Triptych (6 page)

She was about to throw it into the trash before it was ever created.

A strange urge to keep it, treasure it, to secret it away flooded up in her and she sighed.

Evvie shook her head at her own silliness and forced herself to discard the bandage. It wasn’t special in any way, and it was soiled. It wasn’t worth keeping. She refused to feel something as absurd as
regret
about it.

She turned her attention back to Gwennie and her wound. It was longer than Evvie thought it would be, judging by the scar on Gwen’s forehead. On the adult Gwen, it arched back into her hair — that same hair covered it on the grown-up, but Gwennie’s was still baby fine, and it was visible. The cut was a little deeper than Evvie thought at first glance, too. The tip of the knife had done more than nick her.

So close.

It wasn’t bleeding any more, and clotting just fine, but Evvie wondered if perhaps they should go into the hospital for some stitches after all. The thought of having to try to explain to the doctor that an alien from twenty-nine years in the future had been trying to cut her baby daughter’s throat to prevent her from growing up and blowing its face off was too much, and Evvie scrubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands.

No, Evvie knew how to take care of cuts. Her brothers had gotten hurt enough around the farm when they were children, and with her father out in the fields all the time and her mother sometimes in town running errands, it was up to her to patch them up. Some gauze, some tape, and a careful eye to avoid infections, and Gwennie would be none the worse for wear.

Save for the puffing white scar that would mar her perfect little forehead for the rest of her life.

Gwen wore her hair long on the right side of her face. She kept patting it down in a sort of reflexive, compulsive manoeuvre. Evvie hoped fervently that wasn’t the result of some sort of bullying or a complex about her appearance that she had developed during her childhood. She wasn’t sure how to even
think
about Gwennie at school, much less Gwennie at school getting bullied. Evvie didn’t want to dwell on it, but with all the technobabble she and Basil spouted at each other, there was a distinct possibility that her (prom queen) daughter would turn out a geek.

Picked on. Loser. Outcast.

Was that why she was in some nameless military branch, involved with such a…horrible, rude man? Was she hiding? Did she feel she didn’t deserve better?

Did she run away?

Don’t think about it.

Testing the temperature of the water in the wide bathroom sink and deeming it cool enough, Evvie set Gwennie down to sit in it. Immediately Gwennie began slapping the surface of the water joyously with the palms of her hands, splashing the mirror, the wall, and Evvie. Tenderly, Evvie worked the mild shampoo into Gwennie’s hair, avoiding the cut carefully, and rinsed it off with a scooped hand.

The water turned ketchup-red.

Evvie stared at it for an unmoving second, then she pulled Gwennie out. She had just enough time to pull her daughter, dripping wet, against her side and flip open the toilet lid before she puked.

It tasted like fish sticks and ketchup and disappointment and Evvie hated,
hated
that this was happening to her. Gwennie was completely still against her body, clinging with curled fingers like a sloth. Evvie flushed, unplugged the sink drain, and set Gwennie down on a thick towel on the floor of the tub before she cast about for the dusty bottle of mouthwash that was jammed against the back of the cupboard under the sink.

Just as she spat the lumpy, sticky green liquid out of her mouth, for once happy for the overpowering medicine, the sweet alcoholic burn at the back of her teeth, Evvie heard a voice float up through the half-open window. With a glance at Gwennie, who was happily mouthing her big toe, eyes getting droopy, Evvie went to the window, folded her hands over her fluttering stomach, and looked down.

Down in the yard, the lower half of Basil was poking up out of the ruined cockpit of the spaceship, and he was tossing electrical components up into the air, over his shoulders, to fall with a distant thud against the turf like in a cartoon. He was complaining — loudly — about how he was a
scientist
and not a
grunt
and the hiding of evidence was not
supposed
to be his job.

It was hardly eavesdropping if he was speaking at such a volume.

“Well, whose job is it supposed to be?” Gwen asked, rubbing her hands on the thighs of her pants as she emerged from between the rows of corn. A quick glance at where the alien’s body used to be told Evvie what she had been doing out there. They had stripped off their tactical vests. In just their black pants and jackets they looked small and strangely fragile.

Human again.

“Wood’s job,” Basil said. “She’s our clean-up man.” Then, “
Bugger
.”

“What?”

“I’m stuck. My — 
bollocks
 — my bloody sleeve! Grab my trousers.”

Gwen snorted. “What now? Here?”

“
Perv
,” Basil said happily. “Pull me out.”

Gwen complied, grabbing a good handful of his belt. With a mighty tug, Gwen had Basil out of the spaceship and sprawled half on the lawn and half on her. His left sleeve was in complete tatters, revealing more pale skin beneath and a sharp, angry red scratch. He rolled over, took advantage of their position, and kissed Gwen thoroughly. Evvie felt like a voyeur, even more because this was her daughter and her — what, lover? Boyfriend? Fiancé? Evvie didn’t even know, anymore. But she didn’t stop watching. Gwen’s hands ran up the back of Basil’s neck, carded through his thinning hair.

Still tactile Gwennie.

“I’m happy to see you smiling again,” Basil said softly. Gwen replied by ducking her head down, tucking her chin against her own chest, curling up.

Evvie shivered, a feeling of soft foreboding settling over cool skin.

Basil sat up and waved something triangular in Gwen’s face that was silverish and sprouting wires like feathers. “
Got
it,” he said triumphantly, trying to win back the easy banter that his admission had quenched. “Now we can go back inside and I can murder your father’s overcompensating excuse for a video player, and get us the bloody hell out of here.”

Gwen’s grin was wide and twinkling and oh-so-much like Gareth’s and at the same time baby Gwennie’s that Evvie’s stomach lurched sideways and she thought maybe she was going to be sick again.

“Look,” Basil added, digging into his breast pocket and coming up with a small metallic disk. Evvie was too far away to be able to tell, but it looked like it was made out of some sort of multicoloured, shining plastic or steel. “They even left us music to work by.” Basil snorted and shoved it in his pocket without looking at it again. “What would I play it in, anyway?”

“Certainly not the Betamax.” Gwen rolled her shoulders. “You know, when we get back, Dad will make you pay for it.”

“With interest. Balls.” Basil scratched the side of his nose, leaving a long smear of rainbow-slick engine fluid along his cheek. “I’ll buy him an HDTV — one of the ‘spensive ones that fold out and go flat against the wall, yeah?”

Gwen pulled a tissue from her pocket and scrubbed at the smear, and though he winced, Basil suffered manfully.

“I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he sees us again,” Gwen said, eyes on his cheek.

“On
both
their faces,” Basil added happily.

And as quickly as that, the laughter was murdered.

“I can’t do this,” Gwen admitted brokenly, in a rush, and that was when the shaking started. She buried her face into Basil’s neck, her back hitching with visible wrenching, dry gasps that struck Evvie, made her heart hurt and the back of her throat close up.

She was torn.

She wanted to go down, hold Gwen, touch her and soothe, but this woman was not Evvie’s child and Evvie wanted nothing (everything) to do with her and her misery.

She was (Evvie’s) not what she wanted.

Gwen’s eyes were wet, but Evvie saw no tears on her cheeks, and she was blinking furiously, refusing to let them fall as firmly as Evvie had moments earlier. A family trait?

Had Evvie’s mother ever cried in front of her? She couldn’t remember.

“Shhh, shhh,” Basil said, running his fingers through the hair at the back of Gwen’s head, toying with the small curls that were really Evvie’s curls, flipping them across fingernails etched with the guts of electronics and the mechanical oils (blood) of the spaceship. He nudged Gwen’s forehead gently with his nose, murmuring directly into her ear, too soft and intimate for Evvie to hear. He raised his chin, kissed the scar once, kissed each dry eyelid, then Gwen’s mouth, comforting and crooked and so filled with
want
that Evvie had to look away, at the floor, at the damp rug. She peered over the edge of the tub at Gwennie dozing, snuffling haplessly against the fuzzy towel.

“Right then,” Evvie finally heard Basil murmur. “What can’t you do?”

“I can’t go back in there. I can’t…” and the sucking of breath started again, a bit slower and a bit quieter. “Pretend that this is easy. That this is where I want to be. It’s all too much, on top of…”  When Evvie turned back to look again, Gwen’s face was pale, sheeted with cold sweat, but there were still no tears on her cheeks. “I can’t face her.”

“Who, your mother?”

It felt like a punch in the chest.

“Did you see the way she
looked
at me? Basil…she hates me.”

A tidal surge of guilt and grief passed through Evvie, and she wished that the words would wink out of existence; as much as they hurt, they were true, true, true, and that’s what pained her most of all.

“I didn’t choose this!” Gwen hissed, her shoulders hunched up by her ears, defensive, angry, spitting. “I only translate stuff! No one told me when I signed that confidentiality form that they were going to
split apart my world
and then hand me the puzzle and tell me to reassemble it with a
gun
.”

“None of us did, Gwen. Be fair,” Basil said softly.

“I’ll be fair when she’s fair!
Fuck
.”

Evvie blinked at the cuss, wondered idly which one of her parents Gwen had learned it from, because she couldn’t,
didn’t
want to see the rage that it translated instead.

“The way she…I didn’t want to be a…a
soldier
. I didn’t want
any
of this!” She threw her arms out, gestured at the backyard, the hole in the ground, the place where the corn bordered the grass of the backyard. “I am in the past,
my
past, where I caused the scar on my own forehead by blowing off the head of an
assassin
from another
planet
and my mother
hates
me, and this is just way too freaking science fiction for my comfort level!”

Didn’t want to?

Evvie saw the half smile try to slide into the corner of Basil’s mouth. “Does that make me the acerbic genius? Or, no, I most definitely am the engineering geek. Ha! We are ‘Stargate.’ I am so Rodney McKay! And that makes you Samantha Carter. ‘Cause, Amanda Tapping? Hot.”

Evvie resisted grabbing the side of her head. What were they talking about now? Were these things she would read about in the news one day? A knot of panic pushed against her sternum and she took a deep breath. Their idioms and similes were making Evvie’s head hurt, making an already baffling situation so viscerally confusing as to be nearly physically painful.

Evvie didn’t
understand.

Instead, Evvie focussed on Gwen, perched vulnerable and scared in the arms of the man she obviously loved, just as confused as her mother.

Wasn’t a soldier.

Gwen punched his arm. “Kinda having an existential crisis here!”

Mistake.

“Ow,” Basil muttered morosely. Instead of hitting back, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders, reeling her in, holding her against his chest and kissing the top of her head, the shell of her ear, the line of her neck. “I love you,” he said. “And I’m here with you, and for now, that’s good enough, innit?” he said.

Saved my life.

“I miss…” she whispered into his shoulder.

Saved her own.

Basil’s breath hitched. “I miss him, too. I wish he was here.”

Isn’t a…

“That wasn’t what I was going to say,” Gwen snapped, perhaps a bit too quickly, too vehement in her denial. Basil’s mouth slanted in such a way that said he had noticed it, too. “I don’t. I can’t believe… the least he could have done was
admit
to it. Let me hate him all the way, instead of playing fucking innocent up until the moment they blew a hole in his — ”

“You don’t
mean
that, Gwen,” Basil said, his voice high and a little desperate. He pulled her close, buried her face in his neck, rocking her, muffling the rest of her sentence. “Yeah? You don’t mean that.”

Only doing what she has to.

Basil pressed his cheek against her hair, swaying them back and forth, one hand around her head, one arm tight around her neck. His own breath was short and uneven, panicked. “You don’t really mean that, you can’t, you
loved
him.”

What she has to.

Gwen pushed him away, enough to look up into his face, head craned like a furious, puce-faced Scarlet O’Hara. “Just rig up a damn Flasher. Get me the hell out of here.” She sniffled once, then hiccoughed. It would have been a laugh if it hadn’t been so wet-sounding. “Before we descend into more bad sci-fi clichés.”

Basil snorted out a little puff of laughter, which ruined the Rhett Butler pose, but he still tilted his head so their noses wouldn’t bump, then kissed her long and slow and sad.

“They just shot him,” Basil said against Gwen’s lips, shaking like an addict, pulling back just a fraction to give his mouth just enough mobility to form words. “There was nothing I could do. Aitken panicked and just…just
shot him
.”