4

Time in seclusion: 07:03:11

It was a little after 1:30 am when Sydney kicked her legs over the side of the bed and arched her back, various vertebrae and joints popping and creaking their pleasure at being shifted. A dull headache was blurring the edges of her thoughts and making it difficult to concentrate. Strewn across the wrinkled bedspread were three books (one of which was currently propped open, pages-down, on the bed), a variety of mechanical pencils, Uni-Ball pens, and multicolored highlighters, and a notebook with its rounded corners bruised and battered from being tossed into her backpack.

As she rose to her feet and stretched her arms above her head, Sydney cast a reluctant glance in the direction of the book she'd been attempting to read for the past three hours. To her dismay, she realized she couldn't remember a single word she'd read. Moaning in misery, she bent down for the book when every muscle within her tightened.

With her body frozen, she refocused all her attention to her hearing. Yes, there it was again: an incongruous sound. A murmur of voices. An indistinct conversation.

Sydney processed all this as she inched towards the nightstand, slid open the drawer there to retrieve her gun, and then sidled up to the closed bedroom door, pressing her left ear against the cool painted wood to see what else she could hear. The muffled sound of voices continued, but she couldn't assimilate any additional information from them.

Slowly easing the door open, Sydney peeked out into the dark hallway, her right hand wrapped around the handle of her gun, the side of her index finger rubbing against the trigger. As her pupils widened, she could see that the hall was empty. Keeping her gun in front of her, she crept in the direction of the voices. The identity and gender of the speakers remained a mystery to her, but there appeared to be only two of them.

She balanced her weight on the balls of her feet and crouched down lower as she entered the kitchen, an eerie golden light spilling across the linoleum floor. With each step forward, the voices grew less muddled, more distinct from one another. And when she neared the half-wall that separated the kitchen from the living room, she carefully raised her head and saw her father, seated on a couch, watching an old black-and-white I Love Lucy episode with the volume turned down to a low whisper.

She dropped the hand holding the gun down to her side and took a step into the living room. "Dad?" she asked cautiously, wondering whether it was possible for a man to sit as still as he was and not be dead.

She received her answer when Jack jumped and whipped his head around to face her. "Sydney, I—"

"I'm sorry," she apologized with an embarrassed smile. "I didn't mean to scare you. I just— What are you still doing up?"

"Oh, well…" Jack ran a hand through his hair and was grateful for the dark that was hiding his reddening cheeks. "Unfamiliar beds, they… It always takes me a night to get used to them. You'd think that after all these years they wouldn't bother me anymore, but…" His voice trailed off as his gaze focused in on the gun still clenched in her right hand. Lifting his eyebrows, he asked why she was holding a gun without having to utter a single word.

"I heard voices and thought the worst," she replied with a roll of her eyes as she deposited the gun on top of a nearby end table and took a seat beside him on the couch. "Guess that's not very surprising, huh?"

He smiled wryly and shot a sidelong glance in her direction. Her hair now hung loose, cascading down around her shoulders with the sides framing her face, almost as if they were curtains for her to hide behind. It was at moments like these that he had to admit to himself just how much Sydney resembled Laura. Like mother like daughter. In every way? "You…can't sleep, either?" he managed to ask despite the constriction in his throat.

"No, I've been up reading for school. The new quarter started just a few weeks ago but I'm already pathetically behind, so I've been trying to get caught up. Only problem is that I think I may be falling asleep with my eyes open."

Jack smiled and reclined further into the couch cushions. "Classes giving you a hard time?"

"Class," Sydney corrected with a sigh. "Sloane's been sending me on so many missions this past year that it's become next to impossible for me to stay caught up with my usual two classes, so I'm taking a lighter load this quarter."

"Things haven't been easy for you, have they?"

"Not just for me."

Their eyes met – brown eyes, carbon copy eyes – and each shyly grinned before looking away, almost as if they were self-conscious to have shared such an intimate moment. Jack's heart, however, also fluttered with a joy he only experienced when around his daughter. I'm not losing her, he insisted to himself.

"Dad, I'm…" Sydney began, her words tinged with sorrow, "I'm sorry I closed up on you when we were making dinner. I hadn't meant—"

"It's all right. You don't—"

"Just let me explain, okay?" Tucking her hair behind her ears, she exhaled through her nose as she attempted to collect her thoughts. "What happened tonight, I… The reason I stopped talking like I did was because that question you asked me, the one about whether I'd ever wondered why Mom never came back for me, it…it hit a little too close to home." She hesitated when she saw Jack lower his head and look down into his lap. Squeezing her eyes shut, she continued, "What I told you wasn't a lie. Since I've learned that Mom was still alive, I haven't wondered why she never came back for me. But…that doesn't mean I never have."

Jack blinked and felt as if all his hopes were escaping through his now gaping mouth. She's thought of Laura. She's thought of being with Laura.

"I was young," Sydney tried to explain, her mind spinning for a way to diminish the sting of her news. "I was, like, fourteen or fifteen at the time and we weren't getting along. I mean, you were never home, and when you were, it seemed like we were always fighting. If I brought home something with a B+, you'd ask why I couldn't get an A-. And then, if I brought home an A-, you'd ask why I couldn't get an A. And if I was at swim practice, you'd tell me I should have been home studying. And if I was home studying, you'd say I should have been at swim practice working on my turns. It just felt like I couldn't do anything right in your eyes and I got frustrated and clung on to this stupid idea that Mom wasn't dead.

"I knew she was," Sydney interjected when she saw Jack move his lips to protest. "Or, at least, I thought she was at the time. But then I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, she hadn't died in that car crash. Maybe she'd drifted down the coast to San Diego and some hermit there had found her on some beach and revived her and taken her back to his hermit home. And she'd gotten better there, but had amnesia and couldn't remember who she was or where she used to live, and that was why she hadn't come home yet. I…I convinced myself that she'd remember everything and come back for me one day. So I used to sit in my room and dream about the day she'd come for me."

No, she didn't just dream of the day her mother would come for her. She dreamt of the day she would leave you. His mouth and throat parched, he swallowed air in lieu of saliva and struggled to rid his head of the thousands of hammering mallets that had taken up residence there. "I—"

"But Mom never came," Sydney resumed without allowing him to speak, her voice revealing hurt and bitterness. "And as year after year passed, I stopped dreaming that she'd come and began to wonder why she hadn't. I don't think I really stopped wondering why until I left for college because it was on that day that you helped me move into my first dorm room that I realized I didn't need her anymore."

"And me?" Jack croaked, his trembling voice betraying more emotion than he cared to.

Looking directly into his eyes for the first time since she'd begun her 'confession,' Sydney stated, "Wanting Mom back had nothing to do with you being a bad father because you weren't. And you're not. I just really wanted a mother then. I was young and confused and there were… I just really wanted a mother. But none of this changes how I feel about her now. None of it erases what I know she's done to you, to me, to both of us."

Jack nodded, every part of his being numb. "Thank you…for telling me," he whispered, the words large and cumbersome in his mouth.

"I just want to be honest. About everything." Her fingers, which wanted to grab onto his, entangled themselves in each other. "And it doesn't change anything. I promise."

Another numb nod. "I know."

"Well, I should… I'd better get back to my reading. Another hour on Spenser's Faerie Queen and I might actually be able to move on to the Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse," she said lightly with a chuckle that sounded ridiculously false, even to her. Rising to her feet, she grabbed her gun and tapped his shoulder with her free hand. "Don't stay up too late, okay?"

One more nod.

The shuffle of her footsteps mingled with the laugh track being emitted from the TV, but those were all sounds he didn't hear. What instead rang in his ears was a sentence Sydney had said seconds earlier: "And as year after year passed, I stopped dreaming that she'd come and began to wonder why she hadn't."

Burying his face in his hands, he succumbed to the litany of cries exploding in his head. You know why. I know why. You know why. I know why. I know why. I know why.