"Being invisible isn't everything it's cracked up to be," Daniel said in a very grim tone of voice. "Watching people you love suffer and not being able to do anything really sucks." Sam put her hand over Daniel's on the steering wheel for a moment. Danny couldn't believe it. They got weirder by the day. They were both acting as if Daniel had actually been invisible.
"Are we really going home?" Danny asked, "Because I'm running on empty here."
"How about we order some pizza?" Daniel suggested. "I'm kind of in a mood to crash and we'll be up early in the morning working on the house."
Danny groaned. "Can't we PAY someone to do stuff like that?"
They ignored him. As much to stir them up as to satisfy his curiosity, Danny said, "I bet your first wife was Sha're, right?"
Daniel glanced up at the rearview mirror and made eye contact with Danny who was learning forward between the seats. "How did you come up with that?"
"That first night, you asked Dad about a picture of Sha're and you were really upset that he got rid of it."
Daniel said, "I don't want to talk about her while I'm driving down the highway. How about we wait until we get home."
"Ooookay. Then tell me about Charlie, Mom."
Sam shifted uneasily in her seat. "I think that would be better coming from your dad."
"You really think MY dad wants to talk about something like that with me? General Touchy Feely NOT himself?" Danny retorted.
So Sam told him how Charlie had accidentally killed himself with Jack's gun. Danny sat very still afterwards. A lot of things made sense for the first time. He marveled at the amount of self-control his father had exercised to keep himself from overprotecting Danny. His dad must have been obsessed with preventing history from repeating itself but he had almost always managed to hold back and let Danny be one of the guys. He remembered a couple of arguments between his parents when his mom had been telling his father to ease up, that he had to let Danny get his share of hard knocks.
"So why did Sara and Dad get divorced," he asked as Sam unlocked the front door and they went into the house.
"I don't know for sure but I do know that the death of a child frequently has that effect on a couple," Sam answered.
Danny plopped down in an armchair in the living room. "So it's not like you stop loving each other but stuff about the kid gets in the way?" Danny asked thoughtfully. "I mean maybe he still loves her, at least a little?"
Sam and Daniel exchanged a look over his head. "How would you feel about that?" Sam asked carefully. "I mean if they did still love each other and they got together."
"Look, I'm sure you both know I would like my mom and my dad back together, to have things the way they used to be. But now that you guys are married, thank you very much Daniel, I don't think that's going to happen. I think it would be nice for Dad to have someone too." Daniel nodded and started to walk out of the room. "Wait a minute. You were going to tell me about Sha're," Danny called after him.
Daniel turned around. His posture just looked defeated. He looked at Danny wearily. "Why?"
"Why?" Danny was amazed. "I'm interested. I bet it's really a good story."
"If you want a story, turn on the TV. It's Friday night. There ought to be something on the Sci-Fi channel. Sha're wasn't 'a good story.'" Daniel's words didn't really go with the flat, unemotional way they were delivered. Sam had seen this before. Daniel was crawling inside of himself. Daniel turned around and left the room without interruption this time.
"What's his deal?" Danny asked contemptuously.
"I'd send you to sensitivity training if I thought it'd help," his mother said. "I'll tell you about Sha're but you are not to bring her up to Daniel again unless you want to talk about it because you care about what she meant to him, you care about his pain." She sat down opposite him and looked him in the eyes, "Are we clear on that?"
When Sam came to bed about an hour later the room was dark and Daniel was already under the covers. She spooned around him and he reached back and patted her bottom. They lay quietly for awhile, reveling in each other's warmth, in the comfort of it. Sam loved the fact that every time she touched Daniel, he didn't assume she wanted sex. He seemed to understand that women need a lot of physical closeness for its own sake.
Sam snuggled closer and said, "I'm sorry you are so sad. I know with my dad, I can go a long time and talk about him quite unemotionally. I mean he's been dead for years. But then suddenly something will make it hurt again for a little while, almost like it did at first."
Daniel said, his voice tight, "It's not just Sha're, Sam. When I allow myself to really feel her loss, it brings back Skaara and all the people of Abydos too. The loss is huge and Jack and I were the only ones left to mourn. That's why it was particularly hard when he got rid of her picture. Now it's just me."
He rolled over on his back and looked up into her face as she was leaning over him. He reached up and touched her cheek. "I'm so afraid this is all going to turn out that I did something terrible."
"Daniel, if you were in control, you couldn't and you wouldn't. If you weren't, you can't blame yourself for that." She laughed a little. "I know sex doesn't solve anything but if you would like, I would like, and maybe, for a little bit, we could make everything else go away."
"Then that nightgown is just going to get in the way," he responded and in a moment they were skin to skin and in their own world.
Some time later, after Sam thought he had drifted off to sleep and she was fading herself, he said, "Sammy, I haven't brought this up because I've been afraid of what it might mean about Danny."
Sam really was not looking forward to what might be coming next but she prompted him encouragingly anyway. "Remember those three kids in the mall? The ones who asked if I was related to Danny?"
"Oh lord, you're thinking what I've been thinking, aren't you?" Sam groaned. "You're thinking that maybe it's those kids who've been vandalizing the house? I guess on one level I was afraid of what Danny might have done that could have fostered that sort of anger so I've just been telling myself that it couldn't be them."
"I think we should talk to Jack and confront Danny together, all three of us. Jack's gone out of his way to make peace. I think we should start dealing with Danny as a unit."
"I agree," she said. He encircled her with his arms and they finally did fall asleep. A few hours later, Daniel woke Sam moaning in his sleep. He was clearly dreaming something that had him extremely distressed. She shook him awake. He looked at her in the dim light coming in the window from the full moon. She noticed that he was shaking. "Oh my God, Sam, what I just dreamed. It can't be what happened to me. It just can't be."
"Can you tell me? Do you want to? I mean, would it help?" Sam ached for him. She wanted to help but she didn't know how.
He gave one long shudder. "I can't tell you Sam. That would be admitting that it might be true to myself. And if it is true, no one can ever know, especially not Danny."
He pulled her to him and said, "Just be close to me. Promise me you'll never leave me no matter what?"
Sam whispered softly, "I promise."
At 8:00 they were out of bed and downstairs drinking coffee. They flipped a coin and Sam shook her head at her bad luck as she went up to wake Danny. He protested vehemently but she had been waking him up for years. Jack still hadn't arrived when Danny made his way downstairs, complaining loudly about this being unconstitutional on a Saturday morning. "Where is Dad anyway?" he asked, clearly put out that if he had to be up this early, his father, the instigator of this whole poorly conceived activity, apparently hadn't dragged himself out from between the sheets yet.
"Right here," said Jack, letting himself in the front door.
Sam thought, "My, we have gotten really comfortable with the situation at a blinding speed, haven't we?" slightly resentful, for reasons she couldn't identify, at his lack of a knock.
Danny thought about the commune again. But that thought was immediately banished by the sight of the woman who followed Jack in the door. "You all remember Sara from last night?" Jack asked, deadpan. As if a one of them would have forgotten, even ten years from now. "When I told her why we were in Home Depot, she offered to come and help."
"That's terrific. Thanks a lot," Sam said warmly for herself and Daniel. After a certain amount of confused milling around, Daniel realized that he would be a fool to let his pride get in his way. After the dream last night, which still plagued him, he wasn't feeling very proud anyway. Jack appeared to know quite a bit about home improvement type things and Daniel knew very little, unless your home was a tent or a mud hut. He said to Jack, "You are trying not to step on my toes, Jack, but I don't have a clue. Why don't you get us organized."
They hadn't been working for long when Danny's cell phone rang. Both his fathers looked at him like he was nuts. Who, other than a doctor on call, carried their cell phone with them when washing windows. Danny went a little distance from the others to answer it. There was a big smile on his face when he came back. "Dad, Daniel, Mom, my friend Carmen, just called. We had been talking about spending some time together this weekend. I hope it was all right that I invited Carmen over to help."
How could they object? This project was beginning to resemble a barn raising. Sam said to Daniel, "Next thing you know Merilee and Daryl are going to show up."
Daniel said, "You obviously went into the wrong line of work. You should have been a prophetess." He indicated the couple coming down the driveway. Merilee and Daryl offered to help and refused to take no for an answer. Merilee was virtually useless, mainly there to pump for information, but Daryl turned out to be a solid guy. Sam found herself wondering how Merilee had trapped the hapless fellow.
When Daniel and Jack both found themselves in the garage, retrieving various supplies, Daniel decided this was the opportunity to fill Jack in on their suspicions with respect to Danny and the vandalism. Jack listened without interrupting until Daniel finished. When Daniel finished, Jack didn't say anything for a while. Then he looked straight at Daniel and said, "I really appreciate being brought in on this. I took the lead on the home improvements. It's your house and your wife that are being affected. You take the lead on dealing with Danny." Daniel felt like he saw some sun breaking through the clouds. This odd relationship they had formed was getting better all the time. Jack said thoughtfully, "If you're right about Duarte, I think I know why he never vandalized our house. That would have made more sense, wouldn't it? I put the fear of God into a couple of kids shortly after I moved in with some old friends helping. Maybe word got around. I'm thinking we could do something like that here."
Before he could explain himself further, they heard the sound of a car pulling into the driveway and exited the garage to see a teenaged girl climbing out of old but well-maintained sedan. She had glossy, straight, black hair almost to her waist. Her build was that of a WW II pinup, way too shapely for modern beauty standards that applauded thin, toned women, but very pleasant when a man went with his instincts. "I thought Carmen was a guy," Daniel said.
"You're still learning Danny, aren't you?" Jack snorted.
Danny appeared from around the house and approached her. They saw a curious thing. He didn't put his arm around her or make any kind of flirtatious move. Instead, he stopped a few feet away and seemed almost shy, reminding Daniel of himself as a young man, the first time he had ever had that sensation since meeting his son.
They strolled toward the handsome young couple, standing there in the sunlight. Danny looked up as they approached and said, with something indefinable in his voice, "Hey, I'd like you to meet my friend, Carmen Duarte." She smiled shyly at them. She had a very sweet, slightly round face and big brown eyes. "Carmen, this is my dad, General Jack O'Neill, and my stepfather, Dr. Daniel Jackson."
Carmen didn't have the kind of face that could hide anything. It was clear that she knew the whole story about their tangled relationships. Daniel said, "It's really nice to meet you."
Jack agreed, "Same here." They all stood rather awkwardly for a moment and then Jack said, "Danny said you offered to help. You could just pitch in with whatever he's working on at the moment."
As soon as they were out of earshot, Jack said, "Didn't you say that kid in the mall was named Duarte?" Daniel nodded. "Did he look anything like her?"
Daniel said, "He was Hispanic, I think, but whether he looked enough like her to be related I couldn't say. But you know, if Danny's dating the guy's sister, maybe we're not being fair to Danny assuming he gotten in some sort of trouble. It could just be that the kid from the Mall is an overprotective brother."
Jack looked dubious and simply said, "You've haven't been around for the stuff Danny's pulled in the last couple of years. But, okay, it doesn't hurt to think positively."
By noon, there was a fresh coat of paint on the front door and the garage doors and all the windows were sparkling. Daryl displayed some backbone by dragging Merilee off at that point to eat lunch at their own house and Sam scrounged around in the kitchen with Sara to find something to feed everyone else. Sam had absolutely no idea how to act with Sara. It made her appreciate even more how odd it must be for Daniel dealing with Jack.
Sara had a very calm presence. Sam thought how well she must have fit with Jack. He'd be bouncing off the walls, cussing something out, and she'd just be there steady, anchoring him. Sara, in turn, looked at the younger woman, struck by how beautiful she was and remembered what Jack had told her about Sam's career accomplishments. To her, it seemed like sharing the military as they had must have made such a difference. It didn't really make sense to her that they had ended up divorced.
Finally after some inconsequential conversation about what they could do with the meager stores Sam had found, Sara said, "This is really strange. Jack's two ex-wives together in one kitchen."
Sam agreed. Sara continued, "I know it's prying but I have to ask. Why? Why didn't it work out?"
Sam thought about giving a glib surface answer but something in her gut told her that there was more going on, that she and Sara needed to connect, to really be honest with each other. "It's taken me a long time to figure out. I think I always loved Daniel but couldn't see it because I had this fixed notion that I ought to be with someone like my dad, that marriage was the kind of relationship my parents had. My parents loved each other but they weren't really friends on the kind of intellectual plane that Daniel and I were. So I was looking for the wrong things. But then Daniel disappeared and I married Jack and I think I spent our whole marriage trying to deal with his not being Daniel. There were other things that contributed and probably, if it hadn't been for them, I wouldn't have given up, but at the core it was Daniel." She looked over at Sara. "That makes me sound horrible, doesn't it?"
Sara crossed the kitchen and put an arm around Sam. "Promise me you won't tell Jack but I feel like I need an ally here and I am going to trust you." Sam promised. "I tried to get over Jack. I married someone else and made us both miserable for 15 years, because he wasn't Jack. We just got divorced a year ago. That's the real reason my sister dragged me here. She was worried that I wasn't bouncing back fast enough and thought I needed distraction. I understand carrying a man deep in your heart your whole life."
Sam looked into her kind face and felt an instant kinship with her. She found herself saying, without really planning it, "If you're hoping that you and Jack can find something after all this time, I'll help you if I can."
Jack walked into the kitchen to find his two ex-wives hugging each other. They both turned and smiled at him in a way that he couldn't help but find a little unnerving.
Carmen and Danny went off for a while in her car. Danny was officially grounded for his latest escapade but after the two had worked so willingly to help, Jack didn't feel like being strict about enforcing it. When they came back, they both seemed extremely subdued and Carmen looked a bit puffy around the eyes. Sam hoped they hadn't had some sort of fight. She liked Carmen much better than any of Danny's other girl friends she had met in the past.
Carmen was ready to leave immediately and Jack arranged it so that she would drop Sara off at Sara's niece's house on her way home. Jack was going to take Sara to a movie later but Danny's three parents needed to be alone with him to have the talk they were not at all looking forward to. Carmen and Danny seemed to have a hard time parting. She clung to him and he held her tightly. It clearly wasn't about sex. It was about comfort.
They steered Danny to a chair in the living room and all sat looking at him. "What's up? I feel like you guys are going to tell me you voted me off the island or something." He was definitely acting guilty about something despite his cheeky words.
Daniel said, "I have a story to tell you" and he related the incident at the mall. Danny looked ill as soon as he heard the name Duarte. "Do you think you know this kid?" Daniel asked.
"I might," Danny admitted. "Was he about 5'8", thin, earring in one ear?"
Sam confirmed, "As best I can remember."
Danny just sat, look down. "I've been trying to figure out whether to tell you about this for a while. I didn't want to. I still don't want to tell you what was going on but I can't handle this alone."
Sam asked, "You KNEW who was vandalizing us all along?"
Danny quickly corrected her. "I'm pretty stupid I guess but I never made that connection. I should have. Her brother is a real loser. He's been arrested a couple of times. He's done some really nasty things to me at school. I think if I hadn't been so careful about not letting him catch me alone, he and his friends might have beaten the crap out of me by now. No, I meant the whole mess with Carmen."
Jack commanded, "Explain mess."
"She's different than the girls I date. I should never have gone anywhere near her. She's sweet, innocent, very naïve and too good for me. Her parents are really strict with her. It took forever to get her to stop being shy with me. Maybe the challenge kept me coming back. And the fact is that all that innocence combined with that figure is pretty attractive you know"
He stopped talking for a little bit. He was twisting the bottom of his shirt in his hands and his mother remembered her little boy twisting his shirt and working up his courage to confess that he'd broken a window. Somehow she knew this was going to be bigger than a window.
"So finally I got her to agree to go out with me right after you came back Daniel. She didn't want me to come to her house but wanted to meet somewhere. I found out later she snuck out. I took her to this party. I should have known better but it was worse than I thought it was going to be. It was so awkward. The other girls were pretty catty to her because she was different. She made them all look sort of hard and used actually. My friends were teasing me about her. I should have just left but I didn't. I was so involved in my own misery that I wasn't being particularly sensitive. I had some beers. She had a couple. I don't really think she wanted any but she was just trying to fit in. It hit her pretty hard. I don't think she'd ever had a drink before."
Danny looked up at them and there were tears in his eyes. He suddenly looked very young, all the cockiness bled out. Daniel saw something he understood much faster than either Sam or Jack. He moved to sit next to Danny. He said softly, "Tell us the rest."
"So I pulled her into this bedroom and we started making out. She was okay with it at first. I just keep going further and she was drunk and embarrassed and had no idea how to handle someone like me. She didn't fight me and she never said no in so many words but she didn't want it. If I hadn't been drunk, I would have seen that." There were tears running down his face now. "She was … it was her first time. Afterwards, she was crying and crying and it sobered me up real fast. I got her out the back way so she wouldn't have to face any of my so called friends. I tried to tell her I was sorry. I tried to make it better but you can't fix something like that. I've spent all these weeks since then trying to show her I'm sorry. Trying to win back her trust. She was like a bird with a broken wing at first. If her brother had even the sensitivity of a rock, which is about what I think he has, he would have figured out that I had hurt her and probably how."
Sam had let out a small moan and put her hand over her mouth. Jack's fists were clenched. It was Daniel who knew what to say. "You did something very wrong and you know it. The fact that you know it and are so sorry is very important and speaks well of you. We all forgive you. It seems like Carmen has. And it doesn't affect our loving you either. But it is also true that you did something really wrong that has consequences. We can't take the consequences away. We can only help you deal with them."
Danny looked at him gratefully but then his face clouded up. "There's more." Daniel said, so sad for his son and for the girl.
Danny nodded. "She just told me she's pregnant."