Chapter 10: What runs in the family
I was still off-balance a month later, when the visitor arrived.
But I was getting better at scraping by with moments: 'tea time' with Grace (who considered it fair game to speculate about cause when it came to the emotions she had no choice but to be aware of), catching up with Rogue (when she wasn't caught up in the latest iteration of Bobby drama, which seemed to involve a lot of low conversations in her room followed by some very sappy making up), and spending a lot of spare time around Jubilee (usually, waiting for something to blow up).
Jones still obsessively watched nature documentaries whenever the living room wasn't occupied. He was good company if you needed to be alone with your thoughts, the occasional blunt remark, and a few thousand terrifying facts about the ocean floor. Plus, if he understood that it made me feel better, somehow, to remember there were other people who'd never been afraid of John, he never commented on it. Which, considering it was Jones, was sort of touching.
Jubilee joined us once but after her repeated suggestions that we watch a reality show were ignored, took to using the bird feeders out back for target practice instead. The back deck was now constantly covered in birdseed and squirrels. Storm kept texting everyone reminders to keep the back doors closed after the Cuckoo sisters were caught keeping a small flock of pigeons in their room.
Still embarrassed by the living room incident with Colossus—who, to his credit, took my apology in stride, though being slammed into a wall by the mansion's notoriously least threatening occupant seemed to jolt him from whatever jerk phase he'd been trying on for size—I was trying to work on my powers. It had taken me so long to accept they were something I couldn't suppress or deny forever that part of me was annoyed when, after all that, they weren't instantaneously at my fingertips, but I was trying.
I had taken up regular visits to either Storm or the Professor's office for guidance (or in the absence of guidance, enough frustration to send me back down to the gym again), and on one afternoon I found the Professor waiting with a guest.
"Ah, Ms. Lange," Professor X said as I walked into his office.
I nodded back, already wary and re-counting the exits.
"Professor."
There had been a mild tone shift in our meetings from when I'd first arrived. Same old, same old, only now with slightly less existential dread. Still, my sessions always seemed to take longer than, say, Kitty's. I was the problem child again. Digging around in the minefield we'd all set up such nice signage around.
The Professor claimed all of the older students and the X-Men still had meetings with him as a way of checking in, but at the moment, I was neither. Nothing useful to anyone. Since I'd still been hesitant upon "graduation" to embrace anything about my powers, the Professor had helped me enroll in a semester online at a nearby college on the condition that I keep the door open to joining the X-Men. It doubled for a while as an excuse to spend hours away from the mansion or locked in my room studying, away from the sad knowing look in Rogue's eyes and avoiding my own feelings.
Now I was back to swimming in them.
Today there was someone else in the room. An older woman, silver hair in a twist with a voluminous blue scarf draped over her shoulders.
"There's someone I'd like you to meet," said Xavier, dipping his chin in recognition.
He held one hand in her direction in a polite, deferential way, as though he was introducing a head of state.
"Ms. Lange, you may remember Ms. Giselle Lange, your grandmother."
My stomach dropped and I searched my mind and this woman's face for a memory. She stared at me openly with clear blue eyes, flecked with pearl. The same strange eyes I saw in the mirror—almost normal, but ever so slightly something else.
I hadn't seen my grandmother since I was seven, but I couldn't deny the eyes.
She scanned me up and down.
"Well you certainly look more like her than him."
Her voice was more elegant than her blunt delivery. I scowled.
"Ah, and there it is," she said. Then she stood up and circled me, leaning slightly on a cane.
"Where have you been?" I demanded, too caught off guard to be more than slightly embarrassed at the tone.
She laughed once sharply, like a bark.
"Where do you think?" she said, leaning to look at me up close. "I was forbidden to see either of you, years ago."
She leaned away and returned to her chair, sitting with care, still examining me.
"If I were a younger woman still, if I'd had the means to escape that wretched power of his…I might have neutralized him myself. But as it was, I couldn't risk doing anything that might put you and my daughter's life in danger. So I stayed away."
My heart had jumped to my throat at her first words, but behind it was petulant anger rising up my spine. I'd had a grandmother who was alive and well, all this time? We had been alone. For so long.
"She was in danger," I bit out.
"More danger," she said in the same tone. "Danger she hadn't signed up for. Don't misunderstand me, young lady, I am very aware of what your father was capable of. But I'm sure you know better than anyone how fast the rules could change with him, and I wasn't going to risk setting off a massacre. Anna understood the risks she was choosing."
She paused to rub the top of her cane thoughtfully.
"Anyway, I've been in a lovely spot in Pennsylvania for some time now. Not enough people around to bother me, plenty of young home aides to do things like cleaning and mending and grocery shopping. Nearby hospital in case I kick. They bus us out once a month to Philly to buy Amish pastries and look at the bell."
I just stared at her, incredulous. She stared right back. I had the uncanny feeling of glaring into a mirror.
"How many exits, Celia?" she said finally. Next to her, the Professor's face gave nothing away, though he turned to me and waited as well.
I exhaled through my nose, annoyed.
"Eight, counting the windows."
An almost smug smile appeared on Giselle's face.
"You see? I didn't leave you with nothing."
Turning to the Professor, she said, "If you'll excuse us, we have catching up to do."
Then she turned back to rearranging his pens with one hand, not bothering to check that he obeyed. He accepted the dismissal from his own office without question, the doors closing with a soft thud behind him.
"Your father was a deeply demented man," Giselle said, the words out of place in her elegant voice. "He had an unusually rough time of things—not that it excuses what he did with it—parents who abused him, bleak circumstances, a series of setbacks one after the other. For a time, according to Anna, he was a different man, one she married. But streaks like that don't last with men convinced the world is out to get them. Discovering his power changed everything. It probably seemed like the tables had finally turned. In any case, he seemed…convinced suddenly that he owed nothing to anyone. That he made the rules. That he had earned the right."
She paused, her eyes on my face. She reached forward and laid one hand gently on my arm, the touch cool but comforting.
"Your mother was the only good thing in that man's life," she said. "But then there was his power."
I swallowed with effort. I had understood for a long time that whatever of his life had mattered to him, I'd never really been a part of it. His obsession was with my mother. I'd been the legacy he hadn't asked for. A few times, I'd wondered if he would kill me himself. My gut told me it would have been less direct. He would have had my mother do it, or the mailman, or a stranger. And for every moment before that, he would poke and prod at me indirectly to see what he could provoke, to see if something terrible to match his own was in there somewhere.
It was hard to feel sympathy for a man like that, who had watched my mother fall to her death, screaming at the terror he had placed in her head. It was at least a tiny bit comforting to know his cruelty hadn't sprung out of the earth or some genetic insanity waiting to pounce. He had a life before being the man I'd known to lurk in the dark and closed office.
"That's not to say that I even believe Damon ever loved Anna," Giselle said, a touch bitterly. "I never liked him. Even before his power. Some men just aren't worth trusting."
She sighed.
"But Anna was different, of course. She'd always had a different way of seeing things, seeing what people could be. The world moved differently for someone like her," she said. "And I don't know that he was even capable, by the end. Whatever man he'd been when your mother married him, the 'Sandman' as he became known was someone so much further gone."
She paused, eyes lighting on me again as though remembering something. They nearly glowed in the light streaming through Xavier's tall windows. As graceful on her face as they had always been on my mother's. I wondered what I looked like to her. I was almost surely scowling.
The corner of her mouth quirked.
"Anyway, I'm not just telling you this for the history lesson."
"Oh is there a moral somewhere?" I said, my voice more bitter than I remembered it being. "Don't marry men with names too close to 'demon'?"
Internally, I was crashing. Careening too far off balance to remember to behave. To be alarmed that this was the last living member of my family and in under ten minutes I was already in danger of being a little too myself.
But had I ever been important? To anyone? I knew it was self-centered but god it was depressing. The thought had an iron grip on me. It made me want to find the whiskey I knew Logan hid, dare Jubilee to try to make the appliances dance, say yes to one of the guys in town the next time I ran errands and give Bad Decision Celia a take. It made me want to watch things burn.
I stared at my hands clasped in my lap, this new information churning through my head and heart, processing until I could make sense of it and file it away, somewhere with the floorplans and exits and memories. That careful compartmentalization I'd gotten so used to.
Giselle said nothing for a beat, watching me. Then she ever so slightly smirked.
"Well it can't hurt," she said, eyebrows raised. "While you're at it, I'd stay away from anyone who's never done laundry."
I let out a breath, surprised, confused, relieved.
"But no, that wasn't quite the point of this," she said, eyes narrowed like she suspected she should be scolding me but didn't feel like it.
"Then why?" I said, voice more even than I felt.
She chuckled, shifting her weight.
"Charles was filling me in on the events of the last year or so," she said. "I know I'm getting a late start as a grandmother, but you should hear it from someone who knows that not all men from rocky pasts end up murderous sadists."
All of the blood in my body went to my toes but I kept my face still, annoyed even as my heart sped up.
Damn Xavier and his stupid telepathy and his stupid considerate foresight in finding relatives.
The fear had paced at the back of mind since Alkali Lake, bought up a little property every time a building was on fire on the news. I didn't want to follow my mother off the same edge.
"Anger isn't a bad thing on its own. It's not the end of the road. You can decide where it guides you. And there's usually a lot to be angry about. That doesn't mean every person you meet will do the same thing with it, let it blot out everything else, systematically torture innocent people for no other reason than a god complex and no moral center," she said, rearranging the papers on the Professor's desk and glancing up at me matter-of-factly, like serial torture and murder were table tennis or golf. "I wondered what growing up so isolated would do to you. I hope it hasn't really left you suspecting that everyone will end up a murderer."
Not everyone. Just me.
Still, it was almost comforting to hear. If the reason she was telling me this hadn't already quite literally left me in the cold.
Her gaze softened just a little. "You look so much like Anna. She was stronger than that, too. She handled so much more than you even know."
Suddenly I was about to cry. I tried to breathe it back in.
"Why—"
A sob broke the word in half and I snapped my mouth shut. I finally felt as ridiculous and embarrassed as I did broken. I barely remembered this woman and certainly wasn't about to cry in front of her. Pathetic. But she was right about me. So right. I was a monster of suspicion.
Giselle smiled, not in an unkind way. She reached a hand out with a handkerchief, looking unsurprised when I wouldn't take it.
"Trust can be difficult at the best of times," she said, folding the handkerchief again in her lap. "And of course, it's a whole other beast to be scared of yourself."
Now it was just unfair. My eyes burned and I ignored them. I felt borderline hysterical.
"Also the thing about crying—that runs in the family," she said abruptly, like it was something she'd meant to mention from the beginning.
I choked back a startled laugh, confused relief flying through me again, shook my head.
"Tell me about Mom," I managed instead.
Giselle straightened in her seat, all pursed lips and regal posture, the light in her eyes distant but fond.
"She and I had our disagreements. She was…more trusting, more open. But Anna was so many things," she said. "One of them was very brave. She loved you very much. It was what she weighed against all those other risks."
I stood up straight and ignored my breathing. Ashamed at myself because of course, I'd been important to one person.
"I lost track of her for quite some time with Damian. And even when I found her again…I didn't guess the game she was up to right away."
I narrowed my eyes at her and she continued, eyes lingering on one of the Professor's lamps.
"Goodness even the man's lighting screams academia," she said, before fixing me with an urgent gaze. "Promise me you'll speak to him about decorating more imaginatively."
I gave her a look and she continued.
"Right. I didn't figure it out, not right away. But then there were too many kids surviving. I know that sounds odd. What I mean is that for what had become upsettingly normal at the time—mutant kids turning up homeless or beaten or worse—the community around her hospital was always an anomaly. By then, there were regular stories all around the country about children being turned out of foster care or even their own family's homes because of mutations, of communities looking the other way on certain behavior…" she trailed off. "The numbers from the hospital where your mother worked—they made no sense. Every child who came in with horns and some mysteriously broken bones, for example, somehow ended up with another member of their family, somehow instantly became less accident-prone. No super-strong child orphaned in a car crash and facing a return home to relatives who held them responsible, were out for blood, ever actually did. They ended up somewhere else. Happy, safe. No stories of mutant children abandoned, killed, or turned over to some dubious government 'program'. It was too good to be true."
She paused to take a sip of her water and I thought the world would end. My mind flashed to my mother in the frame of that hospital room, talking about luck. "I've tried to…redirect some of them to places that will take them…"
I'd never been able to piece together anything else, other than the vague suspicion that my mother was doing more for those kids than worrying about them.
But then there were the cousins.
"She certainly knew subtlety better than I did during the war," Giselle continued, heedless to my private meltdown.
"Wait—" I interrupted, "Did mom have siblings?"
Giselle looked puzzled, then drew herself up with something like pride, like I'd ruffled unseen feathers.
"Anna was my only child."
"But what about the cousins?" I blurted urgently.
I was both angry and profoundly unsurprised when the understanding settled on her face.
"As I said," she said quietly, with a gleam in her eye that was annoyingly like the Professor's in the moment. "Anna was more than one thing. She would know better than anyone how to keep the most vulnerable safe in the last place anyone would look for them."
All of those cousins. All of those children. I'd cut their sandwiches and driven them to school and told them stories, completely none the wiser. It must have been easy enough to get away with—none of them stayed nearly as long as Natasha and Bea had, and I had been young enough to distrust my memory of how many there were. All I had known was that I eventually hugged them goodbye and breathed a sigh of relief that they'd stayed safe after all, and my mother had packed them into the car to drop back at the house of my "aunt" or "uncle."
Not for the first time, I wondered if I was awake.
We exited the Professor's office some time later. I was exhausted from sitting tensed up with burning eyes. Giselle had, while rearranging the Professor's bookshelves so her favorites were more prominently displayed, asked me about a hundred questions about my life, equally happy to have answers as to entertain herself by guessing when I didn't or couldn't provide them. I felt lighter walking away.
I still had secrets. But I had a grandmother, too. And I'd had a mother who'd been more than just some nightmare's victim, who had helped me be more without me even noticing, helped me to play the game all along.
Anna Lange had weighed the risks and made some choices.
It was time for me to do the same.