A loyal anonymous reviewer has been asking for a one-shot set after Jake's birth where Miss Peregrine and Abe talk about his future. I couldn't see myself writing it at first, but after a while, an idea began to take shape. This chapter isn't the exact requested scenario (Jake hasn't been born yet), but I do hope that the reader who requested it enjoys it and finds it worth the wait. :)
Abe ran one hand through his thinning grey hair, frustrated, and switched the phone to his other ear. He couldn't remember any phone call with Miss Peregrine being this long and tense, though of course he'd known that she wouldn't give in easily on this. He and Miss Peregrine had been talking – arguing was the better word, though Abe never thought he'd live to argue with his own ymbryne – for ten minutes, ever since Abe had called her with the news that his son and daughter-in-law were expecting a baby boy. He would be Abe's first grandchild, and more importantly, as Abe and Miss Peregrine both already knew, he would be peculiar.
"Abe, raising a peculiar child outside of a loop is too dangerous," Miss Peregrine said, for at least the third time. "He'll need to go to an ymbryne." Abe could picture her in her home in Wales, smoking her pipe in the little room off the kitchen where the rarely-used candlestick telephone sat on a shelf.
"But Miss P, I'll be right there with him," Abe argued, "and I can see the hollows. I'll be able to keep him safe." He was on his cordless phone, pacing the living room of his little house in Florida, halfway around the world and nearly sixty years in the future from Miss Peregrine. "Look at me. I've kept myself safe for this long, haven't I?"
"Yes, you have, and I know you're very vigilant, but you can't watch your grandson every minute, can you? If he's not in a loop, then sooner or later, the hollows or the wights will find him."
Abe pursed his lips, annoyed. Miss Peregrine had slipped right into her I'm-sorry-but-no voice that she used for the little kids whenever they wanted to stay up late or have extra dessert. Abe suspected, and Emma agreed with him, that even though he was an old man now, Miss Peregrine still thought of him as a little boy. She couldn't help it, he supposed. Maybe if he told her what name Frank and Maryann had picked out for the baby, then she would change her mind. Maybe if he told her –
But no, Abe couldn't tell anyone about that. He closed his eyes against the thought. He would have to try a different tactic with Miss Peregrine.
"But Miss P, families are raising their children differently now. They don't send them away so much anymore. It's like... do you remember that little Scottish boy you almost took in? The toddler?"
"Of course I do." The boy in question had been a three-year-old from Dumfries who was not only peculiar, but mentally handicapped, too. Yet Miss Peregrine hadn't hesitated to volunteer to care for him, though he'd gone instead to Miss Snowfinch, whose home was closer and less crowded. "The little Mongoloid boy, you mean?"
"Right. Now, you see, they call that condition Down Syndrome, and now, well, for the most part, children like that are raised by their families. They have all sorts of resources and support groups for special needs now. Parents aren't so quick to send their children away over every little thing. I don't think Frank and Maryann will be, either."
On the other end of the line, Miss Peregrine fell silent, thinking. Frank and Maryann were Abe's son and his wife, the parents of the coming baby, and she realized guiltily that she hadn't taken their feelings into consideration before now. She knew that some ymbrynes took peculiar children away from parents who loved them and wanted to keep them. It was ugly, but sometimes, it simply had to be done. She thanked the birds that she'd never had to do it. Her children had all lost their birth families in some tragic way: either they'd been abandoned or, like Abe, reluctantly sent away to keep them safe. But now, she sighed and forced herself to consider for the first time, if Frank and Maryann wanted to keep their baby, would she have it in her to take him away? Would Abe have it in him to allow that?
Though she lived in 1943, Alma Peregrine was not ignorant of how time was marching on in the world outside her loop. She knew that parenting styles were changing. There were magazines about parenting now – glossy magazines with stock photos of happy families having picnics or playing games. The formal, black-and-white family portraits of her day were gone, it seemed. Abe sent her copies of these magazines occasionally, and though of course, she was an ymbryne and could've managed her children very well without any advice from magazines, thank you, she found that they did have useful information. One of them contained an article about "trauma-informed parenting," which she'd had to steel her nerves before reading late one night while her children slept.
Another magazine had showed a photo of a pretty new British royal – Princess Diana, she was called – romping barefoot on a beach with two little boys. The older one, according to the caption, was in direct line to the throne. Miss Peregrine had stared at that photo for some time, surprised at how even the royal family – which she'd long admired as a stronghold of pomp and tradition – seemed to be changing now, too. Like most ymbrynes, Miss Peregrine knew the truth about young Prince John, whom the king and queen had hidden from the public, supposedly due to his severe epilepsy. The boy wasn't epileptic at all, but peculiar, and his parents had done the proper thing and sent him away to be cared for by an ymbryne. But on the phone with Abe now, Miss Peregrine remembered that photo of Diana and the two little princes. If another peculiar baby was born to the royal family in Abe's time, would they send it away again? Could they? Perhaps Abe was right...
But Miss Peregrine was distracted from her thoughts when she heard a scuffle from the parlor, followed by raised voices. Enoch yelled, "Horace, give that back!" and then Horace replied something that she couldn't catch. She narrowed her black eyes and snapped into ymbryne mode. She held the telephone receiver to her breast with one hand, yanked her pipe from her mouth with the other, and called over her shoulder, "Boys, work it out, please!" At the tone in her voice, the noise from the parlor instantly ceased.
Miss Peregrine slowly raised the receiver to her mouth again. She could understand Abe's point of view better now, but still, the idea of a peculiar child being raised outside of a loop was simply too sacrilegious. She had to make him see that... but she had to do it delicately. She tapped her long black fingernails on the polished wooden base of the telephone and took a deep breath. "Now, Abe," she began, but unsure of how to continue, she hesitated – possibly the first time she'd ever hesitated or felt uncertain in her life – and as she did, Abe spoke.
"They... they picked out a name for him, you know," he said slowly, and there was a tremble in his voice that Miss Peregrine had never heard there before. "For the baby. It-it's... Jacob." A ragged breath burst out of him as he said the name, and he felt tears spring to his eyes. "Jacob," he said again, and it felt like laying down a heavy burden. Abe had avoided actually saying the name aloud since Frank and Maryann told him that they'd chosen it. "That-that was my father's name, Miss P."
Abe paused again – he had to – and though Miss Peregrine was silent, he could tell that she was listening very closely now. She'd tried to coax him into talking about them before, but Abe had never once spoken of his first family, of the parents and grandparents that he'd lost to the Nazis in Poland – not to the ymbryne who'd raised him, not to Emma, not to his wife, not to his children. He almost couldn't believe that he was doing it right now. "Everyone called him Yanky, but his name was Jacob. They don't even know that. They only picked it because it's so popular in America right now. But... but he's going to have the same name as my father, Miss P. I-I think it must be a sign."
Abe had tried to tell his son that Jacob had been his father's name, but he couldn't make himself say the words. It seemed too late to share that with Frank now. He'd kept so many secrets from Frank, ever since he was a boy. For bird's sake, Frank didn't even know that Abe was peculiar – and he still had no idea that his unborn son would be, too. Abe knew that he hadn't been the best father to Frank, but he was determined to do a better job as a grandfather.
"I tried to tell him, but I can't... I c-can't, Miss P..." He bit his lip hard, trying to hold back his sobs, but he couldn't. The tears in his eyes spilled down his cheeks, and he was crying as if his entire family had perished in the death camps yesterday, not so long ago that he was older now than his grandparents had ever been, not so long ago that he couldn't even remember his parents' faces anymore.
"Oh, Abe," Miss Peregrine whispered softly, and though it was no consolation at all, he knew then that he had won this argument. Miss Peregrine was very strict, but she wasn't heartless. She would let his grandson, this new little Jacob, grow up normally, outside of a loop, as sacrilegious as that was to her, and likely she wouldn't even try to convince him otherwise again. Abe knew that this might be the wrong decision, that growing up in the real world might be too dangerous for a peculiar child. Maybe there would be a too-close call with a hollow, and he would have to call Miss Peregrine in the middle of the night years from now, when Jacob was three or seven or twelve, and admit that he'd been wrong and beg her to take him in. Abe had already decided to retire from hunting hollows to protect his grandson – and besides, he was getting too old for it, anyway – but he knew that they would both be treading dangerous new ground now.