2. The General in His Room

The universe was safer. The world was saved. We'd been freed. Tom was dead. Jake was upstairs.

Sleeping.

I had put a frozen pizza for dinner, having given up on the quest for a perfectly healthy meal that my family would eat. At least for the time being. We were all still recovering. Steve and I from being enslaved and drafted into a war where, it turned out, our sons were generals on opposites sides. Jake was recovering from… so much that we couldn't even comprehend it. All of us were still trying to make sense of Tom's death.

Steve was watching TV on the couch. I check to make sure that the cheese wasn't bubbling yet and brought him a beer. He was watching the news with a dazed expression. Jake was on it. He usually was.

Two months, almost, since that final battle, but the news was still all Animorphs this, Yeerks that. Andalites, Hork-Bajir, Visser One.

Jake Berenson, Jake Berenson, Jake Berenson.

A video of Jake walking off the pool ship changed to a school picture, one that we had lost when the town had burned. It was an old picture. I remembered it. His first junior high picture. I had been so upset with him after the proofs came back because he had forgotten all about it so I'd had to give his relatives a picture of him with his hair a mess, circles under his eyes, and wearing a dirty shirt.

The reporter, in the tone of awe that people used with they talked about The Big Hero of the War was explaining that the photo was taken just after Jake had become the leader of the Animorphs.

I watched, aware that my face was falling into the same dazed expression as my husband's.

It was too much to take in. We were trying, truly, and some things were normalizing. Jake getting picked up in private jets for meetings and talk shows and interviews. The Hork Bajir being on the news and in the forests. The occasional spaceship overhead. Him sleeping a lot and not really talking.

Even a few of the really crazy things that I had seen were starting to seem more normal in my memory. Like when Jake's Hork Bajir… friend or comrade, Toby, had shown up with an honor guard one afternoon and sat visiting with Jake at the kitchen table for an hour. I'd brought her a cup of coffee because I wasn't sure how else you show hospitality to important alien guests. Toby had looked at the cup, politely befuddled, but accepted it. The image I had of Toby using a soup spoon to pour a little coffee into her beak because she felt obligated to try some after it was brought to her wasn't something that I'd forget anytime soon.

I know I'm not the first mother whose child has revealed some secret life to her. I have friends with kids Jake's age. Back when things were still normal I'd had friends call weeping over pregnant daughters. Angry about a child's drug use. Enraged over an addiction. One friend had called in a hushed and shocked voice after coming home an hour early to find her son en flagrante with his male best friend.

Jake's secret life was different. My friend's issues were valid, but so small in comparison. If expectation was a dam, their children's surprises were leaks. Jake's was like running a bulldozer right through the thing and watching the water gush through.

The picture on the news, a middle school picture of a tired child whose secrets I never could have guessed when I scolded him about how much the pictures cost changed to a video. Black and green nighttime security camera footage. Taller, broader Jake, fearlessly facing down an Army General and his armed men between a fence and an army truck. There was a gorilla behind him. Marco. A graceful blue deer on his other side. Aximili Esgarouth Isthill, who, when we had met him, said we were welcome to call him Aximili and bowed in a very formal way.

He had come to visit Jake right after the war had ended. That had been the single strangest thing to happen to Steve and I. I had decided to like Andalites after a couple weeks as a Yeerk slave. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

Aximili had been a shock. He was flawlessly polite. Terribly charming. Incredibly deferent to Steve and I. Like we were dignitaries and heroes that he was meeting, not the other way around.

He had come into our home as an Andalite, and Jake had invited him into the kitchen where he had "morphed" into a very handsome young man with creamy, caramel colored skin and devilishly curled hair.

Steve and I had gone upstairs, but paused a few steps from the top and very quietly settled in to eavesdrop. We wanted to understand our son. What better way than listening to him talk to one of his alien lieutenants from his secret war?

Aximli talked in a weird repetitive way. After Jake offered him food Steve and I struggled to make out the words while he talked in a melancholy tone with his mouth full. We understood almost nothing. We exchanged glances when we realized that he always referred to Jake as "Prince Jake" and when Jake said, in his tired, heavy voice, "Do you still have to call me that now that you're a prince too?" Axmili had responded that Jake would always be his Prince.

Jake called him 'Ax-man'. This charming alien with the impossible name who knew him better than we did. Jake talked to him like they were basketball buddies from school.

We came back downstairs while Aximili was turning back into his own real body, which was still melting and changing in the way that I had first seen on my driveway, when, with a slug in my brain, I had seen my son send me a message of freedom in feathers.

Jake, for some reason I didn't understand, and still hadn't asked about, had stopped Aximil before he walked out the door, run to the freezer and come back to the living room with two tubes of Pillsbury Cinnamon rolls from our freezer. Aximili had seemed beyond words. He had touched the cardboard tubes to his chest, as though they were a precious, extravagant gift, and Jake had hugged him and said goodbye.

Jake had gotten a little misty eyed when the door shut behind Aximili. It was the only time we'd seen him cry yet.

The video on the news changed again. Now it was Jake, Cassie and Marco on one of the many talk shows they had been on. Jake looked handsome and stoic. Cassie looked politely interested. Marco was cheerful and telling a story that had the host and audience roiling with laughter, calming only when Marco set a hand on Jake's shoulder and said something about their fearless leader "Big Jake" saving them all in the pinch.

"Big Jake," Steve repeated quietly. "It's his birthday in two weeks. Seventeen." I took his beer from him and took a sip. "So grown up," Steve whispered.

I heard footsteps on the steps, then the kitchen. Jake was up. He popped his head into the living room. "Pizza smells great. Is it almost done?"

I snapped out of my news induced funk, from watching my baby grow up the way the rest of the world was watching him, to trying to concentrate on the sleep-touseled young man in front of me. Big Jake the Hero with his hair sticking up in the back just like it had after he woke up from a nap when he was little.

"Yeah, sweetheart. Nearly ready. I'll just get the table set."

Jake glanced at the TV, now showing him shaking hands with the president.

"I'll do it."

Plates clanked quietly in the background as the news finally moved on from Jake to Marco. He was going to be in a movie or something.

We sat down together, one empty chair at the table. Steve and I talked about what still needed to be done on the house. Baseboard. Shutters. Carpet for the basement. The usual debate on weather or not we wanted a swimming pool.

Jake updated us on his schedule for the next two weeks. Cabinet meetings. A Senate Hearing. Taxxon conversions were starting and they wanted him there at the first few as a good faith gesture.

He reminded me of my father now when he spoke. Heavy. Like he was just a slightly more solid presence than everything else in the world.

Seventeen in two weeks.

I didn't know yet that I'd spend years learning about the man my son became through other people.

That his father and I would both be in line to buy Marco's book, hide it in the same place in our bedroom and only ever read it with the door closed.

That we would watch news clips and collect articles about everything related to the Animorphs, but never ask Jake about the inexplicable crocodile attack on a news station, or the McDonalds downtown whose sudden inexplicable burning had been linked to Dracon fire. Or any of the random animal attacks around town, or about the tiger that had nearly bled to death in the mall a few years ago.

We'd never mention that we'd read every account of an ex-controller who'd fought them. Who had nearly killed them. People missing eyes and limbs who still called him hero. People who had hosted Yeerks high up in the pecking order who wrote books or did interviews on how much the Visser had hated and feared Jake. When he was thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

I didn't know that I would never ask him when he'd given the order for his brother's death. Never ask him about the Visser's lawyers accusing him of war crimes. Never tell him that we heard him sneak out at night or that Marco's mother had told me that he went down to Rachel's grave.

That night, sitting down to dinner, wondering about the young man in front of me, how he was doing, how he would recover, I didn't know that my youngest son would haunt my house as much as my oldest did, while the world build a Hero's sarcophagus around him.

Not yet.

Next Week: Miracle in the Sky