"Oh May," he thought, feeling a huge wave of sadness rolling over him. "If only you could have loved me back." He hadn't thought about her when he was awake for years but asleep was a different story. Sha're's change to a Goa'uld had felt like rejection, the rejection he had already tasted from May and Sarah, and he had dreams sporadically over the years about Sha're that sometimes included May and Sarah and later Sam, all the women he had loved, turning their backs on him.
It hadn't started out like that. May was his first love, his first real kiss, and his initiation into sex. They had both been virgins and he had dared to dream that they would never be with anyone else but preserve this special and unique bond. He had been as much of a romantic fool as a preteen girl and let himself believe, for a brief euphoric moment, that he had found his soul mate. A very lonely life had been the desert after a rain for an evening and for the first two or three weeks after he returned to Chicago until he could no longer ignore the fact that she wasn't interested enough to stay in contact.
He went home early that night and looked for the journals that his friends had preserved, even when most of his things had been discarded after he had ascended. He was eternally grateful that they had never read them. Stuck in one of them were the letters. He dropped into a chair like a stone and unfolded the one on top. It was printed on notebook paper in pencil and dated 18 years after the birth date in Deeje's file.
Dr. Jackson,
I dont say deer Dr. Jackson becuse your not deer to me. My granddaddy told me about u and how u did not want me and u ruint my mamma's life when she could had a career in Nashville. Well I dont want u neither I am grownup now and a high school graduate and my cousin told me that the child support stopped when I was 18 which is OK because I am marrying Billy Jeeters next week. We are having a baby soon. He has got a good job at a truck stop near I40 and we got us a trailer and I already got it fixed up real nice.
For the last time ever -- Your daughter,
Dani Jackson Cox
This barely literate scrawl did not, COULD not, come from a woman who started a Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago at 18. He looked at the next one. It was in the same hand on notebook paper again, although this notebook paper had been torn from a spiral notebook. It was dated the year before.
Deer Dr. Jackson,
My cousin who takes real good care of me says I have to write u onct a year because u are my daddy and pay child support. I think it is the least u could do considering what you did to my mama and how shes dead and all. He can make me write this stupid letter but he cant make me like it. I really like him and his wife other than this making me write these stupid letters. She is a real good cook. I am doing okay in school. I like NASCAR. My boy friend Billy wants to be a NASCAR driver or work on a pit crew someday I think that would be real cool. I do not hope u are fine.
Your daughter,
Dani Jackson Cox
This missive would have been written while she was getting a BS with a perfect average and a double major if Deeje Cox was Dani Jackson Cox.
She had been 10 before he'd even known she'd existed, years after May's death. It had been hard to get free but he had gone to Tennessee and tried to see her. Her grandfather and legal guardian had made it quite clear that he would not be allowed anywhere near her. "Dani, don't want to know you, no how," the old man said. "You ruint her mama's life and she's knows it." Her grandfather didn't have a phone but he wrote his daughter and the letters all came back, unopened with a child's scrawl on the back, "LEAV ME ALON."
To his shame, after her grandfather died when she was 11, he had accepted the suggestion too easily that she would be happier staying in Tennessee with her mother's relatives. He told himself that he had his career and he was gone off world so often that it would have been logistically very difficult to have an 11 year old living with him. He was lying to himself and he knew it. He was just at such a low point that he couldn't take the unremitting rejection any more. Surely this was nothing like the way his grandfather Nicolas Ballard had opted not to take him when his parents died. Dani was with family, not in foster homes, and vehemently did not want to live with him. But when he returned from ascension and regained his memory of her, he could no longer let himself off so easily. Her cousins had a phone and he had talked with her twice. She had been hostile and, frankly, not very bright. She was certainly not at all interested in living with him.
So what was real? Was his daughter Captain Deeje Cox or the sullen woman in the letters? If Cox hated him as much as she appeared to, than she could have somehow made up her identity to make it look like she was his daughter. That just boggled the mind and he couldn't believe it. That would have to make her hate him for some other reason and his own daughter was the only person he had ever really hurt. He also couldn't believe that there just happened to be two girls with the same name born on the same day in the same relatively small place. So, if the military officer undermining him was really his daughter, who was the girl who had written these letters and talked to him on the phone?
The easy thing would be to confront Captain Cox but he couldn't make himself do it, not without a lot more understanding as to how this had happened. Instead he used accumulated vacation time to go to Sevierville, Tennessee, to the address of the second set of cousins she had lived with after her grandfather died. It was in a modest neighborhood of small houses, generally well maintained, except for this one that corresponded to her address. It stood empty with a neglected yard. The neighbors looked at him suspiciously and no one admitted to knowing anything. He finally was getting back in his rental car when an elderly woman in a bizarre combination of colors and patterns between her blouse, her skirt, her knee socks, and her embroidered sweater, banged on the passenger window. "Young man," she said, "carry me down to the Piggly Wiggly and back and I'll tell you a story. While we're there, you can buy me some smokes."
"Just tell me how to find it and I'd be glad to," Daniel agreed.
She settled back in her seat and played with the controls for a couple of blocks, seemingly very entertained by getting the seat exactly the right distance back from the dashboard and inclined at the right angle. Then she went to fiddling with the way the vents were aligned in her direction. When she pulled the visor down to see the mirror and began to fuss with her thin curls and reposition her two pink plastic butterfly barrettes, Daniel was ready to scream, his normal patience with children and the old nowhere to be found. He snapped the visor back and said, gritting his teeth, "You promised me a story."
"No need to be so teechy about it," she complained. "So here's your story. You was looking for Carson Cox and his wife Fern, right?"
"Actually, I was looking for information about their cousin, Dani Cox, who lived with them as a teenager."
The old lady suddenly sat upright and looked ready to bolt. "Pull this car over young man. I changed my mind."
"Please, ma'am, I don't know why you changed your mind, but I really need to find out about Dani," Daniel pleaded.
"Look me in the eyes, young man," the woman directed. When he turned toward her, she screeched, "You're going to get us kilt. Look at the road." After Daniel complied, she said, as if talking to the mentally challenged, "Pull over first and then look in my eyes."
She fixed him with a stare once they were at the curb. "Look right here," she said tapping her checks right below her faded blue eyes. "Now tell me what you want to know about Dani for. Promise me you mean her no harm."
"She's my daughter, Ma'am. I haven't ever met her and I think it's past time. I want to understand who she is first," Daniel said, willing her to hear the sincerity in his voice.
"You do look just like her in the eyes and I think the mouth's the same," the woman said, evidently deciding to believe him. "Well," she said, now lowering her voice to a whisper even though she and Daniel were alone in the car and the windows were rolled up, "she being your daughter and you never having met is right curious. She just lived with them about two or three year and then she was gone. They told all us neighbors that she went to live with her daddy." The woman leaned back, looking very smug at her possession of such shocking knowledge.
"I got letters from this address from her until she was 18. I talked to her on the phone twice when she was 15," Daniel said.
The woman looked past him, staring off somewhere and considering. "Aha," she said suddenly. "I tell you what I think happened. They had a daughter, same age as Dani. Dumb ox of a girl. Got herself pregnant and married that idiot Jeeters boy. You talked to her, not Dani." She nodded emphatically. "Betcha that's what happened. You was sending money for her, right?" When Daniel nodded, she said, "There you go. Fern and Carson was keeping the checks."
"So where are they now, Carson and Fern?" Daniel asked.
"Well, Carson finally took off with one of the women he was cheating on Fern with. That was about 6 months ago. Fern went to live with her daughter in Florida somewhere. She wasn't well liked and I doubt if there'll be anyone who has any idea of the address."
Daniel rested his forehead on the steering wheel. "Tell me about her, about Dani."
"She was a fey thing," the woman said, fondly. "Too good for Carson's bunch. Had her head in a book all the time. Practically lived at the library when she could get away from the house. Fern did work her pretty hard with chores. The kids teased her about being a book worm, about giving herself airs, at first that is."
She paused and looked at him. Daniel included cultural anthropology in his credentials and had worked with extracting information from informants before. His part of the bargain was to react and prompt her. "Why do you say 'at first'?"
"Well, thing is, she knows how to fight. Somebody taught that little girl how to fight and fight dirty. After a little bit, she took one of the bullies out. Beat him up, she did, even though he was much bigger. They had to pull her off him. She broke his arm." The woman shook her head slowly. "You don't want her as an enemy. She's like a pit bull if she gets started."
Another pause. "How do you think she learned to fight like that?" Daniel asked. Part of the description sounded like a daughter of his but the other part was the raptor described to him in the briefing back at Cheyenne Mountain.
"Her granddaddy, Hector, he was known around here even though he lived out in the county. Ornery. Real ornery. Even at that he was the best of them Coxes. He was a God fearing, church going man. He probably learned her. You got to wonder, though, what she might have picked up from the first pack of family she lived with after Hector died, her cousin Barbie and Barbie's boy friend. That'd be before Carson and Fern."
Daniel was getting the rhythm. "Tell me about them."
"Here's the thing. They had a meth lab. There's a lot of them all over the county. Sheriff's department busts one up seems like practically daily. You get some trailer set up on a wooded lot on a back road and you start making crystal meth. Well, it blew up. Kilt them all. Carson went and got her right off from the neighbor where she'd been visiting when it went up. Nobody wanted her talking to the deputies. I think Carson was selling some product for Barbie. He sure is shifty enough."
"You seem fond of her. You must have talked to her a lot. Did she ever say anything about me?" Daniel asked.
"She was kind to me. She'd come to my house and we'd drink sweet tea and talk. She talked a lot about her grandparents. Her mama died real early on and it was the grandparents that raised her up. She only talked about you once. She said her granddaddy told her that he promised her mama when her mama was dying that he'd make you pay. Then Dani, she promised her memaw when she was dying." Daniel looked unsure of her meaning. "Lots of folks call their grandma, memaw, and their granddaddy, papaw. Her granddaddy made her promise too. Folks around here, they got long memories. People aren't real strong on forgiving and forgetting. They make fun of us in like "The Beverly Hillbillies" about feuding and all. The real thing isn't funny."
She fixed him with an eagle eye. "Would it a kilt you to have sent her a birthday gift or Christmas gift every onct in a while? Maybe written her a letter." She took in Daniel's stunned expression and made a face. "Either you're a better actor than that fellow Marlon Brando who was in the last moving picture I ever seen or you were sending her gifts and letters and that lot was keeping them from her. Probably her granddaddy too. He purely hated you. Some daddies they want their little girls to stay pure so bad they can't even look at em if they fall from grace, you know."
Daniel felt so ill it was hard to keep talking, hard to keep extracting more memories from this woman that he didn't know what to do with once he had them. "What did Deeje look like?" he finally asked. There was a question that shouldn't produce any more unpleasant information.
"I got a picture. I keep it with me. My grandchildren are a long way off and I don't never see them. Dani, she was more like my grandbaby, in some ways that my flesh and bone." She pulled out a battered wallet and extracted a dog eared photo. "You can see there. She was all arms and legs, thin and gawky, at first. They teased her a lot about that too before she taught them better. But then, right before she left, she started to fill out. She probably wasn't what you'd call pretty but she had these big blue eyes, like yours, I guess, and so much spirit. Made her more appealing than lots of girls who are actually prettier. Carson seemed to take notice."
Daniel remembered being a foster child. He remembered the indignities he had faced and had seen other kids face. He was getting a sick feeling about why Dani had left. Still he had to ask, "Did she say anything to you? Do you have any idea why she ran off?"
She looked at him, sadly. "I wish she would have come to me. I was an old lady even then but maybe I coulda done something. She didn't. But I know that skunk, Carson Cox. He went after everything that looked like it was female. When Dani started filling out, he probably went after her." She looked at him reassuringly. "Don't suspect he actually was able to do anything to her though."
"Why? If you never talked to her about it, why do you assume that?"
The answer was simple. "She would have hurt him real bad, maybe kilt him, but he was fine."
Daniel was staring out the windshield but he wasn't seeing the bird dropping splat in the middle of the windshield any more than he was seeing the two boys who rode by on their bikes, the dog chasing a squirrel, or the other cars that passed frequently. The old woman waited patiently but eventually her need for her smokes couldn't be denied and she tapped him on the arm. "How about we go on to the store now?" she asked. He put the car in gear again but she seemed to change her mind then and laid a hand on his arm to stop him for a moment. She said very softly, "You asked for information on Dani but not how to find her. Does that mean you know where she is? Can you tell me?"
Daniel said gently, "I think I know but it's up to her to decide to tell you where she is."
The woman nodded, seeming to have expected that answer. "When you see her, tell her Malva says thanks for all the presents she's sent me over the years. There's never much information on the card and never any way to tell her thanks. She's still my girl. You tell her that."
Daniel agreed but his thoughts were turned inward now. He drove to the store on automatic pilot, his mind back in the foster homes where he had seen what happened to the Dani's of this world, no matter how you spelled it.