Margaret insisted on dinner together in the dining room. Over the preceding hour, she'd infused the whole house with the wafting scents of a mushroom and hazelnut soup, as well as something else reeking of garlic. She all but pushed Miss Parker and Jarod into the two seats on either side of her when it was time to tuck in, such that Miss Parker was hard pressed to avoid Jarod unless she put some real elbow grease into it.
"So!" said Margaret. "I hope you two had a comfortable journey."
Little could have made for a more uncomfortable start to dinner conversation.
"Eventful, more like," said Miss Parker, and glared at Jarod. The force behind her anger had been waning since arriving at Margaret's place, but she was willing to stoke the coals deliberately. Anger helped. Anger was easier than helplessness.
"Lighten up, Miss Parker, I know for a fact you enjoyed your first sky-dive," said Jarod, with an attempt at a teasing half-smile.
Then, of course, Margaret wanted to know all about sky-diving, which was a much more comfortable topic. Miss Parker found herself gushing at the memory of it, fingers flying about her face. She found it both harder and easier to keep emotional honesty under wraps while signing. ASL is a manual language, yes, but it requires facial expressions too. To convey emotion, she had to show emotion in her face, and the act turned into the real thing as the tale progressed.
"It really does feel like flying," she finished.
"You might be interested to know, Marcie, your mother's chosen adrenaline rush was skiing. Did you ever see her ski? She could slalom like a master."
Miss Parker might have seized upon this new fact about her mother, might have asked Margaret to describe at length everything she knew about Catherine's talent for skiing… were it not for that one slip of the tongue.
Marcie.
Meanwhile, Jarod had choked on a Brussels sprout. Downing a glass of water was not enough to quell the coughing that followed.
"Marcie?" he gasped.
"Oh, I'm sorry," said Margaret, all innocence. She didn't seem all that sorry. "You go by Miss Parker, don't you?"
Miss Parker nodded. She pressed her lips together. Thank you so very much for giving Jarod more ammunition, lady. Not that she expected Jarod to tease her about an innocuous childhood nickname. He wasn't twelve, despite his enthusiasm for childhood diversions. But she certainly didn't need him knowing more about her that nobody else knew. He knew too much already.
"Jarod, what is wrong with you, are you sick? Go get a lozenge," said Margaret impatiently. Jarod smirked and ducked out to the kitchen, apparently for a lozenge. "I'm sorry, Miss Parker, just thinking of your mother brought back how she used to talk about you. She loved you so much. And, of course, she called you Marcie. Does nobody call you that anymore?"
"Nobody," said the once-Marcie. "Not since she left me."
"Left you, o-oh." Margaret tutted. "I hear something twisted there in your phrasing. Someone's told you something unfeeling about your mother. Never mind, we'll clear everything up while you're here. I hope you'll be with us a nice long time."
There was that looming deadline again. Miss Parker nodded jerkily. If anything, it was getting more difficult to envision how returning to the Centre was going to work. The whole of the horizon looked fuzzy. Miss Parker wasn't sure how Margaret would take it if she admitted she wasn't committed to a defection, so she said nothing. She cast about for something to say, noticing for the first time that there were five chairs around the table.
"Is it just you and Jarod living here, Margaret? It's a big space for only two people." It was a blatant change of topic, but Margaret let it pass gracefully. She smiled, and her smile was a little wistful.
"No, it's not just the two of us. For one, as I'm sure Jarod told you, you're in Charles's room. He is… away. Jarod is also away often, as you can imagine, since you've been chasing him all the while." Miss Parker's eyes flicked over to Jarod and back again. The pursuit for Jarod was an uncomfortable fact to acknowledge, let alone so casually around the dinner table. Remember when you would hunt my son across the entire continent, never allowing him to settle anywhere or find any lasting source of happiness? Those were the days! Oh, and how is the soup? "Our family fluctuates in size, but I always keep all five places set. Just in case we all end up together at once. With a couple of more permanent exceptions."
Margaret nodded at the empty chair to Miss Parker's left, but didn't expand on the point. A place setting to memorialize Jarod's dead brother, maybe? It was a little morbid for Miss Parker's tastes, but then, everyone grieves differently.
She imagined Jarod sitting there with his reunited family, instead of with her interloper self. They were very nearly the prototypical nuclear family, but for the empty bookshelves in Miss Parker's borrowed room and the fact that Margaret didn't mention when, or if, Jarod's father would be coming back. Miss Parker felt the slight creep of envy tightening her jaw. Both she and Jarod had had their families ruined by the Centre, but Jarod had gotten his back. All she had left was a serial killer twin brother, and a boss with a dubious relationship with paternity.
Jarod returned, cough soothed. Margaret wordlessly put her hand over his and shook it gently. He smiled in return, like he couldn't quite believe his luck.
"We get the news here, you know," said Margaret. "I didn't know killing racketeers was your usual modus operandus, Jarod. Isn't it usually something ironic but ultimately non-lethal?"
"That was me," said Miss Parker, before Jarod could do something idiotic like take the blame. If she'd known how much heat killing Lorefice would bring down on their heads, maybe she would have hesitated that fatal half-second. Then again, maybe not.
"She saved my life," said Jarod. His eagerness created the impression he was bragging about her, which was ridiculous. She noted that he conveniently omitted the bit where she'd inadvertently tipped off Lorefice to Jarod's con in the first place. Margaret beamed at her.
"You did? Oh, thank you so much, Miss Parker," said Margaret. "I know you two — ah, but I won't push. More veggies?"
With repeated encouragement, Miss Parker agreed to one more helping of vegetables.
"Jarod told me what a fantastic job you did in Iowa," Margaret continued, nudging Jarod. "That horrible man poisoning families just because he didn't want to do a little extra work. I think I can quote part of it verbatim now, from his glowing review."
"What do you mean, you can quote it?" said Miss Parker suspiciously, through a bite of garlic bread.
"Mom, we don't have to —" started Jarod.
"'I'm just the substitute teacher today, Mr Sýkora,'" said Margaret dramatically. "I'd love to see you choke." The Shakespearean prosody didn't sound like anything Miss Parker had ever said in her life, but then, Margaret wouldn't know that.
"You quoted the surveillance tape to your mother?" said Miss Parker, addressing Jarod directly for the first time since they'd sat down. Generally she'd been more comfortable using Margaret as a go-between. She wasn't above a classic silent treatment.
Jarod shrugged without apology.
"I told you at the time, Miss Parker. You were very good."
His earnestness was enough to rot the teeth. Miss Parker chanced a smirk, testing the waters.
"I believe that means, statistically, I have a better track record than you do," she said. She speared a roast potato on her fork to punctuate the jibe. Her smirk slipped, and real bitterness eked through. "Never once crashed and burned in the single Pretend I've taken on. Or does Chabot count against me? That would put me at even odds."
Jarod didn't laugh, or even smile.
"I'm not happy about how the Chabot case shook out either, you know," he said, after a moment of searching her face for sincerity. "If I had to do it again…"
"Save it," she snapped.
Apparently she was not ready to joke about it.
Margaret glanced between the two of them with an expression of confused exasperation.
"OK!" she said brightly. "Make sure you leave room for pie, you two."
After dinner, an awkward, telegraphic negotiation played out between Jarod and Miss Parker over who would do the dishes, of all things.
"I can…"
"I've got it."
"You must be tired."
"I slept in the van. You've been driving non-stop since Twin Falls. Who here must be tired, again?"
Ultimately, Miss Parker won by parking herself in front of the sink with a scrub brush and ignoring Jarod's protracted, largely wordless attempts to do her this unsolicited favour. It wasn't that she had a deep and abiding love of minor household chores, far from it. No, she had the vague idea that loitering in the kitchen would put her in an ideal spot to strike up a conversation with Margaret about her mother. She failed to anticipate that, of course, facing into the sink and away from the rest of the kitchen, she wouldn't be able to carry on a conversation with someone who relied on a combination of lip-reading and ASL to participate.
(Why she was walking on eggshells around Margaret, she wasn't sure. Get it over with and leave, Parker, she told herself. She didn't get it over with and leave, though. She put away a whisk, instead.)
"Grab some kindling and logs from the wood shed, would you, Jarod?" said Margaret from her chair by the window.
Miss Parker looked around. Jarod had left the room. Apparently his mother hadn't noticed.
"Jarod's not —"
Margaret plowed on, her eyes on her book.
"I have some papers that need burning, we can use those for tinder. I want to make a nice campfire to welcome Miss Parker. A campfire always makes the place smell so nice."
Miss Parker had no special love for campfires, but time with Margaret was time with Margaret. She hung the dish towel over the oven handle and went off in search of Jarod.
She found him coming out of a room in a back hallway on the second floor. She caught a glimpse of a cluttered desk behind him before he closed the door. His hair was wet and a fresh t-shirt stuck to his skin in places, suggesting a recent shower. He looked relaxed — that is, until he spotted her, and immediately tensed.
"Can I help you find something, Miss Parker?" he asked, in a voice that hinted he was abstaining from suspicion only out of politeness.
"No, I've found it," she said. He raised an eyebrow in a question. "Your mom, she wants some kindling and logs for a fire. A campfire."
"Oh." He shifted from one foot to the next. "Thanks, I'm on it."
He didn't move to leave. He seemed to be shifting to more effectively block the narrow hallway. Miss Parker looked beyond him and counted three doors past the one he'd come out of: two closed doors and one open, the latter showing a narrow angle of a spacious bathroom. The others must be bedrooms. He was blocking access to the bedrooms, consciously or not. As if Miss Parker had any interest in rifling through Margaret's sock drawer.
Finally, Jarod turned sideways and slipped past her, though not without an oblique glance her way. Miss Parker caught his arm, bringing him up short.
"If you didn't trust me in your mother's house, then why the hell did you bring me here?" she hissed. She wasn't sure why she was whispering. Nobody else could hear, not even if she brought the whole place down in a shouting match.
Jarod paused. In the darkened hallway, Miss Parker couldn't make out his expression well enough to read it.
"It's not that I don't — hm," he said, interrupting himself. He appeared to tear a sheet off his mental typewriter and start fresh. "Having you here is just as surreal for me as it is for you, Miss Parker. I'll adjust, if you give me time."
If you give me time.
She wasn't planning on it.
Jarod's campfire was a masterwork, because of course it was. From her spot on a lawn chair just outside the range of the fire's errant sparks, Miss Parker watched the last of the tinder curl away into flame. She'd tried to catch some of the words on the paper before Jarod had torn them up and stuffed them into the spaces between the logs, but no dice. She'd have to hope that any relevant secrets they contained, Margaret would share willingly later on.
Speaking of Margaret, Jarod's mother was huddled on a stripped log a stone's throw away, wrapped in a knobbly afghan. She rubbed her hands together and grinned expectantly at Miss Parker.
"When's the last time you enjoyed a fire like this, Marcie? That is, Miss Parker?" She corrected herself very deliberately, like she'd done it only to placate her guest. "This is just the thing. It's really just the thing, isn't it?"
Two weeks ago, Miss Parker didn't say. It was indoors, and I didn't have to battle a thicket of bloodthirsty insects for the privilege of its warmth.
"Hmm!" said Miss Parker, in what was intended to sound like all-purpose agreement.
Something rattled against her ankle, making her jump.
"Bug spray," said Jarod. Miss Parker reached down and picked up the offending item he'd tossed her way, peering at the label in the half-light. "It gets buggy here after nightfall."
Like he'd read her mind. Maybe he had, in his Pretender sort of way. She nodded stiffly and, without a further word, began liberally applying the noxious repellent to every inch of exposed skin. Meanwhile, Margaret was pulling supplies out of a string bag: a box of graham crackers, two chocolate bars, and a crumpled bag of marshmallows.
"S'mores!" she announced, with no small amount of glee.
"… Some more what?" said Jarod. He caught his mother's eye and repeated himself in sign. Her smile slipped.
"S'mores?" she said again, as though hearing the name again would help. "Marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers? No, I guess Charles and I didn't take you boys camping before you were taken, so when would you have had the opportunity?" A heavy sadness descended on the bones of her face. Miss Parker felt like she was intruding on a private family moment, absurdly. By rights, campfire-side snacks should be inconsequential.
"First time for everything," said Jarod cheerfully. He leaned over and gathered the listed ingredients from his mother's lap. "So…" He stuck a marshmallow and a square of chocolate between two crackers. "… Like a sandwich?"
"You're supposed to toast it."
Jarod looked through the flames at Miss Parker, who realized she had said that last comment aloud.
"Toast it?" he echoed.
"Oh!" said Margaret. "Oh, damn. There aren't nearly enough graham crackers in here. I'll go get some more. And some toasting sticks."
She pushed the s'more fixings off her lap onto the seat beside her and got to her feet. Jarod got up, too.
"Sticks? Mom, I can —"
But she'd bustled off at a surprising clip. Jarod caught Miss Parker's eye, and the same thought that was undoubtedly going through Jarod's head flitted through her own: Margaret was leaving them alone on purpose.
"At least I know you got your lack of subtlety honestly," Miss Parker muttered.
Despite Margaret's best intentions, her departure did not magically lead to some cathartic hashing-out of all past wrongs, and for a long time no further words were exchanged from either side of the fire. The air was filled with the merry snap-crackle-pop of bugs carrying out glorious kamikaze missions on the glowing coals. Miss Parker could feel Jarod's eyes on her, trying to climb into her skin and anticipate her. It was his whole shtick.
"If you —" he started, after a pause so long Miss Parker had begun to think (to hope) he wouldn't say anything at all, and she'd be allowed to enjoy the fire with only the caveat of the pervasive stink of DEET.
"I'm going back inside," she said, and stood. She paused. "Goodnight."
And she left without waiting for a reply.
For the second time in a week, Sydney had been summoned by Mr Lyle. This time, however, the meeting was scheduled to take place in the sub-levels, rather than Mr Lyle's inherited office above ground. Sub-Level Twenty-Three. Sydney couldn't say with confidence that he'd ever been to SL-23 previously, though he had the uncertain notion the communications department made their home there.
When the elevator dinged on floor twenty-three, the doors opened to reveal what appeared to be a hastily-constructed personal gym. There was a wide open space near the elevators, populated by a modified stationary bicycle, a treadmill, several multi-coloured exercise mats, and other assorted exercise equipment. So much for the communications department. It was mostly quiet, though at the far end of the main hallway someone grunted along with the clinking and clattering of metal. It sounded like nothing so much as… someone using a bench-press? Oddest of all given the incongruity, through the crack between a nearby door and its frame, Sydney could see a sliver of a hospital bed.
Knowing perfectly well what could happen to a Centre employee who happened to know Too Much, Sydney stayed where he was, exploring with his eyes alone. Why would they turn a sub-level into a gymnasium? There was a company exercise room above ground, fairly lack-lustre for the real fitness enthusiast but serviceable enough. This gym lacked even more lustre. It was downright matte.
The elevator dinged again behind Sydney and out stepped Lyle, almost running into him.
"Oh, there you are," said Lyle impatiently, as if it were he who had been waiting for Sydney, rather than the other way around.
"Here I am," Sydney agreed. "But why am I here?"
Lyle hummed.
"It's a difficult thing, Sydney," he said, beckoning Sydney to follow him down the hall. "I don't know who to trust with this. I'll be frank, ordinarily — that is, with my sister around — I'd never even consider bringing you into the fold. You two and Mr Broots, you're thick as thieves, so if I tell you, it's getting back to her, and if it gets back to her, she'd start throwing her weight around."
Sydney was tempted to beg the man to stop wasting his time and show him whatever sordid nonsense the Centre had festering in the sub-levels this time, but in all his time in clinical work, he'd never found it helped to push clients to get to the point.
"But of course, Parker is tragically missing," Lyle continued. "So that risk is temporarily off the table. And I can't deny you're the foremost psychiatrist we have employed. And the Triumvirate have been flaying my back for an update on his condition… hrm. Here we are. Sydney, you were asking about Raines during our most recent meeting. I have the sad duty to report that our leader has suffered a serious accident. A — what was it?"
A doctor materialized at his elbow. Sydney looked wildly around to see where she would have come from. Now that he knew to look and listen for it, though the wing was quiet, it was packed with staff. A good half of them wore scrubs or lab coats, while the rest seemed to have shown up two days early for Casual Friday.
"A left middle cerebral artery cerebrovascular accident," the doctor recited. The ID pinned to her chest said 'Jeong'. "A stroke. He was very lucky to survive."
"A stroke?" Sydney repeated, momentarily stunned. He wasn't sure whether he was feeling disappointment or relief. Relief because it hadn't killed Raines, or disappointment that it… hadn't killed Raines.
"He will have long-term motor and cognitive effects from this, which is something everyone in his life needs to come to terms with. The majority of any progress he'll ever make will happen in the first six months to a year. It's not out of the question that he could make a full recovery, but we should prepare for things not to be so optimistic as that."
"Thank you," said Lyle, and dismissed her with a pointed look. As he watched her leave, something terrifying overtook his features: a look of… of what? Hunger? Sydney realized belatedly that the woman had an East Asian background, Sydney guessed Korean. A familiar gurgle of guilt ate away at his stomach lining. The three of them in-the-know about Lyle's extra-curricular activities generally preferred to ignore the fact that one of their superiors was a serial murderer, but it was harder to ignore when he wore his urges on his sleeve like this.
"What do you want from me?" said Sydney loudly. It had its intended effect: Lyle looked away from the doctor.
"Check under the hood, let me know how much he understands," said Lyle, with the level of flippancy one might use to suggest that a friend change their necktie. "Get me a prognosis. We need to know whether we need to start talking about finding a successor."
Finding a successor, as if Mr Lyle considered there to be anyone in contention besides himself.
"Ah, sorry."
"Learn to knock, Jarod, Christ."
"Sorry."
"Yeah, you said that."
"… You're going to bed in that? You don't have pyjamas?"
"We were on the same flight and in the same van, you wanna tell me when I was supposed to pick up a pair of PJs?"
"Right."
A soft groan of exasperation. "Can I help you? I know for a fact there's a bathroom downstairs."
"There is, yeah."
"So?"
"Goodnight, Miss Parker."
"Mhm. 'Night."
Lyle pointed Sydney towards the door with the hospital bed, and Sydney let himself in. Raines was reclining in bed, looking no better nor worse than any other day, not that the latter was saying much. He was under a thin sheet, and a feeding tube snaked under the sheet to somewhere in the region of his stomach. Lyle hovered in the doorway.
"Hello, Mr Raines!" said Lyle in a half-shout, as if being louder made him easier to understand. "I brought Sydney to see you! He'll make you all better, you wait."
"Hello," said Sydney, much quieter. "Can you tell me your name?"
"I think we can skip the intake form, Sydney," said Lyle sharply.
Sydney swallowed his impatience, and slowly turned to face Lyle.
"You asked me to check his cognition and comprehension," he said. "Please let me do that."
In a rare occurrence, Lyle looked slightly chastised. Sydney turned back to Raines, who was staring vacantly at his bedside table.
"Sir? Sir?" said Sydney, and waved a hand until Raines looked at him. "Thank you, sir. Try your best to pay attention. What is your name?"
"N-n-n," said Raines. "Bill. Bill, Bill."
He sounded, if possible, even more strained and slow than usual.
"Yes, you're Bill. William Raines. Well done," said Sydney with an encouraging smile. It was surreal, providing a nurturing presence to someone he usually made no attempt to conceal his loathing from… but he didn't know any other way to be, in this role. "Next question. Ready?"
Raines gazed back blankly. He looked around his surroundings, as if for help.
"We'll give it a try," said Sydney. "What month is it?"
"Mo — hm, no, dammitall. Mo —" Raines exhaled noisily. Sydney began rattling off the months of the year. Raines joined in half-way.
"June, July, August, September, October, November, December," they said in chorus.
"He's talking!" said Lyle, evidently trying to sound cheered. "I have to admit, I didn't think it would be that easy."
"It's automatic," said Sydney. "He might sing along with Happy Birthday, too. Bill — hi! Ready for another?" He didn't wait for confirmation. "Are you in California?"
Raines nodded.
"No, you're —"
"Please don't correct him, Mr Lyle. Bill, are you in Delaware?"
Another nod.
"Are you in Russia?"
A three-nod streak. Lyle frowned.
"He really thinks he's in three places?"
Sydney sighed. "Most likely not. There are a couple of possibilities. Either he can't communicate a clear 'no' signal right now, or he doesn't understand what I'm asking. Or he is not oriented to place at all, but he's agreeing to my suggestions because his healing brain is susceptible to —"
Suggestion. He bit the word off before it escaped his mouth. Raines could be exhibiting confabulation, a common phenomenon where a survivor of a stroke or brain injury might become convinced of facts with no basis in reality, with no awareness on the part of the patient that what they believe is not the truth.
The last thing Sydney needed to do was to tell the prospective head of the Centre that the current head was pathologically susceptible to suggestion.
Miss Parker woke in complete darkness with no inkling of what had woken her nor of where she was. There were blankets tangled around her and a muffled concert of crickets coming from outside. Could she be home in her little house in Delaware? She blinked a half-dozen times in quick succession and her eyes adjusted to the dark. Out of the gloom, the shapes of unfamiliar furniture materialized. The empty bookcases. A flood of memories almost knocked her flat, and she stared up at the ceiling.
She was in a limbo of her own making. She had told Jarod she'd leave as soon as Margaret told her what she wanted to know. Margaret had been generous so far in gifting Miss Parker unprompted anecdotes from the final years of Catherine Parker, the years her daughter had never shared with her. Not once did Miss Parker ask a question about something Margaret did not bring up herself, letting Jarod's mother drive the conversation. All Miss Parker had to do was sit Margaret down and drill her for information until there was nothing left of value to give, then blow this popsicle stand.
Miss Parker was avoiding A Truth, or more accurately several Truths, but the most immediate of these was that she was in no rush. She didn't relish the idea of going back to the Centre, as familiar as it was. The only discomfort of Margaret's ranch house in the Teton Wilderness was the chronic awkwardness with Jarod, but if he could deal with it, she'd be damned if she'd bow under the weight first.
Speaking of Jarod —
A noise drifted up from below and Miss Parker solved the mystery of what, exactly, had woken her up. The noise was a half-croaked shout, followed by the dwindling, sleepy groans of her downstairs neighbour. Jarod's bedroom must be right beneath her own.
It was not the first time she'd heard sounds like these. Back in Philadelphia, Jarod had started talking in his sleep when he thought he was going back to the Centre. That was no longer on the table; no matter how angry she was with him over the Chabot fiasco, she intended to stick by her word. She poked at the reaction in her gut when her mind went to Jarod. She'd been so angry when the news had come out that the whole business on the flight over had been a waste of time and effort, and all they'd done was mess up the lives of at least two people.
Since leaving Oregon, however, she'd reluctantly crept up on the mosaic of reasons underlying her anger and not found them to be too flattering. For one, she knew she was angry in part because the failure flew in the face of a lot of her unrealistic preconceptions of how Jarod functioned. She'd grown used to him racking up win after win on their years-long tally board, always one step ahead of her, always somehow having the free time to ruin some asshole's day while she worked overtime on his case exclusively, only to be outmatched by a nose. Surely the silver lining of having taken leave of her senses and willfully let him go would at least mean, for one shining moment, she'd have that infallibility on her side. That it should be otherwise, when she'd finally bothered to care about one of his prototypical underdogs (a homeless, orphaned kid, no less!), felt phenomenally unfair. Like he'd done it on purpose.
(He hadn't. She knew that. It didn't help.)
That left another unflattering reason, which was that she was only as angry as she was because she couldn't separate her anger at Jarod from the niggling suspicion that she deserved a fair amount of the blame. That everyone knew she was to blame, and was only waiting for her to admit it. She'd been there, at the airport, on the plane, etcetera. She hadn't won the day any more than Jarod had.
And then, dammit, yet another reason was laid bare: she was angry because being angry made it easier to travel back along the path of least resistance, back home. The worst part of this reason was that now, as the core of anger crumbled under nighttime dissection and bared some ugly pit that looked alarmingly like forgiveness, it left her with a damned inconvenient ambivalence towards parting ways with Jarod. Even now, she was thinking thoughts like 'just a few more days'. Thoughts like those were dangerous.
She made a midnight resolution, the kind that can be easily forgotten before dawn anyway, that she'd get it all over with tomorrow. She'd talk to Margaret, and she'd wipe the slate clean with Jarod, and she'd jump on the next plane back to Delaware.
Miss Parker remembered the resolution the next morning. The problem was, by the time she woke up, Jarod had left.
She woke up in the unfamiliar house, pleasantly chilled by the morning air as she crawled out from under a heavy stack of quilts. The house was quiet, aside from the clinking of dishes in the sink. Miss Parker had slept in her clothes, intending on continuing the rotation through what few outfits she currently had to her name, but her clothes were not on the dresser. She padded down to the kitchen.
"Margaret?" she called, before mentally slapping herself upside the head. Margaret couldn't hear her.
Remembering Margaret's words upon their arrival, Miss Parker sat down on a stool at the kitchen's island rather than try to hail the Deaf woman's attention while she was washing anything fragile. She quickly grew impatient, however, so she went to tap her host on the shoulder.
"Good morning, Miss Parker," Margaret trilled, back still turned, before Miss Parker could reach her. "Thank you for waiting, you're a sweetheart."
Miss Parker snorted. She doubted she'd been called a sweetheart once since the death of her mother.
"Good morning," she signed back once Margaret could see her.
"Would you like some toast and marmalade for breakfast? Jarod and I have already eaten, I'm just cleaning up."
Miss Parker stole a look at the clock above the sink. It wasn't even seven-thirty.
"Sure," she said absently.
Margaret pressed a jar of marmalade into her hand, along with a bag of brown bread, and pointed her towards the cutlery drawer and the toaster.
Slotting two slices into the toaster, Miss Parker recalled the disappearance of her clothes.
"I had some clothes —" she started.
"On the line. They were pretty whiffy when you came in, I hope you don't mind, I gave them a wash. I hoped they'd be done before you woke up, but we've had a dewy morning."
Miss Parker stopped and listened for signs of where Jarod might be. She had made a misguided promise to herself, obviously sleep-addled, to talk to him. She couldn't hear anything. Straining her ears to catch any audible sign, she was startled when the toast popped back up.
"Where is Jarod, anyway?" she asked Margaret once she'd spread marmalade over a slice. She took a bite, sparking a flare of nameless nostalgia for tea parties with her mother.
"Oh, right," said Margaret. "I was supposed to tell you. He left, dear. Early this morning."
Miss Parker froze mid-chew.
"Left?" she repeated, mouth full.
"He took my car. Didn't say when he'd be back. He said to tell you — what was it? He said, he said if you needed to leave before he came back, to wish you luck, and tell you that you could take the Westfalia if you like. Though for my own part, if it's not urgent, I'd just as soon you left me some means of reaching town in an emergency."
Miss Parker tried to decide if she was relieved or annoyed. A mix of both, most likely. Closure would have to wait until Jarod had finished saving a cat from a tree, or whatever had called him away from her at some ungodly hour.
She'd note afterwards that never for a moment did she consider accepting the offer and leaving while Jarod was gone.
"Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?" she said.
She'd intended it rhetorically, an impotent fist-shake at the heavens, but Margaret kept a constant eye out for lip movement and caught it anyway.
"We'll do what you came here for, of course," she said, putting the last coffee mug in a cupboard over the drying rack. "We'll talk."
Miss Parker suspected later that Margaret had been planning ahead for this meeting for some time. For one, she'd brought notes, pages and pages of hand-written notes in a green-bound notebook. She'd ushered Miss Parker out onto the back porch, where the screen barely fended off the insistent crowding of the bordering forest, long blades of grass and needle-armoured boughs pressing in on them from every angle. Margaret sat in a big winged chair upholstered in rose-pink satin and gestured for Miss Parker to make herself comfortable. She did so.
Margaret tapped the book's cover and looked, for the first time, a little anxious. A little keen-to-please, Miss Parker thought.
"I don't have some big secret to share with you, Miss Parker," Margaret started. She started slow and tentative, something a little querulous in her voice. "I know you've been looking for answers for almost as long as my Jarod has been free, and I'm sorry if the contents of my little Catherine book don't help you the way you wanted, but I wanted to tell you that first. I don't have your Holy Grail, as far as I know there isn't one. But maybe that's a kind of Big Truth, too? That there isn't a big conspiracy under all this. All the convoluted conspiracy tying our two families together has come straight from the Centre, and the Catherine I knew was a Catherine who was defined in part from having left the Centre."
There was a moth caught in a spider's web under the porch awning, outside the screen. Miss Parker watched it struggle, prodding at her heart, asking it whether she was disappointed. Margaret didn't have any world-shattering secrets to share, no inside scoop, no thread to tug on and pull taut across the paths of Miss Parker's enemies. Ostensibly, that was the sort of thing she'd sought in coming to meet Margaret. It was an important bit of reconnaissance to be taken care of, so she could report back to Sydney and Broots and the three of them could keep scurrying over the underbelly of the Centre, playing at being detectives while the beast lumbered on inexorably with or without their interference.
On the other hand, it would be really nice if she could hear something honest about her mother, something entirely without ulterior motive. Specifically, something about the zombie-mother who had lived on past that staged scene in the Centre elevator.
It'd be really nice.
"That's alright," said Miss Parker, once she had decided that, yes, it was alright. "Tell me."
The stories in Margaret's book were about Catherine, yes, but more than that they were about Catherine-and-Margaret. The two women hadn't known each other for very long, but their closeness hadn't required years upon years of acquaintance. The stories spoke to Margaret's admiration for Catherine. Of course, Miss Parker admired her mother too, but it was different coming from an unbiased source. If anything, Margaret had every reason to hate and distrust the wife of the head of the Centre, who had had every opportunity to save her sons but had never succeeded.
"Cathy wanted to champion the children her husband's company had hurt, as you know," said Margaret. "It was so hard for her, loving your father and hating what your family legacy had become. She was a great believer in science, and she feared if the evils of the Centre ever came to light, it would cast mistrust over everything good that had ever come out of the place. She insisted that there was good coming out of the Centre, even later when I was feeling particularly bitter and railing against them with everything I had. Not only would that good suffer under exposure, every advancement that stood on the shoulders of the experimental results released from that building's most ethically suspect sub-levels would be called into question. When she met me, a mother directly impacted twice over by the Centre's lack of accountability to any system of ethics, she doubled down on her rejection of the Centre."
The most empowering were Margaret's second-hand stories of Catherine's various rebellions against the Centre. How she'd stabbed at the guts of the Centre from the inside. How she'd hardened a little after her "death" and become more willing to take the fight to the Centre in actionable, destructive ways, as long as she'd been able to stick to the shadows. Centre outposts had experienced mysterious gas leaks after hours, potential trade partners had suddenly backed out of deals with the Centre with no reason given, employees and project subjects disappeared overnight on forged passports. Margaret had asked Catherine once to become a more visible face behind these scattered attacks, so the Centre would know they weren't just a run of bad luck. Catherine had refused.
"She said if the Centre ever found out she was alive, it could put you in danger," said Margaret. "You might end up being used as bait to bring her back under the Centre roof. You were more important than anything, Miss Parker, than anything."
Miss Parker swiped away tears for the nth time since sitting down. At first she'd scowled with embarrassment when her throat started to twist and her tears threatened to pour down her cheeks. In the end, Margaret had beaten her to it, crying unabashedly like she was sending up an offering of tears to her departed friend. After that, Miss Parker didn't bother to hide it.
Along with the tales of rebellion, anecdotes were sprinkled in liberally which showed Catherine as a person, Catherine as a friend, Catherine as a woman. It takes years for a child to realize their parents are only people, and Catherine had died long before her daughter got the chance to figure that out. This was Miss Parker's chance at that perspective. As the morning wore on and well into the afternoon, Miss Parker filled in her portrait of Catherine Parker little by little.
By the end, she was wrung out inside, but she had what she had come for. She knew the best version of her mother, and the Centre couldn't take that away from her now.
Nightfall rolled around, and Jarod still hadn't returned.
