Naomi at the Body

I didn't see her death, and I had learned that I probably wouldn't have understood it if I had seen it happen. It was all too much. It was outside of my world. Everything that was happening was. The woods, the Hork-Bajir. The Animorphs. The Yeerks. I was a lawyer in a war. Lawyers are for afterward. And I knew that. And if I hadn't, the kids damn well reminded me.

Marco, in the tin-man voice he used when he couldn't be funny, but had to be practical, was the one who told me that my daughter had been killed. He didn't go into a lot of detail. He used the word 'brave' too many times. He used the word sacrifice only once.

Sara started to cry. Jordan held her. I held Jordan. Marco nodded at us at went back to the world they had all bought with blood.

I guess it's not a surprise that I just couldn't process the information that Rachel had been killed. Death in a spaceship after being attacked by her cousin who was both a snake and an alien rebel because her best friend had defied a direct order from her other cousin and given one alien menace's technology to another?

It was too outlandish. An impossible death on top of too many other impossible things. All too fast.

Rachel had turned into a grizzly bear in my kitchen only a few weeks ago while her alien friend distracted my other daughters. My family, along with a few others had been hauled off to be refugees in a freaking meadow full of aliens, held hostage under the muscle of our mutating 16 year old children.

Those were the things that were too strange, too unbelievable to deal with, and those are things I had to fight against so hard because it was better than the things that hurt too much to deal with.

Rachel wasn't the Rachel that I thought she was. She was a warrior. They all were. Her friends had all seen so much more pain, slavery, destruction, cruelty and war.

Realizing what had happened to our children struck us hard in those first few days and the horror of what our children had needed to become was something that we, the parent refugees, communicated, but never once discussed. We acknowledged it with tight shoulders and tight faces. When Jake gave an order in his weary voice, or Marco picked apart a plan with the insightfulness of a true and fire-tested tactician, my eyes would meet Michelle's, or Peter's, and then we would look away too quickly.

We could hardly talk to each other about it. We would be bitching about the escape drills, or trying to distract ourselves with pointless conversation while the kids were out on a mission they might not come back from, and our voices would just peter out mid-sentence.

It was too much. Our babies had been at war since they were thirteen. Jake had been thirteen when he'd become a general. Marco had been thirteen when he became a lieutenant. Rachel had been thirteen when she became a killer.

They were battle hardened. They were determined. They were willing to make sacrifices to win.

My strong, brilliant, girl. The one my little daughters looked up too wasn't just battle hardened, she was blood thirsty.

Eva looked up to my nephew as a leader, a great Yeerk killer, the thing that monsters told each other campfire stories about. And he was afraid of Rachel. They all were.

But the worst part, the worst, was that we hadn't noticed how different our children had become. Their actions, their war, was a shock to us.

They'd come home, tired, hungry, hiding tears, and we'd asked them to go take out the garbage, grab a take out menu out of the drawer.

It was something I couldn't digest. Couldn't believe. Couldn't face.

I could feel bad when I heard Cassie's parents talking. They had noticed how tired she was, but wrote it off on Cassie being a teenager and always working too hard. They had noticed that she occasionally forgot a chore or an assignment but always attributed it to her workload, or to some cute, innocent, puppy-love affair with Jake distracting her hormone riddled mind.

Marco's father had blamed himself, and then his remarriage, never imagining that Marco was trying to save Earth from the mother he though was dead, and that he had almost had to destroy her several times. Eva knew this, had to know it. Never once said anything.

And when I tried to examine my own home over the last few years?

The guilt was too much.

Rachel had been changing under my nose, everyday, and I'd done nothing. Willfully ignored it at times, because I was too busy.

Her grades had dropped. Not rock bottomed, but slipped from straight A's to B minuses and C plusses. I should have asked then.

Her bulletin board of cheerful, if naïve, sayings about personal growth became quotes about battle and anger and victory and death. Then she'd stopped using it altogether. I should have asked then.

Jordan and Sara had both come to me about her nightmares. They'd both fought to wake her while she kicked and screamed.

Even the way she always kept the window open, or how once in a while I'd hear soft, one-sided conversations in her room should have been a clue that something was different. Off. Dangerous.

I couldn't have possibly begun to guess the truth. None of us could have. My daughter was fighting aliens alongside her pre-pubescent friends and her boyfriend, who was in her room all the time, was an abused child who'd become ah hawk and could sometimes be human and was always quiet because he had nearly been tortured to death during the course of their war?

That Rachel had been the reason for all the inexplicable escaped elephant rampages? That she had stolen and piloted the jet that had scared all of downtown to death when it nearly crashed into a building?

No. I never could have guessed.

But with the grades and the mood swings and her new tendency to talk to herself? I should have suspected drugs. Or at the very, extreme least not angrily ignored her father when he called and suggested it. Not taken it as a baseless insult to my ability to be a parent.

I should have suspected drugs or depression or a bad crowd. I should have at least wondered. At least worried.

If I had asked her, she never would have told me. She would never have betrayed her friends or her cause. She never would have given up the war that had become her drug.

Not matter what I had noticed, or asked about, I would have found myself shocked and repulsed when Rachel revealed who she really was. The pain and fear I felt watching her friends pull away from her. When I heard Aximili the Alien accuse her of being the thing that these other soldiers, already robbed of all innocence, feared.

I still would have seen the look on her face when, after nearly killing a man with a stolen army truck full of explosives, she truly thought she had been so fixated on blood that she had not even heard a direct order.

After everything, the war was revealed. The Andalites capitulated and Jake became the sad, destroyed, hero of a galaxy. Sarah and Jordan and I moved to the other side of the country and tried to move on.

And a body was found, floating in space.

Cassie went with me to identify it. We both cried. Broke down and clung to each other. Cassie's tears were grief. Deep mourning for Rachel's life that she must have been holding back since those first days of bulletin boards and gymnastics.

There was grief in my tears too. Loss. Pain.

But what I'll never tell another soul is that while I cried over my daughter's body I thought of the others. I thought of the woman my daughter had turned into trying to live in the world. And mostly, mostly, I cried because I was relieved that Rachel was dead.


Next Chapter: The General in His Room coming April 20th