Disclaimer: All recognizable characters and settings are property of their lawful owners. This story is written for entertainment purposes only and no profit is made. No copyright infringement intended.
Spoilers: Knowledge of episodes up to Beneath the Surface is required but no specific spoilers.
Timeline: The universe of this story goes AU little after Beneath the Surface. This story is told from the POV of Sam & Jack's daughter years later and has almost nothing to do with the canon timeline.
Genres: Family
Rating: T
Pairing: Sam/Jack is the base on which this story builds but it's not present in this story all that much.
A/N: I just can't let go of this universe. This is the third part/side of the story that started with Home Is Where Half of Your Heart Is. This one covers about the same time as It Means Home Or Together.
I haven't traveled all that much and most of the mentions about countries are very stereotypical. I apologize for that.
I had two main reasons to write this: explain how Gracie actually found Jack AND show that her childhood wasn't as bad as it seemed when seen through Sam's eyes. Gracie remembers the good days where Sam remembers the bad ones.
Oh, one more thing. When I wrote Home Is Where Half of Your Heart Is, I simply assumed that all ex-hosts have naquadah in their bodies. It has been brought to my attention that apparently Jack doesn't have naquadah (or at least it was never mentioned) but I went with the idea of the original story. I also wanted Gracie to have flashes of Jolinar's memories but apparently that's not possible so I just cut those parts out.
Something You Know But Don't Say Out Loud
She has just learned to read, after her sixth birthday, and is desperately trying to find something to read. She read through most of the newspapers already though she doesn't really understand much about what they're saying and she doesn't know why there are so many pages about big men who kick a small ball around.
The boys play football in the yard but she has never seen any adults do it, ever. But there they are, in the newspaper, like they are heroes of some kind. And there's only a small article, fifty-seven words, she counted, about a fireman who rescued mother and her two sons from a burning house. It doesn't make much sense to the girl.
She read the newspapers, as well as the three books they got from the library. Actually she read the books twice but they're not that exciting. She needs to find better books next time. But she wants to read something now and Mommy is still sleeping so she can't ask. She searches the drawers instead. Maybe Mommy has hidden a book somewhere. She's very good at hiding things.
There it is, a purple book that looks very old and worn, hidden in the bottom of the middle drawer. The girl pulls it out, eager to read anything, but she doesn't recognize the language. It's her mother's handwriting, at least she thinks so. It looks familiar but the language isn't German. She tries to read the words out loud but they don't sound like Swedish, either. She never learned how to read Swedish, though, so she could be wrong. But she remembers a lot of letters with dots and rings over them and these letters don't have any of those. Why is her mother writing in language the girl doesn't speak? She shrugs and buries the book at the bottom of the drawer again. Maybe she'll read more about the heroes who can kick a small ball into a big net.
They just came home and had a quick dinner and now they're on Mommy's bed. Mommy has lifted her feet up because she says they hurt from long day in heels and the girl is sitting next to her, hugging her yellow teddy bear to her chest and babbling about her day.
Mommy's face hurts, too, from smiling at strangers, and now she's trying to make it feel better by making silly faces. It doesn't look like it feels better, though. The girl is also a little worried that Mommy doesn't smile as much home because she's used all her smiles for the day already.
The girl tries to make her face twist like Mommy does and Mommy laughs at her and pulls her into a hug. Who needs smiles when there's laughter? It's a lot better.
"My body tingles when you hug me," the girl mumbles. She noticed it long time ago but she hasn't said it out loud before. "Is that a secret, too?" she asks because most of the weird things she wonders about are secrets.
"Yes, honey," her mother says and kisses the girl's forehead. She doesn't sound like laughing anymore. She might be crying a little, the girl thinks, and it makes her sad.
"I like it," she says and hugs her Mommy a little tighter, hoping it will make her feel better. She can feel Mommy drawing the symbol on her back again. She doesn't really know what it is but it's familiar, it's hers. There aren't many things in this world that are hers.
It's her seventh birthday, her second seventh birthday. That's one cool thing about being a girl without name and home, sometimes she gets two birthdays the same year because every passport has a different date.
Her first birthday was in May but then they moved again and now her birthday is in September. She thinks her Mommy does it on purpose because she could have put February in the passport but she didn't. Her mother is the best mom in the whole world despite the fact that she can't cook very well. She's pretty and strong and will always keep her safe and though she works hard, she always has time for the girl.
"Blow the candles, honey," her mother urges and the girl realizes she got lost in thought for a bit too long.
"Je t'aime maman," she says and flashes a smile at her mother before she blows all seven candles and makes a wish that she'll meet her father soon.
Each language feels different in her mouth. She doesn't remember much about Swedish but she remembers it felt easy, and soft. She remembers that German used to tickle the back of her throat. French... French is still new but it feels like those sweet, pink, fluffy things they sell in fairs. She doesn't know a word for those in any of her languages and she thinks maybe mother doesn't, either, because she always says One of those if the girl wants one. The words are sweet and feel like they melt in her mouth. She thinks she likes French more than other languages.
She gets a kiss on the forehead from her mother and a big slice of the chocolate cake. Her mother didn't bake it, Josie did. Josie is good at things like that and the girl will miss her when they move again. She wonders if they could take Josie with them but she doesn't want to ask because she thinks it will make Mommy sad and she does her best not to make Mommy sad.
Lady at the bakery asks about her father. Everyone always asks about her father, even the girl herself. Her mother tells a different story for the strangers in every town. This time there is no father, there never has been. It's true and it hurts, a little more than she lets her mother know.
She likes the other stories better, the ones where her father is doing something so important that he can't stay with them but he loves them both very much. She likes to think that they're the true ones and this is just the story they tell to hide it. But she's a big girl now and it's not so easy to lie to herself anymore.
Mommy always tells her they're running because they need to stay safe, because it's not safe to stop. There's a girl in her school, Claire, who's running to stay safe as well because her father hit her and her mother. Claire's left hand doesn't work right because he broke it when she was little.
The girl was scared for a while after that, worried that they were running for the same reason, but she trusts her mother now. Mommy wouldn't lie to her, not at truth time. And she always tells the girl that her father is a good man but he doesn't know she exists. Good men don't hit people, right?
"Truth time?" she asks when she climbs into her mother's bed. She always makes it a question though she knows her mother will always say yes. It's more polite to ask than demand, she knows.
She doesn't like it when Mommy tells people she doesn't have a father. It makes her a little bit scared and she wants to hear again that her father is a good man. She wishes she knew more than that, so she asks her mother to tell about him again.
Mother tells about safe hands again and the girl feels better. She wonders what they would feel like holding her hand or giving her a hug. Safe, probably, she decides. He'd probably be very bad at board games, though. Hands that big can't be good at moving small pieces around.
She asks if he will be angry when he finds out he has a daughter. Mother says no. Mother always says that and the girl thinks that today she believes it more than before. But Mommy says that Daddy might be angry at her for not telling. But the girl isn't scared of that, either. A little sad but not scared. Because he's a good man with safe hands and Mommy trusts that he will never hurt her.
"I still don't know what he looks like," she sighs. Mother never tells her anything real, nothing that would help the girl put a face on the man. He's just something big and safe in her head.
"He has the darkest brown eyes I've ever seen," mother says, surprising the girl.
"Chocolate brown?" she asks, hesitantly. She doesn't want to ask too many questions because then mother will say it's enough and she can't tell more.
"Like that hot chocolate Josie makes, before she adds milk," mother says and the girl's eyes widen a little. She's thinking of that yummy hot chocolate but also the dark, glossy icing on her birthday cake because those were about the same color.
"That dark?" she asks just to be sure.
"That dark," mother agrees with a little nod and then talks about drowning in them but the girl doesn't really understand. Eyes are too small to drown in. Perhaps she means hot chocolate instead. Perhaps someone somewhere has drowned into a pool of hot chocolate.
She wants to ask about his mouth, what kind of lips he has, if his teeth show when he's smiling, and what his voice sounds like. She wants to ask if he kissed her like most daddies kiss mommies. But she doesn't want Mommy to say that's enough just yet so she asks something safer instead, something simple.
"And his hair?"
"It's short and brown with a bit of silver here and there," mother says and the girl is a little surprised because she always thought her father was the same age as her mom.
"He's old?"
"Older than me," mother says. "No numbers, Josephine."
The girl knows that's her clue to stop asking. She'll ask about his lips some other time. And maybe his nose. But she's noticed a long time ago that people are not very good at describing each other's noses. Graying hair and dark brown eyes. That's more than she's ever known before. She closes her eyes very tightly and tries to fit those features into that big mass of safe in her head.
She thinks her mother loves her father very much even though she never says the word love out loud when she speaks of him. The girl feels very clever all of a sudden when she realizes that she probably knows something her mother doesn't.
Mommy gets sad when she looks in the mirror but the girl doesn't understand why. She climbs to sit on the counter and watches how her mother applies make-up and combs her hair.
"Do you miss your dark hair?" the girl asks because she remembers that Mommy had brown hair before, dark brown in Sweden and light brown in Germany. Now she's blonde and the girl thinks she looks even prettier.
"No, honey. I miss being young."
"But you didn't have me when you were young."
"That's true," her mother says and pulls the girl into a hug. "And you're right. I don't really want to be younger. Because we are perfect, you and me."
"I like now," the girl says. "You're pretty, Mommy. The most prettiest mom on the whole planet."
Mommy smiles a new kind of smile, like the girl said something funny.
It's their second home in Spain, after her first ninth birthday, when the girl finally learns how to ride a bike. Bikes are too big to take with them when they move and Mommy doesn't make enough money to buy a new one in every town. But now her new best friend, Soledad, got a new bike for her birthday and gave the old one to the girl.
"We can't take it," Mommy said which was a stupid thing to say, the girl thinks.
"Please," her friend's mother pleaded. "It's not a new bike anymore. There's little bit of rust all over it. It's not in good enough condition to sell but I think it will last the few years before it's too small for Sofia. So either you take it or it goes to the dump."
So she got a bike. And her friend taught her how to ride it. Mommy helped a little, too, the girl has to admit. It's simple, really, driving a bike. It's just like the rest of her life: Keep going because if you stop moving, you'll get hurt. Sometimes she gets a little sad when she's on her bike but it's not too bad.
She gets a lot sadder because of the boys at school. They bully Soledad, call her with nasty names and shove her outside so that she hurts herself almost every week. And now they bully her, too, because she's friends with Soledad.
It's a weird name, Soledad. The girl can't understand why any parents would name their kid "loneliness". Mother tried to explain that it actually means solitude which is when you're alone but it's a good thing. The girl has never understood how being alone could be a good thing.
Soledad explained that her name comes from Virgin Mary who is probably someone very important. Mommy explains that she was the mother of Jesus and the girl asks if Virgin means the same as Mother because it sounds like a title instead of name and because those houses full of Jesus pictures have lots of Fathers who have no children. Mommy looks at her a little funny and says that no, virgin doesn't mean mother. But she doesn't explain more and the girl doesn't ask. She thinks perhaps it's another secret.
She misses her teddy bear every now and then. Hugging the pillow isn't as comforting but she never says it out loud, because that's how they are. She knows her mother misses things as well. She has left behind a lot more important things than a teddy bear, the girl's daddy, for example. For the first time the girl wonders if her mother has a mommy and daddy somewhere, too. She doesn't ask. It's a secret, that they miss things and places and people. Secret is when you know something but you don't say it out loud.
Hugging Mommy is almost as good as hugging her teddy bear. Except maybe better because Mommy hugs back and she has a heartbeat which is like a lullaby without words, always calms her down.
"The boys kicked Soledad today," she confesses. They have never kicked before, only shoved. But now they shoved and when she fell, they started kicking. The girl got one kick in the side as well when she tried to protect her friend.
She cries a little and Mommy holds her close. Her one hand is stroking the girl's hair and the other is drawing that familiar symbol on her back with the tip of her finger. She knows what it is now, it's half a sun and half a heart together. Mommy says it means I wish good things for you but the girl likes to think of it as her name that doesn't have a word.
Mother comes to the school with her the next day. They get Soledad, too, and tell everything to the teachers. They don't need to see the boys ever again. She feels better.
She's twelve when they move to UK. She knows some English already but not enough to hold a conversation. She learns fast, though, she always has. She thinks that maybe this time she should just pretend she doesn't get it, can't grasp the exceptions and how the pronunciation makes no sense because same letters are said differently based on a million little things. Maybe they would stop moving if she stopped learning.
But then one night, when she feels scared and little again and crawls into her mother's bed in the middle of the night, she catches her talking in her sleep and recognizes the language as English. Mommy only speaks French here, making the girl act as her translator though she never really understood why.
She realized at some point that her mother had a life before, a real name, a home and probably friends as well, before she left and started running. She felt sad then because she had always thought that Mommy is the only one who knows what it's like but she realized that it's not true. She has never had anything permanent, not even a name. She's whoever she needs to be to stay safe. A chameleon, she likes to think. Mommy was something else first before she became a chameleon.
She knew her mother had a past, a story she wasn't sharing with her daughter. But now, for the first time, the girl thinks that perhaps she could piece that story together on her own. She has the first piece. Then she remembers the diary she found years ago but couldn't understand back then and realizes that maybe she has two.
She hates airplanes. She comes to that conclusion when they're sitting in the old, Soviet-era tin can somewhere over Siberia. Mommy says it was probably a cargo plane during the war, a very reliable machine she says, but she squeezes the girl's hand almost tight enough to hurt when the plane shakes again.
The right engine seems shut down at one point, the propellers slowing down enough that the girl can see them instead of the swirl of motion they are supposed to look like. But it starts again, with a big puff of black smoke.
"Can we take the train next time?" the girl asks. "I don't care if it takes a week or two."
Mother doesn't comment but she squeezes the girl's hand and she gets the impression that she agrees.
At Russia she doesn't need to pretend she doesn't understand the language. Hell, she can't even get the alphabet. She's fourteen and she would have liked to stay in UK because she was starting to feel normal there. She had friends and for a while she could just worry about cute boys and make-up instead of running and staying safe.
Deep down she always knew it wouldn't last but she's getting tired of running, tired of being anyone instead of someone. She wants to be angry at her mom but when she looks at her, she knows her mother probably hates herself more than the girl ever could. Mommy is all she has and it's not really her fault that their life is messed up.
They only stay six months. That's about four and a half too long, at least for her. Especially because it's winter. She has to admit that people are nice, though, and the food it great. She just doesn't get the language at all and it's cold as hell. That doesn't really make sense, though, because it's not particularly cold in hell. Cold as a freezer. Except it's even colder than that some mornings.
In UK, the whole country was in chaos if there were a few centimeters of snow. Schools were closed, traffic was hell, nothing worked. Here, in the small Russian village in the middle of nowhere, people were panicking for weeks because there wasn't enough snow. They couldn't get the snowmobiles going and the ice on the lake was too thin to open the ice road that shortens the distance to the closest big city and hospital by hours.
Finally the ice got thick enough but the girl can't imagine ever being sick enough to choose the ice road over the regular to get to the hospital.
She rarely gets homesick, mostly because they don't stay long enough in one place for it to feel home, but she's homesick now. It's not as specific as with most people, though. She misses the mild winters and the warm summers. Perhaps France, she always felt the most comfortable there. Spain was a little too warm and UK was a little too windy at times.
It's the first time the girl suggests it's time to leave. She brings their suitcases to the living room and sits there, with her jacket on, when her mother comes home from work.
"I'm done with this country," she informs her in English. "I don't care where we go, I'm leaving."
"Give me an hour," mother says. It's amazing how she manages that every time. In an hour the place changes from home to something else. They burn all the papers of this life in the fireplace, pack their extra clothes in plastic bags and write a letter to the landlord that they had to leave in a hurry and all their belongings can be donated to anyone who needs them. Mother always leaves a little more money on the table than is necessary, to make sure they don't try to find them.
"Where to?" the girl asks when they're standing at the railway station. She's surprised to see the sparkle back in her mother's eyes that have been empty for too long.
"I was thinking India," she whispers in the girl's ear.
Warm, colorful and spicy, those are the first three words that come to mind when she thinks of India. Sounds like heaven after all the ice and snow, not that she believes in heaven.
"Sounds like a plan," the girl agrees.
The change in pace is incredible. It was so cold in the Russian village that even time seemed to freeze but in Mumbai everything is vibrant and colorful, the hot air filled with car horns and chatter. It feels like the world around them is fast forwarding itself and they're frozen in the middle, in black and white in the middle of the colorful world around them.
"Where to?" the girl asks when they've been standing outside airport for a long while, looking like lost tourists.
"Food," mother says right away. "Then we need to find a place to stay."
They stay three nights in a nice hotel, something they don't usually do, then go through their belongings and ditch everything that's not absolutely essential before they take the first train somewhere. The crowded trains almost make the girl change her mind about flying but there are no flights to where they're going. Not that they know where that is.
It's the first time they don't even try to fit in. They're simply tourists, backpacking around the country for a couple of months. They change their backstory a little every time somebody bothers to ask because they don't need an airtight one this time, they're constantly on the move.
On week three the girl notices her mother seems to laugh more and her smiles reach all the way to her eyes again. Maybe this was all it took, a little adventure, some good curry and tons of fresh fruits bought from markets. But the girl knows they can't keep doing this forever, it's just a vacation.
They speak English with a Russian or French accent most of the time but sometimes, when mother has to whisper or when she's very tired, she slips into something that sounds almost like an American accent. The girl adds it to her box of puzzle pieces she's trying to put together.
Every now and then, when mother falls asleep early, she manages to take a peek at the diary as well. Mother keeps it in the side pocket of her backpack and the girl thinks that perhaps she does that on purpose, maybe she wants the girl to read it. Probably not consciously but maybe there's a part of her that wants the girl to know her story. She feels a little better about reading the private notes when she thinks of it that way.
The diary is in English though it sounds like mother is writing in code because a lot of things don't make sense and it's obvious she's trying to avoid using names.
She finds her birth certificate one evening, folded at the back of the diary. Emma Lindberg, it says. Born June 15th, 2001. She doesn't remember being Emma and she wonders how long that name lasted. Perhaps she got a new one as soon as they left the hospital.
There's one picture as well, of her mother holding a baby. It's a little wrinkled in the corners but she doesn't mind. Her life feels a little less of a lie when she looks at it for some reason.
In the diary, Mother does her best to hide the names of the people but she slips every now and then. She never tries to hide the names of places and the girl starts her own diary where she scribbles down little things and clues she picks.
They had a barbecue at Jack's place at one point and the girl gets several reference points. Mother describes the color and shape of the house and the patio. She also mentions a gas station close by where she stopped to buy more beer, and a small park small distance away. She thinks she could find the house in aerial photos if she could just narrow down the area a little more from the state of Colorado. She's not sure who this Jack is, but she thinks he's important and at the very least, she used to know her mother, back when she still had a name.
Mother buys her a new dress on June 15th, with the simple excuse that it seemed like her style. The girl starts to realize that every year around that time Mommy does something special, takes her somewhere or buys her something. Never big enough to be obviously a gift but something out of the ordinary anyway. All her life she has celebrated her real birthday, she just never knew.
She hugs her mother a little tighter than is probably normal but she doesn't seem to mind.
"Go on," mother urges her with a chuckle. "I want to see if it looks as good as I think it will."
It's bright green in color, like the first grass after winter, and she swirls around a little, feeling happy and carefree in her new dress. Her mother laughs and claps her hands, obviously happy as well.
The girl gives her mother another hug, suddenly very aware of the fact that her mother still hasn't gotten used to the colorful clothes. When she thinks about it more, she realizes she can't remember any outfit where her mother actually looks comfortable. Oh, she hides it well, almost perfectly, but the girl can see that she wishes she was wearing something else.
She wonders what mother wore when she had a name. She doesn't do dresses or skirts and looks equally uncomfortable in jeans and pantsuits. That doesn't leave much, does it? Maybe she was a stripper. The girl snorts and her mother raises her eyebrows.
"Nothing, Mommy. I just thought of something funny."
No, definitely not a stripper. Her mother is way too prim and proper for that and way too self conscious. She's lacking the confidence needed for a job like that.
Maybe she's used to wearing a uniform of some kind. Perhaps a flight attendant? Perhaps she has been to all these countries before, perhaps that's why she seems to settle so quickly whenever they move. Maybe her father is a captain of the same airplane. Hell, maybe the girl was a result of some mile high club fun somewhere over the Atlantic ocean. Maybe that's why she doesn't have a home country, she was destined to be a traveler from the very beginning because she didn't get started on this planet but above it. It's her best theory so far and she decides to cling to it for now.
Canada is different. It's very different to India but it's also different to any of the places they've lived in before. They have Canadian passports now and she's sixteen and two months according to it, almost a year older than in her last passport and fourteen months older than her real age but she's not supposed to know that. Officially they are returning from a holiday in Europe so the girl tries to keep all the awe at bay despite the fact that she's enchanted by the big planes and the huge airports.
She's only seen small planes that feel like they're falling apart and the coffee shop in this airport is larger than most ofairports she's seen so far.
Usually they pick small towns away from big cities but this time they're right in the middle of all the crazy buzz of the city and she sees more buses in the first two hours than she's seen in her previous life combined. The trains are a lot nicer than in India, too.
Mother seems to breath easier, like she is back in her own element for the fist time since the girl was born and she wonders if this is where her mother lived in the life before running.
She likes to sneak out at night when mother is sleeping and wander around the streets of this new city. She's barefoot more often than not, her feet silent on the hard tarmac, and she feels almost invisible because the few people that are out at that time never pay attention to her.
All her cities and towns and villages smell different and she could probably be dropped in any of them with her eyes closed and she'd know where she is, based on the smells and how the tarmac feels underneath her feet. There was that one town where the roads were like a patchwork quilt, patch over patch over patch, each one only fixing one small hole or crack.
Some roads feel smooth, some are rough and of course the temperature alone would help a lot. The pavement near their second Spain home had paw prints in it. She's trying to find words for this new city underneath her feet. It's... efficient, perhaps. A little impersonal, too, and definitely unappreciated. People tend to do that when they are surrounded with concrete and tarmac every day, they never stop to think how inconvenient it would be to have dirt roads instead.
Sometimes she climbs up the fire escape, all the way to the roof of their apartment building. It's the highest one in the block so she can see quite far but the horizon is hidden by the higher buildings further away. She likes the city. It's hers in a way none of the other cities have ever been. Not home, really, home means something different, but hers nonetheless.
She often has her sketchbook with her on these nightly adventures. Sometimes she draws scenery, sometimes people. She often makes sketches about her father, tries to transfer all the details her mother told her, onto the paper. Tall, brown eyes, gray hair, good sense of humor, safe hands. Mother's diaries add a couple more details, like the brand of his favorite beer and that he likes fishing.
Sometimes when it rains, she draws the symbol, the one that's like a name for her, on the drops that are rushing down the metallic door, but it looks foreign to her eyes. It's something she prefers to feel on her skin.
She kisses a couple of boys, even one girl, just to see what it's like but she always puts a stop before things go too far. She needs to stay in control and the blood coursing in her veins and pounding in her ears makes her feel carefree, like she could blurt out all her secrets to anyone who asks. And people like to ask questions, that's their biggest flaw and it's a global problem, she has come to realize.
The thought of having a boyfriend frightens her, the idea of bringing someone home and introducing him to her mother feels weird and impossible. At least there are no family albums to embarrass her with. But for the most part, she keeps her walls up and doesn't let anyone too close.
That's before she meets the boy. The boy has even more names than she has and his lips keep shooting cheesy pick-up lines at machine gun rate from the moment they meet. He's a friend of a friend or maybe a step or two further but nonetheless, they end up seeing the same movie as a part of the same group. He seems fake in so many ways but there's one definite advantage about him: he doesn't ask questions, not like others do.
"What's your name?" the boy asks.
"Why should I tell you?"
"I'm gonna call you Emma, then," the boy announces, and he does, all the way until the bitter end.
Emma. Without knowing her story, he managed to pick the name that was scribbled in her birth certificate. And she decides it doesn't matter how fake the boy is because she feels more real than ever before when she's with him.
"What should I call you?" she asks instead of commenting.
"You can call me yours, Emma." He winks and she laughs. She likes him.
The girl can't remember ever seeing her mother cry. Not before the night of her eighteenth birthday. Mother gave up hope, convinced herself that the girl had left and wouldn't be coming back and for the first time the girl truly understands how much she means to her mother. They don't usually exchange I love yous, in any language, but the girl whispers those words that night, in her first language because firsts are always special in everything.
She draws the symbol on her mother's skin, the simple wiggly line that means home or together.
Mother would never abandon the girl, she knows that much, and she wants mother to know she won't abandon her either.
She gets the symbol tattooed on her toe the next week. The boy has a cousin who owns a tattoo shop and the girl marches there one day and gets inked. It's a reminder of a promise she made. Her home is with mother, wherever they are, whatever they do. They have too many secrets but they're still meant to stick together, that's just how it works.
With someone you trust, sober, in bed, use a condom. That's what her mother tells her when she asks for advice about her first time.
What does it really mean, trusting? Is it supposed to be a black and white thing, a binary switch of one or zero, either you trust or you don't? Because she has divided it into subcategories, separated people based on what she trusts them with.
She trusts the boy with her body, she trusts that he won't hurt her, that he will be gentle and caring. She trusts him not to tell anyone about them, not to brag about getting laid. But she would never trust him with her secrets, with her story. She doesn't even trust him with the name Amelie.
It's a little confusing that with the rest of the world, Amelie is the lie and Emma is a secret truth harbored inside her but with him the lie becomes a truth she can't bare to tell and the truth is a lie that separates them. Being with him feels like her life gets turned into a negative of a black and white picture and deep down she knows he's trouble but he's her trouble.
Second advice is easier to follow. She doesn't drink or use any other substances that alter her mind or behavior in any way. She has too many secrets, too many languages she could slip into if she doesn't focus, so many names that she might forget her current one if she doesn't focus. She's always sober, she's always here. She envies the people who know how to escape.
She got a car on her fake eighteenth birthday and it was the biggest and most expensive thing her mother has ever bought her but she's more at awe about the scarf she gets for her real eighteenth birthday a year later. They're both gray and the girl thinks that it's because gray is mother's color, gray with a splash of that odd shade of orange that makes mother smile and cry in frequent intervals. The scarf has a red border, though, and not orange.
The story of the scarf is that Mother's workmate does them and mother thought the girl would like one. It's warm and beautiful, despite the boring color, and the girl loves it from the first moment. It's like a hug she can take with her when she leaves the house, warm and comforting.
It's like her mother is saying I love you in the language she speaks best: without words.
She can't remember ever being as scared as she is the night when she hears the police caught the boy. She had no idea he was in that much trouble and now she sits in the armchair next to her mother's bed, her bag packed, her favorite scarf wrapped around her throat to comfort her, watching the sleeping woman. The little frown on mother's face only relaxes when she sleeps and it's such a shame that she has to cut that short but every minute counts. They've never left in a hurry before, they've always moved just in case, before things go wrong.
"Forgive me mother for I have sinned." It feels like an appropriate way to confess she screwed up.
After the initial panic, mother explains and the girl is both relieved and scared because of what she hears. They're not criminals, that's a relief. But it's always unpleasant to know that there are people out there who would like to cut her open just to know what's inside. It's probably because her body hums when she's near her mother. She wonders if she got something special from her father, too.
She wakes up with a stuffed animal between her arm and her side and it takes a moment before she recognizes it as the same teddy bear she left behind in Germany, the one she's been secretly missing for almost fifteen years.
She wonders why mother never gave it to her but then realizes that she was probably waiting for the girl to say something, to mention the teddy bear in some way. She never did because she wanted to be strong. And her mother never mentioned it because she probably didn't want to admit her emotions got the best of her and she decided to keep the toy.
They are both bad with words nowadays. They snap and hurt but the silences often cause the deepest wounds. Secret is something you know but don't say out loud. They have too many of those. Maybe it's because of the languages. Maybe they learn the harsh words too fast and the gentle ones too late. Or maybe it's because they don't know any language well enough to truly communicate, they're barely holding up the facade.
Mother still gives the best hugs in the world and the girl feels safe when her body starts to hum at the contact. She brushes the graying hair away from her mother's face and plants a kiss on the tip of her nose. They have this. Even if they fight with words, they'll always have this.
"Det räcker," she mumbles against the fabric of her mother's nightgown. "Det måste." It's enough. It has to be.
She's forgotten a lot of Swedish but sometimes she sneaks into that one corner in the library where nobody ever goes and reads a little, tries to remember how the words sounded. It helps her stay grounded.
Towards the very end of the diary, mother writes about a boy and a girl. It's told in third person and sounds bit like a fairytale, a little sad, a little insecure, but the love shines through and there seems to be a happy ending but something tells the girl that there's another ending that came after that, a sadder one that broke her mother's heart.
Mother mentions the names only once in the story and the girl keeps forgetting them but she doesn't think they're that important because they're probably fake anyway. Most of the time they're just he and she but the girl gets the idea that she means her mother and he might be her father. But mother doesn't talk about how he looks, she only talks about how he makes her feel, safe and confused and cherished, so she can't be sure.
There are only two diary notes after that.
"It's been hard. Harder than I expected," is the first one, dated two weeks after the fairytale chapter.
The last one, few days after the second to last, simply states "I'm pregnant" and it's written with precise handwriting, nothing like the quick scrawls of previous adventures.
The girl can imagine her mother sitting there, at the kitchen table or perhaps in the office, staring at the pregnancy test. She's probably made the plan already, decided that she's going to run and keep running as long as she can. There are tissues in the trash can and perhaps one still squeezed in her left hand but she's not crying anymore. The words hold determination, not hesitation.
Did she try to tell her father, the girl wonders. Did she even consider it? She wishes there were more words, lists of pros and cons or something, something to explain how she came to that decision. All she has is the conclusion which has become her life. Would mother take it back if she could choose now? Or would she do the same thing again?
Life goes on. Mother works too hard and looks too tired, the girl studies and paints and hangs out with her friends. She sells a couple of her paintings to a small café, the ones she sketched when she was sitting on the rooftop of their first apartment, sunrises over the city in different weathers and seasons. She likes them, but they're not her best works. She doesn't show the best ones for anyone.
A gallerist contacts her, says he would like to have her paintings in a small exhibition. They meet up a few times, discuss details and schedules, look through the paintings to see which ones to choose. He uses big and important sounding words to describe her art but she only smiles at him and nods a little when he looks at her expectantly in the middle of his rant. She doesn't care whose technique they remind him of or what terms he uses to describe her way of using the light.
She paints because the pictures want to be painted, because they deserve to be memorized. She paints because she wants to paint and she paints things that are important to her. She feels like the man doesn't understand that, at all, but she lets him talk.
They sign the contract and she lets him offer a dinner to celebrate, knowing they'll end up in a hotel room afterwards.
The sex is good, gentle and unhurried, but they both know it won't become anything more than that. The girl wonders what it would be like to fall in love, to be consumed by desire and love, to be so passionate about something. She always keeps a barrier between herself and the people around her, even with him, the man who's been staring directly into her soul for the last month through her paintings. But he doesn't know that. Some people are blind without ever knowing it and that's even sadder than the people who've seen so much bad that they choose to be blind to the world around them.
Her mother is the latter one, the girl thinks. She looks at the world through her special glasses that turn everything into meaningless gray or threatening black. She doesn't see the smiles around her anymore. It's a sad thing to watch.
She's been hesitating to find the last pieces for her father puzzle but when she comes home from the dinner and fights with her mother, she knows it's time.
The girl thinks her mother still loves her father and always will. And she feels like she's gotten to know her father, too, and she thinks he might love her mother, too. He seems like that kind of guy, just stubborn enough to never let go. Probably too stubborn to ever admit that, though, but she'll cross that bridge when she comes to it.
She reads through her notes one last time and spends all night searching online until she has everything she needs to contact him, except his last name. She narrowed down the area to Colorado Springs and even managed to find his house in aerial photos, based on the clues in mother's diary.
In the diary, she mentions the same bar several times so finally the girl decides to take the risk and looks up the phone number for the place. It's not like she has anything to lose.
She introduces herself as Jessica and explains that she's looking for her old classmate, Jack, with whom she had a beer in the same bar a few years ago. She apologizes for her accent and explains that she married a French-speaking man and hasn't used English for a while. She tells a long story about how they used to call Jack with various nicknames and nobody remembers his last name so she decided to try this one last thing and call the bar because she really needs his address so she can send an invitation to a class reunion.
When she's asked to describe him with bit more details, she mentions that he's tall, guessing at six foot three, has gray hair and brown eyes and only drinks Guinness.
"Ah, you mean O'Neill," the bartender says right away. "You're wrong about the Guinness, though, because I've seen him down a few glasses of whiskey, too. Poor bastard still tries to down his sorrows every now and then. Hasn't learned yet that they can swim."
"Has he had a lot to drown lately?"
"Not lately, no. But he hasn't been the same since that pretty blonde of his left twenty years ago. It wasn't you, was it?"
"No, sir. Wasn't me. I'm just an old classmate," she says and tries to laugh a little but she fears it sounds fake. "He didn't mention a wife to me but we were never that close, I suppose."
"Oh, it wasn't a wife, I think. Oh, my... I'm talking a lot more than I'm supposed to. But the last name is O'Neill. I do not know the address, though. Do you want me to give him a message next time he comes?"
"No, thank you. I'm sure I can find the address now that I know the name. And please, don't mention this to him. I want to surprise him."
"No worries, ma'am. I'm good at keeping secrets."
Considering that he just blurted out half of the man's life story to a complete stranger over phone, she's not too convinced about that. But she politely thanks him for his help and hangs up.
It all seems to add up and she's certain that she has the right guy now.
Jack O'Neill, Colorado Springs.
She writes the exact address on the envelope and puts a stamp in the corner. It has flowers on it, in that same brownish shade of orange that mother painted on her wall because she thinks that color has something to do with her father.
Dear mister O'Neill, she starts the letter and then stops, wondering what she could possibly say. In the end she decides not to mention that he might be her father. That's something that's better to be said face to face.
The reason why I'm writing this letter is that I believe you knew my mother.
I don't know much, just that she left before I was born.
I believe you two worked together but I might have misunderstood.
All my life we've been on the run, running from something nameless, changing names and towns and countries so fast that I lost count before I turned ten.
I've grown tired of the lies and decided to find something real.
If you'd like to answer some of my questions, buy a flight ticket somewhere, anywhere, and meet me at gate 25 at 1500 hours this Thursday. I will give your real ticket then.
I'll be wearing a green dress.
She hesitates again because this is the point where she adds a signature but Amelie is a lie, though a persistent one, and she doesn't want to lie to this man. Emma makes her head hurt because it's a lie to a part of her and truth to another so it's not really an option. She's heard of boys breaking girls' hearts but she feels like The Boy stole her name from her when he left.
She draws the left half of a heart, continues it as the right half of sun and then colors the halves in red and yellow. It's the first time she's drawn the symbol on paper. She draws it on her skin sometimes when she feels like she's drowning in the lies, she's carved it on wet sand at the beach a time or two, but never on paper.
Papers are for lies, for false identities and forged documents and this symbol is the only real thing in her life except for her mother. Well, mother has her secrets so she's not completely real and true, either. But this letter is real and filled with only honest words so she feels comfortable drawing her symbol at the end of it. She then draws the other symbol, the wiggly line underneath it.
It means home, she whispers out loud. Or together. She wants those both with him.
She snaps a picture of her mother the next day, when she's drinking her morning tea, staring into nothing with a thoughtful look on her face. She prints the picture when mother leaves for work and adds it in the envelope, along with the picture that was taken at the maternity ward. She scans it on the computer, though, just in case it gets lost in the mail, but for some reason it feels important that she sends the original to him.
She reads the letter through several times during the day and tries to decide if she'll send it or not. She knows it will change everything, break the bubble they have lived in all her life. But she thinks it's the right thing to do.
At night she climbs in bed with her mother and wraps her body tightly around her. She's apologizing and asking for forgiveness in advance because she's realized that more than anything, she fears that her mother will be angry with her. She could live with the man breaking her heart, if her father was nothing like she imagined, but if mother starts hating her because of this, she'll have nothing.
"Everything alright?" mother asks and hugs the girl back just as tight. No matter how badly they have hurt each other with words during the day, mother always hugs her back. The girl feels better when she realizes that.
"I think it will be," she mumbles. She'll take the letter to the mail office the next morning.
He looks pretty much like she expected, except perhaps a little older. His eyes are kind but cautious and not quite as dark as her mother made them sound. He plays along, the simple game of pretending they've known forever, and she appreciates it. He gives the pictures back in the plane and she thinks he gets it, like he really understands how important they are to her.
The questions only start when they reach the apartment. The boy used to live there and she rented it for herself when she saw it was free. The boy only got a short sentence but he left the town as soon as he could afterwards. She tries not to be bitter about it. The place is clean now, but it's in a part of the city where her mother doesn't come searching for her. It's her safe haven, her escape from the world. It's also where she paints most of the time but she's not working on any paintings right now so she took the paints away to the basement.
"Do you have a name?" the man, her father, asks.
"Not really, no," the girl admits and shakes her head.
"Just Half Heart Half Sun then?"
Nobody has ever described the symbol with words, it's always been just a picture. But the way he says it, it sounds like an Indian name, someone old and wise who brings joy to others. She doesn't feel like it matches her all that well but the man seems to find it fitting for some reason.
She pulls the pictures from where she hid them in her bra and looks at them. She wonders when mother first draw the sign on her back. Was it right after she was born or later?
"It is the only thing I have had forever," she explains. "My mother told me it was a secret writing system, a language I guess, that she used with her friends when she was young. I thought perhaps you'd know it." That's part of the truth, the other half is that she wanted to be honest and this was the only way to do that.
"No," he shakes his head. "I think it goes way back. The only secret language she used with me was math and that was so secret that even I had no idea what she was saying."
The girl's face goes blank when she tries to fit that piece of puzzle somewhere. Math? Mother? Sure, she's smart, the girl knows that, she couldn't have organized all those false identities and passports otherwise. But she's worked most of the girl's life as a waiter or a storehouse worker, math isn't something she automatically associates with her mother.
"It means I wish good things for you," she explains, returning to the subject of the symbol. "And the wiggly line means home or together."
He smiles but she's not sure why. She smiles back before she continues.
"It has been mother's sign for me since I was born, the only thing that is real and doesn't change. When I was little... If I was upset, she used to hold me and draw it on my back, over and over again. I tattooed the home part on my skin when I realized I would never have house I could call home, my home would always be what I carry with me. I haven't shared the sign with anyone before but I wanted to share it with you."
"Why?"
How honest does she want to be? Because now is the moment when she has to decide. She trusts this man, more than she's ever trusted anyone before, black and white, binary one, without reservations.
"Because I think you might be my father," she says softly and looks him in the eye before she drops her gaze back to the pictures she's holding on her lap.
"How did you come to that conclusion?"
He neither agrees nor denies but he doesn't sound angry, either. Mother promised he wouldn't be angry, not at the girl. He doesn't sound all that shocked to be honest so the girl thinks that maybe he suspected already.
She explains about the diary, about the two people whose names she can't remember for sure. But it soon becomes obvious that he knows who Jonah and Thera are.
"How did you connect me as Jonah?" he finally asks.
"I didn't, not really. But even when she didn't write of Thera, she spoke of you more often than the others and I though I read something between the lines, some of the same emotions Thera had for Jonah. But it is only my idea of what happened and I probably jumped to conclusions too fast. I did not bring you here to demand anything from you." She wants to make that clear. She's not asking for money or any official recognition from his side, she just wants to learn who her mother used to be and who he is, the man who knew her mother.
"We were complicated, Carter and I," the man says and she can see the sadness in his eyes and hear it in his voice.
"Carter?" she asks, not sure what he's talking about.
"Your mother."
"Is that her name?"
"Yeah, at least it used to be. Last name that is. Samantha was her first name. Sam."
She realizes for the first time that she never even tried to find that out. She focused on him instead. But then again, that's how you often build a puzzle: first the borders, then one section of the picture.
"I never knew that," she admits, looking at the picture that was taken the day she was born. Samantha Carter. Not Marie Lindberg like she was in her birth certificate. "But please, continue. You were telling about your history."
"We worked together. We weren't supposed to fall in love with each other. But then something happened and for a while we forgot who we are, forgot our roles and all the rules we were supposed to follow."
The girl can tell that he's hiding what they actually did for a living but that's not as important. The girl is bit curious, though, because she's starting to see that they weren't a flight attendant and a captain. But somehow she thinks it has something to do with flying. And math. It doesn't make much sense in her head.
But she gets back to the topic of how she was conceived and realizes that Jonah and Thera weren't code, the two of them really thought they were them.
"They were only intimate once," he explains. "I never realized she might have gotten pregnant. She was on birth control, at least that's what I thought back then. I thought she ran away because she couldn't work with me anymore."
The girl swallows several times, fighting against the tears. Mother told her the truth all along, about everything. He really had no idea he had a daughter. It hurts a little but it's also a relief to know their truth times were just what they claimed to be.
"I was an ass to her," he says. "She tried to talk with me but I pushed her away. Then, one day, she just left. Quit her job and packed her bags without a single word to any of us."
"Did you look for her?"
"Two years. I followed what little leads we had for two years. Flew all around the world whenever I had time off from work. Frequently checked some databases for eight more but she was too good."
"Was it you she was running from?" she finally risks the question even though she's almost certain she knows the answer.
"Maybe," he admits. "But I think there was more to it."
Something about his body language tells the girl that he knows exactly what her mother was running from but doesn't think he should tell her. Yeah, why bother. It's not like it has anything to do with her life.
Mother comes screaming in the morning, bit like the girl feared. She's surprised she was found that soon, though, but the volume of the foul French words through the door suggests that mother stayed up all night, searching.
The moment the parents recognize each other is something special, it's like the air changes in the room, into something almost charged with electricity as they scan each other from head to toe and back up again.
"We wiped out the NID a decade ago," her father says in a way of greeting and the girl thinks that's who they were running from. It doesn't tell her anything more than that, though.
Mother calls work that she's coming down with something and couldn't sleep all night so she's not coming today, and then they gather their meager belongings into Mother's car and drive to their house. The girl still hasn't quite learned to call it a home yet.
There doesn't seem to be any anger, not like mother feared. Sadness, relief, maybe even a hint of love lingering underneath all the chaos and the girl feels proud of finding him. She did the right thing bringing him here instead of meeting him in Colorado.
Mother stirs her tea, silently like she always does, lost in thought. Then she takes them all by surprise when she informs them that the girl's name is and has always been Grace.
"Grace O'Neill, Gracie."
Father seems to approve but the girl doesn't know how she feels yet. Grace. Tears of relief threaten to fall from her eyes because she has a name now, a real name, but it still feels foreign. She clings to her father's hand and the familiar humming helps her stay grounded.
Mother doesn't have a name, that becomes painfully obvious when Daddy calls her Carter and her face falls. She doesn't respond to Sam, either, but Thera brings that spark back into her eyes, that same look the girl has seen when mother looks at her headboard square. And she knows now that the odd shade of orange is the color of Thera, the woman who was just a fantasy yet more real than anything else in their lives, that's what Daddy says.
She wants to hear the whole story but she doesn't want to ask now because her parents are so lost in their connection that they probably don't even know the girl is in the same room.
Anger flashes in mother's eyes and then she builds her walls up high, something the girl has only seen her do with the girl herself, never with other people. Nobody else gets under her skin like the girl, nobody matters enough. But Daddy does, and it's obvious that his words hurt her.
"I would have ran with you," Daddy says and the girl gets the impression that it's his apology. "If I had known, I would have packed a bag and left everything behind to go with you. It doesn't make a difference, I know that, but I want you to know it anyway."
He doesn't say he's sorry because he's not, he meant every word he said. Honesty is something the girl appreciates, even when it hurts. She briefly wonders what it would have been like, to be running with both of them instead of only mother but she decides it's best not to go there.
Mother nods, Daddy nods back. The girl is not sure what they're saying to each other without words but it's obviously important.
"Grace?" Daddy asks and squeezes the hand he's still holding. "Wanna go for a walk?"
The girl thinks she likes the name. It sounds right leaving his lips like that, natural somehow. She says she needs to change but it's not really true. She just needs a moment alone and she thinks mother and father need a moment even more.
Her new tattoo is itchy and she keeps tossing and turning in her bed, trying to fall asleep. She went to bed too early, she knows that, but she wanted to give her parents some time alone to talk things through. She reaches out for her teddy bear and remembers she left it in her mother's bed the previous morning, before she sneaked out to catch her flight. Oh, well.
The day was long and exciting but everything went a lot better than she ever could have dreamed. Daddy doesn't talk much but the little he says is special and somehow it feels like he gets her, maybe better than even Mommy does. He has secrets, too, they all do. But she's not quite so angry about it anymore, now that they're together.
It's little past midnight when the girl gives up and decides to go get her teddy bear. She could use a hug from her mother, too, because it's all a little overwhelming, to be honest.
She's surprised to find them both in mother's bedroom. Mommy's head is resting on Daddy's shoulder but they're not talking, just staring straight ahead and then at her when the door opens enough for them to see her.
"I just wanted my teddy bear," she mumbles. She doesn't want to interrupt them but she can't sleep alone, either.
"Come get it, then," Daddy says and she makes her way to the bed and crawls to sit between them, forcing them both to move to the side a little. She wants to be close to them both now, to make sure they're really here and nobody is fighting. The bad guys are gone, that's what Daddy said, and she feels truly safe for the first time in her life, sitting there between the two of them.
"You wanna stay, too?" Daddy asks and the girl thinks it's a silly thing to say because isn't it obvious?
"If that's OK with you, Car- Thera," he continues and messes up Mommy's name again. The girl wonders why he calls mother by her last name and not first. She wonders how much they will tell her, if she'll hear all about their lives before mother ran away or if it will remain a secret.
"Carthera," she mumbles and snatches her teddy bear from her father. "I like that."
It sounds nice, new but still obviously familiar to them both.
"Carthera sounds like a good name," mother agrees.
The girl lies down, holding the teddy bear against her chest, and closes her eyes. She feels safe now and she doesn't want to break that by asking questions so it's better to go to sleep. "Good night, Mommy. Goodnight, Daddy," she mumbles and they both reply with "Goodnight, Gracie."
It's funny, really, how quickly all three of them seem to adapt to using that name. Usually it takes weeks before their new names come naturally.
Daddy is the first to wrap his arm around Grace's waist but soon Mommy's smaller arm joins his.
Yeah, definitely safe.
A/N: Thank you for reading! Reviews are much appreciated, good or bad.