After (70 page)

Gareth looked shell-shocked, pale and shaking.

“So, the prodigal son's returned.” The slighter man's hazel eyes looked mischievous, kind, now. “Nadia had us wondering, with her mysterious exuberance. Had us making some pretty silly guesses. We half thought she'd fallen in love with one of her resistance heroes and was bringing him home to meet the parents.”

“Papa!” Nadia punched his shoulder.

“And who's this hiding in the shadows?” The piercing hazel eyes sought Nix out in her dark corner, pulled her into the light.

“This is Nix,” Nadia said, rushing over to put her arm around her waist and bring her into the fold. “Gareth's friend. And legend with the resistance.”

“Always a pleasure, meeting a legend,” he said wryly, offering his hand.

“Papa,” Nadia scolded in a whisper.

He drew his hand back. “Forgive me. I don't often come in contact with people from west of the line.”

Nix put her hand out. “No. It's alright. I'm happy to meet you...”

“Avery.” He shook her hand firmly, like a comrade.

“Everyone just calls him 'Major.' From his Army days. But it's more of a nickname, not really a title anymore,” Nadia told them. “Daddy,” she nudged John's beefy arm, “say

'hi' to Nix.”

John forced his eyes from Gareth, and gave Nix a fragile smile. “Hi, Nix.”

“John.” She felt an immediate warmth for him, he looked so like Gareth. When she put out her hand he clasped it between his big, warm palms and held it, as if he loved her just for being his son's friend.

They settled around the warmth and light of the fire, Nadia coaxing Gareth into an armchair at the center of the seating arrangement. He hadn't said a word since they'd entered the house.

“You're with the resistance,” the major tried to draw him out.

“No,” Gareth said, his graveled voice quiet. “I came east with Nix.”

“On the train?” the major asked.

“Yes.”

“How many did you say, Nadia?”

“Eight hundred seventy-three.”

“An auspicious prelude to the next phase,” the major grinned, one eyebrow arching above a sharp, hazel eye. “Did Nadia tell you? It was her idea. Barely twenty, and already a burgeoning military strategist.”

Nadia looked at Gareth, beaming. Wanting her big brother to be proud of her.

“Well, look who raised me.”

The major may have flinched behind his enduring mask of composure. Gareth was sallow. Sinking back into the wings of his chair as if he wanted to disappear.

“Gareth,” John said in a gentle voice. “I have so many questions for you. But I don't want to bombard you.”

“Ask. Ask me anything. It'll be easier, actually.”

John's smile made Nix's chest hurt.

“Riggs. Your father.” It looked, it sounded like it hurt him, calling him that. “Was he good to you?”

“He loved me. He took good care of me, mostly. I had a happy childhood.”

John's gray eyes were veiled in tears. He smiled and nodded. “And now? Where is he?”

“Dead. He shot himself.”

John flinched. “I'm sorry. When? How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“That's a terrible time to be left on your own like that.”

“Maybe.”

John went quiet, and for a few seconds he seemed, like the major, to be trying to read Gareth's soul in his eyes. Even Nadia was subdued, now. Still and quiet and watchful.

“It's not an interrogation, you know. You're allowed to ask questions, too,” the major said with a hint of a teasing grin, again trying to put Gareth at ease.

Gareth said, “Dad was almost silent about the past.”

Nix watched a smirk appear and fade from the major's lips.

“Until Nadia, I'd never heard of any of you. This place. Nothing, except a couple words about my mother. Eva. I want to know everything. Everything about her. About her and my dad. All of you. Where I fit in, before we left.”

“You didn't leave, Gareth,” the major seethed. “He took you.”

“Avery. Please.” In a fraction of a second, that heart-broken man's gentle, teary eyes flared, and Nix watched the major's body soften in contrition under John's reprimand.

“Don't,” Gareth said. “Don't pretend anything, or try to protect me. He was so secretive, my father. I don't like secrets. I don't think there's any truth as dangerous as lies and secrets. If you think he was a bad person, if he was an enemy here, say so.”

John sighed. “It's hard for me to be objective. To me, he's the man who took my son from me. To Eva, your mom, he was someone who wanted desperately to love and be loved, and who'd been deprived of it all his life. Most of us didn't, but she saw goodness in him.”

“Did she love him?”

“She cared for him. In the end, she considered him a friend.”

“But they weren't...lovers?”

“No, Gareth.”

“But you and she were?”

John smiled. That smile was so warm, so deep it almost lifted the sadness from the room. “We were. And Avery and Eva were. All of us, terribly in love.”

“And she was happy? It wasn't like it is out there?” Gareth's rough voice cracked, but no tears spilled.

“When you were born, Eva was...” John laughed, remembering, “God, she was so happy. So full of love and hope. And she loved you. Utterly.”

For hours they talked, exchanged life stories. But threaded through everything were the secrets. Gareth's secrets. Secrets wound around every sentence shaping the history of the base. Eva's arrival. One lone woman appearing to a desolate pack of armed young men. Nix wondered if Gareth heard those silences, too. She looked at Nadia and wondered how innocent they'd kept her, a couple hundred miles east of where virgins were sold at auction and runaways were branded and raped for a penance.

Watching Gareth slowly going quiet, turning gray, his crimes coating him, weighing him down, pulling the heat from him, Nix swallowed against a thick bitterness rising up her throat. They'd make him chose, these fucking hypocrites. Wear his crimes like chains, or throw away this mirage of family and love.

“Say, Captain,” the major said with his teasing grin, nudging Nadia's foot with his.

“Don't you have a report to make to your commanding officer?”

She laughed. “Come on, Papa. That can wait, can't it? I think Gareth's arrival trumps military protocol.”

“Do you? Does that include you taking charge of tomorrow's tour of the facility with the potential recruits?”

Nix watched the bubbly girl transform into an ambitious officer, jealous of her prize assignment.

“Well, I'll see you in the morning, right?” she asked Gareth, then relapsed for a moment and sank against him for a long, close embrace. When she finally let go and rose, John stood and gave her a tender hug, kissing her hair from her crown to her ear.

“Goodnight, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I know you know how much this means to me.”

“I know, Daddy.” She kissed his rough cheek.

Nix was about to get up and leave with them, to give Gareth some time alone with John, but the moment she shifted to rise Gareth caught her hand, held it tight, gave her an imploring look. She squeezed his hand and settled back into her chair.

The major said his more reserved good-byes, and they left. John gave Gareth a confidential, almost conspiratorial smile, when they'd shut the front door. Then he sighed and, still smiling at them both, said, “We don't hide things from Nadia. She knows what happens out there. And she knows what's happened here. But it'll be easier to talk now.”

Gareth's pale rigidity seemed to soften.

“I don't like secrets either, Gareth. I worry some things will be painful for you. But I'll be open with you about everything. I'll never lie to you.

“Good.”

“And you should know, I've spent time over the line. I know what goes on over there. Not from third-hand refugee stories.” John gave him a small, sad smile. “I know how boys are raised over there. What they're raised to think. What they're raised to do.

So you don't need to be scared that I've got some naïve idea that you've led an innocent life.”

Stiff again, pale and bright-eyed, Gareth whispered, “I've done some awful things.”

Nix and John were quiet. Let Gareth spill his sins before them. The girl in the sex hotel. The branding party. The men he'd paid back with their own cruelty. The pleasure he'd taken in it.

He stood up, his back to the fire, crossed his arms tight over his chest and leveled his gaze with John's.

“I know you've missed me all these years. You've wished you could have your son back. Imagined a day like this. I know you must wish I'd never turned up. I'm sorry I'm taking away your nice dreams of that little boy you lost.”

John rose, cupped Gareth's face in his hands. Tipped his brow to his son's.

“Never, Gareth. Nothing you've done makes me regret you're here. Nothing you've done makes me regret it's you, that you're my son.”

“I'm just sorry.” Gareth shuddered and broke and tears poured down his face. “I'm sorry I'm not better.”

John pulled Gareth to him, wrapped his arms tight around him. “God, Gareth. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I'm sorry you didn't get to grow up here. You belonged here. I let you go. I didn't keep you safe. I'm sorry.”

For a long time they held each other, the father and the son, sundered for two decades. It was after midnight, and the fire had burned low. John asked them, and they agreed to stay there at the house rather than return to the barracks.

Leading them upstairs, John said, “I know you want to hear more about your mom. And there's a lot to tell. But it's better that you hear her side, rather than just mine.

Here, this is my room,” he said, and went through a door at the top of the stairs. He plucked a few slender notebooks from between other volumes on a shelf, and held them out to Gareth. “Her journals. She wrote down a lot of what happened when she got here. You'll see that Avery and I have not been blameless, in things. I want you to know everything, now instead of later.” John clutched the notebooks to his chest, looking nervous. Sad. Then John gave Gareth a sad smile, but Gareth was starting so hungrily at the notebooks, he probably didn't see. “You'll find, in her later journals, that almost everything we've done, everything we're doing, the sanctuaries like Sewanee, bringing refugees over the line, and the military action that's about to unfold, they're all plans she put in motion.”

Gareth took the notebooks from John's hand.

“Come on. We'll get you settled down the hall.” John stopped in front of another door a few rooms down. “I'm sorry,” he said, an embarrassed smile tugging at a corner of his mouth. “Would you like two rooms? Or one?”

“One,” Nix said.

John seemed reluctant to leave them, to let Gareth out of his sight after being lost from him for so long, but after asking twice if they needed anything, and reminding them three times that he was just down the hall if they did, he wished them a good night and softly closed their door.

Nix watched Gareth carefully place his mother's journals, unopened, at the edge of a dresser. After sweating through the trial of meeting his estranged fathers, Gareth wanted a shower. A moment after she heard the sound of water surging through the pipes and pattering into the tub, she quietly slipped out the door, down the hall and knocked on John's bedroom door.

“Gareth's having a shower,” she said in response to John's surprised, querying look. “And there's something I wanted to say to you. May I come in?”

“Of course.”

John gestured her through the door, and she closed it, doubting he would. He was too aware she might fear him. All of them.

“Gareth needed to tell you those things. It's important to him that you don't welcome him back under any false pretenses.”

John had the same sad smile as Gareth. “I know. I understand. And we have our own confessions to make, here.”

“Gareth won't tell you the good things about himself. But you should know those, too.”

John nodded, eager, hopeful.

“The way we met. Your son and me. A pack of guards had just finished with me.”

She watched the sadness weigh down John's features. No shock, though.

“They gave me to him, to Gareth. Delivered me naked and almost unconscious.

Can you guess the first thing he did?”

“No.”

“The first thing he did was give me clothes. Not a gown. Clothes like this.” She tugged at the leg of her pants. “He risked a lot, doing that.”

John nodded.

“Even when I'd cleaned up, he never touched me. And more than that, he treated me like a person. Here, that may not sound like much. That may sound normal, like the way people should act with each other. But there, where we were, it's not normal. It's unheard of.

“Gareth risked a lot—I don't know if you understand what they do to men who help women like me—he gambled his safety to get me free. He did it more than once.

And he's been...I don't even have a word for it. Just, he's never been ugly or selfish, not even careless in all the time we've been together. And a lot of the men who are in the resistance, however much they mean to do good, they also expect to be heroes. And they expect demonstrations of appreciation. Gareth never has. He doesn't even expect gratitude. It startles him.

“So, even though he's done hard things, even though in some ways he's a hard man, you should know Gareth's also a good man. The best one I've ever known.”

“I'm glad. Thank you for telling me.” John came a step closer and in a quiet voice said, “Nix. Is it alright if I ask you something?”

Even though she felt some intuitive affinity for him, this man who looked so much like Gareth, who had so many of the same mannerisms, when he stepped toward her, when he whispered, the cold snake that lived in her belly coiled and writhed. She nodded, trying not to let her apprehension show.

“Is he alright?”

“What do you mean?”

John smiled, embarrassed. “I don't know. I guess, tonight was hard for him. I understand. Just, I want him to be happy.”

“Well, it's not so easy, is it? But I've seen him happy. And I think if things are what you and Nadia say they are, then finding his family will be good for him. And so will what's coming. This advance you've got planned.”