Not for profit, not for infringement, not for suing. Pure speculation, purely for fun.
Babysitter
"Um, honey, in case you haven't noticed, I'm bleeding to death here."
Martha loved her husband dearly, but there were times she just wanted to slap him senseless. However, after having the combine nearly cut his leg off probably wasn't the best time. She went back to punching through her phone list with a vengeance.
Clark's four-year-old eyes were terrified as he held on with his full strength (far stronger than she could have done, Martha thought, still dazed by the thought, even though she was pretty close to shrieking terror herself) to the compress on his dad's bloody leg. She had gone into automatic mode while she applied the tourniquet and bandage, trying not to throw up at the sight of her husband's mutilated leg. Clark had taken his cues from her -- not screaming, not crying, simply doing what she directed. The alien child was at least as scared as she was. But he did what needed to be done, as if he had been a farm hand as long as Jonathan had.
Martha had swallowed her own nausea to set a good example. "Do we dare take Clark to the hospital with us? Or leave him here alone?" Clark had been very apologetic about the milking machine. Jonathan had spent a long day in the field thinking about a child, who barely came up past his knees, who had crushed stainless steel in his hand. By accident.
"No. No." Jonathan closed his eyes. "Whatever, honey. Just hurry."
"Don't be hurt, daddy," the small voice whispered.
Jonathan managed to lift his hand to the boy's head. They'd already discovered that the child-soft skin could turn a knife, and that open flame meant the same thing to him as warm dirt did. (As in, So?) The tiny child was all but invulnerable. (There had been episodes of screaming terrified curled-up agony here and there, but neither of them could figure out why, or what was causing him to be suddenly horribly sick and then perfectly okay again five minutes later. Duh, the boy had showed up in a meteor storm with a spaceship. Where's the rule book?)
"It's just for a little while," he said faintly. "The doctors will take care of me, and I'll be back home and fine again in a few days."
"Don't leave me." The little boy put enough pressure on Jonathan's leg that he grunted.
"I will never leave you," Jonathan said as firmly as he could manage. "I just have to go get fixed up. Like the machines." Oh hells, now Clark was going to think of his parents as breakable, like the machines that shattered in his hands. The kid was still so scared to be left alone that he wouldn't go to the bathroom by himself. Wherever he was from, whatever he was, he had obviously been sent away and abandoned. "It's," he pronounced the word carefully, "Maintenance."
"Mane-tane-ance," Clark repeated dutifully.
"That's right. Like putting oil in the tractor."
"Oil?" Clark touched the seeping blood doubtfully. His other hand absently continued to provide a tourniquet that no human being could have matched.
"People oil." Jonathan tried to muster some amusement through the fact that he had, indeed, lost an awful lot of blood, and was in serious pain, and going into shock.
The child sitting next to him was from another planet. Match THAT for shock.
"I don't unner-stand," Clark said doubtfully. "Is that one of the other-people things?"
"No, honey." Martha put down the phone. "Your daddy is hurting. That's why he's not making much sense. You remember when you feel hurt? It's hard to think when you're hurt, right?"
Clark shuddered. "Hurting is bad."
"Yes, it is. That's what the word means. Now, can you help me carry your daddy to the car? I need to take him to get fixed."
"I can carry daddy," Clark said confidently, and lifted Jonathan as if he were a kitten. Martha and Jonathan exchanged horrified, terrified, amazed looks. Jonathan took the easy way out by fainting. Martha kept a smile plastered on her face, and her eyes frozen on the picture of a four-year-old carrying a full-grown, 220-pound man.
The beat-to-hell Volkswagon came screeching into the Kent farm just as Martha managed to settle Jonathan on to the back seat. Martha fought the blood pressure spike, not to faint herself. If Jane had seen Clark casually handing her husband over....
Clark scowled at the orange and rust beetle. "Who is that?" he demanded, paranoia already ingrained by eighteen months of living on Earth.
"That's a friend of mine, Clark," Martha said gently. "She's here to make sure you're okay while I take your daddy to get fixed up."
Clark gave her a look that said as clearly as words, take care of ME? "What about...?" he said cautiously.
Martha really seriously wanted to put her fist through a wall, but she didn't want to give her adopted son any ideas. Her husband was bleeding to death, and her extra-terrestrial child was terrified. "Just be a good boy," she said urgently, catching him up in a hug as tight as she could manage. Which he probably barely felt, she reflected unhappily. "Jane is just here to make sure there's no big problems while your daddy is getting fixed up." Turning to the short woman in torn-up shorts and stained t-shirt, she added hastily, "Jane, this is our son, Clark. I told you about adopting him. He's kind of -- special. Just give me a call at the hospital if the house burns down or anything, okay? I have to go now if Jon is going to keep his leg."
"I know, I got the picture. Get gone." The red-gray-haired woman shoved Martha hard enough to stagger her. "We'll get along. Don't worry. Any kid of yours is a kid of mine."
Jonathan chose that minute to throw up blood. That got Martha moving.
The car tore out of the driveway -- Martha had learned to drive in the city -- and Jane sat down in the dirt beside the smudged preschooler. She held out her hand gravely. "Hi, Clark. I'm a friend of you mommy's. My name is Jane."
Clark looked at her suspiciously. "I'm supposed to call grown up people by the other name. Mommy says that's po, polite."
"Well, your mommy is right." Jane sat back, stretching. "But your mommy is a good friend of mine. And my last name is long and hard to say. So you can just call me Jane."
"Oh. Okay." Clark sat down with her. "Why is your last name hard to say?"
"Because I'm not from this country, Clark. Do you know what that means?"
"Yeah," Clark confided. "I'm not from here either."
"Yeah? Where are you from?"
"I dunno. A long way away. Where are you from?"
Well, duh, Jane thought, the kid was barely old enough to be speaking English as a second language. They probably never would tell him want country he'd been adopted from. Though he looked pretty Anglic. One of the ex-Soviet countries? Not with those eyes, she bet. "I'm from a place where people were fighting," she said gently, as befits talking about war to small children. "My mommy and daddy left to get away from the fighting. And I came here, and met your mommy, when we were little girls. We used to play in the dirt together." Jane picked up a clod of dirt, and dropped it in Clark's lap. He looked alarmed until she chuckled at him, at which point he giggled back. "What kind of games do you like to play, Clark?"
"Playing in dirt is fun," he said, with eyes so soulful that beagles would have traded places. "Mommy and daddy don't let me do it."
Not because he got dirty, but because he broke the water main the last time he played dig-a-hole against Scout, their sheep dog.
"Well, I won't tell if you don't. Let's make some mud puddles. And roll in them."
Clark looked alarmed. "I can't." Jonathan had given him a Very Serious Talk for coming through the door covered with mud. THROUGH the door. Proud of himself. At about thirty miles an hour.
"Why not? Do you get sick?" Martha had mentioned that the boy was -- well, the phrase she had used when she had called Jane in a panic was "JaneHelp JonathanDamnNearCutHisLegOff And I Can'tTrustAnyoneElseWithClark." He didn't seem to be retarded, despite his evasiveness with words, and he looked healthy enough. Though appearances, Jane knew too well, could be deceiving. She looked healthy enough herself.
"Sometimes." Clark seemed cautious about that admission, as if he'd been told not to talk about it. "Not from mud. But daddy gets mad when I get dirty."
"Ooh-ooh." Jane nodded. "I bet you went into the house all muddy."
"Um. Yeah." Daddy had also told him not to talk about the door. There was so much he wasn't supposed to talk about, he couldn't keep it all straight sometimes.
"Well, that's because your mommy likes to keep her house all neat and clean. Mud is for OUT side. So long as we stay OUT side, we can get as muddy as we want. But we have to get cleaned up before we go IN side."
The boy considered that, frowning in concentration, then he nodded. "That makes sense." As opposed to so many other things that didn't make sense, like why bother with so many things that broke so easily.
"So let's make some mud pies. Would your daddy mind if we used the rain barrel?"
"Nah." Clark's actual facility with English, owing to a near perfect memory and a processing speed that would have fried an EEG, was coming back as he relaxed a little around the new lady. Clark actually was reading on a third-grade level already, which was just one more thing that mommy and daddy had told him not to talk about, which confused him even more. "It's got mosquito larvae in it. Daddy was going to dump it out today anyway."
Jane blinked. A kid too young to be speaking English as a second language very well had just said "mosquito larvae."
"Well, since your daddy isn't going to be doing any heavy work until his leg gets better, we'll just save him the trouble and do it for him, okay? That way we'll actually be helping him. And we can have some fun at the same time. And he never even has to know that we were having fun. We'll just say we were helping."
The kid's grin could outshine the sun. "I can keep secrets!"
Jane laughed and they went to go tip over the rain barrel. Jane let Clark pretend to help. She was astonished at how easily the hundreds of gallons of water went over. Even with her still-trained gymnast's muscles, she had expected to have to brace herself and give it the same kind of effort that a big farmhand like Jonathan would have had to put into it.
Several dozen mud pies later (Jane had allowed Clark to eat one -- she and Martha had eaten mud pies too, although it had been a rather higher quality of mud, and Jane knew enough sports medicine to understand that humans were tougher than usually believed), Clark declared, unbelievably, that he was bored with mud. Jane looked them both over critically. "We're too dirty to go in the house. What else do you like to play outside?"
Clark looked down and toed the mud. Most of what he liked to do, like race the dogs and jump the fence, was on the "don't tell anybody" list. "I dunno."
"Would you like to learn some new tricks?" He was a little young for gymnastics, but teaching the kids was about the only thing that made her life worth living any more.
Clark looked at her warily. "Only if it's an other-people-can-do-it trick."
Now what the hell did THAT mean? "Well, SOME other people can do it. Some of it takes a lot of practice, though. If you don't like it, just tell me, and we'll think of something else to do." She stood up, and stretched, and did a fast front roll in the mud, coming back to her feet on her toes out of long habit. She smiled at Clark. "The easy way is to start on your hands and knees, like this." She demonstrated a child's somersault, collecting more mud.
Clark narrowed his eyes. Jane did not know, of course, that she was dealing with an eidetic memory and rather more than human sensory capability. "I like the first way better," he decided, and copied her motions exactly, from the stretch to the upright stance.
Jane forcibly shut her mouth before it collected flies. "That's, that's very good. Did your mommy teach you that?" Martha had been a fair-to-middling gymnast herself.
"No." The boy's eyes retreated again, as if he were scared of having done something good. "I just did what you did. Is that an other-people trick?"
Okay, we are going to get to the bottom of this right now. I can't babysit this kid if I keep scaring him. "What do you mean by 'other-people'?"
Now the kid definitely looked terrified, and on the verge of bolting. Jane put out a hand to catch him, not knowing how close she came to losing her arm. "Clark, don't be afraid. I told you, I come from another country. Sometimes I have problems understanding. Can you help me understand? Pretend you have to talk to me like I don't know what you're saying."
Unknowingly, Jane had hit exactly the right chord. Clark's spaceship's programming in Earth languages had been pretty rudimentary. He could get by in any language extant for the last hundred years, but not well, and not comfortably, and he was as aware of what he couldn't do as of what he could.
Clark still looked scared, but not terrified. "I'm not like other people," he mumbled.
Jane sat down in the mud. "I'm not like other people either, Clark," she said gently.
Clark's eyes went wide. "You're not?" he said gleefully. "Are you like me?"
"No." At Clark's crestfallen look, she shook her head with a sad smile. "You're a little boy, and I'm a grown woman. How could we be like each other?"
"Oh." Clark went solemn, and nodded. "I didn't think about that." With a shy sideways look, that might have been a child's attempt to sneak information he wasn't supposed to have, "Can you do things? That other people can't?"
Does coming in fourth in the Olympics count? Does surviving three years after the doctors had given you six months to live count? Does having to pull the plug on your own two-week-old son count? Yes, she could definitely sympathize with not being like "other people." The question remained, though ... how could such a little boy know about the isolation of being so different, and having so much you just didn't talk about, no matter what country he came from? "Yes, Clark, I can do things most people can't. Want me to teach you some of them?"
"If I don't get in trouble," Clark said, habitual caution coming back into play.
"I don't think you'll get in trouble for learning new things." Jane stood up. "You did good at a front roll. Let's try a cartwheel."
Not surprisingly, Clark stunk at cartwheels. Hand-hand-foot-foot is a matter of careful coordination, and no amount of strength will make up for the fact that young children are still learning right from left and up from down. (Clark would stink at cartwheels for the rest of his life, have no inherent appreciation of up from down. Fortunately, Batman and Robin and Nightwing never challenged him to a gymnastics contest.)
Jane swallowed hard when the four-year old mastered an aerial somersault on the second try. She'd been showing off, not expecting anything except his delighted "Whee!" She had never heard of a child that young with the strength to do it himself.
Clark had trouble with back rolls. Also not surprising, Jane had always had a hard time getting her head out of the way herself as a child, and had learned the handstand version to get around the problem with training. Fortunately Clark was still too uncoordinated to manage a handstand-flip back roll, or she would have been in for another rude shock. As it was, his attempt landed them both back in the mud puddle, with much laughter.
There was a low branch on the tree just around the barn that was perfect for demonstrating how to get your head out of the way. Jane showed him how to do a balance-beam back roll, and then, after cautioning Clark that balance beams were for "sissy girls, not boys," steadied him in mastering the art. She was pretty sure Clark took some damage to the between-the-legs area on the first few tries, but he didn't complain.
And then she did something very, very stupid, unknowingly, but stupid. She was living on borrowed time, she didn't much care about herself. But she should have been thinking about the little boy she was babysitting.
Jane jumped from the lower branch to a higher one, caught it in an easy kip, swung around, and did a back-flip dismount, staggering only a little when her knees gave. Oh, for the good old days. Teaching the kids was all that kept her going. It hurt to move much, any more. But damn if she was going to quit.
In front of a child, with a perfect physical memory and no concept of being injured.
Clark concentrated on the branch she had caught, replaying her motions to himself, smiled happily, and jumped.
With a small child's coordination, and superhuman strength.
Jane didn't have time to scream before Clark hit the branch.
The CRACK! of the branch breaking covered the "Oof!" Clark made as he hit it, but not his shriek as he landed on the ground and it fell on top of him. Jane made it to his side in less than a second, more scared than she'd ever been in a fairly unpleasant and challenging life.
Clark was sitting up, his face contorted with tears and fear, staring at the tree. "Uh-oh," he whispered.
Not "ouch." Not cries of pain. A look of terror. A ripped shirt. A hundred-pound or so branch that he had unthinkingly pushed off of him as he sat up. No blood. A small "Uh-oh."
Okay, we are OFFICIALLY going to get to the bottom of this.
"Clark." Very firmly, the tone she used with her own doctors. "Are you hurt?"
The wet and terrified face he turned to her said that he would have run and hidden if he could have quit trembling long enough to get his feet under him. She folded him in her arms instinctively. She didn't care if he could have -- as she was beginning to suspect -- done her some serious injury. (The rain barrel. The aerial flips. The tree. Marty, just how far away did your adopted son come from? I don't think they raise them this strong even in Siberia.)
She'd never been able to even hold her own son. She wasn't about to let this one go.
"It's okay, shh, don't worry," she murmured, along with similar nonsense words in six other languages. "It's not your fault. It was just a rotten old tree branch. The only thing that matters is that you're safe. You're a brave little boy. Just be more careful. It's okay."
"You won't tell?" Clark sniffled and wiped at his eyes.
"You think I would tell your mother that I was clumsy and silly?" Jane ruffled his hair. "And dumb? No way! We can put that old branch over there in the wood pile, and no one will know what happened. We're just helping out while your dad has a hurt leg. Right?"
Clark thought about that for a long time. Technically, it was a lie. Mommy was always telling him not to lie to them. But he had to lie to other people. But Jane was mommy's friend. Jane was asking him to tell a lie to mommy. It was confusing.
"Do we have to lie?" he said in a small voice.
"Clark. I am the grown-up. I will tell your mom the truth. It was my fault. You don't have to worry, and you don't have to lie. You didn't do anything wrong. You just tried to do something you weren't ready for yet. Like the cartwheels, right?"
Clark relaxed a little in her arms. "I'm not very good at cartwheels, am I?"
Jane hugged him. "No, you're not. That's an other-people trick."
Clark managed a small chuckle. "Are there lots of other-people tricks?"
"Oh yes. Many many. You'll learn some when you grow up. Some of them you never will learn. But that's okay too. You're a boy and I'm a girl, remember?"
"Yeah, I know. Daddy's a boy and mommy's a girl. Daddy can't cook worth a damn."
Jane gave a shout of laughter. "Now that, Clark, is something you should not say in front of your mommy and daddy. I will keep it a secret. Along with the mud pies."
"Daddy says it all the time."
"Your daddy is a big boy and you are still a little boy. And some boys can cook. Just not all of them. Some boys do other things, like grow the food, or make the machines." Clark decided that was simple enough, nodded, and snuggled, seeking comfort. Jane grew contemplative for a minute. "Almost everyone does not-like-other-people things, did you know that? Everybody has something they're good at, and something they're not good at. Not everyone can do cartwheels, or cook, any more than they can be real strong and real tough."
"Not supposed to tell," Clark muttered into her shirt.
"You're not supposed to say 'damn' either, little one. Don't worry. It will be easier to understand when you get older."
"Like daddy?"
"Exactly like daddy. Although he does things he shouldn't sometimes too. Like, I bet he did something dumb to get himself hurt."
Clark sniffled for a moment at the thought, but then got himself together the way he had seen Martha do under pressure, and gave her a small smile. "Mommy says daddy does stupid things a lot of times." Conspiratorily: "She says he's stubborn."
"I bet he is. But he doesn't tell you about the stupid things he does, does he?"
"No. Mommy does. When she's talking to herself." Clark did not know he wasn't supposed to be able to hear Martha's subvocal commentary, because she had never known he could hear it to tell him that he shouldn't talk about it. But then, most children hear things they aren't supposed to, so that wasn't particularly suspicious.
Jane snickered. "Your mommy always did talk to herself, even when we were little girls. I would ask her what she was muttering about, and she would say "nothing." Which was sort of a lie, right? But it was more like just something she wanted to keep to herself. A secret. Something personal."
Clark tilted his head, and this time Jane had a pretty good idea what he was thinking about. Secrets. Lies. Being a baby from very far away. Being lectured by that stubborn preacher-wanna-be farmer that she couldn't believe Marty had married. Being doted on by her old friend, the smart popular girl whose life had fallen apart, who had never let anyone else except Jane into her painful secrets, and that only because she knew that Jane -- her real name determinedly left behind during her escape from the massacre -- understood about having parts of your life that you'd really rather never talk about.
Clark, she was pretty sure, already understood that he had secrets to keep, and already didn't like having to think of himself as a liar.
She leaned closer to him. "Secrets are different from lies, you know," she said, mock sotto voce. "Lies are what we tell people if we've done something bad. Secrets are what we keep to ourselves because they're nobody else's business. Does that make sense?"
Clark frowned, considering. "Like saying we're helping when we're playing?"
"We're helping AND we're playing. It's nobody' else's business if we're having fun while we help. We're not lying. We're just not telling anyone else that we're having fun while we're doing good." Marty, I am going to send you a tape of Mary Poppins, see if I don't. If the kid turns out to be able to fly with an umbrella, well, it's your fault for not warning me.
Clark finally accepted that and nodded, smiling that sun-bright smile. "So it's okay to keep secrets. Secrets aren't really lies."
"Well, you'll have to get older and ask your dad about that. It's complicated."
The smile vanished, replaced by a worried look. "How?"
Jane berated herself for that offhand comment. She wasn't about to try to go into that topic, no matter how quick the kid was. "It has to do with politics, honey. Something you don't have to worry about until you're old enough to vote."
"Oh." The boy's face cleared. "Daddy says all politicians are damn liars."
Jane threw back her head and laughed again. "I bet he does. And he's pretty much right. But you're not supposed to say "damn," Clark. That's a big-people word, not a small-people word. Just like there are other-people things. You can do things I can't do, and I can do things you can't do, and your daddy can say things you shouldn't say. You can say them when you get old enough to vote, okay?"
"Can I say all the other-people things when I get old enough to vote?"
Jane looked into his eyes, very seriously. Can you, kid? Can you ever tell anyone just how special you are? Just how "not from around here" you are? "When you're old enough to vote," she said seriously, "then you're old enough to make your own decisions. You can decide then. Until then," she grinned at him, "I will keep it a secret that you said a big-people word, because it didn't hurt anybody, and it's nobody else's business, okay? And you can tell daddy about it yourself when you're old enough to vote."
Clark nodded solemnly. "Then it won't be a lie. It will just be a secret for awhile."
"Yeah." For the rest of your life, child. If what I'm thinking is anywhere close to the truth, I hope to hell no one else ever finds out. "We can keep secrets. Like the mud pies. And the cartwheels. And all the other-people things. Until you're old enough to vote." She hugged him, and Clark threw his arms around her neck, face beaming.
The championship gymnast blessed her trained muscles and lungs for preventing Clark from suffocating or crushing her.
Clark lifted his head. "I hear the car. Is daddy okay?"
How am I supposed to know? And what does he mean, he hears the car? I don't hear any car. And how does he know which car? Marty, you and I are going to have a LONG talk about this "not like other people" business. "I'm sure he is. He'll probably be sleepy and tired for awhile. Maybe he'll let us help do some of the work around here until he's better, huh?"
"That would be fun. Then we could get all dirty and mommy wouldn't be mad, because we'd be doing real stuff."
"That's a good idea! Since we're all dirty already, let's pretend we're doing some work when your mom gets home." She pointed to the broken tree branch. "Want to help me carry that over to the wood pile?"
She was holding herself very carefully as she said it. The kid was obviously terrified of letting anyone know that he was, what was the proper word? unusual. But he also obviously honestly wanted to do whatever he could to help. It must be terribly hard for him, to be so capable and not be allowed to show it.
Worse, maybe, than the secrets she had kept to herself all these years, about the war, and the failures, and the child who should never have been born.
Clark measured her with his eyes, then nodded. A four year old bearing a burning secret. Jane smiled at him hopefully, encouragingly, hoping he couldn't read minds as well.
"I can do it myself," he said finally.
Martha drove up to the house just in time to see a dirt-covered Clark carrying a branch ten times his size over to the wood pile. And a dirt-covered Jane was watching him with her arms folded. "We'll have to break it in half to make it fit," Jane remarked critically, at which Clark frowned, nodded, and cracked the two-inch-thick piece of wood in half like a twig.
Jane applauded. Clark beamed at the approval. Martha thanked God that Jonathan was still in the hospital and drugged out of his mind.
Jane turned around as if she'd just noticed the car coming up. "Oh, hi, Marty! How's your man? He looked pretty tore up, but he's a tough guy."
"He's okay." Martha got out and submitted to a yell of "Mommy, mommy, mommy!" and an embrace that nearly broke her spine. "He'll be in the hospital overnight, but if I know Jonathan, he'll have caused so much trouble by tomorrow afternoon that the nurses will be begging to get him out."
"Yep, sounds like your man. Obviously your boy here takes after him."
Martha went very still, and Clark gave her a worried look. "Was Clark any trouble?"
"You mean, aside from trying to teach him cartwheels? Don't enroll him in my gymnastics class. The other kids would have a fit." Which could mean any number of things, Martha thought. "We'll just keep up with the private lessons, if that's okay with you."
"Can I, mommy? I can do a somersault real good already." He demonstrated.
An actual somersault is one of the aerial maneuvers. Martha gulped.
"Very good, Clark," Jane said calmly. "Be careful how you land. Land on your toes, balance, and roll back on your heels. It looks better that way."
"Show me?"
"I'm kind of tired right now. Maybe tomorrow, when your mom goes to pick up your dad."
"Okay. Mommy, we dumped out the rain barrel for daddy too. He said he was going to, anyway. We just got a little muddy." Clark tried hard to look apologetic.
"It was my idea, Marty. It looked like it was about to hatch some mosquitoes. Clark just helped." She gathered the little boy into a hug, and felt that incredible strength when he hugged back. "Clark is quite the little helper. You must be really proud of him."
Martha caught the quietly warning tone in her old friend's voice, though it was too subtle for the child. She hoped. "Yes, we are. Of course we are." Clark's face lit up, and he hugged her again. Martha made a note to buy more aspirin.
"He's the best little boy anyone could want," Jane said softly, fondly. She had never told Martha what happened to her own son, but she suspected that her old friend knew. Martha had been the lucky one, never being able to conceive in the first place. Not having to carry hope for three-fourths of a year. And have to sign the papers to allow him -- it -- what little and awful bit of it there was -- die.
Clark caught Jane's hand and tried to hug both women at once. The farm woman and the athlete both bit their lips to keep from protesting the crushed muscles. Martha met Jane's eyes worriedly, and saw the knowledge there in her reassuring smile.
"I'll be happy to babysit your boy any time." Jane leaned down and chucked Clark under the chin, smiling, determining to do whatever it took to stay alive long enough to keep Martha from having to find any other babysitters.
"Just don't expect us to tell you about everything we get into." She winked at Clark. "We're good at keeping secrets, aren't we?"
The boy's grin was far brighter than the sun.
______________-
Shout-out to LaCasta here, whose "First Encounters" was so much fun that I couldn't help but want to play.
Babysitter
"Um, honey, in case you haven't noticed, I'm bleeding to death here."
Martha loved her husband dearly, but there were times she just wanted to slap him senseless. However, after having the combine nearly cut his leg off probably wasn't the best time. She went back to punching through her phone list with a vengeance.
Clark's four-year-old eyes were terrified as he held on with his full strength (far stronger than she could have done, Martha thought, still dazed by the thought, even though she was pretty close to shrieking terror herself) to the compress on his dad's bloody leg. She had gone into automatic mode while she applied the tourniquet and bandage, trying not to throw up at the sight of her husband's mutilated leg. Clark had taken his cues from her -- not screaming, not crying, simply doing what she directed. The alien child was at least as scared as she was. But he did what needed to be done, as if he had been a farm hand as long as Jonathan had.
Martha had swallowed her own nausea to set a good example. "Do we dare take Clark to the hospital with us? Or leave him here alone?" Clark had been very apologetic about the milking machine. Jonathan had spent a long day in the field thinking about a child, who barely came up past his knees, who had crushed stainless steel in his hand. By accident.
"No. No." Jonathan closed his eyes. "Whatever, honey. Just hurry."
"Don't be hurt, daddy," the small voice whispered.
Jonathan managed to lift his hand to the boy's head. They'd already discovered that the child-soft skin could turn a knife, and that open flame meant the same thing to him as warm dirt did. (As in, So?) The tiny child was all but invulnerable. (There had been episodes of screaming terrified curled-up agony here and there, but neither of them could figure out why, or what was causing him to be suddenly horribly sick and then perfectly okay again five minutes later. Duh, the boy had showed up in a meteor storm with a spaceship. Where's the rule book?)
"It's just for a little while," he said faintly. "The doctors will take care of me, and I'll be back home and fine again in a few days."
"Don't leave me." The little boy put enough pressure on Jonathan's leg that he grunted.
"I will never leave you," Jonathan said as firmly as he could manage. "I just have to go get fixed up. Like the machines." Oh hells, now Clark was going to think of his parents as breakable, like the machines that shattered in his hands. The kid was still so scared to be left alone that he wouldn't go to the bathroom by himself. Wherever he was from, whatever he was, he had obviously been sent away and abandoned. "It's," he pronounced the word carefully, "Maintenance."
"Mane-tane-ance," Clark repeated dutifully.
"That's right. Like putting oil in the tractor."
"Oil?" Clark touched the seeping blood doubtfully. His other hand absently continued to provide a tourniquet that no human being could have matched.
"People oil." Jonathan tried to muster some amusement through the fact that he had, indeed, lost an awful lot of blood, and was in serious pain, and going into shock.
The child sitting next to him was from another planet. Match THAT for shock.
"I don't unner-stand," Clark said doubtfully. "Is that one of the other-people things?"
"No, honey." Martha put down the phone. "Your daddy is hurting. That's why he's not making much sense. You remember when you feel hurt? It's hard to think when you're hurt, right?"
Clark shuddered. "Hurting is bad."
"Yes, it is. That's what the word means. Now, can you help me carry your daddy to the car? I need to take him to get fixed."
"I can carry daddy," Clark said confidently, and lifted Jonathan as if he were a kitten. Martha and Jonathan exchanged horrified, terrified, amazed looks. Jonathan took the easy way out by fainting. Martha kept a smile plastered on her face, and her eyes frozen on the picture of a four-year-old carrying a full-grown, 220-pound man.
The beat-to-hell Volkswagon came screeching into the Kent farm just as Martha managed to settle Jonathan on to the back seat. Martha fought the blood pressure spike, not to faint herself. If Jane had seen Clark casually handing her husband over....
Clark scowled at the orange and rust beetle. "Who is that?" he demanded, paranoia already ingrained by eighteen months of living on Earth.
"That's a friend of mine, Clark," Martha said gently. "She's here to make sure you're okay while I take your daddy to get fixed up."
Clark gave her a look that said as clearly as words, take care of ME? "What about...?" he said cautiously.
Martha really seriously wanted to put her fist through a wall, but she didn't want to give her adopted son any ideas. Her husband was bleeding to death, and her extra-terrestrial child was terrified. "Just be a good boy," she said urgently, catching him up in a hug as tight as she could manage. Which he probably barely felt, she reflected unhappily. "Jane is just here to make sure there's no big problems while your daddy is getting fixed up." Turning to the short woman in torn-up shorts and stained t-shirt, she added hastily, "Jane, this is our son, Clark. I told you about adopting him. He's kind of -- special. Just give me a call at the hospital if the house burns down or anything, okay? I have to go now if Jon is going to keep his leg."
"I know, I got the picture. Get gone." The red-gray-haired woman shoved Martha hard enough to stagger her. "We'll get along. Don't worry. Any kid of yours is a kid of mine."
Jonathan chose that minute to throw up blood. That got Martha moving.
The car tore out of the driveway -- Martha had learned to drive in the city -- and Jane sat down in the dirt beside the smudged preschooler. She held out her hand gravely. "Hi, Clark. I'm a friend of you mommy's. My name is Jane."
Clark looked at her suspiciously. "I'm supposed to call grown up people by the other name. Mommy says that's po, polite."
"Well, your mommy is right." Jane sat back, stretching. "But your mommy is a good friend of mine. And my last name is long and hard to say. So you can just call me Jane."
"Oh. Okay." Clark sat down with her. "Why is your last name hard to say?"
"Because I'm not from this country, Clark. Do you know what that means?"
"Yeah," Clark confided. "I'm not from here either."
"Yeah? Where are you from?"
"I dunno. A long way away. Where are you from?"
Well, duh, Jane thought, the kid was barely old enough to be speaking English as a second language. They probably never would tell him want country he'd been adopted from. Though he looked pretty Anglic. One of the ex-Soviet countries? Not with those eyes, she bet. "I'm from a place where people were fighting," she said gently, as befits talking about war to small children. "My mommy and daddy left to get away from the fighting. And I came here, and met your mommy, when we were little girls. We used to play in the dirt together." Jane picked up a clod of dirt, and dropped it in Clark's lap. He looked alarmed until she chuckled at him, at which point he giggled back. "What kind of games do you like to play, Clark?"
"Playing in dirt is fun," he said, with eyes so soulful that beagles would have traded places. "Mommy and daddy don't let me do it."
Not because he got dirty, but because he broke the water main the last time he played dig-a-hole against Scout, their sheep dog.
"Well, I won't tell if you don't. Let's make some mud puddles. And roll in them."
Clark looked alarmed. "I can't." Jonathan had given him a Very Serious Talk for coming through the door covered with mud. THROUGH the door. Proud of himself. At about thirty miles an hour.
"Why not? Do you get sick?" Martha had mentioned that the boy was -- well, the phrase she had used when she had called Jane in a panic was "JaneHelp JonathanDamnNearCutHisLegOff And I Can'tTrustAnyoneElseWithClark." He didn't seem to be retarded, despite his evasiveness with words, and he looked healthy enough. Though appearances, Jane knew too well, could be deceiving. She looked healthy enough herself.
"Sometimes." Clark seemed cautious about that admission, as if he'd been told not to talk about it. "Not from mud. But daddy gets mad when I get dirty."
"Ooh-ooh." Jane nodded. "I bet you went into the house all muddy."
"Um. Yeah." Daddy had also told him not to talk about the door. There was so much he wasn't supposed to talk about, he couldn't keep it all straight sometimes.
"Well, that's because your mommy likes to keep her house all neat and clean. Mud is for OUT side. So long as we stay OUT side, we can get as muddy as we want. But we have to get cleaned up before we go IN side."
The boy considered that, frowning in concentration, then he nodded. "That makes sense." As opposed to so many other things that didn't make sense, like why bother with so many things that broke so easily.
"So let's make some mud pies. Would your daddy mind if we used the rain barrel?"
"Nah." Clark's actual facility with English, owing to a near perfect memory and a processing speed that would have fried an EEG, was coming back as he relaxed a little around the new lady. Clark actually was reading on a third-grade level already, which was just one more thing that mommy and daddy had told him not to talk about, which confused him even more. "It's got mosquito larvae in it. Daddy was going to dump it out today anyway."
Jane blinked. A kid too young to be speaking English as a second language very well had just said "mosquito larvae."
"Well, since your daddy isn't going to be doing any heavy work until his leg gets better, we'll just save him the trouble and do it for him, okay? That way we'll actually be helping him. And we can have some fun at the same time. And he never even has to know that we were having fun. We'll just say we were helping."
The kid's grin could outshine the sun. "I can keep secrets!"
Jane laughed and they went to go tip over the rain barrel. Jane let Clark pretend to help. She was astonished at how easily the hundreds of gallons of water went over. Even with her still-trained gymnast's muscles, she had expected to have to brace herself and give it the same kind of effort that a big farmhand like Jonathan would have had to put into it.
Several dozen mud pies later (Jane had allowed Clark to eat one -- she and Martha had eaten mud pies too, although it had been a rather higher quality of mud, and Jane knew enough sports medicine to understand that humans were tougher than usually believed), Clark declared, unbelievably, that he was bored with mud. Jane looked them both over critically. "We're too dirty to go in the house. What else do you like to play outside?"
Clark looked down and toed the mud. Most of what he liked to do, like race the dogs and jump the fence, was on the "don't tell anybody" list. "I dunno."
"Would you like to learn some new tricks?" He was a little young for gymnastics, but teaching the kids was about the only thing that made her life worth living any more.
Clark looked at her warily. "Only if it's an other-people-can-do-it trick."
Now what the hell did THAT mean? "Well, SOME other people can do it. Some of it takes a lot of practice, though. If you don't like it, just tell me, and we'll think of something else to do." She stood up, and stretched, and did a fast front roll in the mud, coming back to her feet on her toes out of long habit. She smiled at Clark. "The easy way is to start on your hands and knees, like this." She demonstrated a child's somersault, collecting more mud.
Clark narrowed his eyes. Jane did not know, of course, that she was dealing with an eidetic memory and rather more than human sensory capability. "I like the first way better," he decided, and copied her motions exactly, from the stretch to the upright stance.
Jane forcibly shut her mouth before it collected flies. "That's, that's very good. Did your mommy teach you that?" Martha had been a fair-to-middling gymnast herself.
"No." The boy's eyes retreated again, as if he were scared of having done something good. "I just did what you did. Is that an other-people trick?"
Okay, we are going to get to the bottom of this right now. I can't babysit this kid if I keep scaring him. "What do you mean by 'other-people'?"
Now the kid definitely looked terrified, and on the verge of bolting. Jane put out a hand to catch him, not knowing how close she came to losing her arm. "Clark, don't be afraid. I told you, I come from another country. Sometimes I have problems understanding. Can you help me understand? Pretend you have to talk to me like I don't know what you're saying."
Unknowingly, Jane had hit exactly the right chord. Clark's spaceship's programming in Earth languages had been pretty rudimentary. He could get by in any language extant for the last hundred years, but not well, and not comfortably, and he was as aware of what he couldn't do as of what he could.
Clark still looked scared, but not terrified. "I'm not like other people," he mumbled.
Jane sat down in the mud. "I'm not like other people either, Clark," she said gently.
Clark's eyes went wide. "You're not?" he said gleefully. "Are you like me?"
"No." At Clark's crestfallen look, she shook her head with a sad smile. "You're a little boy, and I'm a grown woman. How could we be like each other?"
"Oh." Clark went solemn, and nodded. "I didn't think about that." With a shy sideways look, that might have been a child's attempt to sneak information he wasn't supposed to have, "Can you do things? That other people can't?"
Does coming in fourth in the Olympics count? Does surviving three years after the doctors had given you six months to live count? Does having to pull the plug on your own two-week-old son count? Yes, she could definitely sympathize with not being like "other people." The question remained, though ... how could such a little boy know about the isolation of being so different, and having so much you just didn't talk about, no matter what country he came from? "Yes, Clark, I can do things most people can't. Want me to teach you some of them?"
"If I don't get in trouble," Clark said, habitual caution coming back into play.
"I don't think you'll get in trouble for learning new things." Jane stood up. "You did good at a front roll. Let's try a cartwheel."
Not surprisingly, Clark stunk at cartwheels. Hand-hand-foot-foot is a matter of careful coordination, and no amount of strength will make up for the fact that young children are still learning right from left and up from down. (Clark would stink at cartwheels for the rest of his life, have no inherent appreciation of up from down. Fortunately, Batman and Robin and Nightwing never challenged him to a gymnastics contest.)
Jane swallowed hard when the four-year old mastered an aerial somersault on the second try. She'd been showing off, not expecting anything except his delighted "Whee!" She had never heard of a child that young with the strength to do it himself.
Clark had trouble with back rolls. Also not surprising, Jane had always had a hard time getting her head out of the way herself as a child, and had learned the handstand version to get around the problem with training. Fortunately Clark was still too uncoordinated to manage a handstand-flip back roll, or she would have been in for another rude shock. As it was, his attempt landed them both back in the mud puddle, with much laughter.
There was a low branch on the tree just around the barn that was perfect for demonstrating how to get your head out of the way. Jane showed him how to do a balance-beam back roll, and then, after cautioning Clark that balance beams were for "sissy girls, not boys," steadied him in mastering the art. She was pretty sure Clark took some damage to the between-the-legs area on the first few tries, but he didn't complain.
And then she did something very, very stupid, unknowingly, but stupid. She was living on borrowed time, she didn't much care about herself. But she should have been thinking about the little boy she was babysitting.
Jane jumped from the lower branch to a higher one, caught it in an easy kip, swung around, and did a back-flip dismount, staggering only a little when her knees gave. Oh, for the good old days. Teaching the kids was all that kept her going. It hurt to move much, any more. But damn if she was going to quit.
In front of a child, with a perfect physical memory and no concept of being injured.
Clark concentrated on the branch she had caught, replaying her motions to himself, smiled happily, and jumped.
With a small child's coordination, and superhuman strength.
Jane didn't have time to scream before Clark hit the branch.
The CRACK! of the branch breaking covered the "Oof!" Clark made as he hit it, but not his shriek as he landed on the ground and it fell on top of him. Jane made it to his side in less than a second, more scared than she'd ever been in a fairly unpleasant and challenging life.
Clark was sitting up, his face contorted with tears and fear, staring at the tree. "Uh-oh," he whispered.
Not "ouch." Not cries of pain. A look of terror. A ripped shirt. A hundred-pound or so branch that he had unthinkingly pushed off of him as he sat up. No blood. A small "Uh-oh."
Okay, we are OFFICIALLY going to get to the bottom of this.
"Clark." Very firmly, the tone she used with her own doctors. "Are you hurt?"
The wet and terrified face he turned to her said that he would have run and hidden if he could have quit trembling long enough to get his feet under him. She folded him in her arms instinctively. She didn't care if he could have -- as she was beginning to suspect -- done her some serious injury. (The rain barrel. The aerial flips. The tree. Marty, just how far away did your adopted son come from? I don't think they raise them this strong even in Siberia.)
She'd never been able to even hold her own son. She wasn't about to let this one go.
"It's okay, shh, don't worry," she murmured, along with similar nonsense words in six other languages. "It's not your fault. It was just a rotten old tree branch. The only thing that matters is that you're safe. You're a brave little boy. Just be more careful. It's okay."
"You won't tell?" Clark sniffled and wiped at his eyes.
"You think I would tell your mother that I was clumsy and silly?" Jane ruffled his hair. "And dumb? No way! We can put that old branch over there in the wood pile, and no one will know what happened. We're just helping out while your dad has a hurt leg. Right?"
Clark thought about that for a long time. Technically, it was a lie. Mommy was always telling him not to lie to them. But he had to lie to other people. But Jane was mommy's friend. Jane was asking him to tell a lie to mommy. It was confusing.
"Do we have to lie?" he said in a small voice.
"Clark. I am the grown-up. I will tell your mom the truth. It was my fault. You don't have to worry, and you don't have to lie. You didn't do anything wrong. You just tried to do something you weren't ready for yet. Like the cartwheels, right?"
Clark relaxed a little in her arms. "I'm not very good at cartwheels, am I?"
Jane hugged him. "No, you're not. That's an other-people trick."
Clark managed a small chuckle. "Are there lots of other-people tricks?"
"Oh yes. Many many. You'll learn some when you grow up. Some of them you never will learn. But that's okay too. You're a boy and I'm a girl, remember?"
"Yeah, I know. Daddy's a boy and mommy's a girl. Daddy can't cook worth a damn."
Jane gave a shout of laughter. "Now that, Clark, is something you should not say in front of your mommy and daddy. I will keep it a secret. Along with the mud pies."
"Daddy says it all the time."
"Your daddy is a big boy and you are still a little boy. And some boys can cook. Just not all of them. Some boys do other things, like grow the food, or make the machines." Clark decided that was simple enough, nodded, and snuggled, seeking comfort. Jane grew contemplative for a minute. "Almost everyone does not-like-other-people things, did you know that? Everybody has something they're good at, and something they're not good at. Not everyone can do cartwheels, or cook, any more than they can be real strong and real tough."
"Not supposed to tell," Clark muttered into her shirt.
"You're not supposed to say 'damn' either, little one. Don't worry. It will be easier to understand when you get older."
"Like daddy?"
"Exactly like daddy. Although he does things he shouldn't sometimes too. Like, I bet he did something dumb to get himself hurt."
Clark sniffled for a moment at the thought, but then got himself together the way he had seen Martha do under pressure, and gave her a small smile. "Mommy says daddy does stupid things a lot of times." Conspiratorily: "She says he's stubborn."
"I bet he is. But he doesn't tell you about the stupid things he does, does he?"
"No. Mommy does. When she's talking to herself." Clark did not know he wasn't supposed to be able to hear Martha's subvocal commentary, because she had never known he could hear it to tell him that he shouldn't talk about it. But then, most children hear things they aren't supposed to, so that wasn't particularly suspicious.
Jane snickered. "Your mommy always did talk to herself, even when we were little girls. I would ask her what she was muttering about, and she would say "nothing." Which was sort of a lie, right? But it was more like just something she wanted to keep to herself. A secret. Something personal."
Clark tilted his head, and this time Jane had a pretty good idea what he was thinking about. Secrets. Lies. Being a baby from very far away. Being lectured by that stubborn preacher-wanna-be farmer that she couldn't believe Marty had married. Being doted on by her old friend, the smart popular girl whose life had fallen apart, who had never let anyone else except Jane into her painful secrets, and that only because she knew that Jane -- her real name determinedly left behind during her escape from the massacre -- understood about having parts of your life that you'd really rather never talk about.
Clark, she was pretty sure, already understood that he had secrets to keep, and already didn't like having to think of himself as a liar.
She leaned closer to him. "Secrets are different from lies, you know," she said, mock sotto voce. "Lies are what we tell people if we've done something bad. Secrets are what we keep to ourselves because they're nobody else's business. Does that make sense?"
Clark frowned, considering. "Like saying we're helping when we're playing?"
"We're helping AND we're playing. It's nobody' else's business if we're having fun while we help. We're not lying. We're just not telling anyone else that we're having fun while we're doing good." Marty, I am going to send you a tape of Mary Poppins, see if I don't. If the kid turns out to be able to fly with an umbrella, well, it's your fault for not warning me.
Clark finally accepted that and nodded, smiling that sun-bright smile. "So it's okay to keep secrets. Secrets aren't really lies."
"Well, you'll have to get older and ask your dad about that. It's complicated."
The smile vanished, replaced by a worried look. "How?"
Jane berated herself for that offhand comment. She wasn't about to try to go into that topic, no matter how quick the kid was. "It has to do with politics, honey. Something you don't have to worry about until you're old enough to vote."
"Oh." The boy's face cleared. "Daddy says all politicians are damn liars."
Jane threw back her head and laughed again. "I bet he does. And he's pretty much right. But you're not supposed to say "damn," Clark. That's a big-people word, not a small-people word. Just like there are other-people things. You can do things I can't do, and I can do things you can't do, and your daddy can say things you shouldn't say. You can say them when you get old enough to vote, okay?"
"Can I say all the other-people things when I get old enough to vote?"
Jane looked into his eyes, very seriously. Can you, kid? Can you ever tell anyone just how special you are? Just how "not from around here" you are? "When you're old enough to vote," she said seriously, "then you're old enough to make your own decisions. You can decide then. Until then," she grinned at him, "I will keep it a secret that you said a big-people word, because it didn't hurt anybody, and it's nobody else's business, okay? And you can tell daddy about it yourself when you're old enough to vote."
Clark nodded solemnly. "Then it won't be a lie. It will just be a secret for awhile."
"Yeah." For the rest of your life, child. If what I'm thinking is anywhere close to the truth, I hope to hell no one else ever finds out. "We can keep secrets. Like the mud pies. And the cartwheels. And all the other-people things. Until you're old enough to vote." She hugged him, and Clark threw his arms around her neck, face beaming.
The championship gymnast blessed her trained muscles and lungs for preventing Clark from suffocating or crushing her.
Clark lifted his head. "I hear the car. Is daddy okay?"
How am I supposed to know? And what does he mean, he hears the car? I don't hear any car. And how does he know which car? Marty, you and I are going to have a LONG talk about this "not like other people" business. "I'm sure he is. He'll probably be sleepy and tired for awhile. Maybe he'll let us help do some of the work around here until he's better, huh?"
"That would be fun. Then we could get all dirty and mommy wouldn't be mad, because we'd be doing real stuff."
"That's a good idea! Since we're all dirty already, let's pretend we're doing some work when your mom gets home." She pointed to the broken tree branch. "Want to help me carry that over to the wood pile?"
She was holding herself very carefully as she said it. The kid was obviously terrified of letting anyone know that he was, what was the proper word? unusual. But he also obviously honestly wanted to do whatever he could to help. It must be terribly hard for him, to be so capable and not be allowed to show it.
Worse, maybe, than the secrets she had kept to herself all these years, about the war, and the failures, and the child who should never have been born.
Clark measured her with his eyes, then nodded. A four year old bearing a burning secret. Jane smiled at him hopefully, encouragingly, hoping he couldn't read minds as well.
"I can do it myself," he said finally.
Martha drove up to the house just in time to see a dirt-covered Clark carrying a branch ten times his size over to the wood pile. And a dirt-covered Jane was watching him with her arms folded. "We'll have to break it in half to make it fit," Jane remarked critically, at which Clark frowned, nodded, and cracked the two-inch-thick piece of wood in half like a twig.
Jane applauded. Clark beamed at the approval. Martha thanked God that Jonathan was still in the hospital and drugged out of his mind.
Jane turned around as if she'd just noticed the car coming up. "Oh, hi, Marty! How's your man? He looked pretty tore up, but he's a tough guy."
"He's okay." Martha got out and submitted to a yell of "Mommy, mommy, mommy!" and an embrace that nearly broke her spine. "He'll be in the hospital overnight, but if I know Jonathan, he'll have caused so much trouble by tomorrow afternoon that the nurses will be begging to get him out."
"Yep, sounds like your man. Obviously your boy here takes after him."
Martha went very still, and Clark gave her a worried look. "Was Clark any trouble?"
"You mean, aside from trying to teach him cartwheels? Don't enroll him in my gymnastics class. The other kids would have a fit." Which could mean any number of things, Martha thought. "We'll just keep up with the private lessons, if that's okay with you."
"Can I, mommy? I can do a somersault real good already." He demonstrated.
An actual somersault is one of the aerial maneuvers. Martha gulped.
"Very good, Clark," Jane said calmly. "Be careful how you land. Land on your toes, balance, and roll back on your heels. It looks better that way."
"Show me?"
"I'm kind of tired right now. Maybe tomorrow, when your mom goes to pick up your dad."
"Okay. Mommy, we dumped out the rain barrel for daddy too. He said he was going to, anyway. We just got a little muddy." Clark tried hard to look apologetic.
"It was my idea, Marty. It looked like it was about to hatch some mosquitoes. Clark just helped." She gathered the little boy into a hug, and felt that incredible strength when he hugged back. "Clark is quite the little helper. You must be really proud of him."
Martha caught the quietly warning tone in her old friend's voice, though it was too subtle for the child. She hoped. "Yes, we are. Of course we are." Clark's face lit up, and he hugged her again. Martha made a note to buy more aspirin.
"He's the best little boy anyone could want," Jane said softly, fondly. She had never told Martha what happened to her own son, but she suspected that her old friend knew. Martha had been the lucky one, never being able to conceive in the first place. Not having to carry hope for three-fourths of a year. And have to sign the papers to allow him -- it -- what little and awful bit of it there was -- die.
Clark caught Jane's hand and tried to hug both women at once. The farm woman and the athlete both bit their lips to keep from protesting the crushed muscles. Martha met Jane's eyes worriedly, and saw the knowledge there in her reassuring smile.
"I'll be happy to babysit your boy any time." Jane leaned down and chucked Clark under the chin, smiling, determining to do whatever it took to stay alive long enough to keep Martha from having to find any other babysitters.
"Just don't expect us to tell you about everything we get into." She winked at Clark. "We're good at keeping secrets, aren't we?"
The boy's grin was far brighter than the sun.
______________-
Shout-out to LaCasta here, whose "First Encounters" was so much fun that I couldn't help but want to play.