Disclaimer: Jericho is not mine.
Skylar
Her father was a good man; her mother was a nice woman. She clings to those words in the back of her mind even as she realizes that was has replaced is in the parts of her thoughts that are shoved down so deep that she can still pretend that she does not really have them. She always uses is when she speaks of them out loud. She defends them against any perceived slights with her words; her eyes were practically begging for the acknowledgement from Mrs. Carmichael as they stood negotiating over price in the store.
They have always been nice people. They were always reasonably good parents. They still left her behind. It wasn't just because of the bombs. They had been leaving her behind for a long time before the bombs ever came. There had always been business trips where her presence wasn't needed. There had always been couple's vacations where her presence wasn't wanted. They had things to do. They had places to be, and a child in tow hadn't always been a part of their plans. Being a teenager hadn't made any difference in the number of times in a year that the two of them packed their bags and left without her - it just meant that they no longer left someone to watch her while they were gone.
It wasn't so bad. She hadn't been neglected. It wasn't as if they hadn't wanted her. It was just that they hadn't always wanted her with them. She would pout, they would insist, and she had an entire shelf in her bedroom devoted to souvenirs that were supposed to soothe her wounded feelings and make it up to her that she hadn't been invited along. Pretty, impractical things were brought back as offerings in exchange for the missing time.
That was their pattern - that was their life. She had never known the world any other way. The bombs hadn't taken her parents away (they were always going away); they just stopped them from coming back. It took her a long time to wrap her mind around that. They had always come back before. There had been one time when she was five that their return flight had been cancelled because of bad weather. She remembered that one clearly because it had been two days before her sixth birthday.
There had been a conference or something of the sort, and her mother had gone with her father just as she always had done. They had called and talked to her babysitter first before she had demanded that the phone be given to her. She had been placated by her mother's reassurance that they were coming home soon - they were just going to be a little late. They had finally arrived at nearly ten at night on her birthday. She had been awake and plastered to the window - nothing that the name now forgotten babysitter had said being able to prevail upon her to leave her vigil. They had promised not to miss her birthday, and they, technically, hadn't.
She spent the initial days while everyone else was coming to terms with the fact that a nuclear bomb had gone off in that same haze of vigil keeping. She had been that little girl again refusing to listen to anything or anybody waiting for the first glimpse of her parents coming home.
It hadn't worked this time, and it had left her angry. There were no gift bearing parents each morning when she woke. There were no apologizing for being late parents slipping into her room at night when she tried to go to sleep. There was no souvenir to add to her shelf. There was no mother to tell her that pouting was unattractive. There was no father to tell her that there best have been no boys about while he was away. There was just nothing. There was just no one. That was wrong - there was Dale.
He was always looking at her, and she hated it. It made her angry and irritated and she wanted to scream at him at the top of her lungs to just quit looking at her. He knew. She could handle anyone in the whole stupid town looking at her except for him because when he looked at her she just knew that he knew. He was seeing all the things that she wasn't saying. He was seeing all the things that she would never, ever say out loud. How could he not? He'd been left behind too.
She sold her mother's jewelry box and regretted it the moment she walked out of the store - not because she hadn't wanted to get rid of it. She was angry enough by then that she wanted some way, any way to strike back at the parents she couldn't yell at, couldn't give the silent treatment to, and couldn't even see any more. She regretted it because she had seen the little self-satisfied smirk that Gracie Leigh had tried to hide as she turned to walk away, and she knew what the old bat was thinking.
She always knew what that woman was thinking - Mrs. Leigh had never taken much trouble to hide the fact that she thought she was a spoiled brat. She, in turn, had never taken much trouble to hide the fact that she thought Mrs. Leigh was an overbearing busybody who overcharged for second rate junk - but the trials of finding durable lip gloss in the near to negligible selection of the older woman's shop were a thing of the past. The fact that Mrs. Leigh thought she was a spoiled brat who was throwing away family heirlooms because she had no sense of their value was a thing of the present, and it grated on her nerves that the woman presumed to know anything about her - that she thought she was stupid annoyed her; that she thought that she was actually naive enough to think that a case of soda for one of her mother's prized possessions was anything like to a fair trade was irritating.
A part of her fully expected her mother to be waiting in their living room when she got home to chew her out. That didn't work either. Nothing worked, but she didn't know for sure. She didn't know anything for sure. They might be dead; they might be on their way back. She might never know one way or the other what had happened to them. She didn't think that Dale would see it that way, but there were days when she felt like he was lucky because he, at least, knew. He wasn't waiting for someone who might never be coming back. He wasn't teetering back and forth between being hopeful that they were coming, being petrified that they weren't, and being angry that they were taking so long.
Some days she wondered why they had never thought ahead far enough to make any plans. People could say all they wanted about how no one could have seen the bombs coming, but her parents had been travelers. They were always going somewhere, and they were always going together. Planes used to crash, drunk drivers used to hit people, and a hundred other things had always been possibilities that had apparently never occurred to them. There was never any mention of guardians, she never found any papers, and no one ever came to her to say that her parents had asked them to look out for her.
Her mother had said to her the week before they left that she was sixteen not twenty seven, and she needed to remember that. That was ironic since her parents didn't seem to have bothered to remember that. Either they had never bothered to make arrangements, or whomever they had made arrangements with had left her behind as well.
That was the real reason she had asked Dale to take her with him the first time he had gone off to try to enforce the contracts for the store. She didn't want to be left behind. She was tired of being left behind. She had almost cried when he got into the car for the trading trip at the fairgrounds, but she had held the tears back. She was still a Stevens, and public breakdowns weren't their style. She wasn't going to be clingy. She wasn't going to beg to be included in trips where her presence wasn't required. She had already learned that lesson; she had been learning that lesson all her life. It didn't work. It didn't get you included. It didn't ensure that the people leaving you would be coming back again.
She knew that, and Dale knew that - even though they never said the words out loud. They didn't need to say the words out loud. Dale knew being left, she knew being left, and maybe that's why the two of them worked so well.