Disclaimer: Carmen et al are the property of not moi.

Summary: Being the world's greatest thief was often at odds with being the world's greatest mother. Snippets from the life of Carmen's daughter, from her POV.

Author's Note: This chapter contains a few curse words and some mild sexual content. If you have made it past 8th grade sex ed, you should probably be ok. If it's not clear, Maggie is about 12 in the first section and 15 in the second.

Every year, I wish I could participate in NaNoWriMo but real life always gets in the way. So, this year I will participate in spirit by writing fic. ;)


I grew toward adulthood like a vine creeping toward the sunlight. For years we had been content, careful, and even the revelation of my mother's criminal past was not enough to drive a wedge between us. But there was one secret, one stubbornly unanswered question that threatened to destroy our bond. On this, my mother would not yield and I would not give up. I speak of my father.

When I was little and asked why other children had two parents and I had only her, my mother explained that there were many types of families and none was superior to any other. Some had a mom and a dad, others two moms or two dads, some with step-parents and step-siblings, some with grandparents, and some with just a mother and child, like us. She spoke of ancient Chinese emperors with their multiple wives and hundreds of royal children and of the Iroquois tribe of North America where families lived in large longhouses and traced their lineages through the mother's line. For a time, this answer was enough. But as I grew older, it satisfied less and less.

So, I resolved to discover who my father was, one way or another. I remember trying to broach the subject delicately over breakfast one morning, as subtly as a twelve year old can. I had finished my eggs and orange juice; my mother was only halfway through her inaugural cup of coffee and had barely started reading her first of several newspapers.

"So, um, mom. I was wondering, was I planned?" I asked overly casually.

My responded from behind her curtain of newsprint,"No."

Delighted to be getting somewhere, I followed up. "So, then I was an accident."

My mother put down her paper. "I'm not sure I believe in accidents," she told me enigmatically.

I squared my shoulders back and tried my best to seem grown up. "You can tell me, you know. Because I know. All about sex." My mother arched one of her perfectly plucked brows but said nothing. "Annke's parents have these videos..."

"Really. Do enlighten me," my mother deadpanned.

I gave her the extent of my knowledge on the subject, the things I'd seen in the videos and overheard in giggled whispers from schoolkids in a dozen countries. My mother for her part treated the topic with a clinical detachment. She corrected my misconceptions and actually pointed out a few things I hadn't considered. By the end, I was blushing and stammering with embarrassment, nowhere near as grown up as I pretended to be.

My mother returned to her coffee, satisfied. "Well, then. I'm glad we had this talk. I hope for the time being your explorations will be strictly theoretical in nature. I have no desire to become a grandmother anytime soon."

Though I was blushing to the tips of my ears, I stood my ground. "I know all about human reproduction now, you've seen to that. So why won't you tell me?"

"Ah. Well, unfortunately for you, I reproduce by parthenogenesis," my mother said, the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her lips, never a good sign. When I pressed for an explanation, she would say no more. So, of course I was forced to go and look it up, which was probably her intention all along. Only she would ruin a perfectly interesting conversation with a biology lesson.

I typed "parthenogenesis" into the search engine and was bombarded by images of snakes, reptiles and sharks. The encyclopedia definition read "from the Greek parthenos, meaning 'virgin', and genesis, meaning 'birth,' a form of asexual reproduction found in females, where growth and development of embryos occur without fertilization by a male. If the chromosome number of the haploid egg cell is doubled during development the offspring is 'half a clone' of its mother. If the egg cell was formed without meiosis, it is a full clone of its mother." Well, my mother certainly was special. I doubted she was that special.

I returned to the kitchen, where my mother had moved on to her second cup of coffee and third newspaper. "You're not a snake or a shark," I told her.

"I've been called both on occasion," she said without rancor.

Thinking back to the encyclopedia text, I was momentarily seized by a feeling of horror gripping at my insides. "You didn't have that mad scientist of yours…Dr. Bellum…cook me up in a lab, did you?"

At this my mother nearly did choke on her French roast. "Heavens, no. As if I would have let Sara anywhere near my reproductive system." She sighed. "You were conceived in the usual fashion."

I was relieved but still wary. "So I'm not your clone or half-clone?"

"I never wanted you to be." An answer with multiple layers of meaning.

"Who was my father?" I matched her sapphire gaze with my own and would not back down or look away.

"No one particularly special," she said dryly. An answer that wasn't an answer at all. I pressed and wheedled and pleaded with her, but she was deaf to my entreaties. She did not raise her voice or shoo me away, but grew icy, silent and immovable. My mother's reticence was always a more frightening weapon than her anger and she knew it. I finally resigned and walked away to mull over the crumbs of information she had thrown my way. I had lost this battle, but I would not lose the war.

Late that night, I lay in bed, unable to sleep. The revelations of earlier that day played themselves out again and again and again. I was not planned, but I was not an accident. "Conceived in the usual fashion" seemed to rule out artificial insemination. Yet my father was "no one particularly special." Had she known how much it would hurt me to hear that? The problem with asking my mother for the truth was that she often gave it in the most unvarnished way. I don't think she ever learned the value of a well-intentioned white lie.

And then, a flash of genius. My mother had never met a puzzle she didn't like. Thinking back to how she had once hid her own identity in plain sight, I shot out of bed and switched on my desk lamp. I wrote out the letters of my name and painstakingly tried to unscramble them into an answer. I tried nicknames, full names and aliases, every combination and permutation possible: Maggie Sandiego, Maggie de Cengos, Marguerite Sandiego, Marguerite Vivienne Sandiego.

After about an hour of frenzied scribbling, I was nearly cross-eyed from my efforts and had gotten nothing for my troubles except a nasty paper cut. It was then that my mother gently opened the door and crept into my room. It was past midnight but she kept odd hours- vestiges of her former life, I suppose. Her long graceful fingers flipped through my notebook and then she frowned. "I give up, there's no clue there. Or if there is, you're too smart for me." I hung my head, dejected.

She lightly caressed my hair and seemed to swallow a chuckle. "There is, but not the way you're going about it."

I whipped around. "What do you mean?"

My mother seemed to hesitate but finally took pity on me. "Marguerite was my mother's name. She died many years ago."

She never spoke of my grandparents. The accounts I had read said she was an orphan. But there had been rumors, a wealthy gentleman who got caught up in one of her final heists…

"And Vivienne?" I asked.

"Remember your Arthurian mythology," she prompted in a professorial tone.

"She was the Lady of the Lake, she gave Arthur the sword Excalibur…."

"And at the end of the story…"

"She bore his body away to the Isle of Avalon." I gasped. "Avalon! The businessman. He really was your father?"

My mother nodded. "I had some tests done. Malcolm and Marguerite Avalon were my parents, your grandparents."

"But how come we've never met him?" The revelations had left me breathless, like the endless twists and turns of a giant roller coaster.

My mother sank gracefully down on my bed and looked at me sadly. "He is an old man now, querida, and not well. My presence in his life brought him nothing but pain. He has suffered enough." I have suffered enough, , the unspoken sentiment she would not voice.

I thought back on our travels. We had been all over South America- Caracas and São Paulo, La Paz and Machu Picchu. Even to tiny Suriname. But we had never gone to Argentina, and this now seemed a glaring omission. I still didn't know what to say. I had gained and lost a grandfather in a handful of minutes.

My mother's deep bell-like tones brought me back to the present. "Earlier you asked me if you were 'planned.' I wasn't clear." She picked up an old teddy bear, my favorite toy from childhood, his fur worn from too much play and travel and smiled a sad secret smile. "For many years before you were born, I thought I would make a poor parent. How could I give to a child what I had never known? Somehow, I found the love I needed to give you, unknown reserves I never knew I had. And the more love I gave you, the more I had to give away." Her voice was calm and serene, but my mother's midnight blue eyes had grown unmistakably shiny in the lamplight.

"No, you were not planned, but when you came, I was ready. I learned then that I did not need Malcolm Avalon to have a family of my own," she told me with finality.

It was very hard to be angry with her when she said beautiful things like this. I threw my arms around her, and fell asleep in her embrace, a small child again. Our disagreement had been tabled for another day.


I suppose it was inevitable. Practically a law of the universe. What goes up, must come down. An object in motion will tend to stay in motion. And a child will rebel against her parents.

My mother, for all her idiosyncrasies, was not what you would call "strict" by any sense of the word. She had high expectations for schoolwork to be sure, but I don't remember her ever telling me what time to go to bed, what TV shows I could watch or books I could read, what I could wear, or even who I could hang out with. While my friends marveled at her libertarian approach to parenting, I grew to resent it, interpreting it as a lack of care. My rebellion happened in subtle ways- she was naturally aloof, I became outgoing and friendly. She was footloose, I craved stability.

One day, it all fell apart.

I had just come home from dinner with my friend Evgenia's family. Seeing them all together, mom and dad, daughter and son, all seemingly happy on the surface, eating a homecooked meal, filled me with so much envy, I had to pass on dessert. (My mother could order take out in two dozen languages, but she remains to this day a terrible cook.). When I got home, spoiling for a fight, I found my mother in her office, typing away on her laptop, lost to the world.

"I'm home," I called. My mother simply nodded and went back to her work.

"Don't you even notice?" I muttered sarcastically.

My looked at me absently. "I'm trying to find a synonym for 'exotic'…"

"Bizarre? Strange? Foreign?"

"Ah, foreign. That works."

"You could have just pressed shift plus F7 instead of using me as a human thesaurus." I peeked over her shoulder. "What's this for anyway?"

She closed the file before I could get a decent look. "I'd like to keep it a secret for now," she said, a Mona Lisa smile playing about her ruby lips.

The word "secret" had become something of a trigger for me. "You like to keep everything a secret." I could feel the anger building within me, like a locomotive picking up speed. "There are so many secrets in this house, I can barely find room to sit down sometimes. For example, I've always wondered how a clever woman such as yourself, who had a backup plan for every conceivable situation, could have failed at a simple thing like birth control."

Color rose in my mother's cheeks, but she said nothing. I continued, trying to provoke some kind of reaction. "And my father. Is it that you won't t tell me? Or were there so many men you don't actually know?"

The air crackled with electricity between us. I had touched the third rail and I had never seen her so angry. Finally, she said in a deadly whisper, "I know, Marguerite."

"Then tell me."

She looked at me with pity. "If I tell you, it will not bring you the life you desire."

"Why don't you let me be the judge of that?" I shot back.

She shrugged it off. "When you're eighteen, you can obtain a paternity test."

"A paternity test would require a DNA sample from a possible father."

"Well, three years should be sufficient time for you to assemble a list of likely suspects," she rejoined smoothly.

Her insufferable nonchalance about the whole thing sent me over the edge. "Bullshit."

"Pardon me?"

I slammed my fist down on her desk, setting the papers flying. "You. All of this. It's bullshit," I sputtered. "Two parents, the same house, the same school for more than a few months at a time- is that too much to ask? I have to give up a shot at a normal life because my own mother can't stay still?"

"Maggie, you know why we move…" my mother began, in her elegant and (to my ears) bored voice.

"After all you've been through, growing up not knowing your parents, how could you do this to me?"

"I have my reasons. You're just going to have to trust me."

I ignored her. "And then you treat it like it's some kind of game. I mean, is that why you had me? You got tired of playing with Zack and Ivy and so you created me instead, the perfect opponent." My mother stared at me, a glacial look in her eyes. "Silence means you agree. Well, mom, I'm not going to play anymore. This is me, walking away from the gameboard. I'm going out. Don't follow me," I warned. I made sure to give the front door a satisfying slam as I left.

I went back to Evgenia's, but couldn't tell her about the fight. We did our homework and gossiped and watched old movies. But it barely managed to distract from what I was feeling.

At the center of it all was a truth so horrible, I was ashamed to express it, even to myself. My mother loved me desperately, I knew that. More than the thrill of the cops on her trail, more than the feel of a stolen artifact in her hands, my mother loved me. And sometimes that love was almost too much for me to bear. It was too much of a responsibility, being the anchor that kept her grounded. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but where was my village? The collection of friends and acquaintances we met in our wanderings- aid workers and diplomats, bohemians and aristocrats- those relationships were broad, but they were not deep.

The truth was, I was enough for my mother, but she was no longer enough for me. I had said many hurtful things to her that night. But this truth, more than any accusation, would surely break her heart.

When I came home early in the morning, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table. Her blue eyes were tired and red and there was a large dent in a whiskey bottle that I don't think was there before. But when she spoke her voice could not have been more sober, "I owe you an apology, Maggie."

"Mom, don't…"

She held up her hand. "Hear me out. I do not pretend that I am a perfect parent, by any means. Trying to reconcile being your mother with…my own restless nature…has always been a challenge. But I am trying my best."

I felt a lump in my throat. "I know."

She ran her hands through her long dark hair, now streaked with silver. "Perhaps I have been selfish. I cannot give you all that you desire, Maggie, and for that I am very sorry. But I can give you something." She paused and handed my passport to me. "We have done things my way. Now we will try doing them yours."

"Where are we going?"

My mother sighed, whether with relief or resignation. "Home," she breathed.