Until Again (7 page)

“Okay,” Polly said, making no move to leave them alone.

Chris suddenly saw his entire future flash in front of him. He walked over to Becky, hugged her tightly, and kissed the top of her head. “I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

Becky nodded, and he hugged her again and then quickly turned to leave as emotion welled up inside him. He refused to look at Polly as he passed her.

He opened his car door but didn’t get in immediately, choosing instead to look around one more time. How was he going to reconcile the fact that this was no longer his home with all the memories he had of buying swing sets, lounging on the patio, and building snowmen?

As he opened the car door, he turned toward the window in Becky’s room. She was there, watching him go.

Bye
she mouthed when they made eye contact.

He blew her a quick kiss before slipping into the car. He looked in his side-view mirror as he headed down the driveway and saw her lift a hand and say, “Bye” again.

He managed to make it out of the neighborhood and into the parking lot of a nearby park before he allowed the feelings he’d been battling back to overwhelm him.

Becky had been fighting sadness for the past hour or so, finding it surprisingly comforting to lose herself in her game system. But as her father’s car disappeared down the street, she couldn’t keep it together any longer. Her body shook as though letting out a giant hiccup, and then she just started crying like she had never cried before.

Almost instantly, Mom’s arms were around her. She’d actually forgotten for a second that Mom was still in the room while she was looking out the window. All she could think about was that her father was driving away – for good. Yeah, she’d see him again on Wednesday, but it wasn’t the same thing. It would never be the same thing anymore.

Mom hugged her tightly and sat with her on the bed. As they sat, Becky buried her face in her mother’s chest and stayed there for a long time, needing to feel this comfort. The tears slowed down after a while, but the sadness was as strong as ever.

“I wish I could have talked to you about this earlier,” Mom said when Becky stopped sniffling and loosened the grip a little. “You have no idea how tough it was for me to hold this in.”

Becky lifted her head and sat up straighter. If Mom wanted to talk to her about it and couldn’t, did that mean Dad had been stopping her?

“I don’t understand what happened.”

“What happened is something I hope never happens to you when you’re an adult. Your father and I married each other with the best of intentions, but even when you have the best intentions, sometimes things fall apart and you can’t do anything to put them back together.”

“And then our family falls apart.”

Mom squeezed Becky tighter. “I don’t want you to think of it as our family falling apart. We still have a very strong family, you and I, and nothing is ever going to change that. I promise you. Absolutely nothing is going to change that.”

“But I’m gonna miss Dad.”

Mom kissed the top of her head. “You’re still going to see plenty of your dad. I made sure of that. What’s most important to me is that you have the same home here that you always had, that you have your routines and your friends. I know some of this is going to be hard on you, honey, but I think having your normal life here will make it much easier than it could have been.”

Becky thought about this, about how it was going to be nice to have a lot of things be the same when something this big was changing.

“Standridge seems kind of far away,” Becky said, even though it wasn’t that far at all; they went into Standridge all the time, and downtown Standridge was actually a cool place to walk around.

“I know what you mean. I was very surprised when your father said he wanted to get an apartment there. He could have lived in any number of apartments in Moorewood.”

Mom shook her head, and Becky looked down at her white bedspread, following the patterns. “I’m still having trouble figuring out all of this.”

“I know you are, honey. And we can talk about this all day if you want. I was hoping you’d be a little older before I started discussing adult relationships with you, but things haven’t turned out that way. The important thing is that you’re old enough to comprehend this, and I know how important it is that you do.”

Mom was handling this differently than Becky expected. It was good to know Mom was going to help her understand things, that she wasn’t going to tell her that she was too young or that things would make more sense when she was grown up. This was so different from the way Dad had talked to her, even after everything was out in the open.

In that moment, Becky realized something she’d never realized before: while Mom was willing to treat her like a young adult, Dad still thought of her as a little kid. He wasn’t willing to accept that she’d grown up, that she wasn’t just the little girl who made up stories with him about make-believe places.

Becky also realized now that there was a way to change that. If Dad didn’t want to stop thinking of her as a kid, then she was going to have to force him. He didn’t get to make all the decisions about them anymore. As out-of-control as everything was feeling to Becky right now, she realized there were some things she – and only she – did control. She had to go with that.

The day got a little better after. It kind of had to, considering the way it started. Becky and Mom went for a walk where they didn’t do much talking, but it felt good to move around and have Mom next to her. When they went back inside, they played a couple of games of Scattergories and ate an entire package of Girl Scout Samoa cookies and half a package of Tagalongs, eventually deciding they were going to call that dinner.

When they finished playing, they sat back on the couch and Mom put her arm around Becky’s shoulders. Becky asked Mom to explain again what had happened between her and Dad, and again Mom talked to her like she was an adult, or at least a teenager. It made her even angrier to think about how Dad was handling this. She always thought they had a special relationship. But maybe the relationship was only special to Dad as long as she was his “little girl.”

That time was over.

Becky found herself getting increasingly angry about this. Even when Mom put on the “Fantastic Four” DVD, popped up a big bowl of popcorn, and told her she could stay up a little later even though she had school tomorrow, Becky still kept thinking about how Dad was treating her like a baby and how completely wrong it was for him to do so.

By the time he called that night, she was in a foul mood.

“Hey, babe, was the rest of your day okay?” he said.

What kind of question was that?
Hey, little girl, did you
have fun after Daddy told you he was moving into an apartment in another town?

“It was okay,” she said, trying to keep from freaking out.

“It’s almost bedtime, right?”

She didn’t want to get into the whole thing about Mom letting her stay up later. “Yeah, I guess I’ll be going up in a few minutes.”

He didn’t say anything back right away. Was he expecting her to just sit on the other end of the phone? Did he think this would be like hanging together on the couch?

Finally he said, “Wanna do a story?”

Becky knew this was coming but still found it hard to believe. “A story?”

“You know, we can do a story on the phone like we did that time I was away delivering that paper.”

The anger that had been building came to the surface so fast, Becky couldn’t have stopped it even if she tried. “I don’t want to do a story, Dad.”

He was quiet again for a while. “Okay. We can wait until next weekend.”

Becky felt her emotions flying all over the place, but she knew she had to dig in her heels.
I’m not gonna be your baby anymore, Dad.
“Not next weekend either.”

“What do you mean?” Dad’s voice sounded funny, the way it was when he was upset. Good. He was
supposed
to be upset.

“I don’t want to do Tamarisk stories anymore.” Becky said, though she had to battle to get the words out.

“Babe, I know things feel very confusing right now, but –”

“Dad, stop. Don’t treat me like a little kid. I’m
not
a
little kid.”

She could hear him taking a deep breath on the other end. “I know you’re not, babe.”

“I’m done with Tamarisk, Dad.”

Yet another pause. “If that’s the way you feel right now, it’s okay”

Becky closed her eyes and held the phone tighter to her cheek. “That’s the way I feel, period.” She knew she was going to start crying if the conversation kept going, so she made up a little lie. “Listen, I have to get to bed.”

“Okay, babe, you go. I love you.”

“Yeah, love you too, Dad.”

“Until again, babe.”

A tear rolled down her cheek. “Dad, really, get over it.”

She hung up quickly, put both hands to her face, and cried even harder than she had that morning.

Plenium felt a shift. It was as though the entire world had moved a quarter of an inch to the side. He turned toward Folium to see if she’d noticed, but she was busy talking with one of her aides. No one else in the car seemed to be aware that anything had happened, though Plenium waited for it to happen again.

Was the stress of this trip taking a physical toll on him? The first day and this morning had been largely ceremonial, with the king and queen traveling through Tamariskian towns on the route with their retinue and stopping to shake hands and offer good tidings. For the past several hours they’d been crossing farmland. The territory here was nearly all agrarian, with the occasional scientific outpost. There were no real municipalities here. Soon they would reach the Malaspina Bridge, and from there it was less than fifty miles to the Gunnthorn border.

Plenium had not stepped foot in Gunnthorn in more than a decade, and then under very different circumstances, as a foreign dignitary attending the wedding of the former prime minister’s eldest son. There was much decorum then, and the seemingly eternal tensions between Tamarisk and Gunnthorn never surfaced. There would be decorum tonight as well, but no one involved would forget for even a moment that contentious negotiations would begin tomorrow, negotiations that could lead to a long and costly conflict if they failed to produce more beneficial results.

His focus shifted back to the car as he felt Folium’s hand briefly touch his arm.

“Where did you go?” she said, softly patting his bleep for a moment.

He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “Just thinking ahead.”

She nodded with understanding. “We’re prepared, Plenium. We’ve done as much as we can to make this go well.”

He looked into her face and offered a measured smile. “We have.”

They’d worked hard and well over the past week to get to this point. The team of advisors and aides they’d assembled had made it possible to explore this mission from a variety of perspectives – most importantly from the perspective of the Thorns. Plenium had made it an essential part of the workings of the palace to have several people on staff who were experts on Gunnthornian culture. Mistakes had been made in previous generations by kings who’d failed to acknowledge how differently the Thorns thought. At night, after everyone else had gone, Plenium and Folium had played through various scenarios to develop their diplomatic approach as effectively as they possibly could in an attempt to have an answer for every possible Thorn response.

They worked brilliantly together. That hadn’t always been the case. During the Great Blight, an agricultural scourge across multiple regions of Tamarisk, they had done such an awful job of communicating with each other that their marriage nearly withered along with the sickened foliage. Plenium had seen a level of ruthlessness in Folium back then that he’d been unprepared for, and she probably discovered during that crisis that he felt every loss in Tamarisk far too deeply for someone charged with making difficult decisions. While Plenium had never again been able to feel the unalloyed warmth for his wife that he’d felt before the blight, he respected her greatly – especially her strength and resolve – and that in itself had allowed them to be gracious to each other and even to express a certain level of affection.

Plenium looked out the window, wondering if the accord they’d shared in the planning of this mission would continue if the Thorns acted in ways they hadn’t anticipated, despite their preparations.

“We’ll be at the bridge in just a few minutes,” he said.

Folium sat a bit straighter in her seat. “Time to gird ourselves.”

The king turned back to his wife and gave her an-other smile, this one, surprising even to himself, warmer than the last. “Maybe just a few more minutes of tenderness before we gird. I haven’t had the chance to tell you about my latest conversation with Miea. She confessed to me that her feelings for Dyson are not casual.”

Folium chuckled. “I suppose it’s too late for us to arrange an apprenticeship for him in the Northern Territories. They can always use an extra botanist or two up there, and I’d be happy to pay for his protective clothing.”

“I don’t think our daughter would receive that well, though I’ll admit to thinking something similar.” Plenium grinned at the notion of finding a clever way to separate Dyson from Miea by thousands of miles, though he was much more likely to find a way for them to work together. “It was quite a surprise to hear her talking this way. I think you could fairly characterize her expression as ’dreamy’”

“She’s probably hopeless, then. Unless, of course, we invent an emergency that would require her to abandon the university – temporarily, of course. Dyson is scheduled to graduate in a year and a half, no?”

Plenium laughed, though he wasn’t entirely certain Folium was joking. Hadn’t she once told him with absolute sincerity that love and leadership didn’t mix?

“I’m afraid this one might be out of our hands already, my queen. As we well know, there isn’t much that can prevent Miea from listening to what her spirit tells her.”

“A character deficiency we should have addressed when we had the chance.”