A/N: The chapter of fluff . . . . Fluff is hard to write, I've decided. If the goo factor is too much for you, wait until the next chapter. Oh, there's sex in this chapter, some strong language, and more sex.
Of course Myka's separation from the Warehouse didn't last long. Homeland Security, although displeased that she had skipped the psychological evaluation, decided to use it as support for demoting rather than firing her. While still a senior agent in terms of title and pay, she was stripped of responsibilities for supervising agents in the field. Helena knew that she struggled with the embarrassment of having her job performance criticized because she was Myka, after all, and Myka Bering never performed poorly, and it mattered, the criticism, on one level, even if it didn't matter on the more important ones. She had made her choice and it had been the right one, but the realization that her record, for as long as the Warehouse remained under Homeland Security's oversight, was flagged and included reports describing her as "impulsive and insubordinate," "uncooperative and incapable of providing effective guidance to the agents who report to her," and those among the kinder assessments, was a hard one to put behind her. That she wasn't fired was something of a mystery to her, but Helena suspected, with no evidence for her suspicions other than the late night conversation in the tree house and a begrudging respect for what a formidable figure she was, that Irene had had a hand in Myka's remaining with the Warehouse.
For a few days, before it became clear to her that she still had a future with the Warehouse, Myka had contemplated what alternative careers she might pursue. Trying to be a good girlfriend, a good partner, whatever the appropriate term was - and she was big enough to admit that she was small enough to let her anxiety that she didn't know how to be that person feed an anger at Homeland Security that, at its mildest, found expression in "Idiots!" every time someone referred to the agency - Helena had offered to support them while Myka went back to school, "if that's what you want, darling." Law school, medical school, graduate school, it didn't matter. If Myka wanted to make a career of being a student, that was fine, too. They, she could afford it, and, considering that Drew's academic future was always somewhat endangered by the other half of his genetic inheritance, to which college would invariably suggest "girls" and "video game contests" and "more girls," he might need the example of a perpetual student, and wouldn't Myka, as his mother, want to give him the best foundation possible?
Myka had laughed at that, the worry, which had been causing not lines but grooves to develop above her eyebrows, put aside for the moment, and she had slipped her hand underneath the band of Helena's panties to stroke the curve of her butt, saying, "There's something else students have a lot of time for." It was late at night and Drew was asleep, but Helena couldn't resist what she knew might be a mood-destroying response and hooted at the image of a college-age Myka vanquishing half the student body at the University of Colorado. The hand slipped out of Helena's panties as easily as it had slipped in as Myka used it to push herself up from the mattress a few inches in mock outrage. "I wasn't -"
"What, a virgin at graduation? You most certainly were," Helena said dryly.
"Sam wasn't my first, I'll have you know," Myka said, looking adorably uncertain about whether defending the breadth of her sexual experience was actually a good thing.
Helena narrowed her eyes and looked at her appraisingly in the glow of the nightstand lamp. "Not your first but your second. Your first was after graduation. You hadn't found that special someone in college - little did you know that she was encased in bronze - but, as you were debating that summer whether to go to law school, as you had planned to do, or take on something more adventurous, such as join the Secret Service, you thought that being a virgin hardly suited the image of a federal agent prepared to sacrifice her life for that of the president." She sighed theatrically. "Were you unfamiliar with the term 'virgin sacrifice?'" The classics reek with it, and of course it would have suited the kind of Secret Service agent you were to become, principled, dedicated . . . unstoppable." With her finger, Helena followed the curve of Myka's breast through her sleep shirt, smiling smugly as the nipple hardened at her touch. "And oh so quick to respond."
"Your point?" Myka's air of boredom was undercut by the grin at her own pun (of sorts) and by her arching her chest so that Helena could cup her breast.
"I've already forgotten it," Helena murmured, rolling closer and pressing Myka down onto her pillow, her hand deserting Myka's breast momentarily to dip beneath her sleep shirt.
"I haven't," Myka breathed. "Go on."
"I'm trying to," Helena complained as Myka's hand pushed her hand down. "Oh, all right," she groused. "He was someone you met while you worked at your father's bookstore. You being you, you would've had to have felt some emotional connection with him, but he was married or otherwise involved with someone since you wouldn't have wanted to become too attached. Close enough?"
Myka stopped batting Helena's hand away. "His name was Bart and he had a one-year contract teaching composition at UC Colorado Springs. He wasn't married but he was in a long-distance relationship that was going sour. No fireworks, but he was nice." She awkwardly drew in her arms as Helena worked the sleep shirt over her head.
"Stop wearing this to bed," Helena growled, flinging it to the floor. "I want unimpeded access to you." She trailed her lips down Myka's neck to her breast, but Myka was moving against her impatiently.
"No need for appetizers. I'm ready for the main course," Myka said, pulling up her legs and spreading her knees.
"Main course?" Helena repeated witheringly, but she found Myka so wet and so open that her sarcasm dwindled to a sigh that was more appreciative than dismissive. "He must have been more than nice for you to be this . . . enthusiastic . . . already."
Myka groaned. "God, you're shameless. Bart never made me this wet." Grunting a little at the effort, she launched herself into a sitting position and leaned down to take Helena's face between her hands. "No one has ever undone me like you, Helena. I'll see you flip your hair back, and I'll want to take you right there and then."
"The next time that happens, just do it, darling."
"Not in a supermarket, Helena, no." They smiled at each other, and then Myka flopped down onto her pillow. "I believe I said something about being ready to move on to the main course?"
Several minutes later as Myka keened at the ceiling, crying out, among other things, "Christ," Helena lifted her head and said, with no small amount of self-satisfaction, "That's not my name, but I'll answer to it."
Although that conversation about Myka's future plans had evolved into something else, Helena wasn't willing to let the subject drop, wanting to ensure that Myka knew, whatever she chose to do, that she would have her unwavering support. She mentioned it often enough that even Drew became aware of the anxiety besetting her, at one point, patting her hand with one grimy from building mud forts with his friends and telling her, "Mom's okay, she knows she has us," and then fleeing from the family room into the yard before Myka could find him and order him to change his clothes.
Myka remained good-humored about it, seeming to understand - and tolerate - the flux of Helena's emotions better than Helena herself, which wasn't at all surprising. Sometimes when Helena issued one of her solemn assurances "That no matter what -" Myka would look thoughtful and say, "I have wanted to become a better cook. They have a culinary school in Denver that I might look into. How would you feel about my turning the kitchen into a cooking laboratory in the meantime?" Helena would smile and gamely reply, "Whatever you want, darling." At other times Myka would accept the earnestness of the assurances and respond in kind, hugging Helena and whispering into her ear, "I know that you're here for the long haul, babe. I love you, too."
Then the day came when Myka was called in to the Warehouse and, with a casual-seeming shrug of her shoulders that didn't fool Helena, she said, "I guess my fate has been decided." As had become customary, Helena said scornfully, "Idiots." For good measure, she added, "Fools." Just before Myka pushed the button of the garage door opener, Helena shouted after her, "Don't give them the power. March in there and tell them you're through. You know that -"
"No matter what you'll back me 100%," Myka finished for her. When Helena flushed in embarrassment, Myka's expression grew serious and she came back into the kitchen and kissed Helena on the cheek. "I love that you're trying so hard, but you don't have to. You're not going to cut and run . . . and even if you did, if I can't run down a 148-year-old woman, I don't deserve to be an agent."
When she returned home, Helena was at the table in the dining area, pretending to be absorbed in her design for Drew's upgraded bedroom, while Drew was just as studiously examining the birdhouse he and Pete had finished building for the end of math camp. Even Shep, slack and snoring on the family room rug, seemed to be putting more effort into his sleeping than was absolutely required. All three merely lifted their heads as Myka came into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water from the refrigerator's water dispenser. She had, just possibly, made more noise than necessary since her appearance had elicited only casual "Hi's" from Drew and Helena. Passing behind Helena, she swept the hair away from the back of her neck and rolled her glass across the exposed skin. Helena startled at the coldness of the glass, and she turned to glance up at Myka. "I didn't want to smother you with questions. I wanted to give you to time to, ah, process if you needed it."
"Now you're choosing not to 'smother' me?" Myka said it wryly, but she softened it with a kiss to the tip of Helena's nose.
"Were you fired, Mom?" Drew put the birdhouse on the sofa cushion next to him. As Myka laughed and demanded, "Are you and Helena double-teaming me? One of you taking the gentle approach while the other goes straight for my gut?," Helena completed another appraisal of the birdhouse, which Drew was to present as his final project at a special afternoon pizza party session of math camp. Twenty eight-year-old students and their parents in an elementary school cafeteria signaled only the tedium of polite conversation with adults and tepid praise for the offerings of their children, but this was what parents did nowadays, apparently, accepted without encouraging their offspring to aspire to better, even if "better" were out of their reach. Conceivably a bird desperate for refuge might occupy Drew's birdhouse, but if the gaps between the roof and walls didn't suggest that it would collapse in a strong breeze, its decided canting to the side did. She could try to fix it before she and Myka took him to math camp, but Drew was proud of the birdhouse, apparently having forgotten that, at one point, he wanted a more ambitious bird condo. Helena suspected that Drew was proud of the birdhouse because it attested to the teamwork that had produced it, the hours he and Pete had spent working together, and not to any woodworking prowess. Of which there was absolutely none. But she had to let that go, she had learned her lesson with Adelaide and her art class project. If accepting the output of the average student was the goal of K-12 education rather than holding all to a higher standard, so be it. She would not protest, although she felt it was incumbent upon her, should she ever talk with Drew's teachers, to point out the complacency of such -
"Did you hear what I just said? I'm not fired. I've been suspended for the next four weeks without pay, and when the suspension ends, I'll basically have Jacqui's job. Which works out pretty well since she's wanted to go back into the field." Myka was standing next to her but leaning down, close to her ear. "Maybe we should look into hearing aids for you, there's no shame in admitting hearing loss at your age, you know."
"There is nothing wrong with my hearing," Helena said crisply, "I was -"
"Looking at Drew's birdhouse and thinking Pete should never be allowed within 20 feet of a hammer and nails," Myka said quietly so that her son couldn't overhear her, "or, what I suspect is the case, that no educator should accept such below-par work as a final project." As Helena shot her another surprised look, Myka gave her a cocky smile. "You're not so hard to read yourself."
And so Myka was gathered back into the Warehouse's bosom, which, Helena thought, were the Warehouse to have anything resembling a bosom, would be generous in its proportions and covered by a blouse and suit jacket in complementary colors. During her suspension, Myka mentioned more than once, but not so often that it undercut her sincerity, that she had never enjoyed the supervisory part of Artie's job. What she had loved doing was researching artefacts and doing that full time, or as close to full time as the occasional QA assignment to clean up a retrieval permitted (Unfortunately the DHS hadn't thought to relieve her of that responsibility, Myka complained), would be . . . terrific, actually.
If Helena believed that Myka's potential termination from the Warehouse had been a cruel tease, she could view Homeland Security's interest in her only as further punishment. It had started with a phone call from a Homeland Security idiot . . . lackey a few days into Myka's suspension. Helena had thought the call was for Myka, and she had curtly informed Dave, as the lackey had insisted she call him, that Myka wasn't home - which was true since Myka had taken Drew to the dentist - when Dave told her that he was calling her. The conversation, which, in Helena's opinion, hadn't proceeded well from the moment that Dave had said he was with Homeland Security, only plunged off a cliff from there. At first she had thought she could decline the job offer, which would involve her working on various mid- and long-term projects for the department, and she had tried to be polite in her refusal, but Dave grew insistent, and as he became more insistent, Helena became more strident in her declining of the offer, ultimately shouting into the phone that she would never consent to work for a government agency whose collective intelligence was so far down the scale that it registered as an intelligence deficit because an intelligence quotient implied a positive value. Frustrated that she had been unable to deliver a more stinging insult, Helena was caught off-guard by Dave's unoffended chuckle. Then he just as genially explained that he hadn't been offering her a job, he had been outlining, in necessarily general terms, the job that she would be taking with Homeland Security. The department couldn't pass up the opportunity of employing someone with the talents of an H. G. Wells, and, his genialness not quite disguising the threat, it also couldn't allow someone who had once almost ended the world - "Bit of an overachiever, aren't you?" he had said almost indulgently - live among the innocent citizens of Rapid City, South Dakota, or anywhere else for that matter, unsurveilled.
After complaining to Claudia and Jane, who had done little more than hunch their shoulders helplessly and explain that she had been what they sacrificed to retain the Warehouse's nominal independence, Helena had "summoned" Irene (which had seemed to require no more than a muttered "She's behind this somehow. Come out from behind your curtain, you old fraud. This is one pissed-off Dorothy" before she practically ran into the woman as she stormed out of the B&B).
"The position's quite attractive," Mrs. Frederic had said mildly, putting a hand to her hair as if Helena's furious descent of the verandah's steps had generated a gust of air strong enough to disturb its intricate weave. "You can telecommute for the most part, which will allow you to work from home and at hours convenient to Drew's schedule. The projects will employ skills you've not had to use in years, I suspect, and, unlike your appraisals, will provide worthy contributions to the continued stability and strength, if only indirectly, of the Warehouse. Moreover," she leaned in conspiratorially, touching Helena's arm, "the health plan and retirement benefits are more than market-competitive."
"I'll try to keep that in mind when I make my weekly reports to Dave," Helena said sarcastically, "who, no doubt, has a metal nameplate outside his office attesting to the fact that he's a manager over the areas of pencil-sharpening and label-making."
"He's the deputy secretary," Mrs. Frederic replied with a sly smile and, in the millisecond it took Helena to blink in surprise, disappeared.
Helena's announcement that she was working for Homeland Security, "for real," seemed to amuse Myka rather than outrage her. "You'll be a giant among Lilliputians," she said consolingly, and when that didn't rouse Helena from her sulk, she said, "All right, think of it this way. With you there the proportion of idiots will be slightly smaller."
Helena made a face at her over her glass of wine. "That didn't sound nearly as complimentary as you think it did." They were sitting at the patio table, watching the sunset and drinking wine. Rather Myka was watching the sunset and drinking wine, while Helena was glowering at nothing in particular and inhaling hers. "'Dave'" she said with disgusted emphasis, "blackmailed me into this job."
"I know," Myka said, "but how much worse is it than the file we worked up on you as a potential suspect for the replicated artefacts? It's the nature of the work we do. Forget the 'endless wonder,' we see the threat first and respond accordingly." She covered Helena's hand with her own. "I wasn't entirely joking. Maybe you can change the culture. Aren't you H.G. Wells genius extraordinaire? You can do anything." Helena scoffed, albeit lightly. Giving Helena's hand a jiggle as she pretended to be struck by the deepening rose and orange of the horizon, Myka said casually, "Would Dave be open to your pushing off your start date by, say, a month? I've been considering a few things we could do during my suspension."
Considering a few things. This was Myka. Math camp and soccer were over, and Drew had more than three weeks of unstructured, unblocked-off time, and she was determined to fill them with an edifying round of sightseeing - wonders natural (the Grand Canyon), zoological (the San Diego Zoo), and cultural (the Getty). The feverishness with which Myka consulted maps, guidebooks, and online sites only confirmed Helena's suspicion that the road trip was the justification for the planning. A suspension was still a suspension, notwithstanding Myka's real pleasure at returning to what she loved most about the Warehouse, and when feeling unsetttled and at a loss, she planned and scheduled with a vengeance. Helena half-expected to be given an itinerary for the trip, which thankfully did not happen, but Myka presented her with many, many checklists.
Pet-friendly hotels having been booked on their circuitous route through the Southwest, suitcases having been packed with clothes for every kind of weather and outing (aided by vacuum-seal storage bags, a vacation must, Myka said firmly), and healthy snacks having been purchased and ordered by type (and then stealthily replaced by other snacks, courtesy of a few extra grocery runs taken solely by Helena and Drew), they all piled into the Range Rover. Helena forgave the dawn start because she had a large travel mug of Earl Grey at hand - and she wasn't driving. She was also fortified by the knowledge that new snack cake packages had been placed in the glove compartment and the hope that, at some point during the trip, they might be employed during a late night, Drew-less drive into the desert.
Helena hadn't been sure how she would manage two and a half weeks spent in close confines with an eight-year-old, a dog, and a woman who had multiple planner apps on her phone - and used all of them - but she realized as they settled into their suite in San Diego that she was enjoying herself hugely. Yes, Myka had frequently consulted her planners, calculating the drive to and from, time spent on, and money needed for each day's activities, but when Helena grabbed the phone from her and buried it in the shoulder bag that had become their all-purpose mini-cooler and pharmacy, she meekly acquiesced. Shep's panting presence was not a required variable in any experience, especially once she discovered that he liked to flop between her and Myka in the middle of the night, but, really, that was a small thing. The mule ride in the Grand Canyon was also an experience she wouldn't care to repeat, but being saddle sore for two days was also a small thing. They were small things because there were so many more things that she came to love: the sight of Myka and Drew sharing the bathroom sink as they brushed their teeth, the assiduous movements of their brushes nearly synchronized; Myka and Drew curled up together on a sofa asleep; their version of the showdown at the OK Corral as each flipped through a guidebook eager to be the first to reel off a series of facts about the Grand Canyon; Myka's wry aside at the real OK Corral about how differently it might have gone if Teslas had been used instead of guns and then her soft, "That's what you do. You make the possible real. So make the DHS what it can be."
She loved most of all Myka's whispers and touches and, in Drew's occasional absences, her sultry sidelong looks. Looks and discreet caresses were all that they exchanged for the first week, but after they had crammed the San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld into two days, Drew finished an evening call with Pete by bouncing on his bed and shouting, "Dad's going to come get me and take me to Disneyland." Then quieting, he ran into the living room of the suite, Shep galloping after him, and asked his mother uncertainly, "He can, can't he?"
Darting a sly glance over the top of her glasses at Helena, Myka said, "It's all been arranged, bud. Your dad's flying in tomorrow and driving you and Shep up to Los Angeles. Three days of Mickey Mouse and beaches and baseball games."
"Awesome, awesome, awesome." Drew pumped his fist and ran back to the bedroom.
Sprawled on the loveseat opposite Myka's, Helena scrolled down the screen of her iPad, which was filled with design ideas for master bedroom makeovers. Directing her words at the screen, Helena said, "I've developed a strange desire to see Disneyland. Being greeted by a human-sized mouse and seeing where it all began, the promotion of childhood as a state of mind, not to mention a profit-making venture -"
"I'm sure you'll find room in the car between Drew and the dog," Myka interrupted smoothly. "But I'm staying here." She grinned at Helena and stretched, slowly, arching her back more than was probably necessary. "The hotel's said to have a world-class spa . . . ."
Helena's glance over the top of her glasses wasn't sly but frankly appreciative of the view. "One might think," she observed carefully, "that Pete's coming here had been planned well in advance, if one were inclined to believe that her fiancee was something of a planner."
"One might think that," Myka responded just as carefully before turning her attention back to her book.
Helena grew used to seeing Myka wrapped in a towel over the next three days, sometimes in the spa or at the swimming pool but mainly in their bedroom, and the only thing that disturbed their occupation of the fantasy land they created out of their hotel suite - which had no human-sized mice, although Helena said she had no objection to a little Cinderella/Prince Charming role playing - was the call she received from the researcher at her hedge fund who was researching Wade Farraday. She hadn't forgotten, but Wade Farraday and the replicated artefacts seemed, not far away, but pushed down the list, as if she had opened one of Myka's planner apps and entered all the things she needed or wanted to do and "find out more about Wade Farraday" had ended up 92nd on the list. Myka was in the shower, so she had a few minutes to listen to what the researcher had found. 'The reclusive collector' wasn't new, and Helena only half-listened to the researcher's exhaustive rundown of everything Farraday found worthy of collecting until he mentioned one interest that she hadn't found and Jacqui either hadn't discovered or thought significant enough to mention.
"Items from famous Victorian-era crimes?" Helena repeated.
"You know, Lizzie Borden's axe, Jack the Ripper stuff, that sort of thing. It's all violent crime, really, no matter the period, but since Farraday almost got arrested for trying to steal some purported Ripper evidence from another collector, that's what made me think maybe that's the period he's most interested in." The researcher cleared his throat and moved on to Farraday's penchant for antique snuff boxes, rare albums, old cigarette and candy vending machines . . . . "He's not a collector, he's a hoarder," the researcher concluded with a chuckle.
The interest in crime memorabilia, if it could be called such, unsettled her. Artefacts created from those objects could be especially powerful. She remembered from her time at 12 the retrieval of the dagger that had been used to kill Christopher Marlowe, which drew its power not only from the emotions of the killer but the victim's as well. It was a nasty little artefact in that the possessor, in addition to having a compulsive desire to attack writers, with no distinction made between the type of writing or level of skill, felt equally compelled to publish accounts of his murders. The dagger had fallen into the hands of a failed poet, and he had both terrorized and titillated all of London one summer by publishing his deeds in verse. Ultimately so frustrated in his attempt to capture the artefact, Caturanga had used her as a decoy, which became a story in and of itself, something she would have to share with Myka on a rainy night . . . . But the possibility that artefacts originated from violent crimes could be associated, in some manner, with the replicated artefacts wasn't the only cause of Helena's unease. It was a reach, but the murder of her daughter and the maid who had stayed with her that day, while never quite claiming headlines, had been reported in both the Paris and London papers. Christina had been the "niece" of H.G. Wells, after all. As far as Helena knew, the clothes that Christina and the maid had been wearing that day, the bedsheets, all of the items kept by Michaud and his men as evidence, had moldered in the depths of a Paris police station until they were destroyed or discarded.
Helena shook herself - the researcher was still talking. "Another thing you might find interesting," he was saying, "the Farradays, back when there wasn't only Wade the hoarder representing the family and they were an economic and political force to be reckoned with, they had plants all over Maryland, Delaware, the Virginias, making lots of products. One of the products was turbines. Over time the plants were sold or closed down, but I was talking to a friend recently in the DC area, and I mentioned the Farradays to him. He said there had been some strange goings-on at an abandoned Farraday plant just outside DC. For the past couple of years, people living near the plant have reported that they've seen the buildings light up, felt the ground shake, like someone's not only been building turbines but having jet planes take off from inside the plant. The most popular rumor is that a terrorist cell is operating out of it." When Helena didn't respond, he said apologetically, "I know it's not the info you're looking for, but financially speaking, Wade Farraday isn't all that interesting. Don't get me wrong, he's as rich as all get out, but a lot of the money is tied up in trusts. The family must've been thinking, 'Better lock it up before crazy Wade gets his hands on it.'"
"This is all very good," Helena hastened to assure him, but her voice faltered as she pictured a cavernous room in which turbines had once been assembled, now home to Farraday's collections and all the artefacts, unknown to the Warehouse, hidden in them. The only thing lacking was someone with the expertise, and the obsessiveness, to begin working over Farraday's treasures and putting the artefacts in combination. A Warehouse without any of the Warehouse's protective measures for neutralizing all the power it contained.
The researcher waited patiently for her to gather her thoughts and, with a shake of her head, Helena forced herself to say with a casualness she didn't feel that she appreciated the information and his diligence in obtaining it. With more assurances that he would be well compensated for the time he had spent as well as promises that she would consider him the next time she needed research - "on the rich and eccentric," the researcher interjected with a laugh - Helena wound the conversation down, telling herself at the same time she was praising him once again for his efforts that Irene had said their off-the-books investigation of the replicated artefacts was over. No sense in making Dave mad before she even began her indentured servitude.
She weighed her options. She could brood about the implications of what the researcher had told her or she could lose herself in something just as absorbing and much more pleasant. The old Helena (older, in some ways, than she was now, more than one hundred years later) would have chosen the former, unconvinced that she had emotions or needs as deserving of fulfillment as that so-called fine mind of hers. But she was capable of learning and, to give her old self its due, that Helena hadn't had a Myka. The silence in the suite once she ended the call had alerted her to the fact that the shower had stopped running, which meant there was a possibility that Myka was still in a towel - but only if she hurried. Tossing her phone in the shoulder bag, she returned to their bedroom where, in fact, Myka was still in her towel. Tugging it open and wrapping herself in it until she was pressing against Myka's damp body, she said, "I believe we need to rectify the mistake we made by getting out of bed."
Myka looped her arms around Helena's neck, the towel loosening and dropping to the floor. "It's a rare event when H.G. Wells confesses to a mistake," she teased, kissing the little pucker of skin that had developed between Helena's eyebrows.
The pucker had developed because, in spite of her best intentions, Helena was recalling the image she had had of another Warehouse, in which someone like her was experimenting with artefacts, courtesy of Wade Farraday's insatiable desire to collect, well, everything. "I've wanted to be wrong more often than people might think."
But soon Farraday and the other Warehouse started to slip down the list again. There were so many other things that blunted the importance of what the researcher had found and distracted her from her uneasiness. There was the start of school and indoor soccer and, instead of math camp, band, because what child's life could be considered well rounded without musical appreciation? Given the choice of oboe or trumpet - the band also needed baritone horn and percussion players but Myka nixed those options - Drew picked trumpet, much to his father's relief. "Not that I'm all into 'manly' stuff for boys," Pete said, hunched over his controller as he and Helena squared off in a game of Grand Theft Auto. She was tempted to give him a disbelieving look, especially as last month's issue of Maxim was peeping out from under the sofa, but that would have assumed she believed him capable of moments of quiet reflection. "But, c'mon, an oboe? Give the kid a chance to leave the playground before every other boy in the school jumps him." Pete also didn't have to listen to his son practice the trumpet, an experience that had Helena adding "thoroughly soundproofed music room" to her renovation plans. Which hadn't progressed beyond plans since Myka had declared that she wasn't going to live in the midst of plastic sheeting and gaping wall-less spaces all winter long.
It was unfair of her to lay it all at Myka's feet, however, since her own "job" with Homeland Security had also begun, and she had her reports to Dave to make. Her first project was to review TSA security protocols and to determine how the agency might more reliably identify potential threats. "And if you have an idea for a new tool or device that would make our job easier, don't hesitate to mention it," Dave had said jovially during their first face-to-face meeting in Washington. "I hear you have a knack for that kind of thing." He grinned at her. She did love to dismantle and rebuild, she couldn't deny that. Even her mad scheme to end the world had had that impulse, although it was hard to see how rebuilding would have been successful after throwing the world into another Ice Age. To create something that would be misused or mangled by these idiots . . . her colleagues . . . was precious little enticement, however, and her smile in response was pained.
While she had been in Washington, she thought about renting a car and driving out to the plant in which the "strange goings-on" the researcher had mentioned were supposed to have occurred, but between meetings at Homeland Security and searches for an architecturally-inspired gift for Drew (rather grumpily, she settled on a Legos White House), she hadn't had time. She had also thought about calling Suzanne. While weeks could go by without an e-mail or phone call, it was rare that months would elapse. Of course that had been the whole point of their relationship, such as it was, that neither would feel compelled to remain in touch with the other. But she wondered what Suzanne made of her silence, if she suspected that Helena had begun to piece together the fragmentary clues, the connections between those who had possessed the artefacts that had been replicated (Michaelis, Afton) and PAWL, between PAWL and Congressmen Jaffee and Perkins, between PAWL and Farraday. Or if she believed that Helena had lost interest or found someone else, which was the simpler explanation. None of what they had learned about the replicated artefacts or PAWL or the victims had anything to do with Suzanne; her only connection to any of it was that she was the curator of the Farraday family's art museum. Maybe she was innocent, and Helena's suspicions of her were reflective more of a desire to distance herself from the life she had led before she had returned to the Warehouse, to Myka, than of anything substantive that pointed to Suzanne's involvement. What was it she had told Claudia shortly after she had returned? Her "twistiness" would never disappear, not completely. How like her, then, to magnify a conspiracy and to suck someone innocent into it because that someone reminded her of an emotional carelessness, an amorality, she wanted to deny about herself. Nonetheless, the night before she was to take a flight back to Rapid City, she contacted the oh-so-helpful researcher from her hedge fund (she supposed Dave would make her get rid of her ownership interest in it because it posed some conflict of interest or other) and charged him with finding out everything he could about Suzanne Emory. Discreetly, of course.
And then that slid down the list as well. Not forgotten, just toward the bottom of the list, because when she returned there was the party for her 48th/148th birthday, which she pretended she hated but secretly enjoyed, and, in October, Drew's birthday, which occasioned much readying of the tree house for an influx of eight- and nine-year-old boys. He dutifully endured a joint birthday dinner the night before with his mother, father, and Helena, but he couldn't wait to leave the restaurant so he could bury himself in his room collecting all the items necessary for the overnight. The tree and the tree house still standing after the birthday party, Helena took a steadying breath only to be flung into a series of fundraisers for the indoor soccer team, the band, and several other school-related activities, most of which Drew wasn't involved in, but which Myka believed required their support as well.
One of the fundraisers took the form of a bowling contest, proceeds to go toward – it didn't matter what, Helena crossly decreed in repeated mutterings about the house, since her participation would require her either to put her feet into shoes worn by countless others or buy her own, never to be worn again. Myka ignored the glares and mutterings, saying only, "At last, a game of your youth" with an impish smile. While Helena fretted about the shoes, Myka worried about her role in a matchmaking attempt suggested by Colton's mother, who thought she had found the perfect woman for Pete. Myka's role was limited to ensuring that Pete would be able to attend the fundraiser, Colton's mother would see to the rest, but . . . "Things between you and me and Pete are going better than I thought they would, and I don't want a disastrous blind date to change that," Myka moaned in their bedroom, five minutes before they were supposed to leave for the bowling alley.
"It's not a blind date," Helena disagreed. "It's an introduction, and I'm sure Pete will be absolutely clueless that he and this woman are being set up."
"God, his vibes. How could I have forgotten about them?" Myka sank onto the bed again and flopped backward. "He knows, Helena, and he's already planning his revenge."
Showing no pity, Helena yanked at her hand and pulled her up. "If I have to endure hours wearing shoes that have hosted scaling skin and toenail fungus, you can suffer the minor discomfort of watching Pete trying to charm a woman with his collection of fart jokes and superhero lore."
But after a couple of hours spent surreptitiously glancing at Pete as he chatted and joked with Cindy, an emergency room nurse at a Rapid City hospital, Myka and Helena exchanged one long, similarly stunned look. Their team having been knocked out of the competition early on – Myka's fencing-ingrained sense of balance deserting her on a bowling lane as she stumbled on every approach and Helena's tentative, skipping dance just before she released the ball a testament to the reluctance of her feet to inhabit rental shoes – they claimed a booth in the snack area, from which they could occasionally pop up and cheer on Drew's team or spy on Pete. Cindy, a pretty, petite blonde with two teenaged children of her own, wasn't just smiling politely at Pete's tried-and-true jokes (Helena especially appreciated the one about the bank robber and his pig accomplice, which had the immortal punchline – coming from the indignant pig – "What makes you think I'll squeal?"), she was throwing back her head and laughing.
"All she has to do is snort, and I think the deal is sealed," Helena said, more relaxed now that the hated rental shoes had been returned to the service counter.
"Wow," Myka said softly, twirling the straw in her glass of unsweetened iced tea. She shook her head in disbelief.
Helena regarded her curiously. There seemed to be more than simple surprise at work in Myka's expression, but the emotion that seemed to darken her eyes and pull down the corners of her mouth was one that Helena couldn't identify. If forced to guess, she would call it jealousy, but that was ridiculous. Half-rising from the booth, she surveyed the bowling alley, seeing groups of adults, some still bowling, some sitting in booths and tables in the snack area, some talking with other parents. Other couples. She and Myka were the only same sex couple at the fundraiser, she realized. What her relationship with Myka signified to the world at large, particularly those conservative parts of it, rarely weighed on her mind. She had had no issues with who she was sexually, the fact that her desire encompassed both sexes had seemed entirely natural to her; intellectually she had rebelled at limits, so why would she accept the conventional thinking that because she was a woman, she should desire only a man? But while she and Myka frequently arrived at the same conclusions, they arrived at them by taking different paths. Myka might have, probably did have a vastly different understanding of her own sexuality. Whereas she heard the awkward references or recognized the hard stares only when someone else drew her attention to them, Myka might be all too aware of them. After all, Myka hadn't dated a woman before becoming involved with her, not to her knowledge, at any rate. They had talked about a million things since she had moved in to Myka's house, but how a relationship with a woman was something completely new to her wasn't one of them. Myka could easily be jealous of Pete and Cindy, not because she still harbored feelings for Pete but because their connection would never raise the questions or invite the criticism that her relationship with Helena did.
"Does it bother you . . ." Helena began, unsure how to ask what she suddenly felt she needed to ask. Unsure because she had never asked it before, of Suzanne or Giulietta or Catherine or Giselle, hadn't thought of asking it, hadn't cared, frankly, what the other woman's answer would be, because whatever it was, it wouldn't change how she felt, couldn't make her feel more committed or less because she was incapable of committing to anyone.
"Bother me?" Myka repeated, the frown her lips had only hinted at earlier now fully expressed. "Do you think I'm jealous?"
"Not that I actually believe you're reconsidering . . . us . . . but, you have to admit, no one will raise their eyebrows at them or struggle about what to call them." As Myka's mouth formed an even grimmer line, Helena said helplessly, "I haven't been very good about considering things like that, have I? Perhaps Drew has been beating up other boys daily for making jokes about his 'two mothers' and neither of you has told me. I've never even asked you how you broke the news to your parents." She hesitated. "It will never be as easy with me . . . that way . . . so how could I resent your occasionally wishing that it were?"
"It's not jealousy. It's . . . ." Myka seemed to be at an equal loss. "We need to have a conversation," she muttered as Colton's mother and her boyfriend approached their booth, Colton and Drew in tow and asked to sit with them.
As Helena changed sides to allow, Colton's mo—Heather, yes, Heather and Casey to sit across from them, and as Heather crowed in triumph to Myka, "Didn't I tell you she would be a good fit for him?," Helena was grateful that the question she had so awkwardly raised could be buried beneath more self-congratulations from Heather and, eventually, gossip about other parents, minor complaints about teachers and the school, and, ultimately, a bowling alley-wide tallying of funds raised. By the time families were returning bowling balls and shoes and leaving to go home, she and Myka and Heather and Casey had moved to a bigger table where they were joined by two other couples and they talked well into the night, the children falling asleep in their parents' laps, and Helena would have been hard put to find a moment when she and Myka weren't viewed as being the same as anyone else around the table, as a couple of overtired parents appreciative of a chance to sit and commiserate, or doze, with other overtired parents.
Had "We need to have a conversation" been on Helena's list, it, too, would have slipped toward the end because Helena was a firm believer that "necessary conversations" were an oxymoron. "Necessary conversations" weren't about imparting new or significant information, because if they were, they would have already taken place before becoming a necessity. What they were was an opportunity for one party to repeat something to another party that the other party had already heard, usually something negative about the other party's conduct. But "We need to have a conversation" was on Myka's list, and while it soon became clear to Helena that it was not at the top of Myka's list either, since they didn't have the conversation the day after the bowling alley fundraiser, or the day after that, or even during the following week, she knew better than to think that Myka had forgotten it.
Since Drew didn't come home from school with a bloody nose or a black eye and since people in the grocery store didn't give her and Myka stares any more incredulous than the ones they normally gave them, usually when she had stopped the cart in the middle of an aisle to exclaim at the latest abomination created to assuage a consumer's anxiety about her intake of carbohydrates, such as honey wheat-flavored pancake mix that was actually free of anything resembling wheat or honey, which had caused her to flourish a box of it in front of Myka and demand, "Why not just stick a price on a rack of test tubes and be done with it?," Helena began to return to her former indifference about how their pairing was regarded outside their home. It was made easier when Myka chided Drew for his reluctance to acknowledge that his father had as much right to have a girlfriend as she did, and Drew didn't use the opportunity to complain that, although Helena was cooler than Cindy, she would never be as cool for his mother as a cool boyfriend would be. "What makes Cindy less cool than Helena?" Myka asked, and though Helena could think of any number of things, she reminded herself that Myka wasn't asking her. Drew mentioned the tree house, of course, and Helena's plans for renovating his bedroom and, somewhat surprisingly, her ability to "kick butt at video games." But when, after a long pause, Drew said, "'Cause she can think like a grown-up and a kid," Myka had stopped smiling and her expression became more sober, just as it had at the bowling alley.
While Helena didn't think Myka's sudden seriousness had anything to do with misgivings of the sort that might be numbered under the heading "Why I Should Have Picked Jeff Over Helena" and saved in one of her planner apps to be updated as needed, she nonetheless brought up their bowling alley conversation as they watched Scandal later that evening, Drew having been dispatched to bed. "Take Fitz and Olivia, for example," she began, as though they had been arguing about the relationship since the episode started. "Do you think it never crosses her mind that part of their difficulties likely stems from the fact that she's black and he's white in a society that still discriminates?" She had to be careful as she gestured at the TV since her hand was flying close to Myka's glasses and sending them across the room would hardly make the conversation any easier.
Myka, who frequently watched her favorite shows using Helena as a backrest, twisted her head up and around, her expression puzzled. "I think their biggest problems are that he's married and he's kind of an ass, not to mention a murderer." She paused. "Are you looking at them as a stand-in for us?"
"Darling, you have to admit, I am a murderer and also a bit of an ass at times." She gave Myka her best devilish smile, but the smile did little to ease the irritation that was creeping into Myka's face. "We've just never talked about the fact that I'm your first foray into same-sex relationships," she added plaintively. "I'm not suggesting that you've agonized over it, but you can't tell me that over 12 years ago, you saw yourself living with a woman."
With more elbowing and pushing against her than Helena felt was needed, Myka turned around so that she was facing her. Balancing herself on her knees with both arms braced on either side of Helena, one hand on the back of the sofa, the other on its arm, Myka leaned in until their noses were barely an inch apart. "Twelve years ago I didn't see myself settling down with anybody, man or woman. I never had, not even when I was with Sam. I was completely focused on my job. Then you blew into my life and you rearranged it, and I didn't realize how much you changed what I hoped for until you told me in Boone that you had found what you wanted." She cocked her head, her eyes searching Helena's. "Are you asking me what I think I am and whether I'd ever get involved with a woman again? I don't care what loving you makes me, Helena. If others want to label me, they can go right ahead. And as for getting involved with another woman were you to do something really despicable like die on me . . . it doesn't hold any meaning for me because whoever it was, she – or he – wouldn't be you."
Glasses askew, ancient yoga pants drooping down her hips slightly, Myka had never looked sexier, and Helena thought she might come simply from the feel of Myka's breath on her face. Frantically pushing down her own pants as she nipped at Myka's lips, she pulled one of Myka's hands off the sofa and tried to guide the fingers into her but her movements were too impatient. Eyes intense and alight behind the lenses of her glasses, Myka wriggled off the sofa and then pulled Helena down until she was only partially resting on the cushion. "Only you," she murmured as she cradled Helena's lower back and hips and began to move her fingers in and out, setting a rhythm that Helena wanted to rush but, as Myka's steady gaze held hers, chose to follow. "Only you," she echoed, the two words becoming one as their pace increased and ending in a pillow-muffled wail as Myka lifted Helena's hips higher and tongued the words, or something very much like them, that her fingers had been speaking minutes before.
Sometime later, Scandal and the local news both long over, she and Myka spooned on the sofa, an afghan covering them, their clothes in a heap on the floor. Sleepy yet still aroused, Helena began moving her hand inquisitively between Myka's thighs, and as Myka groaned in exasperation and began rocking her hips at the same time, she mumbled against Helena's forearm, "It was before Ellis when I called my mom and told her that I was involved with someone, someone I had known a long time ago. I thought I would have to work up to telling her that it was you, but she already knew. She asked me if it was 'the friend who convinced you to come back to the Secret Service in spite of what she had done,' and when I said yes, she said she had known then that it must have been a pretty powerful love-gone-wrong to make me quit my job."
"Can't imagine that she's too happy about it," Helena grunted as Myka hooked a leg, backward, over Helena's leg and shifted to allow Helena's hand greater room. Helena nuzzled Myka's neck, feeling the increase in her pulse, the skin jumping under her lips.
"She believes in second chances," Myka said, a little breathlessly, as she started to grind her butt against Helena's abdomen. "Lucky for you that I believe in third and fourth chances, which is why you're still here."
While she might have a second chance with Jeannie Bering, Helena suspected she would have no margin for error with Myka's father. Other than exchanging polite greetings on the rare occasions when Warren Bering called his daughter, Helena had had no conversations with the man who had been the most significant factor in how Myka had become Myka. Their upcoming Thanksgiving visit to Colorado Springs, where, thankfully, they would be staying with Myka's sister Tracy and her family and not trying to cram themselves into the small living space allotted to the elder Berings in their senior living complex, was sufficient cause for Helena to volunteer to pick up Drew from the B&B one evening. In the time it would take for Drew to gather his clothes, his toys, and his dog, she would pick Pete's brain – and what an undertaking that would be – about how best to deal with Myka's father. "That was the upside to the divorce," Pete said, turning off the TV remote and sweeping off leftover popcorn from the sofa cushions. "Not having Warren as my father-in-law. He's mellowed with age, but he's . . . he's still a piece of work." He glanced down the hall at the door to Drew's bedroom. It remained shut, but he lowered his voice. "Jeannie's a sweetie, you'll love her. But Warren . . . kind of funny that Myka could never do anything right in his eyes, but, man, there isn't anyone good enough for her. I could go on about him, but I think this'll tell you all you need to know. Every time we visited? He'd throw his beer out and make Jeannie dump her wine too. I'd open the recycling bin, and there the empty bottles would be. I told him he didn't have to do that, but he just looked at me, like I was something on the bottom of his shoe."
Helena had only nodded. She knew what disapproving parents were like. What child growing up in the nineteenth century didn't have disapproving parents? Children were disapproved of for being children in the first place, and the sins went on from there. Her parents had certainly been representative of the time. Like others whose station in life was subject to shifts in fortune, they clung all the more to respectability, insisting upon dressing well, if not expensively, attending church services faithfully, and exhibiting the decorum that marked men and women as gentlemen and ladies. Her parents had stretched her father's meager means for Charles' education; she had been taught only what was considered necessary for a woman to know – how to cook, properly clean, set a table, sew, quiet a child, manage a servant (when they could afford one). But her parents' disappointment in her refusal to "behave like a woman of good character should" (as her father put it) had had no power to sting her. She had known early on that she was different, able to learn more and learn it faster and better than others, and the older she grew, the more she came to view her parents, and even Charles to an extent, as weights dragging at her heels, preventing her from flying high and far away from an existence, which, if it wasn't exactly false, wasn't true to her capabilities, her potential. That her superiority was worth far less than the value she had put on it she would learn only later and at great cost.
Myka, however, hadn't grown up with a fatuous belief in her own superiority. She had grown up believing that she was a disappointment instead. She had failed first, in her father's eyes, by not being a boy, and every B instead of an A, every 80 instead of 100, was a failure that naturally followed upon the first. That it had taken her so long to look with a critical eye at the bookstore that her father owned and that they had lived above throughout her childhood, a bookstore that rarely made more money than the minimal level that could support a family of four, was one of Myka's biggest regrets. Helena remembered one long, slightly drunken late night conversation when she had been at 13 that had turned from books to their childhoods. Content for once to listen, she had watched as Myka unsteadily navigated a cup of tea that was more brandy than tea to her lips only to lower it as she exploded at her father's unrelenting demand that she outperform her peers at school. "Jesus Christ, he could spout all that crap to me when here he was, with a fucking MFA, and he couldn't do any better than manage a bookstore. I wish I had kicked him in the balls. Better yet, my mother should have left him." Looking down into her tea, she had mumbled, "You would have kicked him in the balls."
And she would, if he said one unkind word to Myka or Drew during their visit. But Warren was on his best behavior, gliding past those moments when he might have said something cutting, such as when Myka awkwardly explained that her duties with the Secret Service had undergone a change in response to his question, "Still running the show and ordering people around?" Or when Drew had shown him pictures of the birdhouse on Myka's phone. After staring at them, eyebrows hiked high, he had said only, "Looks like you put a lot of work into it." He had even treated her cordially, if not especially warmly, asking her where in England she was from, if she was able to see her family as often as she would like. Helena responded with polite fictions, noticing, not for the first time, how much Myka and her father resembled each other. They had the same rangy build, the same eyes, and though his hair was little more than a fringe around the back of his head and mainly white, she could see how the longer hairs started to curl at their ends. Though Myka would say later, after they had returned to Rapid City, that her father had been on his best behavior because "he knew he was on his fourth and last chance with me," it was clear to Helena how happy she was that he was behaving more like the father he would have been in some kinder timeline, one in which Sam wouldn't have died and Myka herself wouldn't have so irretrievably fallen for a woman destined to hurt her so many times. At the dinner at Tracy's house on Thursday night, Myka squeezed her hand so hard when Warren joked and kidded with his three grandsons that Helena thought one of her knuckles might have been permanently displaced.
Because Myka had looked so happy, been so happy, during the dinner and afterward, playing an old board version of Clue with Drew and her nephews, ten-year-old Connor and six-year-old Liam (British voices for certain suspects provided by Helena), ribbing Tracy about her high school career as a cheerleader, and dutifully asking for tax advice from her accountant brother-in-law Kevin, Helena was unprepared for Myka's straddling of her in their bed and her quietly announcing, "I want another child."
At first when Myka had straddled her, Helena had had the hope that her "no sex while we're sleeping in Tracy and Kevin's guest bedroom" might have been lifted. Drew was bunking with his cousins during their stay, and surely if they went about it silently enough . . . . Then Helena recognized the seriousness with which Myka was looking at her, and she was reminded of how Myka had looked at her in the bowling alley and the night that Drew had enumerated the reasons why she was cool. She had known that the seriousness had signified something, thus her fears that Myka had found their relationship lacking, and, apparently, there had been some truth to her suspicions. She wouldn't have guessed that what it lacked was a baby. Too startled to know exactly what she felt about the idea, Helena said carefully, "We're a little old, don't you think?"
Myka shrugged, defensively, and started tracing a pattern on Helena's chest through the sheet – and a nightgown that Myka had insisted she wear while they were at Tracy and Kevin's. "I turn 44 in March, and if we were to do . . . this, I'd like to start before then. I've been thinking that, if you were in agreement, we could start after the New Year. We'd work with Vanessa to see if I might need any fertility treatments –"
Although it was possibly one of the least arousing conversations she had ever had with Myka and Myka's finger was having to work through two layers, Helena couldn't deny that the figures Myka was drawing on her chest, especially when Myka's finger would bump against one of her breasts, were making her twitch. Forcing herself to concentrate, she said, "I'm 148, I'd be closing in on 200 when the child graduated from college."
"What does it matter whether you're 148 or 170? Let's face it, you could die on me at any time." Myka's finger wasn't stopping and it was working its way down Helena's chest.
"What about Drew? He's barely gotten used to having me in the house, plus he's having to accept the fact that his father has a girlfriend, too. It's a lot of change for a nine-year-old boy." Helena peered up at Myka's face. She looked so grave, so focused. The finger couldn't be a ploy. She just needed to physically work through her thoughts. Helena ordinarily wouldn't have called Myka a kinesthetic style of thinker, unless one counted how she would worry through several Twizzlers or work her fingers through her hair –
"Helena, are you with me?" Myka leaned forward, planting her hands on the bed even with Helena's shoulders. The distraction of the pattern-tracing finger was now replaced by the distraction of seeing down the neck of Myka's sleep shirt and imagining her mouth or her hand on one of Myka's breasts. "I just said that Drew's been asking me lately if we were going to have a baby. His only concern is that if you're the one to carry it, you won't want to renovate his bedroom next spring." She smiled, a tender and strangely giddy smile that Helena hadn't seen before. "He wants to be a big brother."
Mesmerized by the slight sway of Myka's breasts, Helena wondered if her distraction had less to do with her usual responsiveness to Myka and was more a method of not focusing on whether she wanted a child. Because that was what Myka was asking her, though she had yet to express it as a question. Did she want a child, a baby? It wouldn't be like it had been with Adelaide or as it was now with Drew, a parent of sorts but most definitely not a mother. It would be closer to what it had been like with Christina, when she had looked into dark eyes that matched her own and realized that she encompassed her baby's known universe. She was Christina's sun, moon, and stars, and while Christina would someday recognize that a universe much larger and much, much more promising existed outside her mother, some fragment of that earliest misapprehension would remain. It was in her shrieks of laughter when Helena returned from a retrieval or the trusting acceptance with which she received Helena's casual lessons about pollination or the life cycle of insects when they played in a park. As long as her mama was with her, all was well. "You don't have to do this for me," Helena finally said, looking away from Myka. "I've been a mother."
"I don't want to do it for you, I want to do it for me." Myka quit straddling her to sit, cross-legged, beside her. "I've been wanting to talk to you for a while about this, but I couldn't figure out a way that wouldn't sound like I was trying to redo some part of your life, make up for losing Christina. Maybe because I didn't know why I suddenly wanted another child." She shrugged, this time as if she were helpless to explain what she felt. "I was happy with Pete, and Drew, he seemed a natural consequence of that, you know? But I wasn't dying to have more children, although Pete would nudge me about it sometimes. I was happy, Helena, I was satisfied. And then Drew was sick and I wasn't happy or satisfied any longer because I had realized during that whole mess that being satisfied with Pete wasn't enough. I wanted more, I wanted you. At the same time, I knew you weren't coming back. Whatever you had found was enough for you because you weren't knocking on my door. So for the two years before Pete and I got divorced?" She quirked an eyebrow at Helena and her mouth slanted upward in a crooked twist that Helena hoped wasn't as painful as it looked. "I became a baby-making machine, tried to, anyway. Because maybe another kid would make it all better. And nothing happened. We hadn't even tried with Drew. I got pregnant on a retrieval when Pete and I were both so tired we hardly knew what we were doing. But this time around? Nothing." She shrugged again. "And the longer we kept trying and failing, the more everything just seemed. . . wrong."
Helena had rolled onto her side as Myka talked, propping her head on her hand. With her free arm, she reached out and grabbed one of Myka's big toes, lightly rubbing the ball of it. Not the most romantic of gestures, but it was the part of Myka closest to her. "I dated after the divorce, obviously, since you met Jeff, but I wasn't looking for anything serious. I told myself that it was because I didn't have the heart for it, but maybe I was waiting for you and I didn't want to admit it."
"You have me now, and you would have had me sooner if I hadn't been such a bloody idiot about everything." Helena gave Myka's big toe a loving squeeze.
"I know." Myka's twisted smile smoothed into something happier, goofier, and she stretched out her hand to sweep Helena's hair back from her face. "And I thought once I had you I would be happy, I would be satisfied." At Helena's incipient frown, Myka unfolded herself and slid down the mattress until she could lock her legs around one of Helena's. "I'm happier than I ever thought I could be, but I'm not satisfied. You make me want more, more of you, more of us. I want to see you putting 'nappies' on our baby and thinking of all the ways you can improve the process. I want to see you blowing out the candle on her – or his – first birthday cake. I want to fill that living room we never use with pictures of you and me and Drew and his little brother or sister. I want all that, and even more. Do you understand, Helena?"
Helena thought she did. Perhaps it was all the easier to understand here in Myka's childhood home, loosely speaking, since Tracy and Kevin's suburban two-story bore no resemblance to the cramped two-bedroom apartment in which Myka had grown up. A child who had never been enough for her father became the woman who always demanded more of herself without expecting "more" in return. Being grateful for what she was given, certain that she didn't deserve what she desired most, she had been happy enough. Until H.G. Wells had come along, Helena wryly reflected – with, what had Claudia called it? – her "black mane" and "Byronic history" –and taught her that having enough wasn't nearly enough. Myka should have recognized in her the lesson of what happens when a person's reach exceeds her grasp, but whatever alchemy it was that never stopped drawing the two of them together, it had led her to find in Helena the "more" that had always seemed to elude her.
In her own case, maybe it wouldn't be wrong, this one time, to want more. Having spent ten years trying to want nothing and discovering that it was as lethal in its own way as wanting too much, perhaps she could engage in a small thought experiment and determine if picturing how she and Myka would raise a child together, from scratch so to speak, could evoke in her more than terror. The child would have one thing in its favor, it wouldn't have her genes. That was a positive she could build on. She pushed at Myka's hip until Myka got the signal and turned over, allowing Helena to put an arm around her waist and draw her in. "I will observe the 'no sex' rule here, but once we get home and send Drew off with his father, we are locking ourselves in our bedroom, and I am going to do my best to impregnate you."
"You think you're joking, but you're H.G. Wells, and anything is possible," Myka chuckled. She took a deeper breath and said, "You didn't say no, and I can live with that for now."
No pregnancy resulted from the time they spent locked in their bedroom, but one result was that Helena could imagine a child, a girl, with Myka's eyes and hair and uncertain smile, looking up at her with the same unawareness of anything else in her world except her mother that Christina had had, and she wasn't filled with dread. Because the illusion that she was the only object in her child's universe would exist only to the extent that Myka didn't enter the room and kiss her daughter's and Helena's foreheads and Drew didn't make faces at his sister designed to have her crowing in delight. She could be a good mother to this child. As Myka had said, she was H.G. Wells and anything was possible.
One morning in December, a couple of weeks before Christmas, Helena was washing her face in the master bathroom, thinking, if she was thinking about anything, about when they should contact Vanessa, assuming, of course, she decided that she wanted a child. As she lifted her head and reached blindly for the hand towel, she suddenly remembered where else she had seen the post-Impressionist painting that had once been Stewart Afton's. She and Suzanne, in one of their few date-like outings, had taken in an exhibit at the National Gallery. There had been no big names among the painters, in fact that had been the point of the exhibit; it featured the works of artists overshadowed by the likes of Gaugin, Cezanne, and Van Gogh. They had stopped for several minutes in front of a painting of demimondaines and their lovers, and Suzanne had pointed at the dark-haired prostitute with the rose sitting provocatively on the lap of her client as she gazed with flirtatious intent at the viewer. "That's you, already eyeing your next conquest," she had teased. Helena had laughed, although the comment had rankled her without her being able to define exactly why. Instead of coming back with a retort, she had leaned toward the impeccable shell of Suzanne's ear and said softly, "The paintings are lovely, but I'd much rather be fucking you in my hotel room."
Suzanne rarely betrayed embarrassment, but she had then, flushing and moving slightly away. "Always the romantic, and just when I think it's safe to take you out in public . . . ." Her voice was quiet and edged with irritation.
"I am what I am," Helena had said with an unapologetic smile, which wasn't reflected in the cool challenge of her eyes.
Suzanne had dipped her head in acquiescence. "Want a souvenir before we go?" She motioned toward the painting. "It's difficult to get prints of it but not impossible. I've done it before."
Helena had shaken her head, incurious about the others to whom Suzanne had offered the gift. The only souvenir she wanted was Suzanne coming above her, under her, and all that would happen soon enough.
As quickly as it had flashed into her mind, the memory disappeared. Perhaps because the next several hours after they had left the exhibit, the next day, had been exhausting without having been meaningful. Helena couldn't even place it among her other memories of Suzanne, unsure which sex marathon it belonged to. Recalling the moment now, she was struck not only by what an utter ass she had been but the rightness of Myka's perception of Suzanne as well. That had been one of the few times that Suzanne had let her mask slip, betraying her boredom with, maybe even her distaste for, yet another protracted session with Helena in a hotel room. Drying her face, Helena knew she could live with the delayed sense of chagrin at her self-centeredness. What she wasn't sure she could live with was not acting on what she knew now, that Suzanne had been involved with the replicated artefacts all along.