Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 (14 page)

“I woke up,” she said, and her breath hitched.

I put my hand on her head and pulled her closer. “It’s all right, sweetheart,” I said. “It was just a dream.”

“But it was so
real
,” she said.

“You’re here now,” my husband said. “Right here. In your room. And we’re right here with you.”

“I don’t want to go back to sleep,” she said. “Do I have to?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing it was better for her to sleep than be afraid of it. “Tell you what, though. I’ll program House to tell you a soothing story, with a bit of music and maybe a few moving images. What do you say?”

“Dr. Seuss,” she said.

“That’s not always soothing,” my husband said, obviously remembering how House’s
Cat in the Hat
program gave Kally a terror of anything feline.

“It is to Susan,” I said gently, reminding him. In her third year, she played
Green Eggs and Ham
all night, House’s voice droning on and on, making me thankful that our room was at the opposite end of the hall.

But she was three no longer, and she hadn’t wanted Dr. Seuss for years. The dream had really frightened her.

“If you have any more trouble, baby,” my husband said to her, “you come and get us, all right?”

She nodded. He squeezed her hands, then I picked her up and carried her to bed. My husband pulled back the covers. Susan clung to me as I eased her down. “Will I go back there if I close my eyes?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “You’ll listen to House and sleep deeply. And if you dream at all, it’ll be about nice things, like sunshine on flowers, and the lake in summertime.”

“Promise?” she asked, her voice quavering.

“Promise,” I said. Then I removed her hands from my neck and kissed each of them before putting them on the coverlet. Then I kissed her forehead. My husband did the same, and as we were leaving, she was ordering up the House reading program.

As I pulled the door closed, I saw the opening images of
Green Eggs and Ham
flicker across the wall.

***

The next morning everything seemed fine. When I came down to breakfast, the chef had already placed the food on the table, each dish on its own warming plate. The scrambled eggs had the slightly runny look that indicated they had sat more than an hour—not even the latest design in warming plates could stop that. In addition, there was French toast, and Susan’s favorite, waffles. The scent of fresh blueberry muffins floated over it all, and made me smile. The household staff had gone to great lengths to make Echea feel welcome.

My husband was already in his usual spot, e-conferencing while he sipped his coffee and broke a muffin apart with his fingers. His plate, showing the remains of eggs and ham, was pushed off to the side.

“Morning,” I said as I slipped into my usual place on the other side of the table. It was made of oak and had been in my family since 1851, when my mother’s people brought it over from Europe as a wedding present for my many-great grandparents. The housekeeper kept it polished to a shine, and she only used linen placemats to protect it from the effects of food.

There wasn’t a scratch on it.

My husband acknowledged me with a blueberry-stained hand as laughter made me look up. Kally came in, her arm around Susan. Susan still didn’t look herself. She had deep circles under her eyes which meant that
Green Eggs and Ham
hadn’t quite done the trick. She was too old to get us—I had known that when we left her last night—but I hoped she hadn’t spent the rest of the night listening to House, trying to find comfort in artificial voices and imagery.

The girls were still smiling when they saw me.

“Something funny?” I asked.

“Echea,” Kally said. “Did you know someone owned her dress before she did?”

No, I hadn’t known that but it didn’t surprise me. My daughters, on the other hand, had owned only the best. Sometimes their knowledge of life—or lack thereof—shocked me.

“It’s not an unusual way for people to save money,” I said. “But it’ll be the last pre-owned dress she’ll have.”

Mom?
It was Anne, e-mailing me directly. The instant prompt appeared before my left eye.
Can you come up here?

I blinked the message away, then sighed and pushed back my chair. I should have known the girls would do something that first morning. And the laughter should have prepared me.

“Remember,” I said as I stood. “Only one main course. No matter what your father says.”

“Ma,” Kally said.

“I mean it,” I said, then hurried up the stairs. I didn’t have to check where Anne was. She had sent me an image along with the e-mail—the door to Echea’s room.

As I got closer, I heard Anne’s voice.

“…didn’t mean it. They’re old poops.”

“Poop” was Anne’s worst word, at least so far. And when she used it, she put so much emphasis on it the word became an epithet.

“It’s my dress,” Echea said. She sounded calm and contained, but I thought there was a raggedness to her voice that hadn’t been there the day before. “It’s all I have.”

At that moment, I entered the room. Anne was on the bed, which had been carefully made up. If I hadn’t tucked Echea in the night before, I never would have thought she had slept there.

Echea was standing near her window seat, gazing at the lawn as if she didn’t dare let it out of her sight.

“Actually,” I said, keeping my voice light. “You have an entire closet full of clothes.”

Thanks, Mom
, Anne sent me.

“Those clothes are yours,” Echea said.

“We’ve adopted you,” I said. “What’s ours is yours.”

“You don’t get it,” she said. “This dress is
mine
. It’s all I have.”

She had her arms wrapped around it, her hands gripping it as if we were going to take it away.

“I know,” I said softly. “I know, sweetie-baby. You can keep it. We’re not trying to take it away from you.”

“They said you would.”

“Who?” I asked, with a sinking feeling. I already knew who. My other two daughters. “Kally and Susan?”

She nodded.

“Well, they’re wrong,” I said. “My husband and I make the rules in this house. I will never take away something of yours. I promise.”

“Promise?” she whispered.

“Promise,” I said. “Now how about breakfast?”

She looked at Anne for confirmation, and I wanted to hug my youngest daughter. She had already decided to care for Echea, to ally with her, to make Echea’s entrance into the household easier.

I was so proud of her.

“Breakfast,” Anne said, and I heard a tone in her voice I’d never heard before. “It’s the first meal of the day.”

The government had fed the children standard nutrition supplements, in beverage form. Echea hadn’t taken a meal on Earth until she joined us.

“You name your meals?” she asked Anne. “You have that many of them?” Then she put a hand over her mouth, as if she were surprised she had let the questions out.

“Three of them,” I said, trying to sound normal. Instead I felt defensive, as if we had too much. “We only have three of them.”

***

The second night, we had no disturbances. By the third, we had developed a routine. I spent time with my girls, and then I went into Echea’s room. She didn’t like House or House’s stories. House’s voice, no matter how I programmed it, scared her. It made me wonder how we were going to link her when the time came. If she found House intrusive, imagine how she would find the constant barrage of information services, of instant e-mail scrolling across her eyes, or sudden images appearing inside her head. She was almost past the age where a child adapted easily to a link. We had to calm her quickly or risk her suffering a disadvantage for the rest of her life.

Perhaps it was the voice that upset her. The reason links made sound optional was because too many people had had trouble distinguishing the voices inside their head. Perhaps Echea would be one of them.

It was time to find out.

I had yet to broach the topic with my husband. He seemed to have cooled toward Echea immediately. He thought Echea abnormal because she wasn’t like our girls. I reminded him that Echea hadn’t had the advantages, to which he responded that she had the advantages now. He felt that since her life had changed, she should change.

Somehow I didn’t think it worked like that.

It was on the second night that I realized she was terrified of going to sleep. She kept me as long as she could, and when I finally left, she asked to keep the lights on.

House said she had them on all night, although the computer clocked her even breathing starting at 2:47 a.m.

On the third night, she asked me questions. Simple ones, like the one about breakfast, and I answered them without my previous defensiveness. I held my emotions back, my shock that a child would have to ask what that pleasant ache was in her stomach after meals (“You’re full, Echea. That’s your stomach telling you it’s happy.”) or why we insisted on bathing at least once a day (“People stink if they don’t bathe often, Echea. Haven’t you noticed?”). She asked the questions with her eyes averted, and her hands clenched against the coverlet. She knew she should know the answers, she knew better than to ask my older two daughters or my husband, and she tried ever so hard to be sophisticated.

Already the girls had humiliated her more than once. The dress incident had blossomed into an obsession with them, and they taunted her about her unwillingness to attach to anything. She wouldn’t even claim a place at the dining room table. She seemed convinced that we would toss her out at the first chance.

On the fourth night, she addressed that fear. Her question came at me sideways, her body more rigid than usual.

“If I break something,” she asked, “what will happen?”

I resisted the urge to ask what she had broken. I knew she hadn’t broken anything. House would have told me, even if the girls hadn’t.

“Echea,” I said, sitting on the edge of her bed, “are you afraid that you’ll do something which will force us to get rid of you?”

She flinched as if I had struck her, then she slid down against the coverlet. The material was twisted in her hands, and her lower jaw was working even before she spoke.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Didn’t they explain this to you before they brought you here?” I asked.

“They said nothing.” That harsh tone was back in her voice, the tone I hadn’t heard since that very first day, her very first comment.

I leaned forward and, for the first time, took one of those clenched fists into my hands. I felt the sharp knuckles against my palms, and the softness of the fabric brushing my skin.

“Echea,” I said. “When we adopted you, we made you our child by law. We cannot get rid of you. No matter what. It is illegal for us to do so.”

“People do illegal things,” she whispered.

“When it benefits them,” I said. “Losing you will not benefit us.”

“You’re saying that to be kind,” she said.

I shook my head. The real answer was harsh, harsher than I wanted to state, but I could not leave it at this. She would not believe me. She would think I was trying to ease her mind. I was, but not through polite lies.

“No,” I said. “The agreement we signed is legally binding. If we treat you as anything less than a member of our family, we not only lose you, we lose our other daughters as well.”

I was particularly proud of adding the word “other.” I suspected that, if my husband had been having this conversation with her, that he would have forgotten to add it.

“You would?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“This is true?” she asked.

“True,” I said. “I can download the agreement and its ramifications for you in the morning. House can read you the standard agreement—the one everyone must sign—tonight if you like.”

She shook her head, and pushed her hands harder into mine. “Could you—could you answer me one thing?” she asked.

“Anything,” I said.

“I don’t have to leave?”

“Not ever,” I said.

She frowned. “Even if you die?”

“Even if we die,” I said. “You’ll inherit, just like the other girls.”

My stomach knotted as I spoke. I had never mentioned the money to our own children. I figured they knew. And now I was telling Echea who was, in all intents and purposes, still a stranger.

And an unknown one at that.

I made myself smile, made the next words come out lightly. “I suspect there are provisions against killing us in our beds.”

Her eyes widened, then instantly filled with tears. “I would never do that,” she said.

And I believed her.

***

As she grew more comfortable with me, she told me about her previous life. She spoke of it only in passing, as if the things that happened before no longer mattered to her. But in the very flatness with which she told them, I could sense deep emotions churning beneath the surface.