Omigord. Tissue alert. Seriously. I pride myself on not being an emotional person. At least not when it comes to sad things. But wow. I had tears in my eyes writing parts of this chapter! You'll notice it's longer too. That's because once I started I couldn't stop. I hope you all like it. And thanks for you feed back from last chapter.
Chapter 28
"What happened when Mama called you?" I asked, completely wrapped up in his story. It had been hours since he turned up and every minute had been filled with a wealth of information about my mother and her life. I had gleaned a few tidbits of information about Diesel himself as well. He was a kind of fugitive apprehension agent, like mama, but apparently a special kind, because he had special "gifts". I hadn't yet managed to figure out what these special gifts were, but there was still much more of Mama's life he had to tell me about, so there was time for more detective work in regards to that. For now though, I wanted to hear about the portion of Mama's life no one else had been able to tell me about.
Diesel picked up his bottle of water from the floor beside him and took a sip before answering my question. I was sprawled across most of the couch cushions, still scattered on the floor, with my head on Papa's lap. Papa was leaning against the back of the couch, absently curling and uncurling my hair around his fingers. Diesel was positioned across from us, his arm propped on his one raised knee.
He took too long getting to his answer, so I asked another question. "Was that when she left Trenton? Was she asking for help? Did you help her?" Okay, so it was more like a few questions, but hey.
"Yes. Yes. Yes," he said simply.
I gave an exasperated sigh. "Details!" I demanded, waving my hand around above my head and almost hitting Papa in the face before he grabbed it and forced it back down.
"I'm getting there," Diesel told me. Shaking his head with a grin. "How do you expect me to tell you want you want to hear when you keep interrupting with questions that I have to answer or your Papa glares at me?"
I felt Papa stiffen and craned my neck to look back at him. He was glaring at Diesel, so I guessed that Diesel had been telling the truth.
Papa glanced down at me when he felt my eyes on him and explained, "I wanted to make sure you got all the answers you wanted, ." Then he brushed the hair out of my face and gave me his secret smile and I returned my gaze to the man. "Continue," Papa prompted him.
"She called me one night in a flat spin," he explained. "Told me she'd packed all her stuff into her car and just driven away and that she now had no idea what to do." He shook his head with a slight smile. "I told her she could stay with me for as long as she wanted, gave her directions and the next day she was on my doorstep. Rex the hamster in his cage and hoisted up on her hip and a suitcase at her feet. In that first moment I wasn't sure what to do myself. Sure, I'd told her to come, but I hadn't actually expected her to. She's such an independent woman that I thought she'd go to a hotel or something and make it on her own. But there she was. Standing there. On my doorstep. "
"What did you do?" Papa asked. Startling both me and Diesel if the slight widening of his eyes was anything to go by. Papa hadn't really been a participant in the conversation up until now. He'd just been silently observing, as per usual.
"I dragged her suitcase up to the guest room, go her settled and let her know that she could stay as long as she liked. When my wife got home I introduced them both and that was pretty much the end of my involvement in the making her comfortable. They got on like a house on fire. Quite literally at times. " He chuckled.
"You let her in the kitchen, didn't you?" Papa asked, chuckling a little himself. It was good to see he was finally relaxing.
"Yeah. After Steph explained that her cooking skills were non-existent Janelle insisted she could teach her. Needless to say, the first few attempts were disastrous, ending in fire extinguishers and take-out, but over time she got better."
I looked up at Papa again. "She learned how to cook," I told him. "Grandma would have been proud." He nodded his agreement and tugged on a curl.
"Once she'd mastered the art of not burning food she decided it was time for her to find her own place," Diesel continued.
"Was she working at the time?" Papa asked.
Diesel nodded. "Part time reception work at a medical centre. So Steph moved into a small apartment in the next suburb over. Far enough away that she felt like she had her independence back, yet close enough that she could still see Janelle three to four times a week. Things progressed normally for a few weeks. Then I came home one night to find Janelle and Steph deep in discussion at the kitchen table. There were magazine and website printouts scattered around, as well as hand written notes and a few pens. They refused to tell me what they were up to, so I grabbed a bottle of water and went to my office." He paused to take another drink of water, like the mention of it reminded him he was thirsty and I once again grew impatient.
"What were they talking about?" I prompted. "Stop drinking and tell me. Papa, confiscate his water and make him keep talking." In response, Papa simply laid a hand on my shoulder and Diesel put his water down.
"Impatient much?" he asked. "I didn't find out what they'd been talking about until a week later. I'd decided to accompany Janelle on her weekly shopping trip. Nothing spectacular, just wandering through the local mall looking for bargain, usually. Janelle loves a good bargain. We'd been wandering for a couple of hours when we came across a store that sold nothing but baby stuff. Horribly cute. I balked when she stopped abruptly and insisted we go inside. My mind was going a million miles a minute, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for why she would all of a sudden want to look at baby things. Finally, I gave up and asked her. That's when I found out that Steph had decided to have a baby. The night I'd walked in on them talking, they'd been picking a sperm donor."
He paused then and simply studied my reaction. "You knew it was sperm donor?" he asked, though it sounded more like a statement.
I nodded. "Auntie Mare told us."
"I wasn't expecting Ranger to know," he admitted, ignoring Papa's presence and talking solely to me now. "Let alone you. I wasn't aware Steph had told anyone else." He shrugged then. "So she went through the pregnancy thing and Janelle gloried in being able to buy little baby things for her and with her."
Finally, he reached for one of the boxes he'd brought. They'd been sitting there all afternoon, taunting me with their presence. I had to know what was in there.
He opened it up, pulled out a photo album and passed it to me. I immediately sat up and placed it on my lap, flicking it open. The first page was a photo of Mama in a baggy Van Halen t-shirt and cut off sweat pants laughing as a woma – also laughing – pointed a turkey baste at her. I turned a page and there was a picture of my mother's flat stomach. Week 1, the caption read. No sign of change =P. Opposite that picture was Mama and the woman, I assumed was Janelle, holding a pose that made me laugh because it was something I could envision Meli and I doing. Steph was side on, thrusting her flat stomach out so that it looked bigger and Janelle was pointing at it with a surprised caption read: I better hadn't spontaneously combust. The next page was another picture of Mama's flat stomach. I looked across and there was a picture of mama holding a positive pregnancy test, grinning from ear to ear. The caption went across the bottom of both pages in capital letters. We survived the Two Week Wait!
"You have her smile," Diesel informed me. I glanced up at him. "You're doing it right now," he added and handed me a hand mirror with a smirk. I looked at myself then back at the photo and gasped when I realised he was right. It wasn't that I'd never seen my mother's smile before. I'd seen it plenty of times. I just never thought to compare hers to mine.
I grinned wider and set the mirror aside as I returned to looking through the album. Each week Mama had taken a photo of her stomach whether it had changed or not and then beside it was a silly photo. Usually with Janelle.
I noticed after a short time that the same Van Halen t-shirt kept reappearing. Just when I opened my mouth to point it out to Papa, Diesel pulled something else out of the box, distracting me. My gaze locked on the faded black fabric and my first thought was No. Way. With a flourish, Diesel unfolded it to reveal THE Van Halen t-shirt.
"No way," I said allowed. "It's not. It can't be…. Is it?"
"It is."
"That's Mama's t-shirt?"
He nodded and tossed it at me. I snatched it out of the air and held it to my face, imagining Mama in it, her belly bulging, stretching the t-shirt to its limits. I smiled and after a moment, laid the t-shirt across my lap, returning to the album. When I reached the last pages I found not a picture of Mama's rounded belly, but a picture of mama, sitting in a hospital bed, cradling a small pink blanket wrapped bundle. I laughed when I recognised the t-shirt. On the opposite page there was a picture of mama and me, my face was contorted weirdly and mama was imitating it. One day old and already knows the ways of the Plums: When in doubt, pull a weird face.
The next album Diesel handed me was much larger full of pictures of me in hundreds of different outfits. Each time I turned the page, Diesel would pull the outfit in the photo out and place it on the pile between us. I marvelled over how small they were. Papa picked them up and looked at them curiously. I think he was speculating what I would look like if I wore something like that now. The simple truth of the matter was, I wouldn't. It simply wouldn't happen. They were to girly and cutesy. Don't get me wrong. I had nothing against pink, but there was a limit to the amount of cute I would allow to adorn my body these days.
There was another album full of candid photos of Mama and baby me. As I worked my way through it, Diesel pulled more items from the boxes and added them to the pile in the middle. The first box was empty and the second box was half way to being the same when Diesel picked up his story again.
"When you were about ten months old," he began, "Steph started suffering intense migraines. Sporadic at first, but as time went by they became more and more frequent. It took both Janelle and I a month to convince her to see a doctor. She went to her GP, whom I am convinced got his PhD from a cereal box, and was prescribed pain killers. A week later, I dragged Steph to a friend of mine."
"A doctor friend?" I asked. There was a barely noticeable pause before he answered in the affirmative, but I was becoming an expert on barely noticeable. I'd grown up with an entire building of barely noticeable. "The whole truth please?"
"He's not the conventional kind of doctor. More of a healer. Anyway, he diagnosed the brain tumour that had been causing her pain. He predicted she had about a year. She lasted six months."
Tears slid down my cheeks. I felt stupid for it. I knew how the story ended and it still managed to choke me up. I had all this evidence of the life I'd had with mama, and now it was like she'd just been taken away from me again. I knew I'd spent time with her, but the knowledge that I never could again filled me with a grief I was unable to control.
Papa gathered me against his chest and held me tight for a long while as I cried. I kept thinking it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that I would never get to see my mother again. That she would never hold me in her arms again. Never whisper that she loved me as she kissed me good night. I'd never go shopping with her to buy my prom dress. She could never share her dating blunders with me to cheer me up after a boy dumped me. I'd never be able to tell her how much I was grateful for everything she did for me.
Ages past and I eventually dried my eyes on the hem of my t-shirt and stood. "I'm gonna go fix something for dinner," I told Papa, then turned to Diesel. "I'd like it if you stayed, but I understand if you have to get back to your wife."
"I'll stay," he informed me with a grin, and added, "I haven't had a chance to snoop around yet."
I laughed a little at that. "Papa, do you wanna call the guys, Tio Eloy and Auntie Mare and see if they wanna join us?"
Ranger's POV
I watched Magenta make her way into the kitchen, hoping she was alright. She'd completely broken down at the end of Diesel's story. I don't think I'd ever seen her so broken.
When she was no longer in sight I pulled out my cell phone and called down to the comm. room. Bobby answered on the secong ring and after a short conversation confirmed that he, Lester and Tank would be joining us soon. I called Mary-Lou next and apparently caught her as she was about to call for take-out. She informed me that she would be up in ten seconds and then promptly hung up on me.
Eloy answered the phone with his customary, "I don't know what you're blaming for, but I didn't do it."
I sighed. "I'm not blaming you for anything. I'm inviting you to dinner. Genny's cooking. She wanted to know if you'd join us."
"Is that safe?" he asked. "I've heard stories about Steph's cooking abilities. Surely that kind of thing is genetic."
"You'll be fine," I promised. "Now get up here."
With the phone calls done, I wandered into the kitchen. Genny was a flurry of activity, seemingly everywhere at once. Diesel was positioned at the bench, peeling carrots with a bemused expression on his face.
"Can I borrow Diesel for a moment," I asked my daughter. She barely looked up from the bowl meat she was tenderising, and grunted a 'sure'. I dragged Diesel down the hall to the opposite corner of the house, set my face to blank interrogation and crossed my arms over my chest. "You lied," I said. No point beating about the bush.
"I didn't lie," Diesel countered, leaning back against the wall and shoving his hands into his pocket.
"Don't try to fool me, Diesel. I've been trained to recognise a lie. And when you told Gen about Steph's tumour you were lying about something. What aren't you saying?"
Diesel shrugged and looked me straight in the eye as if daring me to force a confession out of him. "I can't say," he said, sounding bored. "Can I get back to the carrots now?"
Please review. Speculations. General feedback. It's all welcome.
