very sweetly and adorably while batting her huge, blue eyes at you that she will no longer take baths or she will only eat candy and pie, and you are powerless against her cuteness, I will not help you.” I told him, and he laughed and laid his head in my lap.
“I know.” He replied, “I know, you evil wench.”
I whacked him lightly on the forehead, and without opening his eyes, and very airily, he said, “Watch the face,” to which I laughed quite heartily and leaned down so I could kiss right where I had just hit.
Whenever he laid his head in my lap, my hand always began to absent-mindedly run through his hair. God, that man and his perfect hair… As my fingers worked through the thickness of it, I never failed to be amazed at how it was perfectly gelled to the point of being styled and yet still soft. As he always did, the second I began to run my hands through it, he closed his eyes, ready to pass out right there in my lap.
“Stay awake and talk to me, you beautiful man.” I told him, “I want to hear your sultry baritones.”
“You want me to sing to you? Okay.” He opened his mouth to begin to sing, but my hysterical laughter stopped him before he could. The girls looked at us, and he looked over at them.
“Worry not, ladies. Mrs. Olivier-Elohimson finds herself incapable of fighting my charm and perfect sense of humor. She will be fine in a moment.”
“Shut up!” I told him, “You are so dumb, James Maxwell.”
“And it is because I am so dumb that you love me.”
“It is one of the many reasons, to be sure.” I replied, as he closed his eyes again. My hand that was not stroking his hair was rested on his shoulder, and he reached up, entwined his fingers with mine, brought my hand to his lips, and kissed it twice. The first kiss was hard and held fast for several seconds, and the next was quick. Then, he began kissing each of my knuckles that were still bruised from the fight. Up and down my fist, touching to each knuckle gently, his lips pressed, and his newly regrown facial hair tickled against my skin. I found that the slight movement was bringing a perfect onslaught of that warmth that always filled me up when he kissed me or touched me, and I beamed.
“So, do you have everything you need for when we dock again?” He asked me softly.
“What do I have to bring but you and everyone else I love?”
“Well, though we are the best cargo there is, of course, what I am referring to most is whether or not you’re ready.”
“So why did you not ask if I was ready, ding-dong?” I asked, and he chuckled, “Keep kissing my knuckles like that.”
“You like that?”
“Yes.”
“Alright, then. If my lady likes it, it shall be done.”
“That is absolutely right. When is Abe coming with Janna?”
“He was keeping an eye on the Warden until the second-to-last chime. Once he’s asleep, he’ll bring her over to get Idan, and then they’ll be here. The Lord of War knows you’re here, obviously. But if he goes on a walkthrough and doesn’t see Janna in her cell for the night…”
“I know. He will start suspecting that I have some guards on my side.”
“And we absolutely do not want that.” He replied, “Not when we’re so close, baby. I mean, we still have weeks to go, but we’re closer than we’ve ever been.” He opened his eyes and looked up at me, “Are you nervous?”
“No,” I replied flippantly, and he furrowed his brows at me in disbelief, “I’m not!”
“Alright, don’t get all touchy and mean, my tough-as-nails, vaguely psychotic but totally, breathtakingly gorgeous warrior woman. I believe you are not nervous. I’m a little nervous, but…”
“But how can my tough-as-nails, vaguely psychotic but totally, breathtakingly gorgeous warrior man be nervous? He said this would be done easy-peasy.”
“The word ‘easy-peasy’ has never left my mouth, woman! I said it would be done easily!”
“Oh, forgive me, I could have sworn you said ‘easy-peasy.’”
He laughed half-hysterically at that and sat up to kiss me quickly.
“It is going to be quick and clean and easy, baby.”
“Tell me again so that I may rake your plan over hot coals, as they say. I want to pick it apart…”
“For the ninetieth time.”
“Yes, for the ninetieth time, and there will surely be a ninety-first, and a ninety-second, and a ninety-fifth and sixth, before the time comes, perhaps more. I want to pick it apart so that I may weigh all the variables and look for points of weakness. He will kill each and every one of us if he catches us a
t this, or if we make it halfway there and the guards who don’t work for you intercept us at the shore. So, tell me the plan again.”
“We dock once every two months to refuel. This time, we’re docking at two and a half months. We’ll be at the port closest to their city Blancstizia…”
“What the hell does that even mean? Is that ‘White Justice?’”
“It is.” He replied, looking impressed, “It never fails to amaze me how quickly you catch on to things. I mean, I don’t speak any other languages besides good ‘ole American…” I giggled quite ridiculously at that, and he grinned, “But I didn’t even catch the ‘white’ part. So, look at me, I know one word of French now.”
“I know another word you know in French. It’s a phrase actually, but I will not utter it here, because there are children’s ears near us.”
“And neither of them speak French!”
“I don’t know what Grace knows, but whatever. It is unimportant. I’ll tell you later. Continue with the plan.”
“Oh! You mean menage-a…”
“Shh!” I reached out and lightly covered his mouth, “Yes. That.”
“Can I have one of those for my birthday?” He asked under my hand.
“We don’t even know when your birthday is! I lost count of the Earth calendar the year after the Fall.”
“It’s tomorrow. My birthday is tomorrow.”
“Well, I will consider it, then. In the meantime, push those thoughts from your mind…”
“Impossible…”
“And continue with the plan.”
“So, we are going to avoid Blancstizia all together, obviously, because it’s a huge Old Spirit territory. I mean, huge. Second only to Southsage, Tyre’s stomping grounds, which is the biggest city on the whole damn planet now that Lumiere is gone.”
“Oh, Tyre tried to build a city that was bigger than Adam’s city.” I said with a derisive laugh, “Silly boys. You put so much emphasis on size.”
“Why are you generalizing me in this?” He asked good-naturedly, “I didn’t build any cities.”
“No, but you built a big ship.”
“I needed to build a big ship so it would house a lot of people! It had nothing to do with a fixation on size!”
“Of course it didn’t, sweetheart.”
“It didn’t!” He replied with a laugh. “I had four world governments and their families to build for, madam, and none of them were going to fly in a tuna can.”
“Of course they wouldn’t, sweetheart.”
“Oh, you’re fucking with me. Why do I never realize it when you’re fucking with me?”
“Of course I am, sweetheart.” I said, and he looked up at me, trying not to laugh as he frowned, “Alright, I will stop, but it has just been so long since I have given back to you what you give to me.”
“You mean, love from the bottom of your heart and adoration that borders of reverence? Because that is what I give you.”
“Oh, as if, James Maxwell!” I snapped back at him jokingly, “All you give me is sarcasm and sometimes, once in a blue moon, some very, very good cunnilingus, and that is all!”
“What do you mean, ‘once in a while?!’” He lowered his voice so Penny and Grace, who were already paying us absolutely no mind on the other side of the spacious room, could not possibly hear him say, “I live with my face buried between your legs!”
“The statement stands, Mr. Maxwell.”
He burst into a fit of the most ridiculous laughter that I had ever seen from him. His laughs were boisterous and loud, and his knees curled into his chest because of the force of it. Grace and Penny looked at us now, Grace looking mildly concerned (and exactly like her mother, when she had shown her concern for me) and Penny looking adorably judgmental, with her brows furrowed and her lips pursed in the way that my face contorted when I was watching someone and feeling that they were behaving nonsensically. The fact that they both looked like their mothers made me laugh, certainly, but it also made me somewhat sad, though I did not know why it should have made me sad.
“Ignore us.” I told them, “Get back to your very impressive card castle. Did Tom teach you that, Grace?” I asked, and my tone was almost warm, almost kind. She took notice of that tone, so when she replied, her tone matched it.
“Yes.” She replied, and her shoulders rose, showing me that she was guarding herself against me. I made a mental note to proceed cautiously, to mind my manners, which surprised me, considering I minded them for no one. “We used to build them for hours. Sometimes, we’d have to stand on chairs to finish them.”
“I remember.” I replied, and my voice was even gentler, which made me mildly nauseous but which I knew was necessary. “Penny does, too, don’t you, Penny?”
“Yup!” Penny replied enthusiastically, “One time, we were out on the back porch, ‘cuz we used to have these huge cookouts where all our friends would come over to eat, and Tom and I built a big one on the table, but then the wind blew, and it fell, and we laughed, ‘cuz it was so silly to build it outside in the first place.”
“You saw my dad a lot, then?” Grace asked, looking from Penny to James and me, and back again. “I know you saw my mom, but I know that my mom was married to someone else for a long time.”
James looked at me, not knowing what to say. I did not look at him, though I did not know what to say, either. My eyes were fixed on Grace, on her hunched shoulders, on the way her blue eyes that mirrored my own and my daughter’s met mine and diverted over and over again. She had wanted to ask me questions, and for some reason, after all the nights we had spent in Penny’s room, eating dinner and then just lounging around, with her and Penny on the other side of the room, reading or building or drawing or braiding each other’s hair, she had chosen tonight to ask me questions. That night, when I was thinking of James’s plan, and all the areas where it could fail, when I was thinking of my earlier confrontation with the Warden…
Still, she was afraid to ask. It had taken months to build up her courage, and though I was certainly not the nicest of people, I was not a total monster. I would not shun my birth child now that she had finally worked up the nerve to ask for more details on what life had been like before she came to be.
“We knew him very well. He was a good friend.” I replied, and I was treading lightly, because though Tom’s true identity was nothing to be ashamed of, Grace had been raised among people who believed that it was. I had alluded to it in Adam’s room, but I had not dropped the bomb, so to speak, even then, when I was very angry.
“He was around our house every other night,” I continued, “Just like your mom and her first husband.”
“And my Daddy was best man at his wedding! He was his best man! Tony’s best man was his mom, even though she’s a lady! Mrs. Rose was the nicest lady in the entire world, and she’s still alive!”
Well, so much for treading lightly… James groaned and turned over on his side, pulled his knees to his chest, and burrowed his face in my stomach.
“Wait a minute…” Grace said, and James groaned louder.
“James, it is nothing to be ashamed of…” I started to say.
“What do you mean ‘Tony’s best man was Mrs. Rose.’ What does that have to do with my dad?”
I sighed heavily, rolled my eyes for a moment, and turned my head on the side, my typical stance of discomfort.
“Connect the dots, sweetheart, though I suspect that they are already connected.” I told her.
“Is she talking about the Tony here? The big Tony? The scary Tony? The really tall, really thin Tony?” She asked quickly, and her eyes were filling with tears, because Tony was not shy about being gay. In fact, he was as… busy… in his love life as I was in mine. Turns out many of those Old Spirit boys who purported to hate him just wanted him, and why shouldn’t they have wanted him? He was bizarrely handsome, in what Tom had always described as a “Sherlock Holmes meets Grizzly Adams” (because this was back when Tony was a little rotund and bearded) way
. He was tall and slender in the prison, but when I had first met him, he had been much rounder and much more scraggly; losing Tom had taken its toll. He had lost more weight than was healthy, though somehow, he made it work, and just like how James had shaved off his facial hair because it reminded him of me, Tony had shaved off his because it reminded him of his husband. With his new look, he was much sought after by those aforementioned Old Spirit boys, so everyone who did not already know certainly knew that he was gay, including Grace.
“Is it that Tony? Your friend?” She spat the word at me like a slur, as the tears began to leak from her eyes. James gave another groan into my stomach, but it was much louder this time.
“Stop that!” I snapped at him, as my blue eyes switched over to red, and from the red, they began to swirl with white. No one talked badly about Tony. In the same way that he would snap if anyone uttered a word against me, I would snap, as well. Tony was known to kill those who defamed me, but obviously, I would not physically harm my child. Emotionally harm, on the other hand…
“Yes, Tony and Tom were both my friends, and yes, they were together. Yes, your father was gay. Yes, your mother was very happily married to a man the Old Spirits had beheaded on the Execution Deck while your mother watched, for something utterly ridiculous.”
They had said that he had stolen from a guard. They had imprisoned him. They had killed him. A year and a half later, Rachel had gotten her release papers. They cut her sentence early, despite her closeness to me. They brutally murdered her husband in a public display, made an example out of him for the rest of us, and then took her away from me so I could not care for her in her grief. Her grief which, as I am sure you can imagine, was utterly crippling. It would have been one kind of pain to lose him on the battlefield, but to lose him there on the ship, when they were trying for a baby, when she knew that he had done nothing, that the charge was false… I remembered the day they killed him. Her scream rattled around every corner of my skull when I remembered it. I remembered the feeling of her head against my chest, of the way her body shook with sobs long after she had passed out, of how she would not allow me to let go of her for even a second, how her grief had left her utterly destroyed, unable to walk, to eat, to drink… For years afterward, she would wake up screaming or crying his name, and Janna, Illa, and I would hold her through the night.
Then there was Tony. For years after Rachel and Tom had been released from the ship, Tony had come to me when I was alone, shaking with such rage, and he would rant and rave until he couldn’t breathe about how when we escaped, he would kill every man or woman who stood in his way until he found Tom and his mother again. Sometimes, his rage would come crashing back down suddenly, and he would be besieged by tears, and sometimes, he would simply come back down slowly, and then, he would say, “It’s going to be years, isn’t it?” and I would nod, because he always knew when I was lying to him, so there was no use in doing so. Plus, he did not need me to lie for his benefit. When word reached us from the gleeful mouths of the guards that Tom and Rachel had been shot in the village square of our old home, I had tried to take Tony’s hand, but he had pulled away from me and stormed from the room. Later, he had come to the laundry room where I was working, and we had sat in the room overcrowded with sheets and uniforms and hot with the steam from the machines, and he had been totally speechless in his grief. He had not cried, but he had opened his mouth to say something one hundred times and yet nothing came out. I had held his hand, telling him how I knew. I knew better than anyone, because of James, because of Grace, and he had finally found his words.
“They are going to take from us until there is nothing left, Brynna.” He whispered, “Even though Tom is gone, and I can’t fucking take it, I can’t fathom it, I can’t even begin to grieve for him…” The tears had started then, “I know there is more they can take, and it scares me.”
I had held his hand and leaned forward so I could rest my forehead against his. I had not said anything, because he was right, and it scared me, too.
But enough with these old memories. This old grief. Grace was on the brink of a breakdown to end all breakdowns…
“My dad was not…” She sputtered, “He couldn’t have been… He loved my mother! He loved her…”
“…As a very dear friend with whom he had experienced a long succession of terrible tragedies, yes, but he did not love her romantically. He was incapable of loving her romantically…”
“Why?!” She shouted, and her pale skin was turning splotchy now, something that had always happened to Rachel when she had gotten angry or very upset. “Because he could only love men romantically?!” She shrieked it at me like it was the worst possible insult, and Penny startled terribly and scampered to James and me. James sat up, wrapped his arms around her, and let her burrow against his chest.
“Come on, ladies. If you want to do this, wait until you get back to your cell. Not in front of…”
“He was not sick like that!” Grace shouted, as tears poured from her eyes, “He was not a… He was not a… an… an…”
“Say it.” I told her, and it was a challenge she was, for once, not afraid to take,
“Idem!” She shouted.
“Grace!” James bellowed, and even I jumped, because I had never expected him to shout like that, “Do not use that word in front of your sister!”
“She’s not my sister!” Grace screamed through her hiccupping sobs, “She’s not my sister, because you’re not my mother!”
Penny, though she was technically still six or seven in body and mind, was not impervious to the cruelty of Grace’s words. She fully understood the magnitude of what Grace had just said. She knew that Grace had just disowned her, and she was not old enough to know that Grace was just angry, and she did not truly mean what she was saying. But then again, I was almost fifty in my mind, though I was still twenty-two in my body, and I did not know if Grace was merely spouting off because she was mad or if she truly meant what she was saying. Either way, Penny began to cry softly into James’s chest, and that she upset my daughter only made my ire towards Grace grow.
“I do not care how you feel about this, Grace.” I spat, “I do not care about the prejudices on which you were raised. I know that you did not learn it from Rachel or Tom, because Rachel was fully sympathetic to our way of life in Shadow Village, and Tom had never even looked at a woman in all his forty-two years on Earth!”
“Stop it!” Grace snarled at me furiously.
“Brynna, that’s enough.” James snapped at me.
“Do not snap at me like this is my fault!” I shouted at James, “She wanted to know, so she is going to know, and the truth hurts, as they say, for her, though it should not! That she allows herself to be so ignorant as to believe that her father was sick, that Tony is sick, that her two little friends Rohanna and Yumi are sick…”
“I don’t care about the other ones! I only care about him, and he loved my mother! He loved her, and he could never be with a man like that, because it’s wrong, and he knew it was wrong.”
“Oh, did he tell you it was wrong?” I asked with yet another derisive laugh, “Did those words come out of his mouth?”
“No! But he was not sick like that! He was not…”
“He was not sick at all!” Penny screamed at her before I could reply, “There is nothing wrong with him or anyone else! If boys want to love boys, and girls want to love girls, then they can!”
“Shh…” James told her, “It’s alright, baby. If you know that, that’s all that matters.”
“And you all are planning on escaping!” Grace shouted, “Out there, on land, if she says that, she’ll get put right back here, or she’ll be put in the Joined Hands Academy, and they’ll sort her out!”
Now, I had heard all about that damned Joined Hands Academy, and believe me when I say that the thought of few other things could make me as sad or as sick. Men and women had their little children taken away so those children could be brainwashed into believ
ing the ways of the Old Spirits, and so the Old Spirits could have soldiers valiant to their cause when those children came of age.
So thinking of my daughter being strapped to a chair in front of a television screen until her mind was shattered made me quite angry, and within half a second, I had zoomed forward so that I was right in Grace’s face.
“I dare you to say that again, Grace DiAngelo. Regardless of the fact that you are my blood, if you say that again, I swear to God or the Gods that I will…”
“What?” She shouted, staring into my red eyes with her red eyes. For the first time, she held my gaze, “What are you going to do, Mom?! What are you going to do?!”
“That is enough!” James had put Penny down on her bed and come to stand between us, “Separate corners, now!”
“I want to go back.” Grace cried, and she strode towards the door quickly, eager to get as far away from me as she could and forgetting, I suppose, that I shared a room with her. “I’m leaving! I won’t listen to these lies.”
“Alright, I’ll take you back.” James said, his voice quieter and calmer now that we had stopped shouting at each other. He was holding Penny again, and she was squeezing him tightly, only crying very softly now.
“Don’t go, Daddy.” She cried, “You said it could be a long time before you could come see me.”
“I’ll go back by myself.” Grace snapped, and just as she put her hand on the door, I felt that urge I always felt after a verbal disagreement or a full-out shouting match. It was the ever-present urge to have the last word.
“Well, if you see Tony—big, scary, Tony—make sure you tell him how you know all about his idem ways. Though I doubt you’ll last long after spitting that word at him.”
“Goddamn it, Brynna!” James bellowed, and Penny was sobbing again, Grace was sobbing and screaming again, and I felt, for just one minuscule second in time, like the bitch they all claimed I was. Then, I shrugged one shoulder, grinned to myself, and laughed as Grace stormed out of the room, sobbing so loudly, she would surely wake the entire children’s wing and draw the attention of the guards, which would be quite unfortunate for us.
“Nice.” James spat at me as he handed Penny to me, “Real, fucking nice, baby. Still gotta have the last word, don’t you?”
“Yup.” I replied, “Some things never change.”
“Just…” He was at the door, and he turned back to me, shaking with fury, “Stop fucking talking, would you?”
“Nope.”
“God, you’re a child!”
“I’m a what?” I snapped, and I put Penny down even though she was clinging to me like a little spider. Once she was on the floor with me, she wrapped her arms around my leg. “I’m sorry, I’m a what?”
“Oh, you don’t like that? Good, I’ll say it again.” He leaned closer to me and said it in my face, “You’re a child. You’re a fucking child. You heard me!”
“Well, what does that say about you, that you’re dating a child? That you’ve been dating a child for two and a half decades? I don’t do anything that you have never done, so if I am a child, then you are a child, and I will thank you not to use such foul language in front of Penny.”
He glared at me, so angry that he was shaking even worse. He wanted so desperately to say something, to have the last word (even though he had just accused me of always having to have the last word), and in typical James fashion, his last words had to also be the worst possible words.
“You know, sometimes you make me question why I’ve put up with you for so long.” He said, quietly but with enough venom to make me wince, “Sometimes, actually switching sides instead of just pretending to switch sides is preferable to watching you act like this.”
“Like what?” I snapped back instantly, “You want to say it. So be a man, and say it, James.”
Because Penny was clinging to my leg, he would not say it out loud. If he had spat it at me, I would have been able to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he had simply spoken out of anger. But the way he leaned in and whispered it in my ear showed calculation; it showed that he had time to change his mind before he spoke.
“Like such a heartless cunt.” He spat, and believe me, I tried to fight it, for Penny’s sake. Even as my hand reared back, a little voice in my head begged me to put it down, or even to just shove him in the chest to get him away from me. But the rage was in control of every part of my body, and it was the rage that silenced the voice in my head telling me to find my calmness again. It was my rage that did not stop me from slapping him across the face not once but three times, and it was the rage that had me slapping him wherever I could reach once his arms came up to shield his face.
Finally, he reached out, not like he was going to hit me back, but just so he could restrain me, and I flinched so terribly that he immediately backed off. Penny was on the floor, sobbing, having lost her grip on my leg when I stormed towards him and started hitting him. Unfortunately, from down on the ground, she had the perfect view of her mother slapping her father repeatedly.
“STOP IT!” She screamed, and she inserted herself in between us, crying so hard that she was gasping for air. “STOP HURTING EACH OTHER! MAMA, STOP HITTING HIM!” She pushed me in the stomach, and then turned to James, “DADDY, STOP CALLING HER NAMES! STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!”
“See what you did?!” James shouted at me, “Do you see what you did?!”
“Oh, and you did nothing?!”
“STOP IT!” Penny shrieked, and it was so loud, and so desperate that the torches lighting the room erupted upwards, brightening everything and erasing the shadows from James’s face.
She had one hand on my stomach and one on James’s, and she was reaching out, holding us apart, and it was then that I was besieged by the urge to cry, because my mind was flashing back to my childhood on Earth, when Violet had stood between my father and me, or my mother and me, and sobbed just like Penny was sobbing. As Penny begged us not to fight, I remembered how Violet had begged my mother, father, and me not to fight. Over the years, I had come to appreciate just how big of a part I had played in Violet’s anxiety, and I prayed that one day, I would be able to tell her that I was sorry for not backing down when they enticed me into fights, and if not that, that I was sorry that she had had to see it all. I had sworn on every grave of every ancestor I had that Penny would never see James and me even verbally spar, and up until that night, she had not, but of course, that night was so terrible that she would never be able to forget it. Of course the first time she had seen us fight would be the worst fight we had had since the time James had attacked me whilst high on Peace Fruit. Of course. Of course.
He opened his mouth to say something else, something just as terrible, to pass the blame completely onto me for Penny being so upset, for Grace being so upset, and for the whole rotten night in general.
“Just go.” I told him quietly, and because the tears had snuck up on me before, and because they were tears for Violet, I could not fight them. I turned my head away from him as they began to fall in large drops, unrelenting, down my cheeks, and for a moment, I felt an overwhelming guilt in his heart, one that temporarily erased the anger he felt at me for what he perceived to be a showing of immense cruelty on my part. But it was erased as quickly as it had come, and it was replaced not only by that rage but by great disgust, too.
“Oh, you’re going to cry now?” He spat at me, “Of course you are. Trying to make me the asshole in this, right? As always. Same old fucking Brynna, even after twenty-five years.”
“James, please.” I whispered, because now that I had started crying, I could not stop, and Grace had reappeared in the doorway, waiting for James to escort her back, and I certainly would not allow that little girl to see me cry. “Just go.”
“Fine. I will. But don’t expect me to come crawling up to you, begging. This is all you this time, baby. So until you want to grovel at my feet for once, don’t bother trying to talk to me.”
He finally left,
and Penny and I were alone. I scooped her up, shocked that even with my significant muscular enhancement and her very slight frame, she was getting too heavy for me to carry. She was seven years old physically, so why that should have shocked me that she was getting heavier, I did not know. Her aging was jumpstarting again, and soon, she would more than likely not even want to be seen with me, let alone have me trying to carry her around. I giggled, somewhat more hysterically than the mental image warranted, as I pictured trying to carry her around when she was sixteen, and the girls and boys she had grown up with there in the prison were teenagers. I prayed that Penny would not go through the ‘I hate my parents’ phase, but I knew that she would. And as far as hating her parents went, I wondered if she would even be able to hate James, because as usual, our fight seemed to leave our relationship open-ended.
“I’m so sorry, Penny.” I knelt down and put both of my hands on her face. Her cheeks that had once been so round were elongating now, steadily erasing her childish features. Soon, my baby would not be a baby anymore, and the thought of that made me cry harder. But I had had so many extra years with her being an adorable, loveable, little five or six year old girl, who was I to be greedy? And yet I could not fathom the idea of her growing older, of there being any kind of distance between us. Everything was piling up, and as she fell into my arms so I could hold her, I cried because she was getting older, because James and I had fought in front of her (because James and I had fought at all), because I had no idea how to love Grace, despite how much I had loved her when she was just a tiny flicker of light in my womb, despite the fact that she had been raised by two of my very best friends, and then I was crying because those two best friends were dead, because Violet and Elijah were somewhere out in the world and I knew not where, because Adam spent his days locked away, alone, and even though he wanted to tell me how terrible it was to be locked away in isolation like that, he did not, because he did not want me to worry, and then I was crying because Illa was not with her mother, and Janna had been raped all those years ago, and I had been raped all those years ago before that, and then I was crying because my mother was more than likely dead, but what if she wasn’t? And from there, I was crying about Luc and Rachel and how my dad had loved me once…
It is called, quite hilariously, “tempestcerebrum” or “brainstorm” in the language of my husband’s folk. It is a condition that affected all Athenes when their huge minds became too overstimulated by past and present traumas, and by worries about the future. It happened to me more frequently than perhaps was normal; over my twenty years of being a full-fledged Athene, I had succumbed to these brainstorms two or three times a year, and my poor husband had always been there to help me sort it all out. The first time had been when I remembered, in alarming detail, what had happened with my father, after years of telling myself that it had only been Michael, that the snippets of memory in which I saw the blood all over my hands had been something my macabre brain had manufactured. Perhaps it was some vile symbolism, or some very over-exaggerated memory of what it had looked like after the first time with Michael. I could not be sure, but as I laid Penny down in bed that night and held her until she had cried herself to sleep, I found myself crying at yet another sadness: Penny would have these moments when she was older, when her power stopped occurring in snippets and began occurring in frequent bursts. She would have to come to control it, or at least handle it, the way that I had to work at handling it every day. As her head burrowed into my chest, and her breaths against my skin grew softer and more even, I held her tighter. God or Gods, how I wished she had not gotten my power.
Abe, James’s friend and a sympathizer to Adam’s cause, came to take me back to my cell well past midnight. Grace was turned away from me when I entered, awake but trying to pretend like she was asleep. I stripped out of my clothes and climbed into bed with Janna, who turned over and stroked my face.
“Did he talk to you?” I asked quietly, and she nodded.
“He is very, very angry. I have not seen him like that in a very long time. Not since that night we don’t talk about.”
The night she had fucked him in a back alley to get back at Adam and me, to put no finer point on it.
“Well, I am not totally to blame in this. I should not have hit him, but God, sometimes he just provokes me, and the things he says…”
“No, Brynna.” She told me gently, and yet still firmly, as she sat up and grasped my hand, “You should not hit him. You have always lost control that way, with him, especially, and you know that if he raised his hand to you, it would…”
“It would be different.” I snapped at her, “Because he is a man, and regardless of my stance on feminist principles, I must say that he is physically stronger than me. He’s a goddamn Herculian, for Christ’s sake.”
I reached over to the bedside table and grabbed a cigarette. After lighting one up and taking a drag, she reached out, and I handed it to her. She inhaled deeply, coughed adorably, and handed it back to me. After years of us sharing cigarettes, she still coughed on the first inhalation.
“But it is not fair of you to hit him, Brynna.” She told me, “It is not fair of him to call you terrible names. You bring out this side of each other, and thankfully, it has gotten exceedingly rare for it to get to this point. But he feels that you were unforgivably cruel tonight. He sympathizes very much with the girl. You know how he is with his children. By the One God, Violet failed out of medical school, and he would not allow you to even confront her, let alone shout at her and berate her for her immaturity.”
“I know.”
“And look at how he dotes on Penny. Grace might not be his child by birth, but she is your child by birth, and he loves her because of that.”
“I know.” I said again, “I understand that she was raised in an environment that is hostile to our ways. I truly do understand that, Janna. But God… she sleeps in this room with us every night. She knows that Illa has two mothers. She hangs around with Rohanna and Yumi and Rael constantly, and yet she still has such prejudice in her heart. It is as though it is alright as long as it is not someone she loves. I should not allow myself to get so angry, but to hear her deny it so vehemently about Tom, it is like she invalidates him.”
“I know that you miss him, my love.” She told me, and her slender hand grasped mine, “But you have to be more understanding of Grace. You must try to be, at the very least.”
I sighed heavily, leaned closer to her, and kissed her full, soft lips.
“How are you able to talk sense into me so easily, while Adam and James struggle for days to do the same?”
“Because though they are both such beautiful men, I am so amazingly beautiful that you become hypnotized on my beauty and from there, you become a slave to my will.”
I laughed at that, and she smiled.
“Perhaps.” I replied, “Or perhaps it is because you coddle me.”
“It is that, too.” She replied, “Now get some rest. It is very late, and we have an early start tomorrow in the laundry room, and you know that I will want you at least twice in the shower before we start our long and tedious day of work.”
“Of course, of course.” I replied, “As you command, my annoyingly beautiful, raven-haired goddess.”
“And I do command it, my annoyingly beautiful, redwood-tree-bark-haired goddess.”
I laughed so hard that I woke up Illa and Grace. Even after such a terrible night, Janna could make me laugh. It was one of the things about her that had most surprised me, how funny she was. I fell asleep that night with my face nestled in the crook of her neck, laughing in random bursts until I fell asleep.
Janna Elohimson-Maxwell was the greatest cure for a brainstorm there ever was. Perhaps if she had been of age when the Athenes had been fighting their last fight, she could have saved them all from destruction.
Before I fell completely to sleep, I sat up, kissed her cheek softly, and whispered that I loved her in her ear. She smiled, ran her hand up
and down the arm I had draped over her, and whispered back that she knew, and that she loved me, too. Before I could wonder if the swelling of love for her in my chest was preceding some foreboding, I fell asleep.