Chapter 25: The Article
There were many days when Bill thought that his children were the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Today had not been one of those days.
"Daddy, can I have a Zeus bar?"
"No," Bill said wearily, piloting their overloaded shopping cart into the line behind the cash register and praying that Zak gave up quietly.
No such luck.
"But you let Lee have one last time," Zak whined, tugging on his sleeve.
"No, we split one," Lee, always the soul of precision, corrected.
It had been like this all day. Zak wouldn't go down for his nap and was so overtired he was practically bouncing off the walls, Lee hadn't stopped talking since six in the morning...and Bill would have given a year of his life for a little peace and quiet. And now, in another moment, he knew, he'd have a meltdown on his hands.
Maybe he should have just bought the damn Zeus bar.
"Daddy-"
"No, Zak," Bill said automatically. "We're on our way home to make dinner."
Distantly, Bill heard the echoes of his own childhood, a thousand similar pleas, a thousand tired responses.
He'd become his mother.
Maybe he'd call her later, Bill decided, unloading his cart onto the counter. At least someone would get a good laugh out of this...
"Dad!" Lee's yelp would have been appropriate if he'd suddenly burst into flames. "It's Laura!"
Bill's shoulders stiffened, his heart pounding queasily in his throat. After all this time, now? In a grocery store, when he hadn't showered off the morning's dirt and dust, and his children were on the verge of a public tantrum?
Lee shoved a magazine under his nose. "Look!"
There she was, on the cover of the Caprica Times: a big black-and-white shot, all face, with Laura Roslin: The Woman Behind The Murders printed underneath.
Lee shook the magazine, like he thought Bill wasn't paying attention.
As though Bill could possibly look away.
Half her face was in shadow, the sepia tones lending a gravity to her quiet expression, the slight furrow of her brow. Her lips barely curled upwards at the corners, only hinting at a smile, and it confused him. It wasn't her public smile, the one on her book jackets, where her smile was just a little brighter than it was in life, a little too polished, missing the sardonic quirk that he loved. She looked like she'd been caught unaware somehow, like she'd forgotten the camera was there. He'd seen this look on her face before, more than once, when he'd think that they were talking, and then suddenly, her eyes would be clouded, staring off into space, her thoughts anywhere but with him. It was a private expression, almost intimate, and he wondered if she'd approved this picture.
He wondered if there was another picture of her inside.
"I see it," he muttered.
Lee's fingers eager wrinkled the paper. "Can we buy it?"
No, Bill wanted to say. He did not want that magazine in his house. Not the home where they'd shared pizza and clandestine kisses, where he'd fallen asleep thinking of her, where he'd let himself imagine that they could one day make a life.
"Put it back," he grunted.
Lee squared his little shoulders, his fists tightening at his sides. "I. Need. This."
His son was not going to back down, and Bill knew it.
"If Lee gets a magazine, I get a Zeus bar," Zak whined, in a voice loud enough to carry back to the dairy aisle.
Bill took the magazine from Lee. The Woman Behind The Murders-how tacky. He hoped she thought so, too.
He hoped, wherever she was, that she was cringing every time she saw it.
"Dad?"
Silently, Bill dropped the Times and the Zeus bar with the rest of the groceries. Lee sighed in relief, Zak cheered, and Bill ignored the judgmental eye of the teenage cashier.
Let Lee read it. Let Lee carry it around. Let Lee build a shrine for it.
Bill didn't care.
But it would be much easier not to care if Lee didn't have to read the damn thing so loudly.
"Dad, what does this word mean?"
It was important to encourage Lee in his reading, his kindergarten teacher had told Bill. Most almost-seven-year-olds were still working their way through their first thin chapter books, and Lee was already attempting grown-up novels. It was crucial to his development that he receive cheerful, willing help whenever he needed it, his teacher had said. They didn't want him getting frustrated or discouraged.
But did he have to be encouraged while Bill was trying to put dinner on the table?
Bill peered over his shoulder. "'Transcendent,'" he read. "It means..."
Inside, the picture was in color. Laura was standing in front of a window, her face in profile, the light softening her features, limning the dark red of her hair with a gentle golden glow. Taken in Roslin's suite at the Caprica City Grand Hotel, the caption read. So that's where she was living now...in a hotel?
"Dad?" Lee prompted, his foot bouncing impatiently.
Bill sighed. "It means he liked the book, Lee."
Across the room, Zak shrieked in happiness; he was feeding Viper the rest of his Zeus bar, Bill saw. Because that's what he needed: tiny pieces of peanut butter-stained wrapper all over the floor.
This day was never going to be over.
"Dad, what does this word mean?"
"'Cathartic,'" Bill pronounced.
Lee waited.
"He thought it made her feel better to write it," Bill translated.
Why, Bill might have asked...if he still cared why Laura did things. But he was past that now, done with parsing her motives, struggling with her reasoning.
He had things to do, kids to feed.
"Dad-" Lee began. But Bill, busy draining his noodles into a colander in the sink, couldn't hear him.
"It's time to put that away for dinner," he informed Lee, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. "Tell your brother-"
Lee wasn't listening. "Dad, what's a drunk driver?"
Bill paused. "Let me see that a minute."
He had to know what his son was reading, after all, make sure it was age-appropriate-
There it was, in black and white, everything he'd ever wanted to know, and had been too polite, too considerate, too cowardly, to ask.
And he knew now he hadn't bought the magazine for Lee.
Drunk driver...two years after her mother's death from cancer...head-on collision...father and one sister killed instantly, one sister pronounced brain dead at the hospital...Roslin, as the only living relative, made the choice to take her off life support...
It was all coming together for him now: the dedications in her books-to Edward, Judith, Carolyn, and Sandra, whose names she never uttered out loud...the tremor in her voice when she spoke of her childhood in that lake house...the pictures missing from her home, the visitors who never came...
He imagined losing his family in one night, pictured standing there, all alone, making the decision to pull a seventeen-year-old's life support, and he could feel tears pricking at his eyes.
Why hadn't she told him? Had she thought he wouldn't understand, that he couldn't be trusted with that part of herself?
Unless...maybe she'd tried.
He'd yelled at her, he remembered suddenly, the memory hitting him like a blow. Their minor little accident, and she'd been so afraid, and he'd been so angry...
Something cold shivered deep in his gut, and he wished he hadn't hung up on her, that last time they'd spoken.
Some of these details have been written about before. But what hasn't been public knowledge, until now, is that Roslin was in the car, too...and that her injuries were not so minor as have been assumed. Roslin underwent several emergency surgeries immediately following the accident, doctors only just managing to save her life. But there was another loss she suffered that night...
The first time he read the words, he blinked, shook his head a little. No. No, he would have known...
But when he opened his eyes, the words were still there.
At the time of the accident, Roslin had been seven months pregnant.
He flashed to the delicate scar crisscrossing her abdomen, the look in her eyes when Zak hugged her that first time...and he knew it wasn't a lie, and it wasn't a mistake.
His fingers dug into the paper until the page ripped.
"Dad!"
"I'll buy you another one," Bill replied numbly.
How could she have gone on, after that kind of loss? How could she have gotten out of bed, written novels, laughed?
He thought about the hesitation on her face when she'd asked him to dinner, the quirk of her lips when she smiled, and was humbled.
He could not have had her strength.
"Dad?"
"In a minute," he mumbled.
The noodles would soon be a cold, sticky mess. The vegetables were probably burning. He didn't care.
Months of recovery...multiple surgeries...a beloved teacher, who couldn't bear to be around children...a first novel, written in hospitals and recovery rooms, alone in an apartment she wouldn't allow even her closest friends to visit...
He found the date in the article, did the math. Six years ago.
Her child would be exactly Lee's age now.
The pieces were clicking into place now, and with all his heart, he wished, for her sake, that he was wrong.
The fear in her eyes when he told her that he was bringing Zak and Lee into her house. The awkwardness as they fixed the window, as she struggled to make conversation with Lee. Her long hesitation, that first time he'd ask her to come to dinner with the kids...
He'd been afraid his children would get hurt.
It had never occurred to him that his children might hurt her.
With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he remembered all those phone calls he'd spent prattling on about Zak and Lee, complaining about Zak and Lee. What must she think of him? The way he'd pushed her come to family dinners-why hadn't he ever asked her if that was what she wanted? He pictured the doubt in her eyes when he'd asked her to stay the night, her panic when she'd woken up in his house, surrounded by his family...
No wonder she'd run away from him.
Maybe he really hadn't learned anything since Carolanne, after all.
He thought about that house next door, sitting empty for months, and his heart twisted.
He thought about the way she curled into herself when she slept, her knees close to her chest, her fingers gripping her pillow.
He thought about a young teacher, her face flushed with happiness, laughing with her sisters, her hands cupping her growing belly.
He thought about the steel in the eyes of a woman who'd survived the loss of everyone she'd ever loved.
He thought about Laura in a lonely hotel room, because he'd driven her away from the home she'd tried to make for herself.
It was too late for them. He would be foolish to hope otherwise.
But maybe...maybe it wasn't too late for her.