A/N: Something of a shaggy dog of a chapter. I believe there was an episode in WH13 where the crew got lost in a replica of the B&B in the Warehouse. Could be I'm remembering it wrong, but that's what I used for the chapter, anyway. I've never claimed this fic was going to be strong on WH13 details. Also, despite the references to H.G. and Pete going on a retrieval together, the next chapter will not be about that. It will be about a retrieval, but one H.G. and Myka partner on. However, I've always kinda liked the H.G. and Pete dynamic, so among the many fic ideas I have, I have one where H.G. and Pete are the sibling-like/working partner pair.
A/N II: I've not been able to completely shake off a mapping of WH13 onto Gilligan's Island. I've always been ambivalent about one-shots, in part because, and you know if you've been reading my stuff, I'm not concise. But a sort of deserted island/Lost/Gilligan's Island thing has had me both laughing and thinking. And Myka is so Mary Ann.
Myka was home from Atlanta for only a couple of days, and then she would be off to Albany, New York, for another clean-up followed by a meeting with Homeland Security in Washington. Helena had assumed that she wouldn't see her; she hardly outranked Myka's son, who also hadn't seen her for almost a week, but on an otherwise unremarkable weekday morning, Myka called her to the Warehouse for a meeting.
Helena had no great desire to visit the Warehouse again, but she did have a great desire to see Myka, even if it was only in the context of a staff meeting. Since Myka's first night in Atlanta, they had been speaking to each daily, actually nightly, ending each call the way they had the first one, with Myka's grumbled protests about "this not working" serving as foreplay to an extended session of phone sex that strained Helena's voice as well as a few muscles. The night before, after Drew had gone to bed, Myka had been the one to tell Helena to turn the volume up and put the phone down, and a few moments later, after Helena suspected Myka's phone had been on mute, she could hear Sade playing in the background. Although she had been wise enough not to comment on the music, Helena asked if she should first whine, "This isn't going to work," to get them warmed up, to which Myka had responded with a frosty " Would you be just as happy listening to the sound of your own voice?" And then immediately answered her own question, "Of course you would."
It was Smooth Operator that Helena was humming on her drive over to the Warehouse. The humming, not on key to begin with, slid into a few sour notes as the Warehouse's dark bulk appeared on the horizon. She was tense as she emerged from the umbilicus, half-expecting a resurgence of the rage she had felt before, but the only emotion that threatened to swamp her was a growing impatience to see Myka. No smell of apples greeted her either, only a musty odor that she was used to encountering in antique stores, two parts things-left-unaired to two parts dust. Perhaps they had achieved a temporary truce, she and the Warehouse, in their battle of wills. She could pretend that it was the world's largest flea market, and it could pretend that she was only another visitor.
Helena stood outside the war room, seeing Myka talking to Jacqui. Myka had returned to her jeans and summer-weight V-neck sweaters, and while Helena thought she had made no sound expressing her pleasure at the end of a six-day absence, she must have sighed or maybe her smile had crashed the sound barrier in pinning itself on her face because Myka turned, giving her a smile just as ridiculously happy and blushing so intensely that she crimsoned all the way to the vee of her sweater.
"Hey, you," she said softly. Turning back to Jacqui, she said, "We can pick this up later."
Jacqui grinned. "If by later, you mean tomorrow later, that's fine by me. I don't have anything to do here that I can't do at home." As Myka fumbled for a response, Jacqui said, "Home being miles away from the Warehouse and where I won't be expecting a call from you." Passing Helena on her way out, she said in a low voice, "I'm trusting you to keep her too busy to think about work."
"Darling, I'm not going to let her have time to think, period." Helena said loud enough for Myka to hear and curved her lips in a theatrically lascivious smile. She leaned against the doorframe. "Is our meeting a performance review? Because I have some ideas about areas of improvement that I'd like to show you." The lascivious smile wobbled and then dissolved as Helena started laughing. "I can do that all day you know, horrible double entendres, cringeworthy innuendoes."
"You forget," Myka said, taking Helena's arm and leading her out of the war room, "I was married to the master of bad jokes for seven years. And don't say what you're thinking, Helena. He's also the father of my child."
Allowing herself to be tugged down to the main floor of the Warehouse, Helena let her glances skim over the artefacts on the shelves. Myka's head remained ruler-straight as she passed them, but, Helena, no slouch when it came to fixing her mind on a single thought, had always admired Myka's ability to concentrate. Myka's pace was quick, she was focused on wherever she was taking them. She slowed only when they entered the area that held, but not just held, preserved, Helena silently amended, the pressed suits, nail clippers, and the like, even the very lodgings, of former agents who hadn't been fortunate enough to voluntarily terminate their employment and thus, carry out, in an extra suitcase or a box under their arms, those suits and clippers. Myka knew what she was looking for, and as her selection unfolded before them, Helena recognized her old room at the B&B.
"This reaction was a little drastic, don't you think, to my leaving the Warehouse?" Helena wandered the room, the floorboards creaking just like they always had. There couldn't have been much she had left behind because she hadn't accumulated much to begin with, not when she was with 13; she had been at the B&B for less than a year before Yellowstone, for only a few weeks, if that, after Sykes had been defeated.
"Claudia thought you weren't in your right mind or possibly under alien control when you told the regents that you weren't coming back. She thought it qualified." Myka had shut the door and was leaning against it, arms folded across her chest.
Helena touched the nightstand, the bed. She wasn't sure what she had expected to feel but something other than this mild acknowledgment that here was a place in which she had given her hair a hundred strokes before going to bed to not-sleep and sorted her laundry. And plotted. She hadn't gone over to the desk, she wouldn't; that might be the one thing in the room that would stir some emotion. There every night she had carefully thought through the next steps of her plan, occasionally scribbling a few cryptic words in a notebook. She hadn't put it past Artie to search her room on a regular basis. She glanced at the windows and smiled. The desk wasn't the only object that could make her feel something. She went to stand in front of the one that had looked onto the garden, where Myka had stretched before her morning runs.
"Too bad the reproduction stops at the interior," she said, fingers hovering over the glass that showed only the two of them and the somewhat sad contents of the room in a blurred reflection.
"So put yourself there. Let's say a June morning about 12 years ago." Myka moved away from the door, arms still hugging her chest.
"You're out there doing your pre-run stretching, in short-shorts and a form-fitting tank top?" Helena suggested, meeting her in the middle of the room. "It's a humid morning, isn't it, and you're already perspiring, here." Helena threaded her hand through Myka's hair, drawing closer to caress the back of her neck. "And here." She ran a finger along the neckline of Myka's sweater, tugging it down at its vee, fingertip brushing, featherlight, over and between Myka's breasts.
"Sounds about right," Myka said casually, but her eyes had grown heavy-lidded and her smile welcomed more.
"As I recall, I left here in a bit of a hurry. There might still be a vibrator and some ancient lube in the nighstand," Helena teased.
"I won't need help, of any kind," Myka murmured, stepping back and pulling her sweater over her head, dropping it on the floor. "I'm running up the stairs to your room, Helena. Are you going to open the door?"
"Wide open, darling."
Twelve years ago Helena wouldn't have allowed herself to fantasize about what they were doing on her bed now, at least not in such detail, and Myka would have been too diffident about her own feelings to think of proposing it. Twelve years ago, it would have taken an accidental encounter with an artefact or the touch of a fairy godmother's wand to have caused them to tumble into bed together. An alternate timeline in which that encounter would have been so magical, so life-changing that she would have called back the students from Egypt, flushed the pages from her notebook down the toilet, and scoffed at her belief that the world should be brought to an end as so much self-pitying nonsense. An alternate timeline because such an encounter then wouldn't have changed anything.
Their timeline, the one in which she nearly ended the world, was the timeline they had; they could come to this room every day and they could come in this room as often as they had the energy to bring each other to the point, but it would change nothing. As Myka raised her head and smiled at her - and Helena could reassure her, if Myka needed reassuring, that she didn't need to feel diffident about anything - the green eyes intent and a little dreamy at the same time, Helena sat up to cup that face. "Myka, this is lovely, but it can't undo, and even then it wouldn't have -"
Myka placed her finger on Helena's lips. "Shush, no talking. It's a fantasy, remember?" A sadness more bleak than gentle swept away the dreaminess in her eyes, and Helena cursed her unerring tendency to complicate something simple, but after a moment, Myka shook her head, saying wryly, "Okay, it may just be my fantasy, but let's face it, Helena, you owe me a few."
"Let's see if I can work off my obligation, shall we?" Her tone was appropriately roguish, and given the age and condition of the bed, not to mention her age and condition, she thought she moved gracefully enough from underneath Myka to a position over her with a minor number of protests and most of those from the bedsprings. In fantasies, you could be whatever you wanted, she could be whatever Myka wanted, and if Myka wanted her untainted by the deaths she had carelessly caused and the billions of deaths she had been planning to cause then that was the Helena she would pretend to be. But as she bent her head to gently take Myka's bottom lip between her teeth, she felt that other Helena, the one she was, with all the misfortune and misery she had unleashed, settling between her shoulder blades, and she nearly sagged under the weight. "Darling, no going easy on me, although," she said, as breezily as she could, caressing Myka's breast, "in this instance, I do believe in grading on a curve."
This time Myka cupped her face. "Helena, if this bothers you, we can stop." Her eyes growing more searching, she added, "When I feel like we're in a summer stock production of Private Lives, I know your shields are up."
"You do know that was more than a mixing of metaphors," Helena said gravely. "You managed to combine Noel Coward and Gene Roddenberry in the same sentence, and my ears are bleeding."
"Helena," Myka said patiently. She tapped Helena on the shoulder to let her know that she wanted to sit up. "I didn't stop to think that it might be difficult for you, being here in this room, pretending that it was when we first knew each other." Drawing the sheet to her, she hugged her knees to her chest. "This B&B, the old one, was more of a home to me than the home I grew up in. But you have an entirely different relationship to it."
Helena rolled onto her back and smashed a pillow over her face. She heard Myka chuckle, and then she felt Myka trying to tug the pillow away from her face. "Helena, it's all right."
"Really, I don't have anything against the room," Helena said from under the pillow. "It's a little drab, but I've lived in worse, I've had sex in -." As Myka noisily cleared her throat, Helena said hastily, "It's the desk. I sat at that desk, you know, scheming, hating, contemplating a mass murder the likes of which had never been seen. It's not a mood enhancer." After a pause, she removed the pillow. "I didn't think it would affect me. But I've never been very good at turning back time."
"How does an early lunch sound?" Myka suggested, bending down to kiss Helena's nose and then scooting off the side of the bed.
"I thought compromise was the basis of a good relationship. This isn't a compromise. You had a fantasy that I have managed, not surprisingly, to turn into some tedious personal drama. Besides," Helena said plaintively, "you're going to Albany tomorrow, and I would like to have sex that involves physical contact."
Myka was stepping into her jeans. "What do you suggest?"
"A compromise fantasy. There is a room in the B&B where I think I would have no issues." Helena looked around the floor for her underwear. "There's a replica of the B&B in the Warehouse, am I right?"
Myka nodded, giving her a wary look. "I wouldn't recommend entering it."
"But you with your prodigious memory," Helena said slyly, "I'm sure you remember how to get out of it. Are you willing to take a chance?"
"It's a maze, Helena, and I'm not ready to spend eternity trapped in it with you."
"So you have considered spending eternity with me?" Helena was on her hands and knees and peering under the bed for her bra. Then she saw a strap peeping out from beneath a sheet.
"Are you proposing?" Myka arched an eyebrow.
"Are you accepting?" Helena arched her opposite eyebrow.
"Let's go find the B&B."
Although Myka didn't lead her as quickly to the Warehouse's B&B as she had to the room archive, she didn't appear to have second thoughts about taking them into a maze, or perhaps, Helena thought, walking slightly behind that rangy frame with its impeccable posture (unsurprisingly attributed by Myka to fencing), Myka's plan was to leave her in it. Other, better people wouldn't have let their misgivings about reimagining the past ruin their girlfriends' fantasies. Sexual fantasies. Other, equally selfish people wouldn't have let their misgivings ruin their one opportunity at having sex before their girlfriends left on another trip. Why did she believe she would act differently in another room? The B&B itself was a reminder of who she was, what, given the right circumstances, she could always become again. Yet as she took the lead once Myka opened the door, guiding them through the foyer and down the hallway to that certain room on the left, the room where she hadn't had fantasies so much as a series of idle thoughts, she knew it would be different.
Myka laughed softly as she followed Helena into the library. "I should have guessed," she said, going to the shelves and trailing her fingers along the spines of well-used paperbacks and the occasional hardcover.
"I think," Helena began slowly. "I think I needed a room we were in together, happy together. I didn't plot here, I didn't obsess over the evil state of the world. I just enjoyed spending time with you." She backed an unresisting Myka toward the sofa. "You were happy, too, weren't you, with me, in this room?"
"Yes," Myka said simply.
"Claudia said she thought that our late night conversations in here were merely another form of seduction."
"I'm not sure how I feel about you and Claudia discussing you and me." Despite her words, Myka was completely absorbed in unbuttoning Helena's blouse.
"Only in the context that I was an utter fool for not realizing what was happening." Helena unbuckled Myka's belt.
"If you didn't realize what was going on, what exactly were you fantasizing about?"
"Always the logical one," Helena sighed as Myka unhooked her bra and then sighed again as she felt Myka's hands rest lightly on her breasts, thumbs grazing her nipples. "I will admit that my thoughts sometimes wandered, particularly when we talked about Melville." Leaning into Myka's touch, she began working Myka's jeans over her hips. "You forget, I come from a nation of sailors, and I know what the ships were like back then." She grinned as her fingers slipped between Myka's thighs and then slipped in so readily that Myka hissed and bit her lip. "Perhaps Melville and you find all those descriptions of rosy-cheeked sailors appealing, but sharing close quarters with a crew of scurvy-ridden, unwashed men holds no appeal for me. Can you blame me if I wondered, every once in awhile, what we might get up to in a hammock?"
"Did your mind wander when we talked about other books?" Myka's eyes had assumed the intently dreamy look they had held in Helena's bedroom, and she stilled the movement of Helena's hand long enough to move in for a kiss.
Helena's hand lost contact with Myka's body only for as long as it took Myka to kick off her jeans and panties and then pull Helena down with her onto the sofa. "All the time when we talked about the Transcendentalists." Helena let out a small groan as her fingers found their place again. "Ah, Myka darling, you must like Ralph Waldo Emerson very, very much."
"I do," Myka said, her hips moving up and down. "In high school, I won a prize for an essay on 'The Over-Soul.' I was. . . . ." Smiling and biting her lip at the same time, the curve of her lashes as they fluttered over her eyes matching the curve of her smile, she said, "Over the moon for Ralph Waldo." Her voice broke off in a pleased gasp as Helena's tongue sketched a circle around one of her nipples. "Tell me how bored you were when we talked about Henry James."
Helena trailed kisses down Myka's abdomen. "So bored that I imagined putting my tongue here. . . and here," she said, demonstrating, as Myka squirmed and muttered a few half-words. "I don't believe those particular words were ever part of our discussions," she said in mock reproof. Straightening and sitting on her heels as Myka reached for her, Helena smiled mischievously. "I always wanted to see the purple passages James excised from the book, the ones in which Madame Merle showed Isabel how truly bad she could be."
"This bad?" Myka breathed as Helena moved between her legs, hand starting a familiar rhythm.
"Something like," Helena said, stroking more urgently. "Goodwood, indeed." She sniffed disdainfully.
"Helena." Myka's eyes were closing again. "I've had enough of books for now."
It took Myka only two tries to get them out of the B&B, but she was practically running down the aisles toward the war room, clearly worried that she was going to be late to pick up Drew from soccer camp. When a sudden, unpleasant thought crossed Helena's mind, she came to a halt, between shelves that appeared to hold artefacts from politicians, while Myka charged on. Eventually turning around, Myka said, "We don't want to stay in this aisle any longer than we have to, Helena."
"Because," Helena squinted to read an electronic description, "we'll develop instant amnesia if we touch Reagan's candy dish?" Pointing to another artefact, she laughed. "Or we'll have 'lust in our hearts' if we wear Jimmy Carter's cardigan sweater? I don't think we need an artefact for that." Sobering, she glanced at Myka, an uneasy expression on her face. "Did you and Pete ever. . . ."
"It was the library, Helena, what do you think?" She grabbed Helena's hand and pulled at her to come along. "Just to hurry things up here, Pete and I never had sex at the B&B. That was what you were going to ask next, wasn't it? What rooms did we have sex in?"
"Actually, I think I'm more interested now in hearing about what happens if we stay too long in this aisle." Helena reluctantly shuffled after Myka, but she kept her head twisted over her shoulder to keep the artefacts in view.
"There's a filibuster artefact that periodically activates itself, and when that happens, you can be stuck where you're standing for days. We lost Steve for a weekend once because of it." Myka tugged more firmly on Helena's arm. "We need to move faster, babe."
"You did just call me 'babe,' you realize that." Helena's eyebrows arrowed in concentration as she silently mouthed the endearment. "I don't know that I'm a 'babe' or 'baby.' Certainly not a 'hon,' so don't even try it. 'Darling,' of course, I own."
"Helena," Myka groaned, exasperated. She slowed once more and pivoted on her heel, seeing that Helena was still gazing down the aisle. "What's so fascinating about these particular artefacts?"
"Besides the fact that I'm planning how we might use the filibuster artefact to trap ourselves in your bedroom, I was thinking that, perhaps, Congressmen Jaffee and Perkins might have had an interest in them."
"They're all present and accounted for - going back the last several inventories. It's possible they've been replicated, but I doubt it." Myka dropped Helena's hand and came to stand beside her. "Jacqui could check and see if either Jaffee or Perkins asked for any of them to be 'investigated.' They've done that with a number of artefacts that they say they're concerned about."
Helena nodded abstractedly. Then she asked, in obvious disbelief, "You and Pete, never, in the B&B?"
"Claudia," Myka answered, heading back up the aisle toward the war room. "Instead he and I just went on a lot of assignments." She sighed, remembering. "A lot of assignments." At Helena's moue, she glared at her and said, "That's not what I meant. It's ridiculous when you stop to think about it. To spare Claudia's feelings, we traveled to Kansas City or Billings, Montana, to have sex."
"It's sweet," Helena countered, turning and wrapping an arm around Myka's waist, drawing her close. "And that sounds very much like something that you and Pete would do. But I am not that nice," she said, nuzzling the skin below Myka's earlobe. "And I am not that patient. We wouldn't make it to the airport, darling."
"If I didn't need to get to my car in the next five minutes so I can have a ghost of chance of picking my son up on time," Myka whispered, "I'd challenge you to do what you could in those five minutes because I'm still not sure how good you . . . ." As an object rattled on a shelf above them, she stepped out of Helena's arms and sent a rueful glance toward the artefact. "But not here, not today."
"Another fantasy I'll owe you then?" Helena said, as Myka ran toward the stairs. She stood on tip-toe to read the description of the artefact, a piece of costume jewelry from the set of Cleopatra, still moving on the shelf. "Supposedly it brings about a torrid romance, one for the ages. Apropos, don't you think?" She shouted.
Myka's voice floated back to her. "Followed by volcanic arguments, ill health, near bankruptcy, and divorce."
"Well, if you're going to fixate on that. . . ." Helena grumbled, the end of the aisle still a dismayingly long way ahead.
She was in the sunroom of the old B&B, Claudia's version of it, looking over a series of print outs Jacqui had put on the table in front of her, when Claudia, who had been on the phone with Myka, Jane, Pete, and then Myka again, flopped into the chair next to her. "We have a situation. I'm sending Pete out on an emergency retrieval, and Myka and Jane and I have to be in Washington bright and early tomorrow morning, so we need someone to watch Drew. We could fly Pete's sister in, and Jacqui's volunteered." At this, Jacqui nodded, tearing a pastry in half. "But Drew wants you, and now Myka wants to talk to you."
Putting aside a financial statement of one of Congressman Jaffee's backers, doubtlessly purloined from some Claudia- or Jacqui-hacked system, Helena picked up the phone. "Myka, I hear that Drew wants to go to Victorian summer camp for a few days, where he will be drilled in the classics, though I suspect his Latin and Greek are woefully inadequate, and thoroughly hazed by the older boys." Helena was tempted to wander away from the table in search of some privacy but thought better of it when she caught sight of the studied innocence of Claudia's expression. After the embarrassing exchange they had had in the Warehouse about Myka, Helena didn't think Claudia would try to listen in, but it would be wiser not to test her.
Myka laughed, relief not quite crowding out the nervousness. "You're okay with it, then? I know it's an imposition, but he likes you -"
"It's fine, really, but my apartment here is rather small."
Able to concentrate on the practical aspects of the arrangement, Myka's voice grew in confidence. "Get my house key and access codes from Claudia, if you don't mind staying in my house."
"Not at all," Helena said, suppressing the impulse to make a lewd remark about talking later when she was in Myka's bedroom. She managed to end their conversation with appropriate circumspection, smothering a suggestive response to Myka's "I'll call you tonight," though she did murmur dryly, "I suppose this isn't some elaborately devised excuse to give me your key, that you'll want it back when you return," but Myka only laughed under her breath, saying softly "Helena."
Claudia said, taking the phone back, "This is so The Courtship of Eddie's Father." Receiving a puzzled look from Helena, she started crowing, "Ah, how I missed that blank stare when any cultural reference cropped up, my H.G. is back." Giving her a gentle shove, Claudia said, "Mid-1960s show where a son tries to fix his father up with various women. Now you never have to watch it." Sighing, she added, "But Drew, what a devious little monkey he's becoming. It's not in his genes. He must be getting it from his exposure to you, H.G., which makes me think he probably shouldn't be staying with you at all."
"There's nothing underhanded about what he's doing, darling. I've promised him a tree house, and he's going to keep an eye on me until I get it built. Exactly something his mother would do." Helena shuffled the paper into a neat stack. "Can we get back to the matter at hand, namely these financial statements whose provenance I'm not going to bother inquiring about?"
For the next few hours, they followed the connections, such as they were, between Congressmen Jaffee's and Perkins' financial supporters and what little financial data Jacqui had been unable to unearth about PAWL. Claudia rolled in or simply magicked into being a large white board, on which she began listing names, their links to other names, and their association with the nonprofit. Soon the board was covered with lines from several names to PAWL, and all of the names were contributors, past or present, to Jaffee and Perkins. Among them, unsurprisingly given the information Jacqui had found earlier, was Wade Farraday's name, which made Helena shift uncomfortably in her chair, but she heard herself repeating what Suzanne had once told her about him, "He's something of a crank, contributing to both parties depending on his mood and how much he believes one party more than the other is full of scoundrels."
Claudia shrugged. "We're not here to pick on you or your ex-girlfriend, and she is your ex-girlfriend, right?" Her eyes narrowed, and she looked challengingly at Helena. "Cause I don't really want to bust your ass right before I have to go hang out with your new girlfriend, but I will."
"How many times do I have to tell you," Helena said in exasperation, "that Suzanne and I don't have that kind of relationship, any relationship. And I would like to see you try to 'bust my ass.' You failed miserably all the times I tried to teach you kenpo."
"Girls, girls," Jacqui said admonishingly. "The only interesting thing I was able to find out about Wade Farraday is that he's a collector, of all sorts of things. Civil War memorabilia, old timey carousels, 1950s Ford Thunderbirds, just to name a few."
"Nothing that would require my expertise to verify," Helena said, "and I've never met the man."
Claudia held her hands up in surrender. "Honestly, we're not out to get you. Well, not anymore, so relax. Jacqs, what about this guy, Nolan Mercer?"
And so it went, up until Helena needed to leave to pick up Drew. She had just enough time to run up to her apartment, throw a few clothes and her laptop into a bag, and pace the elevator as it ever so slowly rattled its way to the first floor. Claudia gave her the house key, the access codes, and a happy, barking Shep, who shivered with excitement and then lunged at the door to the verandah. Her shoulder nearly dislocated from her efforts to keep Shep from dragging her through the front lawn, Helena thanked Claudia, somewhat less than sincerely, after calming Shep with a deadly glare. She followed the directions Claudia gave her to the park where Drew's soccer camp was held and, though she trusted Claudia, in the main, she also plugged the address into her phone as a double check. It wouldn't be unlike Claudia to give her the directions for getting to Mount Rushmore instead.
She parked the car in the lot and, feeling a little self-conscious, joined the mothers strolling through the grass and chatting with one another as they collected their children. Drew was in a group of boys, laughing at something one of them said. He was taller than most of them, and his hair glinted red in the sunlight. He glimpsed Helena heading toward him, and she heard him say, "That's my mom's friend." At least he said it with a smile. The boys began to disperse, all but Drew and a boy, shorter and stockier, who looked at her with a suspiciousness that would have seemed more understandable coming from Drew.
"This is my friend Colton. We're supposed to give him a ride home, but he wants to hang out at my house with me for a while." Drew squinted up at her, seeking her approval.
What had she done when Christina had wanted to play with her friends? Granted, social relationships, even among children, had been more formal then, but children had still played together. Surely her daughter had wanted to invite a playmate to her home, but why couldn't she remember? My God, had her daughter been so friendless as to have no one to play with other than her dolls or had she been so remiss a mother as to leave it up to Christina's succession of nannies to oversee such arrangements? Hoping it was the latter, although it was small comfort, Helena almost dropped her phone, trying to bring up the keypad. "Colton, what's your number so I can call your mother?"
Going through the awkwardness of introducing herself as Drew's sitter to Colton's mother, advising her of the boys' hopes of spending the rest of the afternoon together, and then allowing her to talk to Colton (probably to reassure herself that Helena wasn't intending to abduct her son), Helena finally obtained her assent to having Colton stay for the afternoon - and for dinner, which Helena wasn't looking for, not in the least. But the boys were jumping up and down and shouting "Pizza!"
She wasn't sure who made the most noise in the back seat, Drew and Colton or Shep, and then, when she pulled into Myka's garage, and the boys burst through the back door into the yard, Shep galloping after them, the three of them became a tangle of legs and fur, shouts and barks. Unpacking her bag in Myka's bedroom, she occasionally looked out a window at the boys as she hung her clothes in the closet - ordered she noticed by type of clothing (business, casual) and then further ordered by color - and arranged her toiletries on the vanity in the bathroom. It didn't look so crowded. She and Myka could share the space, but perhaps not the closet. Her shoes alone demanded their own closet, and such rigid ordering as Myka apparently needed made her itch to upset it, putting blazers between the sun dresses and grays among the reds.
She wasn't ready to concede to the boys' demand for pizza, so she surveyed the contents of the pantry and the freezer for something suitable for dinner. Ever present packages of boneless, skinless chicken breasts and bags of frozen vegetables, she could make something edible out of those. The slamming of doors announced the boys' imminent arrival in the kitchen, and then they were at the island, perched on the stools, wanting popsicles. Helena was surprised that Myka would allow such things, but her eyebrows lowered themselves to their normal levels when she sorted through the box in the freezer and saw that they were made from organic fruit juice.
His mouth purple-rimmed and smiling brightly, grapely, Drew said, "I told Colton that he and all my friends could come see my tree house. Though you said we might not fit up there all at the same time."
Colton shrugged, licking the side of his cherry popsicle. "My mom's boyfriend's always telling me we're gonna do something, or he's gonna build me something." He looked at Helena levelly. "He talks a lot."
Drew's smile dimmed, and he turned his head to look out at the yard and the tree that was to host the tree house, which showed not a sign of the pirate ship that was to float on its branches. When Myka came home, Helena thought she might take it upon herself to suggest that Drew should spend less time with Colton, which was a better alternative than locking him in Myka's closet as she wanted to do now. "Tell you what, I was going to do this tomorrow when you were at math camp, Drew, but if you two don't mind spending a few minutes in a lumberyard, let's go and order the wood for the tree house. I have all the measurements." She smiled and stared at Colton, who remained unimpressed. Drew, however, had hopped off the stool and was running toward the garage.
She had been intending to do no such thing, not tomorrow at any rate. But she would be damned before she let an eight-year-old boy with the cynicism of a man five times his age sully Drew's enthusiasm. With the two boys - and the dog - in the back seat once more, she drove toward where she hazily remembered the mall to be. She had no idea where the nearest lumberyard was, but there had to be one of those big-box do-it-yourself stores, a Home Depot, a Lowe's, at or close to the mall. They could manage to order some wood for her, couldn't they?
They were passing through an unevenly developed stretch of small businesses when she spotted a lumberyard on her left. She wrenched the steering wheel and, tires squealing, the car jolted into the parking lot, which had both boys, even the saturnine Colton, giggling. As the boys chased each other around a stack of lumber, despite her calls to them to stop, and as she tried to keep Shep from marking everything in sight, a tall, powerfully built man emerged from the shed and eyed all of them skeptically.
"Can I help you?" He asked doubtfully. He had graying, sandy hair and a ruddy complexion, and he reminded her of one of the agents at 12 who had thought a woman agent was an abomination.
Wrapping Shep's leash tightly around her hand, she cast a disdainful glance around the yard before looking at him with equal skepticism. "That remains to be seen," she said haughtily, "but it's a relatively straightforward project."
He gave her another look, this time a harder but more measuring one. "Let's hear it."
As she swiftly outlined her plan for the tree house, Jared, as he told her to call him, grew interested, making a few suggestions that she incorporated into the design. He knew his carpentry, she grudgingly admitted to herself, and when she asked how soon the wood, cut and treated to her specifications, could be delivered, he seemed genuinely regretful when he said it would be closer to weeks, not days. Looking at Drew, who, tiring of running around the yard, was sitting with Colton on a bench and gazing with boredom at the lumber, she leaned closer to Jared and said quietly, "I'm willing to pay whatever it takes to get the wood by Saturday." Friday was when Myka was supposed to come home. Saturday was soon enough to appear like a woman who was relationship-worthy, who knew what a commitment was and could honor it.
He nodded and scribbled an astronomical sum on a scrap of paper. "I can't get you exactly what you want by Saturday, but I can get you this and you'll hardly know the difference."
She nodded in turn. "If you can recommend a few men to help me out on Saturday, and Sunday, if necessary, you can keep half of that amount as a referral fee. And I'll pay whomever you can line up twice that amount."
He whistled softly. "I'll bring out a couple of guys and some equipment and help you myself. We can start at dawn for this kind of money."
"Nine will do and make sure you include some tasks suitable for a boy to help with. . . and a hardhat he can wear."
He followed her gaze and smiled when he saw she was looking at Drew. "I think I may even have an extra tool belt for him."
She pursed her lips, remembering that Pete was going to "help" build the tree house. "Make that two hardhats and two tool belts."
Dinner that night was McDonald's, which, while not eliciting the excitement that pizza had, was greeted with shouts all the same as Helena made another careening turn into the drive-through lane, having nearly overshot it on their way back to Myka's house. Colton's cool regard of her hadn't changed after the trip to the lumberyard, and she acknowledged that she was petty enough to want to demolish him in one of Drew's video games, but she restrained herself, watching them play the treasure-hunting game as she sat on the sofa, reviewing additional information that Jacqui had e-mailed her on Jaffee's and Perkins' backers. As soon as the boys finished the second game, she was ushering them, perhaps a little too happily, into the car to take Colton home.
Helena sent Drew off for his bath once they returned, and, as usual, he seemed to hop in the tub only to hop immediately out of it. He still had streaks of toothpaste around his mouth when Helena came to wish him goodnight. He had spoken to Myka while the bath was running, jumbling soccer, lumber, and Happy Meals in a torrent of words, and taking the phone from him, Helena had received from Myka a sardonically amused "We'll talk about this later." Sitting on the edge of the bed and dabbing at his mouth with a washcloth to remove the excess toothpaste, she asked sternly, "Did you wash behind your ears? Scrub your elbows and knees?"
"I'm clean," he protested, crooking his elbows for display and swinging them around so quickly for Helena's inspection that she barely avoided being hit in the face by one of them.
"That'll do," she said brusquely, but her smile belied the growl in her voice, and Drew flopped his arms on the sheet, exhaling loudly and with satisfaction.
"Can we build something else once the tree house is done?" He asked.
"We haven't even started on the tree house. How do you know you'll like building it?"
He lifted a shoulder, his expression commingling uncertainty and an impatience that Helena had had to ask the question, and she recognized only then that it wasn't so much building something else as being wrapped up in the excitement of a project and, possibly, planning something with her that he wanted to repeat. More gently, she said, "There are only so many trees in your yard, but maybe I can come up with something that won't alarm your parents."
He smiled sunnily at her. "Colton thinks you're okay."
Recalling that disapproving, freckled face, Helena doubted it, saying dryly, "I shall go to sleep immeasurably relieved that I've received his stamp of approval."
Drew looked up at her, sensing that Helena's response wasn't to be taken seriously but not sure which part of it he should focus on. Seeing his confusion, Helena relented. "I'm glad he enjoyed himself. Sweet dreams, Drew."
When Myka called her the next evening, Helena could report that she had shuttled Drew from math camp to soccer camp and then home without incident (and without a scowling Colton in the back seat), served him a meal that was not supplemented by soda or action figures, and ensured that he remained in the bathtub for more than 30 seconds by announcing that not only would there be a behind-the-ears and elbows-and-knees check but a between-the-toes check as well.
Myka was silent, and Helena wasn't sure whether she was trying to digest the amount of parental responsibility Helena had shown or finding an omission in the care of her son. "I met her today," she said finally.
"Her?" Helena repeated.
"Suzanne Emory. I went to the Farraday after our meetings were over for the day." Helena was waiting for more, but Myka had fallen silent. After a long pause, Myka said quietly, "She's stunning. The pictures in the file don't do her justice. The file also didn't prepare me for how elegant and charming and smart she is."
Myka couldn't see the knowing smile on Helena's face, which, all things considered, was just as well. "She gave you a tour, did she?" Helena asked silkily.
"A little bit." Helena could picture Myka defensively scrunching her shoulders under her sweater and, if there were Twizzlers nearby, nibbling on one. "I was looking at some of the post-Impressionist paintings, and she was coming down the stairs. She was surprised to see me; it was virtually closing time."
Suzanne wasn't surprised to see you. She had probably scouted you from the moment you paid your admission fee. She just wanted to pick her spot for an "accidental" encounter. Helena said instead, as neutrally as she could manage, "Most visitors aren't so fortunate as to have the curator give them a guided tour."
"You're saying it was no accident," Myka said, laughing a little.
"You're beautiful, Myka, and while Suzanne generally doesn't poach on museum territory - potentially very bad for business, you know - sometimes she just can't help herself."
"Not today," Myka sighed. "It's hot and humid, and my hair was all over the place, and my suit was plastered on me. . . ." Her words slowed, and she said suspiciously, "How do you know what she was doing?"
"Darling, I know how she operates."
"You've seen -." Then Myka understood, and she said hastily, "I don't think I want to know."
Helena thought she could hear the blood beat to Myka's face. But the blushing, and Myka's embarrassment, began to last too long, and Helena didn't find their silence a comfortable one, saying with a tentativeness that she didn't try to disguise, "You do know that's all in the past, right? Suzanne, the others." Sometimes Suzanne and another, but Helena didn't say it aloud. "Claudia has made it very clear that I'm to be seeing only you."
But Myka didn't respond to the teasing note. "We're so different, you and I. Sometimes I forget, and then something brings it home. You haven't asked lately, but I'm not seeing Jeff any longer. That day we went to lunch, I broke it off. I can't . . . ." She stopped. "I've only slept with a stranger once, Helena, and that was because she looked so much like you, she could have been your twin."
"Myka. . . ." Helena gripped the phone so tightly her knuckles hurt.
"But it's not about how many sexual partners you've had and how few I've had. That's just a detail." Myka snorted a little at her own words. "A big detail, but still a detail. Seeing your loft, that financial statement of yours we used with Sheffield, and then Suzanne. We've lived such different lives, the two of us, the past ten years. Sure, every so often I'm called out to neutralize an artefact that turns the harmless guy next door into the Incredible Hulk, but otherwise I'm like most people. I take my child to school, I try to keep in shape, and my guilty pleasure is watching a Shonda Rhimes show. That's my life, the Teslas and the neutralizing goo, they're window dressing."
"I can assure you that the last ten years of my life have hardly been glamorous. I think you know that, Myka," Helena said with emphasis. "I've raised children and done housework. I've lived that so-called ordinary life. We're not that different. Not in that respect."
Myka would be running her hand through her hair, yanking gently, or not so gently, at the roots as she did so. It was a stress-relieving gesture. "I used to imagine what it would've been like for you, if Christina hadn't died. I always come up with some quasi-Bloomsbury lifestyle - I picture drafty old homes crowded with artists and eccentrics, every one of them your lover at some time or other. You're always inventing something, stories, devices -"
"Letting my brood of illegitimate children run wild," Helena interjected, laughing, the tightness in her chest, and in the grip on her phone, easing. "Christina was inevitably going to be joined by a half-brother or sister or two. I was more careful after I had her, but I was far from a nun."
Myka was laughing as well, but there was still something too rueful about it for Helena's liking. "That's what I mean, about our being different. Honestly, can you see me in that life? Trying to order the chaos? I'm a one. . . person . . . woman, Helena, and I don't share, not in that way. I would've been a gorgon standing at the foot of your bed."
"Ready to turn to stone anyone so foolish as to enter my bedroom?" Helena said lightly. "That life you imagine, that's only one possibility, and since I was never all that convivial, I'm already feeling claustrophobic at having so many people in the house." The lightness faded. "You said that this would work only if I was willing to make room for you and Drew, if I was willing to stay. You have to trust that I am willing, that I want to stay." Her voice becoming uncertain, she said, "I thought you were going to suggest that we should slow down, take a step back. Maybe you are going to suggest it, but just know, darling, that it will be hard for me to do, because I've jumped in with both feet."
"I wasn't going to suggest anything like that, I just . . . ." More hair-tugging if the level of Myka's frustration was any indication. "Did you have to date a supermodel?"
It was so plaintively asked, as if Myka were once more a gawky, insecure teenager wondering when someone was going to notice her rather than the cheerleader, that Helena burst out with a relieved laugh. "Suzanne never strong-armed me against a wall in Tamalpais, she never trumped me with her perfect recall, she never trusted that I would save her life in a chess game," she said with loving indulgence. "She isn't you, she could never be you." Adopting an arch tone, Helena asked, "So, after the private tour, did Suzanne suggest getting a drink? Dinner?"
"Nothing like that. She hoped I had enjoyed the museum, and she said she had enjoyed the opportunity to talk about some of her favorite paintings." The frown was clear in Myka's voice. "I really don't think she was interested in me, not sexually, that is." At Helena's derisive huff, Myka added, "It's hard to put the Suzanne I saw with the Suzanne you know. The woman I saw - she's warm, committed. She wouldn't settle for the occasional weekend, she'd be wondering when she would next hear from you or see you."
"I think you're attributing characteristics you have to her," Helena said.
"Maybe." She hesitated. "It's almost as if. . . never mind," she said abruptly.
"She becomes whatever the person she's with expects or wants?" Helena finished Myka's sentence for her. "Her job title may be curator, but she does her share of glad-handing. The museum bears the Farraday name, but I don't know how much the family continues to fund it. She can't overlook a potential benefactor, and you have to be a bit of a chameleon to successfully raise money."
"Yes," Myka said slowly, still building on the thought.
"Since you're safely out of her clutches - I know, I know, you think she was merely befriending some poor, bedraggled government employee -"
"I wouldn't say that I was bedraggled," Myka cut in. "And since then, I've changed and showered and I'm here all by myself on this king-sized bed."
"Not for long, darling, because I'm just about to join you," Helena said, stretching out on Myka's bed and pillowing her head on a bent arm.
"Wait, before we, you know. . . ." Suddenly, hurriedly, Myka said, "About my one-night stand with your identical twin. In the interests of full disclosure, I guess I should tell you about her. It was after Boone, and we were staying at the same hotel, and we -"
"It doesn't matter, she's not important. Suzanne's not important. Our differences are not important, not to me. Any life I led or might lead without you is not important." Helena waited one moment, two, then said very firmly, "Have I made myself clear?"
One moment, two, then a laugh, high and delighted and breathless, more like a giggle than a laugh, as if a gawky, insecure teenager finally realized that she, and not the cheerleader, was the center of attention. "I'm not sure," Myka said, "I'm afraid you're going to have to repeat that."
. . . . .
Myka didn't come back on Friday. Instead she flew to Charlotte to manage an eruption on Facebook and Twitter about people who were suddenly able to take flight, rocketing a few or several feet into the air. No deaths but several instances of broken bones as the victims' ability to launch themselves deserted them as quickly as it had appeared. "This is the home of Kitty Hawk, after all," Myka had sighed on the phone to Helena as she headed toward baggage claim. So she wasn't home to worry her bottom lip when, shortly after Jared and his crew arrived, the backyard filled with stacks of wood, power tools, and a pick-up truck or two. Drew ran excitedly among the men, a hardhat two sizes too big slipping from one side of his head to the other, as he led them to the tree. Helena took pictures of him with her phone, trying to keep the pick-up trucks parked in the yard out of the frame, and sent them to Myka. Pete came later in the morning, exhausted from a red-eye flight from Los Angeles, but he grinned when he saw his son, and Helena took a picture of him and Drew together, swaggering with their hardhats and tool belts. She took another picture, a few hours later, of Pete's swollen thumb, which had gotten caught between the hammer and the nail it was supposed to have hit. When she wasn't taking pictures or ordering lunch, or trying to keep Drew hydrated and out of the sun - the temperature had climbed into the 90s by the afternoon - she was with Jared and his men, constructing the tree house's platform and putting the walls in place. By the time the men left early in the evening, the tree house was mostly built, and though she was pleased with it, she had to admit that it looked more like a tugboat than a pirate ship. The bow and stern were short, and the cabin dominated the middle of the ship.
Drew didn't care, exclaiming that it was the best tree house he had ever seen. He didn't even mind that the crow's nest had become something less ambitious, a small observation deck built above the prow of the ship. At the last, Helena had given in to the caution that had used to visit her when Christina was small, keeping glass containers out of reach, not letting her play among horses. When she had an image of Drew clinging to a slender, bending branch after toppling out of the crow's nest, she had thrown her designs for it away. It was the same kind of caution that had her holding him back by his shoulders when he wanted to run up the staircase and through the tree house. She urged him to wait until tomorrow, when the tree house would be completely finished.
Sunday afternoon brought Jared and his men back. Pete, unable to pry Drew away from the house and, by extension, the backyard and tree house, even for a night, had shown up in the morning, boxes of doughnuts in hand. Claiming that his injured thumb prevented him from taking an active role, he sprawled in a lounge chair on the patio "overseeing" the finishing touches. When Claudia stopped by, Drew dragged her to the tree, and she good-naturedly oohed and ahhed, but her eyes, as they met Helena's over Drew's head, were serious, and Helena suggested that he go into the house and get Jared another soda.
"How do you feel about pairing up with Pete for a snag-and-bag in Kenosha, Wisconsin?" As Helena rolled her eyes, mainly in feigned reluctance, Claudia said, "Glad you're for it. I don't know that we're dealing with a replicated artefact, but a couple of our junior agents were out there on another retrieval about three months ago. It's not like Kenosha's the Vegas of the Midwest, so why two artefacts would pop up there has me worried. I want people I can trust on the job, and since Myka's away -"
"Pete and I get the dubious pleasure of each other's company, yes, I understand. So when do the good times roll?"
"Tonight." Claudia raised her hand in a gesture that was as much about forestalling Helena's objections as trying to placate her. Part boss, part sympathetic fellow agent. "Myka's going to try to catch a flight out yet this evening, and until she comes through the door, I'll stay with Drew."
Tucking her hands into her jeans' pockets, she started to walked back to the house, and Helena fell into step with her. She was certainly in no hurry to repack her bag and head to the airport. In the few days she had spent at Myka's house, she had enjoyed sitting on the patio of a morning with a cup of tea, gazing at the Black Hills in the distance. It was quiet here, except for the thumping and running of Drew and the dog, and even that was comforting in its predictability. What she wanted to do now was sit at the table on the patio, under the shade of its umbrella, and watch as Drew tried to assist the men as they sanded down the last few rough edges or tapped in one more nail.
"Nice job there," Claudia said, stopping and turning to look at the tree house. "Think he'll let me play in it?" As Drew rushed past them, holding out a can of Coke as if Jared were some god of tree houses to whom he was making an offering, Claudia shouted, "Drew, you going to let me come over and play in your tree house?"
"Maybe," he shouted in return.
"If you've stolen my place in his affections," Claudia said, waving her finger threateningly in Helena's face, "there are places in the Warehouse I can put you where no one will ever find you."
"Darling, I was bronzed for over a hundred years. You can't scare me with the Warehouse." At least not that way, Helena added to herself as she pushed the waving finger aside.
As they approached the patio, Pete was talking animatedly, gesturing as if the person on the other end of the conversation was sitting across from him at the table. Slipping into a chair and scooting it farther away from him, Helena saw that it was her phone he was yelling into, and it was Myka's voice, sounding weary and irritable, that was coming from the speaker. "You said she's what?"
"I said that guy she's got from the lumberyard, the way he's looking at her I'm thinking the tree house isn't the only thing he wants to nail."
"You just wanted to make a play on 'nail,' didn't you?" Myka accused him. "Someone punch him in the shoulder for me, please."
Claudia obliged, as Helena sent Pete a withering look. "Jared's been a perfect gentleman, and if he's been admiring, it's solely because, unlike most women of his acquaintance, I understand the basic principles of construction," she said reassuringly into the phone.
"It's the usual, Myka." Claudia impatiently flicked away a lock of hair that had fallen across her forehead. "Pete's being juvenile, and H.G.'s acting as if a show of humility would kill her."
Her voice growing warmer, Myka said, "Like I said last night, the tree house looks great in the pictures you sent, Helena. Thank you."
"It reminds me a little of the Skipper's boat on Gilligan's Island," Pete said "but Drew'll never know the difference." As Helena kicked him in the ankles, he said, aggrieved, "It doesn't look like a pirate ship, that's all I'm saying."
"It doesn't," Helena conceded, although she wasn't about to apologize for kicking him in the ankles. He deserved it for the comment about Jared wanting to nail her, if nothing else.
"It's just fine, regardless of what it looks like," Myka said soothingly.
"That's what she kept saying about you on your wedding day," Claudia said to Pete.
Helena smiled. Put Claudia, Pete, and Myka together for any length of time, and the ribbing and needling, along with a few half-hearted attempts at peacekeeping, wouldn't be far behind. It was familiar, and seemed as natural happening on the patio behind Myka's house with her son running up and down the stairs to the tree house as it did in the B&B's kitchen 12 years ago. As Pete and Claudia continued to amiably trade gibes, Myka stepping in to referee, Helena recognized that the difference between then and now was that she didn't see herself outside it, unconnected. The affectionate digs the three were exchanging, the intermittent shouts and bursts of laughter from the men working on the tree house, Drew's theatrical orders to "Stop!" and "Halt!" from the observation deck to an imaginary merchant ship (she would have to school him in pirate jargon, it would seem), even Shep's barks and whines as he responded to the command in Drew's voice, they made for no celestial harmony - Helena wasn't sentimental enough to think that - but they wove the afternoon together and her within it. For once, she didn't feel herself to be a discordant note. It wouldn't last for long, she knew, but she could appreciate it for as long as it lasted.
It had been on late summer afternoons like this, albeit cooler and greener ones, that she had lain on the grass with Christina, observing insects lumber over twigs and leaves or wildly beat their wings as they settled on a flower. Pointing out an ant scaling a blade of grass, she would attempt to explain what made ants such marvelous creatures, while Christina, more of a born storyteller than her mother, although displaying a fondness for treacly tales that Helena could only hope she would grow out of, invented a story behind the ant's labor; the little lost ant was climbing mountainous blades of grass in search of its parents, or it was a mother ant in search for food for her babies. Sometimes when she was here as well as there, the present would be the hazier, more indistinct of the two, sometimes the past. But today, this afternoon, this minute, she felt she was equally in both. The gap in Christina's teeth where she had lost a front tooth, the squareness of her fingers, as clear to Helena sitting thousands of miles and over 100 years from her as Claudia's chewed thumbnail or the water rings left by Pete's bottle of root beer. If not at peace, never at peace, she at least felt that she was standing on steady ground, neither of her two worlds shearing away from her.
"What do you think?" Pete was asking her. "It's the age-old question, about why the Warehouse smells like apples. Why not cookies or Doritos, something that I, for instance, would want to smell?"
Helena looked down at her phone, still in front of Pete. The screen was black; Myka must have ended the call. She would call her back later when she could be assured of some privacy. "Haven't the foggiest notion. Perhaps the last thing it wants is an intimate relationship with you. If only a disappointingly large number of women had felt the same."
"Ow, ow, ow." Pete crossed his arms over his stomach. "Jeez, you're mean sometimes."
Helena ignored him and waved at Jared as he crossed the yard toward her. His face even ruddier in the heat, he rubbed his arm across his cheeks and nose to wipe the sweat away. She invited him to sit down, but he shook his head. "It's all done. Eric put up the Jolly Roger." He pointed at the tree house, and she followed the line of his arm and saw the flag hanging limply outside the cabin. "Wife's going to be wondering where I am. She was hoping I'd restain our deck today." He shook hands with all three of them, encouraging Helena to give him a call the next time she had a project in mind. Pete worked his eyebrows suggestively at Helena once Jared had turned away, and Claudia slapped him in the shoulder again. "Just because he's married doesn't mean he wouldn't have fantasies about you working his wood, so to speak," he stage whispered. "I can't help it, 'wood,' 'nail,' 'hammer,' you're just lucky I've kept the worst of it in because of Drew," he said in his normal voice.
"Oh, I'm very lucky," Helena said dryly.
Claudia tapped her watch and looked pointedly at Pete. "You need to be hightailing it home and packing. Your flight to Milwaukee leaves in a few hours."
"Okay, okay, boss. Can I say good-bye to my son first?" Pete shoved his chair back and headed in the direction of the treehouse.
"The thing about apples, they're a hardy fruit. If you want a fruit to have your back, it's an apple. It's tough," Claudia said conversationally. "They can keep forever, and you can cut out a bruised spot or a worm," she said, shuddering at the last, "and still have apple left to eat. That is, if you aren't grossed out by having a worm in your food." She rolled her eyes up at the umbrella, as if she were debating whether she'd still eat an apple in that case. "Can't say that about other fruits. They get a brown spot, and they're toast. They're done. It's pretty frakkin' hard to totally ruin an apple, when you think about it."
"I refer to the collective wisdom of the Jackson 5 and note that one bad apple can come perilously close to spoiling the bunch," Helena said wryly. "But I will think on what you said once the dizziness stops from my head-on collision with the moral of your story."
"Myka and Mrs. F. are in agreement concerning one thing about you. You don't see what's right in front of you." Leaning across the table, Claudia pressed the tip of her finger between Helena's brows. "So I'm here to remind you, don't close your eyes."
As Claudia sat back in her chair, Helena's glance lingered on her phone. Failing to see Myka hadn't been her problem. Her problem had been that she could never not see her. She knew that Claudia hadn't been talking about Myka, not this time. But Helena had lived for a hundred years without seeing her reflection, she didn't have a need to start seeing it now. She knew what would stare back at her.