Your Magic or Mine? (39 page)

The two men nodded. Marcus kept himself from smiling in triumph. No more guilt or frustration over not living up to their goals. They were recognizing him as an adult at last. He was almost floating with happiness, when her next words brought him back down to earth.

“And you, Marcus,” she continued, “might have told us how you’ve felt about school, goals, and your novels and probably other things. Even if males in general don’t discuss feelings, it would have helped if you’d raised the question about goals and whose they were, and we should have asked. On the other hand, you’ve certainly gone your own way successfully, and we’re very proud of you.”

She looked from him to his father and back. “The most disturbing discovery of your situation for me is that we have fallen into a pattern over the past years of not discussing the really important parts of our lives—our family, our hopes, our dreams, our successes and failures. We’ve been simply existing on the surface, but not sharing deeply. No wonder we haven’t been communicating. Do you both agree?”

“Yes, Judith,” Marcus murmured and shot a glance at his father who also said, “Yes, Judith.”

“That brings us back to the real reason we’re here,” Judith said with a smile that boded trouble. Here came his biggest problem. “You have a soul mate. You’re trying to reject both her and the phenomenon. According to what you told Gloriana, you’re doing it because you don’t know how to be a mate or a father, you don’t know how to show affection for a mate, and you were afraid you’d treat her and possible children as you think we’ve treated you. You think you can’t be loving, and, I suspect, you think that you aren’t loveable. Am I correct in those statements?”

Marcus managed not to wince at her statements. His mother always could get right to the core of a thesis. He’d never consciously thought about not being loveable, although he supposed it was part of the mix. His parents had certainly given him cause to think so. He looked to his father to see if he wanted to add a comment, but Stefan only raised his eyebrows in question. He turned back to his mother and nodded in the affirmative. “Essentially, yes.”

“Son, I have news for you,” Stefan stated.
“Love
is the most important thing there is, the most ancient magic, the basis of the soul-mate bond and the resulting family bond. We love you, completely, wholeheartedly unreservedly. We haven’t said that enough to you, and I apologize. We haven’t taught you to say it back to us. My parents didn’t teach me, either. Your mother did, at least to her. I’m not sure when we stopped saying it to you—probably when you were a teenager. New rule: whoever says it first, the other has to say it back.” He looked back and forth between Marcus and Judith until they had each agreed.

“Furthermore, Gloriana loves you, and not because of the imperative. Judith said your soul mate’s love came through right over the telephone line, even though she doesn’t acknowledge it yet. She’s probably denying it to herself for protection if you follow through with your rejection. Why on earth would she have tracked us down and told us about you if she didn’t?” Stefan shook his head. “I swear, you two need to work on your communication like the rest of us do.”

“As for your ideas about soul mates, children, and all that blather”—Judith waved a hand in the air—
“of course
you don’t know how to be a mate or a parent.
None
of us did until we met our mate, got married, and had children. Oh, you can read books galore. When faced with the actual mate or child, however, your education, training, or upbringing on that subject … it simply flies out the window. Trust me, you will learn quickly how to show affection.”

“I second that,” Stefan stated. “Your mother scared me to death when we met. The feelings that bombarded me practically left me in a coma when I was alone. When with Judith, however, simply being in the same room and not even touching … let’s say I was stupefied no longer.”

Marcus looked at his mother, who was
blushing
. His father’s words took on a deeper meaning, and he looked at his hands when he felt his face heat. Too much information.

“If you’re as smart as I think you are,” Stefan went on, “you’ll come to your senses and go to Gloriana and make up, not only for the time you’ve wasted, but also for putting that woman through a bunch of hoops she shouldn’t have had to jump through. You have to have faith in the process. The phenomenon doesn’t make mistakes. You’ve never given us cause to be disappointed in you. Please don’t start now.”

“I agree,” Judith said and turned to his father. “I think we’ve covered our main points here, Stefan.”

“I can’t think of any others, either.”

“Marcus, we’ll leave you to think about everything we’ve said and your desires and needs,” she said and stood up. “In your usual fashion, you’ll need to go over and over all we’ve said in your brain until you accept it. Your father and I have a reservation at the Driskill Hotel. We’re going there to get some rest. The flights were not conducive to sleep.”

Marcus stood automatically when his mother did. “Wait… we still have things to talk about. I have questions about everything.”

“We’ll talk more when you’ve resolved your most important problem and made peace with Gloriana,” she told him. “Now, give me a hug. It’s been too long. I think you stopped hugging me when you went through those horrible teenaged years. Come to think of it, that’s when we stopped talking, also.”

“But …” No, it was the other way around—she had not wanted to hug him or had not wanted him to hug her. Or something like that. He didn’t get to voice his opinion, however, because she was giving him a fierce embrace, and he was returning it. And it felt sooooo good. He shut his eyes tight to make the burning sensation in them go away.

“I love you, Marcus,” she said, drawing back to look into his eyes.

“I love you, too,” he answered and saw the tears in her eyes that must mirror the ones in his.

“Good boy,” Stefan said, and, as soon as Judith released him, he pulled Marcus into his arms and pounded him on the back. “I love you, son.”

“I love you, too,” Marcus said through a suddenly tight throat.

“The women are correct here. They usually are when it comes to feelings. You get together with Gloriana, and everything will be a lot clearer.”

Marcus walked them out to their car and exchanged more hugs. While he watched them drive away, he rubbed his forehead. The revelations of the past hour had made him woozy. He looked down at Samson, who had accompanied them to the curb. The hound grinned and yodeled.

What just happened here?

His head spinning, Marcus went back into his house and stood looking down at the chairs and sofa grouping, replaying the conversation in his head.

His parents had come in like a double tornado and obliterated his complete theory and ideas about himself, his relationship with them, and their whole family … what was the term?
Family dynamic?
Yes, their entire family dynamic, all blown to hell and completely reorganized. His new understanding was going to take some getting used to.

What had he been thinking previously? About looking truth in the eye?

They’d certainly done it. Talk about seeing something from the other’s point of view. He knew they were telling the truth, and not simply as they saw it, but as it actually happened. How to decide what to do? His mother was correct; he did go over and over problems. That was his mathematical process, and the answer usually appeared like … well, like magic once he’d looked at it from all viewpoints.

He plopped down on the chair he’d been sitting in. Samson came over and put his head on Marcus’s knee, and he rubbed behind the dog’s ears. “What do you think, boy? Have I been a total idiot, or what?”

Samson shut his eyes and leaned against him.

How pathetic he was. On the other hand, to hear the words
total idiot out
loud certainly drove his predicament home. Maybe, instead of living in his head all the time, it would help to actually verbalize his thoughts. Only the two of them were here, and if it didn’t work, nobody would witness his failure, and Samson wouldn’t talk.

“What I don’t understand is how I could have been so wrong-headed about my family. Where did I get all those ideas? I hardly remember anything before going off to school. Although … Come on, boy, let’s go downstairs.”

With the hound following, Marcus went down to his office and over to the corner farthest from his desk. He knelt next to the floor-to-ceiling shelves and perused the bottom shelf. “Yes, here they are, my copies of
The Hobbit
and the Belgariad series. And look here … Elric … and Thomas Covenant … and Narnia. Oh, here’s Philip Pullman I found in my twenties.”

He picked up a few of the dog-eared books, took them to his desk, and sat down while Samson sniffed around the books and the shelves. When he leafed through them and read passages, he could
hear
his father’s voice saying the words. Yes, they’d read them together, every night, until he went to Silberkraft.

“Oh, my God. I was totally wrong.” He closed the book he’d been looking at and tossed it onto his desk. He pointed a finger at the hound. “But not about everything, Samson. I wasn’t wrong about there never being time to talk about inconsequential things—how I liked school, for example. Even Judith agrees with me on that. I certainly wasn’t wrong about being miserable.”

He nodded at the correctness of those statements and added another. “Was that really inconsequential? It was to them, I suppose, since they couldn’t imagine me not enjoying myself. But it sure wasn’t to me.”

Samson curled up in the corner and yawned.

“Yeah, I’m boring.” Marcus turned to stare out the window. He didn’t see the hills unrolling before him, however. Instead he saw the family trekking through Europe. “What do I remember of those vacations? Lots of traveling, one museum after another, my parents always working, and I got to meet all kinds of cool people who were interested in cool subjects. Somewhere in there … Judith and Stefan became almost like strangers—friendly but not people I could talk to. Not people who would understand what I was going through. Not people who cared.”

He rocked back and forth, forcing his thoughts past the wall he’d erected in his mind against the long-ago pain.

“Was that around the time I was really hating school? I must have been about thirteen? Oh, damn, it was, and I was too embarrassed about my inability to stand up for myself to tell them how I was being bullied or ignored.” He ran his hands over his face as the memories surfaced. “They were and are always sure of themselves. I wasn’t when I was around them. They had many friends. I had none, and I was so lonely. And I knew it was my own damn fault.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, took a deep breath, and released it. “But was it? If I’d been one of the older students, how would I have felt about me? The kid who made higher grades and the teachers called a genius? I’d have ignored me, too. The bullies were truly sick, evil people.”

He slumped in his chair until the injustice of the situation made its way into his brain, and he thumped a fist on the chair arm. “Damn it! That’s not right. I was a kid, for God’s sake. Where were the teachers while I was going through hell and obviously having problems? Why didn’t my parents try harder to talk to me? Why didn’t they have some idea of my misery?”

All sorts of events, comments, and people paraded through his mind. It had to be what an amnesiac experienced when his memories returned—fascination with what it showed him about himself, and terror about what he might learn. He blocked the humiliating images with a shudder that shook his whole body.

He still had no answer to his questions. For whatever reason, the adults hadn’t known, didn’t ask. His parents didn’t have a clue what he was going through. He had decided then they never would understand and all he could do was survive till college. He’d been right about that. He was merely one of a bunch of really smart kids at MIT and actually had competition for the first time in his life. Even better, nobody bullied him, and he’d even made a few friends.

He had always taken it for granted—or from Stefan and Judith’s brainwashing—that he’d teach in a university. He hadn’t settled on his major until his sophomore year at Silberkraft when he’d discovered higher math. By that time, the non-talking pattern had been set.

As for praising him? His parents may have been proud of him, and certainly they introduced him to their circle of friends and colleagues. Why didn’t they express that pride, whether or not he got a big head from the praise?

A vague recollection surfaced of his mother telling his father to stop acting like a know-it-all professor with his family. It had never registered until her comments today what that meant. Judith understood that Stefan seldom asked, but usually told people what to do, what conclusions to come to, how to solve their problems. She’d never, however, run interference for him with his father, and Stefan had never changed his behavior toward his son. She’d shocked the hell out of him when she said he frightened her. The woman who had an answer for everything, who could make graduate students and assistant professors quake in their boots with the lift of an eyebrow. She’d never understood men, or boys, and hadn’t realized how, when he was a little kid, he looked up to his father, took every word as gospel, and strove to make him proud.

So, he’d grown up and tuned both of them out.

It had been his own damn fault that she’d stopped hugging him.

Or had it?

“No,” he said, facing his desk again. He must have said it with more force than he realized because Samson woke up with a start and stared at him.

“No,” he continued more softly. “It’s not all my fault. It’s half theirs. What a screw-up. Okay, where do I go from here? Whatever or whoever’s fault it is, the past is the past. I’m a grown man. It’s time to get over my childhood. Even if it does take some getting used to. I’m glad we’re talking again. All we can do is go on from here.”

But, where did
he
go?