A/N: So this is it, the last chapter. I tried to leave them in a good place. Thanks for reading and thanks for your kind comments. More B&W fanfics to continue (Journey's End, Burned, Convergence) and one to start (All Splendid Lovers). I hope to be writing and posting more fics over on FictionPress, and at least one of them will be a B&W uber, so check it out if you're interested.
September 2016
It started this way now, in the middle of the night, Myka turning to her, half-asleep, and caressing her breasts, parting her legs, and Helena almost always responding by guiding Myka's mouth to her nipples and, with a still half-asleep Myka balancing herself over her on a bent arm, opening her legs wider and encouraging Myka's fingers to advance until they slipped in, slipping in because she was always wet, or so it seemed, even at three in the morning, and hearing Myka suck in her breath as she lifted her head from Helena's breast, awake now, and moan, just a little, in response to her moan because that's how it happened, now, with them. And then Myka was moving, working her fingers, her hand, and Helena was moving with her, and Myka was kissing her as they moved, nipping, gently worrying the skin of her throat, darting her tongue past Helena's lips, groaning, softly, into her mouth, until Helena lifted herself from the mattress and, with an arm around Myka's waist, turned her onto her back, her hand now seeking access and finding it, because Myka was also always wet at three in the morning. They were moving, faster, more urgently this time, and although Helena wanted to do more, and do it more actively, she simply didn't have the energy and neither did Myka. She contented herself with tiny kisses around the areolae of Myka's breasts, the tip of her tongue grazing, ever so lightly, the tips of Myka's nipples. Myka's moans were beginning to turn into cries, and she was arching her hips, and then it ended this way now, though less often than it had before, with their nine-month-old son's cries over the intercom eclipsing his mothers'.
"That's his 'my diaper is full' or 'it's cold and wet.' Your turn." Myka pushed herself up against the headboard as Helena crawled out of bed.
"I thought he was supposed to be sleeping through the night by now. When did he become so exacting about the state of his nappy? He's an infant out of Henry James," Helena complained.
"There aren't infants in Henry James." Myka yawned. "Maybe you should look closer to home. Who else might possibly be dissatisfied with product quality?"
Helena only grumbled in response as she staggered into the bathroom, taking a robe from the hook on the door and belting it around her. She then staggered back out, walking only slightly more steadily down the hall, past Myka's office (her office too, she supposed), the other bathroom, Drew's bedroom where, with a dead-to-the-world devotion to sleep reminiscent of his father's, he would be sprawled diagonally across the bed, to the guest room that had become Ellis's nursery. She turned on the light and crossed to the crib, where Ellis was waving his arms and legs in distress. He blinked up at her and stopped mid-cry, surprised by Helena's presence. Were she more awake she would take the time to marvel at the mystery, no, more like the puckish humor of a universe in which a child who bore no genetic relationship to her could look so much like her, but tonight she merely picked Ellis up, kissing the dark hair curling up from the crown of his head, and pulled the diaper away from his bottom. No smears, only the acrid tang of urine. She quickly removed the diaper, cleaned Ellis, and put a fresh diaper on him; her son was talking earnestly to her now, the "bub-bub-bub" sounding like they were on the verge of becoming recognizable words, and wriggling as though he wanted to be put down on the floor. Helena placed him back in his crib, noting the muddy blue of Ellis's eyes; they would turn darker, brown probably, like her own. They were long and narrow, like hers, not round like Myka's, but how Ellis would look at her, with a directness that shouldn't be possible for a mere baby, that was all Myka. She leaned down and kissed Ellis on his forehead. "See you in a few hours, little one." He began to whine, but it wouldn't turn into the full-fledged cries that erupted when Myka was the one who attended to him. Myka was the object of his adoration, only one of the many things he shared with Helena. She turned the light off and closed the door. Already his whines were becoming briefer, quieter, more like whimpers.
When she returned, Myka asked drowsily, "How's our boy doing?" A note of amusement crept into her voice. "I heard you walk into the wall. He didn't squirt you in the eyes again, did he?"
"No," Helena said, offended. "It was just the once, you know." She held her hands out in front of her, stepping cautiously in what she thought was the direction of their bathroom. When her hand slipped around the lintel, she knew where she was and she shuffled into the bathroom, fumbling her way to the sink.
"But you walked around for hours claiming that he'd blinded you."
"It stung," Helena protested as she dried her hands. "I've had only an intermittent appreciation of that part of the male anatomy. I can't help but think it would benefit from better engineering."
Myka's voice was decidedly more awake, laughter threatening to bubble through it. "I know some anatomy that needs," a laugh finally escaping her, "your expert touch, so get back over here."
"You are quite possibly the worst seductress I've ever encountered." Walking more confidently toward the location of Myka's voice, Helena slipped in beside her and pulled Myka to her, her hand seeking and finding.
"I don't care as long as I'm the last one."
The next morning Helena lay in their bed, allowing Myka the privacy she needed to finalize arrangements for a birthday party that was a surprise to Helena only because she hadn't yet let on that she knew about it. She had fussed the year before on her 49th that she wanted no party, no special celebration on her 50th, understanding that Myka would take it as provocation.
"Dude, it's your sesquicentennial. How can we not celebrate?" Claudia had said, guarding her slice of birthday cake from Pete.
"Because we," Helena had pointed to a pregnant Myka asleep in her chair, "will be exhausted."
"What's a sesquicentennial?" Drew had asked, which ended the conversation.
She could hear the heavy clumping of his sneakers as he got ready for school. He was likely packing his lunch under his mother's direction, walking back and forth between the island and the refrigerator. Carrots, apple, bottled water . . . . Helena shuddered and drew the comforter up over her head. Only to fling it off when Ellis let out a wail that echoed through the house. Myka would have let him crawl in the family room until he did something - tried to pull himself up by grabbing onto the TV, wormed underneath the sofa - that would have had her pick him up and place him somewhere far less interesting. Helena could sympathize, up to a point. She, too, had always resisted having her explorations curtailed, but she didn't think her objections had ever been so piercing. Or so prolonged. He was still crying, and his cries were getting closer.
"Will you watch him? I'm going to take Drew to school this morning. I have some errands to run." Myka abstractedly kissed Ellis on his cheek and set him on the bed. His misery twofold upon seeing his beloved leave the room, Ellis turned a tear-streaked face to Helena. His bub-bub-bub's were the engine sounds of the saddest little motorboat in the world.
Ellis wasn't supposed to be "Ellis." He wasn't supposed to be a he, although Myka, who had been the more certain of the two of them that she was carrying a girl, would vociferously deny it now. The woman who remembered everything had conveniently forgotten her assurances throughout the pregnancy that they didn't need to choose a boy's name because this child would be a girl. In fact, she had explicitly told their ob-gyn and Vanessa, who served as their special Warehouse ob-gyn, not to inform them of the baby's sex. She didn't need confirmation, she had said. So when Vanessa had nestled their newborn child in Myka's arms (the entire hospital staff had been under the strictest instructions to let Vanessa examine the child first - Helena never regretted insisting on it, just as she had never regretted any of her "ludicrous" precautions that had had Myka and more than one nurse grumbling under their breath) and announced, "You have a perfectly healthy little boy," Myka simply stared at her. It was a look she must have perfected during her years with Pete, of such utter disbelief that one could rightly presume Myka had witnessed an event that violated not only the laws of men but of science as well.
"We can't name him Elizabeth," she said slowly.
Helena hadn't known until then that Elizabeth had won the vote. The last time they had discussed names, Charlotte, the name she preferred, seemed poised to carry the day. It had the twin virtues of honoring Charles, which, to her horror, she had become only the more sentimental about the closer Myka's due date approached, and meeting Myka's requirement that the name at least sound old-fashioned, even if it wasn't. "I don't see you calling Amber to dinner or asking Madison how school was," Myka had said early on, and Helena had to admit that her lips began to crimp and pull themselves in every time she tried to say 'Brittany.' Not that there was anything fundamentally wrong with those names, only that had she named Christina Brittany, her mother would have shuddered and asked, "Did you give birth to an atlas or a child, Helena?" She had sufficiently challenged convention by having a child without the (dubious) benefit of a husband, further embarrassing her family by giving her daughter the name of what, in her time, had been a French province or a breed of dog would have seemed cruel. A part of her had been hoping illogically that her long-dead family would accept, if not approve of, her relationship with Myka. Myka was everything that they had wanted in a husband for her, hard-working, reliable, virtuous, temperate in her habits (not in all of them, thankfully) . . . except not her husband. Her wife. Wasn't the fact that she had married enough? She saw her mother shake her head vigorously, as if it were just another disappointment to be expected from her wayward daughter. A name that had currency in late 19th century England was really the most insignificant of gestures, especially directed toward people who were no longer present, who could no longer be offended, but it couldn't be said that Helena Wells completely dispensed with tradition. A conventional name it would be for their unconventionally conceived daughter.
Except that they had a son, eyes squinched shut and and mouth parted, mewling, more kitten than infant, who was already seeking Myka's breast. "We could call him Eli, Elias. How about Eleazar? It's so Biblical you can almost smell the brimstone." Helena, awkwardly balancing herself on the bed next to them, kissed Myka's cheek and then bent farther down to kiss the dark hair springing up in rebellious tufts from their son's head.
"Ellis," Myka said. "He was conceived there, in the way that conceiving a child matters."
Helena couldn't disagree. Ellis it was. Ellis Charles Wells.
They were on the patio, she and Ellis. Or, rather, she was on the patio, ostensibly working but actually sunning herself on a lounge chair while Ellis crawled with great energy in the grass. It was warm for mid-September in South Dakota, and Ellis's baby-sized version of a zippered sweat jacket was folded over the arm of a chair. He crowed in pleasure as he discovered another one of the objects she had hidden for him to find, brightly colored blocks of wood and rubbery, spongy balls that were easy to grip. As he had fussed and waved his arms in his activity chair, wanting more activity than it could offer, she had ranged a small square of yard beyond the patio, seeding the grass with toys. She had worried more than Myka about her capacity to lose track of everything outside her obsession of the moment, which, for the past several weeks and likely into the future as well, was a project to develop technology to replace the TSA's manual pat-downs, fulfilling the twin goals of being more effective and less intrusive. She had had visions of Ellis crawling to the end of the yard and tumbling down the hill. Myka, in turn, had been more alarmed about Helena's proposed solutions. "I don't care what you call it. There will be no electric fence, no electric anything near our son. He's not an inmate or a tiger in a zoo." Thus, she uttered a resounding "No" to, among other ideas, sensor panels in place of grass, which would beep or shrill when Ellis tried to venture beyond them or a tiny drone that would hover above him tracking his every move. In the end, Helena hit upon a solution that was technology-free, Shep. Of the numerous breeds that were part of his genetic make-up, several must have been herding dogs because he intently shadowed Ellis whenever and wherever Ellis was put down to crawl, nudging him back with his snout when Ellis crawled too far away or barking to draw Myka's and Helena's attention. Looking up from her laptop, Helena noticed that Shep was lying only a few feet away from Ellis, head on his paws as he watched Ellis gum on a bright blue ball. Shep loved Drew, but Ellis was his calling, his job.
Letting the ball dribble down his chest, Ellis spied yellow blocks stacked on top of each other like a pyramid, and he gurgled loudly, glancing back at Helena to see if she was watching him. She smiled and nodded, and he emitted a shriek of happiness as he scooted toward the blocks. Every time they brought him out onto the patio, he would scan the yard, expecting a treasure hunt. Helena believed that his surveying of the yard was deliberate and not an unfocused response to a multitude of stimuli. Myka seemed less sure, but she couldn't deny the intention behind his repeated pushing of the purple key on his piano, a toy that had originally produced notes in association with its keys but which Helena had taken apart and rebuilt so that each key played a person's name and a greeting. When Ellis pressed the purple key, he heard Myka saying, "Hi, Ellis, this is your mom. I love you, and just remember, I'm the grown-up." His other mother's key, the red one, had Helena saying, "Mum, Ellis, Mum, not Mom. Because your mom is the grown-up, we're going to have the adventures, you and I." Although she tried to maintain an air of indifference about how often Ellis banged on the red key, she was more than a little smug that it came in a close second to the purple one. Of course Ellis frequently pressed more than one key simultaneously, and Steve's "When you get older, I'll teach you how to meditate. You'll need it as a coping method," Claudia's "Holy frak, I don't know if we can handle two Wellses," and Pete's, "Ellis, I figure I'm gonna be your Obi-Wan 'cause there's stuff those two can't teach you" intermixed like the jokes and cries of disgust when, years ago, they had all gathered in the B&B's kitchen. Myka would always smile wistfully when she heard the cacophony issuing from the piano, and Ellis would pat his hands at the performance.
Observing him butt his head into the pyramid of blocks and giggle as they tumbled to the ground, Helena idly wondered if Ellis's paternal contribution, instead of being shipped overnight from a FedEx location most likely in Atlanta, wouldn't someday be traced to a sperm donation made in, say, 1987 by one Pete Lattimer, the sample frozen and forgotten for decades until it was mistakenly injected into Myka's uterus. It was just a stray thought, the seed of a bad dream, that was all; she would have preferred to chase the thought away with some wine, but she allowed herself only the occasional glass or two now, and at - she peered at the laptop screen - 1:30 in the afternoon, there wasn't a mother in any time zone watching an infant who would say, "Drink up, it's happy hour here." No mother she should be listening to, at any rate. She sipped her tea instead and turned her face up to the sun, Ellis's contented "bub-bub-bub" reassuringly nearby.
Myka had barely waited for the holidays to pass before she was dragging Helena to appointments she had made with various gynecologists and fertility specialists. Helena had urged her to see Vanessa first - Vanessa and Artie had indefinitely extended their stay, buying a townhome in Atlanta, which had Vanessa wisecracking that even paradise could get on Artie's nerves - and when Myka put her off with shushings and vague half-responses of "Soon, I promise," Helena decided to fly Vanessa to Rapid City. Cornered at the B&B by the two of them, Myka had surrendered to an examination, which discovered no lasting ill-effects from the artefact-induced coma.
"Look, I became pregnant with Drew less than a month after I was whammied by an artefact that had me convulsing with seizures." Rolling her eyes in exasperation as Helena failed to hide her curiosity, Myka said, "It was a rare edition of Notes from Underground, all right? My point is that Drew's fine, I'm fine."
"Since Pete's his father that remains to be seen," Helena muttered. At Myka's glare, she protested, "That was a single artefact. You were inundated with the power of hundreds of artefacts plus the power of the Warehouse itself." Catching at Myka's hands and pulling them to her chest, Helena said in a low voice, "None of this is worth risking your health, Myka. We're together, we're happy, that's all I need. Don't think that you have to make up for what I've lost. I have so much now, more than I ever thought I would."
"I'm fine. We'll be fine. I know it. Trust me," Myka said, giving their locked hands a shake, "I know this."
It was with the same certainty, "Trust me, I know," that Myka dismissed all the uncertainties attendant upon, first, the conception of their child and, second, her pregnancy. She had begrudgingly submitted to the genetic screening Helena had insisted upon, brushed aside the recommendations of the fertility specialists she had initially thought necessary ("Honestly, I think all you'll have to do is put the sperm in the same room with me"), and was unfazed by the dizzying number of options available to them when it came to selecting a donor. As Helena minutely studied profiles, in part to submerge her anxieties about the entire process, Myka showed little interest, or so it seemed, in whether their child's father would be a professor of mathematics who played classical guitar or a 22-year-old college senior who described his donation as a humanitarian gesture comparable to ending hunger or eliminating the nuclear stockpile.
In the midst of Helena's deliberations, Vanessa called one evening to inform them of a potential private donation, if they were interested. "I had one of my former colleagues at the CDC contact me," she said with an embarrassed little laugh. "I don't recall having told anyone about your interest in a sperm donor. It would've been a horrible ethical lapse on my part, but all the same, he was aware that I was working with a couple looking for a donor." Her voice took on a wondering, curious note. "He said he had no desire to raise a child, until now he hadn't had any interest in fathering a child, but he wanted to be considered. He's provided me all the typical information required of a donor plus more besides. I can forward it to you."
Vanessa was no spring chicken, although still young enough, Helena wryly conceded, to be her granddaughter, make that great-granddaughter. A "former colleague" could mean an infectious disease specialist or microbiologist on emeritus status. Not bloody likely that she would let the spermatozoa of a 65-year-old man try to fertilize the egg of a 43-year-old woman, no matter how highly Vanessa recommended him. But for the first time since she had been reviewing donor profiles, Helena could see a glimmer of interest in Myka's eyes, which failed to reassure her. "Darling, we have plenty of candidates as it is," she whispered.
It had been a loud whisper, which was the only reason Helena decided much, much later that could explain why Vanessa knew it was time to volunteer her opinion. "You'll make the decision, obviously, but I know this man very well, and he would be a wonderful choice. He's also not 100 years old, Helena, if that's what you're afraid of. As you'll see in the packet of information, he's in his mid-30s, and I won't go into detail, but in every category you can think of, he's truly at the top." She hesitated before adding, "I don't know how heavily you'll weigh this, but his father's English, his mother French. Very close to your own heritage, Helena."
"Next thing you'll tell me," Helena sniffed, "is that his last name is Wells."
Vanessa had simply laughed and promised to send an e-mail with all the information in the morning. But Helena, having planted the seed in her own mind, could only watch it grow, waking up early the next morning, earlier even than Myka, and, hunched in her bathrobe (the temperature outside was a frosty -10, inside it didn't feel that much warmer), mused over a cup of tea how exceedingly strange it was that one of Vanessa's associates, wanting to father their child and no other, apparently, should have emerged from the welter of procreative anxieties, competitive impulses, financial need, and, yes, altruism that had seemingly motivated the other candidates (after all, what leads a man to leave behind him possibly dozens of children?). It smacked of the Warehouse, and Helena called Vanessa at her and Artie's home even though it was just past 7:00 in Atlanta. Yet not only was Vanessa awake, she wasn't surprised to discover who her caller was.
"I'm just thankful you didn't call me at 4:00 in the morning," she said, sounding unshakably good-humored.
"Did Irene have anything to do with this paragon of masculinity offering his services? You don't have lapses, Vanessa, ethical or otherwise, and while I am ready to believe that he recently found himself convinced that it was his duty to help bring our child into the world, someone had to put him in the vicinity of an artefact or magically appear in his bedroom and whisper it in his ear."
Muted clanking, a coffee carafe being put under a faucet, and muted growls, Artie padding around in the kitchen, accompanied Vanessa's next words. "I doubt Irene had anything to do with it, and while I don't know how he divined that you and Myka were looking for a donor or why he decided to throw his hat in the ring, so to speak, I'm going to look at it as a marvelous coincidence, something truly serendipitous. You should do the same, Helena. Read his information before you rush to judgment."
"Nothing serendipitous can come from the Warehouse," Helena said darkly, "calamitous, yes, serendipitous, no."
Vanessa giggled, actually giggled. "Helena, what the Warehouse gained in you, the theater lost." A murmured aside to Artie, then she was speaking into the phone. "The Warehouse brought you and Myka together, and, when you failed to get it right the first time, it brought you together again ten years later. How is that not serendipitous?"
Some half-an-hour later as she was scrolling through their potential donor's information, Myka nipping her ears and lightly sucking at the pulse points in her neck, Helena conceded that Vanessa might, might have a point. It wasn't that she was finally with the woman whom she had pushed away for so long and who, right at the moment, was doing her best to distract her, it was that the information she was trying to focus on was impressive, he was impressive. "Did you note the Ph.D. at 23? The second at 27?" Myka punctuated her emphasis of the achievements by pushing Helena's bathrobe off her shoulder and kissing the line of her collarbone.
"It doesn't prove that he's smart, it proves that he knows what answers to give." Helena tried to ignore the kisses by leaning forward and peering more intently at the screen.
"Okay, so he's cunning and clever. I'll take it." Undeterred, Myka lifted the hair from the back of Helena's neck and let her breath dance across Helena's skin. "He has patents, Helena. He tinkers."
"I'm sure he writes classics of science fiction in his spare time. Maybe if we dig hard enough, we can scrounge up a murder -"
Myka spun the office chair around, forcing Helena to face her. "Stop it," she said firmly. "I want a child with you, Helena, because I can't get enough of you." She brusquely, almost roughly kissed her. "I want to see your joy and your curiosity and even your impatience multiplied. If we could, I would have your child, but we can't, and of the profiles I've viewed so far, he comes the closest to you. He's our donor." She looked stern, her jaw at its 'don't mess with me' angle, but a goofily broad smile was breaking over her face, as if the prospect of raising a child with a multiple murderer was exactly what she had dreamed of as a girl. Helena knew better than to say anything more on the subject and adopted the faux querulous tone she used when she wanted to direct Myka's vexation toward something new. "Doesn't the timing, his knowing strike you as odd? I've told you that Irene already has designs on Drew. Perhaps this is all at her instigation because she's hoping to breed some super agent, and you're her test tube."
"Can't deny that you're a force to be reckoned with in that ratty bathrobe and wearing those reading glasses." The goofiness of her smile was diminishing and a certain welcome lasciviousness was taking its place. Helena removed her glasses as, with more determination than grace, Myka straddled her in the chair. "All this talk about baby making has me wanting to make a baby."
"Except that's not what we'll be making," Helena chided, but not before her hand started exploring underneath Myka's bunched sleep shirt.
"Our daughter won't figure that out for years," Myka said, beginning to rock herself gently against Helena's hips. "Drew's with his father, I don't have an artefact call until noon, and you set your own hours. We have all morning to show each other a world of wonder," she said, hiccupping a little at her own silliness.
"And yet no one had managed to snap you up when I came back to town. How could that be?" Helena drawled, her hand moving up, swift but gentle, as Myka's hips lifted. A sharply drawn in breath told Helena that her hand had found its destination.
That was then, before, as Myka predicted, their donor's sperm, having barely penetrated the examination room ably penetrated her egg; before the morning sickness and the fatigue and the revulsion that took the place of cravings ("Get that thing out of here," Myka had panted, practically dry-heaving at the sight of Helena eating a slice of cheese); before their mad rushing around Thanksgiving week, the parental Berings and Drew in tow, to obtain a marriage license and then find a judge, miraculously, on Black Friday to marry them because Myka had wailed that she couldn't bring herself to have a child out of wedlock; before the midnight feedings and Ellis's nocturnal alertness ("Does he have to be so much like you?" Myka had demanded, accidentally knocking the baby monitor from her nightstand as she went to attend to him); before their middle of the night fumblings with each other because sex at 3:00 in the morning was better than no sex at all.
This was now, Ellis gurgling over another ball he had found, Myka coming out onto the patio, and, after a kiss that found Helena's ear rather than her cheek, scooping up their son and tickling his belly until he erupted into shrieks that weren't unlike the ones she tried to muffle when Myka did the same to her, Helena had to admit. After placing the squirming Ellis back on the grass, where he promptly clutched the ball to him once more, Myka pulled a lounge chair closer to Helena and sank into it with an appreciative sigh.
"Those must have been quite the 'errands.' You're home just in time to pick up Drew from school." If Myka heard the ironic inflection, she didn't let on, and Helena resolved to be good. She wouldn't niggle at Myka about preparations for a party the existence of which she was supposed to be blissfully unaware.
Myka reached for Helena's iced tea and took a long swallow. "I thought I might let you do that. Wouldn't want you to start feeling housebound," she said mildly, but the eyebrow she raised was in an impish mood.
"I'm working," Helena offered innocently.
"I can see that." Myka tilted her head toward Ellis, who had dropped the ball in favor of chewing a piece of grass. "He's not building anything with the blocks yet, is he? Just keeps on knocking them down?"
Helena refused to rise to the bait. Myka still burst into laughter whenever she brought the chess blanket that she had made, at the cost of several days' labor and two sewing machines, and sat Ellis on it with a variety of toys. She would sit on it with him and move toys to the squares corresponding to the appropriate attack or countermeasure, watching to see whether the eyes tracking her movements would begin to see a pattern. So far Ellis recognized his mother's crawling around on the blanket as nothing more than an invitation to roam across the squares and fling the toys out of his way. That was all right, as was his other mother's laughter. She was, aptly enough, playing the long game, and the repetition would tell eventually. He was a Wells, after all.
This was also now, waiting in a line of cars idling at the curb for her other child to shamble to hers, shrug off his backpack on the back seat, and then collapse on the front seat next to her. "Better get a second wind," Helena advised Drew. "You can't be a laggard at soccer practice."
He frowned at the unfamiliar word, then brightened. "You mean 'slacker.'"
"Good. You did that without a dictionary."
"I'm learning." He grinned.
She took in the length of his hair with a critical eye. He needed to get it cut; they would be visiting a barber tomorrow morning among other things. On the weekends he wasn't with Pete, the two of them usually spent Saturday mornings together, more by unspoken, common consent than by arrangement consecrated by a colored block in one of Myka's many planners. Lately they had been spending their mornings together on the land she had bought after Myka had acknowledged, hemmed in by piles of baby clothes and accessories in the office-turned-nursery that possibly they did need to think bigger than remodeling a few rooms. Helena had long since sold her loft in Brooklyn and the expensive off-white furniture in it for an absurd amount of money, and she had used a portion of it to buy several acres farther to the north and west than where they currently lived. They could build on it a house with a far more ambitious floorplan than Myka's, bedrooms that were used for bedrooms and offices that were used for offices, yet all of it remaining on one level ("Because how much longer are your 149-year-old knees going to be able to handle stairs, Helena?"). There would be more than enough land for her workshop, located at a distance far enough away that any explosion turning it to rubble would leave the house intact. They wouldn't start building the house until next spring, but the workshop, which had to satisfy only her and not her budding architect stepson or her simultaneously indecisive and finicky wife, was almost done. In size and appearance closer to a hangar, it nestled between two of the rises that gave their property a pitch and roll that reminded Helena of the sea and had Myka muttering about the cost of having the grass mown. The workshop would be nearly invisible from the county highway that bordered the property as well as from the house, which had been one of Myka's conditions: "If I can't see it, I won't be worrying about what you're doing in it." It wouldn't be true, of course, Helena knew, but she had decided to let Myka cling to that fiction as long as she could.
While he had been initially disappointed at the delay in having the custom-designed bedroom that Helena had promised him, Drew's enthusiasm for the new house and an even bigger and better bedroom had limited his complaints. He was less interested now in having a bedroom that looked like the Fortress of Solitude and more interested in one having "cool architectural features," which he designed and discarded on an almost daily basis. He loved visiting the property with her, surveying the site on which the house would be built and imagining how it would look. They would walk over to the workshop and spend some time wandering around its cavernous interior, Drew excitedly asking her what she was going to create in it and Helena no less excitedly planning experiments in her mind but trying outwardly, at least, to appear the adult, indulging Drew's visions of boy-sized hovercraft and "rocket shoes" and robots that would clean his room while reining in his wilder dreams of manning a special ship that she would build for him to fly to Mars and beyond.
"I'm fairly certain your mother wouldn't approve of you joyriding through the solar system, especially on a rocket of my design. My last effort didn't fare too well."
"Bet Dad would let me." He was running down the long concrete slab, vanquishing imaginary aliens . . . from Mars, he told her, and she smiled, not entirely ironically, at the conceit.
"If you're going to play your parents off one another, you need to think more strategically, Drew. Come talk to me about it when you're sixteen and you want your own car. That is, if your generation still wants to drive by the time it turns sixteen."
He ran back to her and smiled at her slyly. "Mom says that when it comes time for me to learn how to drive, I'm not supposed to let you teach me."
"And yet she lets you ride in a car with me. Such a conundrum, your mother." Well, not so much, since the Range Rover did have all the extra safety features that she had had installed at Myka's insistence. "You're also not supposed to go into this workshop once it's finished. She's already given me a stern lecture about it. Has she done the same with you?"
He nodded. "That's just one more thing we won't tell her."
He had been looking forward to a little sister. His father had assured him that sisters were the best; a brother, after all, was just another boy. A sister had the best qualities of a brother - loyalty, a spirit of adventure - but she could make cookies, too. Not that a brother couldn't make cookies, of course, but really, look at his own hands, those grimy paws, and imagine them wrist-deep in cookie dough. Would he want to eat cookies made by a brother instead of a sister? But Helena suspected that the culinary talents of their daughter - and the odds that she would be any more skillful than her mothers weren't high, surely he realized that - weren't the source of his preference. He hadn't only talked to Pete, or Steve, or his friends about what it would be like to have a sister. He had asked her countless questions about Christina, what she had liked to do, what her favorite subjects in school had been. She hadn't hesitated to tell him everything she remembered about her. Reliving her death and all that had followed after hadn't set Helena free, far from it, but in reclaiming her grief, she had also reclaimed an unalloyed joy in her daughter. The good memories, and there were so, so many of them, she could share them now without feeling she was about to remember one too many, that one unwary recollection would return her to the summer she had left Christina in Paris. Sometimes the memories did lead her back to the morgue and the small, sparsely attended funeral under the hot August sun, but she knew that the sorrow and the guilt would pass. She was strong enough to bear the burden.
He had expected to see Christina's face when Myka had pushed back the edges of the blanket, and his excitement immediately faded when his mother said, "Say hello to your little brother, Drew." His disappointment eventually moderated to tolerance but little more than that, and although he dutifully helped the both of them with Ellis when asked, he accepted every sleepover invitation he received and asked to spend extra days with Pete. Myka thought he was feeling neglected, and she ensured that she and Drew spent time together, just the two of them. It seemed to help for a while, but then the pattern of avoiding Ellis resumed, and Myka frowned and brooded until she came into the family room one Saturday morning in March, and Helena, sitting with Ellis in front of the TV, which was showing a video of a concert pianist demonstrating his technique as he played a Chopin polonaise, looked up to see a smile of triumph on Myka's face.
"Why don't I watch Ellis while you take Drew and Shep out to the park? Shep could do with a good run." Technically, it was an interrogative, but Helena heard the command. Myka had her head bent at an odd angle, and Helena traced its line to the spot on the floor where Drew sprawled glumly with his dog.
Later, as she and Drew stood shivering in a city park as Shep gamboled and chased squirrels, Helena observed to him, "I haven't thoroughly demolished you in a video game lately. We need to rectify that."
"I don't want to cut into Ellis's TV time." He looked up at the lowering clouds, which finally were living up to their promise of snow. Flakes were dusting his hair, which had become even more wavy of late. His resemblance to Myka was growing stronger in other ways as well; his jaw, for instance, had just now taken on a stubborn jut that was unmistakably hers.
"I have to get my influence in early, before your mother enrolls him in baby soccer or Social Skills for Infants 101." It was a poor joke, but he gave her Myka's crooked smile, the one that Helena had always understood to mean, 'You've missed the mark, but at least you're trying.' They watched in silence as Shep harried a squirrel up a tree.
"This afternoon, if it's still snowing out and there's nothing else to do, I could maybe put on the racing video game." Drew offered it with a very casual shrug.
"I would like that, if, of course, you don't have other things to do," Helena said, making clear her concession to the universe of activities that would take precedence over his playing a game with her.
However, none of those activities materialized, and though the snow hadn't lasted long enough to prevent Drew from making plans with his friends, instead of calling them he retrieved the game consoles from a shelf under the TV. He beat her three games out of five, and, after he had gone to bed and Helena and Myka lay quietly talking, the middle of the night no longer measured by hours but by the intervals between Ellis's fussing, Myka said, "Did you see him play with Ellis tonight? Drew just needed some reassurance that your relationship hasn't changed."
Helena chuckled, albeit wryly. "I was trying to see to it that he had extra time with you. I didn't think he would notice."
"You always underestimate how much others care about you, Helena."
It was easy to think that way if you had had a habit of vanishing from the lives of the people who held you dear, Helena reflected.
There would be no more vanishing. She and Drew tacitly carved out time that was their time, when he could be the sole focus of her attention and she, in turn, could indulge in decidedly childlike fantasizing about spaceships and cities built under the sea. More like Jules Verne, in many respects, than H.G. Wells, but she didn't dwell on the resemblance. Today, this afternoon, picking him up from school and then taking him to soccer practice, was not their time together, and while Helena considered herself so rooted in their lives, Myka's, Drew's, and Ellis's, that they would need to blast her out if they wanted to be shut of her, based on the look Drew gave her as she drove him to a practice he didn't want to attend, he would be happy to light the fuse.
"I'll be there at 5:30 to bring you home," she reminded him.
"You're always there," he groused.
She only smiled.
The party began at 3:00 the following afternoon, and Helena had to concede that together Drew and Myka had devised a successful plan to keep her away from the house until after 3:00. Despite her best attempts to dawdle over her tea and enjoy a leisurely shower, Myka had her, Drew, and the dog in the Range Rover by 9:00 a.m. In addition to getting Drew's hair cut and visiting, as usual on a Saturday morning, their new property and fantasizing about their new home, Myka had, unsurprisingly, drawn up a list of things she wanted Helena to purchase or address or address by purchasing. To cross them all off the list, Helena calculated that she had been forced to cover every square foot of Rapid City. Ellis, for example, just happened to be out of organic puréed bananas, and not just any organic puréed bananas but a brand that was found only in the downtown food co-op. Drew, on the other hand, needed to practice his footwork, and the best place for that was the soccer fields where he could move the ball up and down between the goals, but they, naturally, were across town. Helena could have tried to reorder the list, but Myka was diabolical enough to have predicted such a strategy and had designed a to-do list that would involve backtracking no matter how Helena reordered it. Helena gazed at the list in mingled frustration and admiration. Bloody woman, she couldn't love her more if she tried.
They returned a little after 3:00, Drew fidgeting on the seat, excited not only at the prospect of a birthday party, even if it wasn't his own but also at the grander scheme, of which Myka had undoubtedly assured him he was an integral part, to keep it a surprise. Shep, infected by Drew's restlessness, was whining and jumping off and on the backseat by the time Helena turned into the driveway. The empty driveway, had Myka bused everyone in? As Drew uncharacteristically hung back, grabbing at Shep's collar to prevent him from bounding ahead, Helena fixed a smile on her face and opened the door into the house, singing out, "We're back. Do you want to help me unload the Rover? We have Ellis's puréed bananas and the paper towels on sale at Target. I also went to Macy's and bought Drew jeans that fit him -"
There really were people springing up in the family room and coming out from behind the kitchen island shouting "Happy Birthday" at her, and it was just as hokey as any surprise party she had seen on TV, with balloons bumping against the ceiling and a glittered Happy Birthday cut-out taped to the edge of the island and, in the middle of the island, a large sheet cake quilled with birthday candles. Everyone was singing "Happy Birthday," loudly and off-key: Pete and Cindy, Claudia, Steve, Artie and Vanessa, the younger agents Jacqui, Travis, Ernie, and Megan, and, from Drew's school, Heather and Casey and Colton, and the other parents who had become friends. Not a crowd but enough to fill the kitchen and spill out onto the patio, where, on tables with spotlessly white tablecloths that could have come only from the caterers and not their overworked washer and dryer in the basement, were chafing dishes with all the party foods that Myka had wisely decided not to make. Not a bad showing for a woman who had already outlived one set of family and friends.
Although Myka protested that the invitations had explicitly said no gifts, there was the usual assortment of gag gifts for a 50th birthday, jars of baby food (alas, no puréed bananas among them) and boxes of diapers, walkers and bottles of multivitamins. There were the usual jokes as well, although the ones from the Warehouse agents were more barbed; Ernie suggested that, like the Gettysburg Address, the closest thing she had to a contemporary, she should be preserved under glass. He scurried away after receiving her death stare. Turning a friendlier face to their other guests, Helena made sure she thanked everyone for coming, noticing with an amused smile that Ellis was attracting the most attention, cooed over by virtually all of the women and not a few of the men. He enjoyed it so long as Myka was in view, but whenever she disappeared from sight, he squeezed his face closed like a fist and began to whimper, causing, first, Vanessa to give him to Helena and, later, Pete. Letting her son gnaw the shoulder of her blouse for solace, she picked from the plate Pete had filled for her. He picked at it, too, earning him a Myka-like slap on his arm from Cindy before she left him to talk to Heather and Casey.
"You're happy," he announced, biting into a lightly fried chicken tender. There were several varieties of chicken tenders, the only protein other than tofu that Myka had allowed at the party, fried, grilled, marinated, barbecued, roasted, and Pete had piled the plate high with them. "It looks good on you. It would look better if you weren't a sleep-deprived parent of an infant and a ten-year old, but," he popped the remaining half of the tender into his mouth, "still not bad, considering you really should be looking like a White Walker from Game of Thrones. You know, all leathery with your skin peeling off and stuff." He shuddered, almost dropping the plate.
Snagging a chocolate-covered strawberry from the plate before it dropped to the patio, she replied, "You've always worn your idiocy well. Today's no exception."
He snickered and nodded in agreement, gingerly picking up a barbecued chicken tender. "I know, yet Cindy still loves me." His face struggled but eventually won the battle to assume a thoughtful expression. "Maybe I ought to do something about that."
The afternoon darkened into evening, and Myka, prepared for any event, walked the perimeter of the patio lighting patio lanterns. A number of their guests having already left and Ellis put in his crib for a nap, she gracelessly fell into a chair next to Helena, who, without turning away from Claudia and her enthusiasm about the "prosthetic glasses" they were planning to create for Artie, found her wife's hand and interlaced their fingers. "We can rebuild his visual field from the part of his retinas that are still functioning, but what worries me is the time lag . . . ."
Helena murmured under Claudia's thinking out loud, "Ellis is down, and Drew?"
"Heather and Casey are letting Colton stay over. They want to sleep in the treehouse," Myka said softly.
" . . . I mean, you know how frustrating it is when your phone keeps searching for a Wi-Fi connection? The processor has to be so frakking fast, H.G., or what's the use of doing this . . . ."
"It will get chilly later. They'll need something heavier than those sleeping bags," Helena fretted.
"It's been taken care of. You just have to be prepared to go out for doughnuts tomorrow morning."
"Doughnuts?" Helena exclaimed.
"H.G.," Claudia demanded, annoyed, "are you listening to me or are you in mom mode?"
"Both." Leaving her hand linked with Myka's, Helena leaned toward Claudia. "The human body is a power station, Claudia. We'll be tapping into his neural pathways. I'm more concerned about the complexity of the field we'll be recreating -"
"That's what I'm saying. The complexity will slow down the process -"
"Claudia," Helena said sternly, "what have I said is a scientist's greatest attribute?"
"Persistence," she answered sourly.
"And what is her constant companion?"
"Failure," she said even more sourly. "Persistence through failure," she singsonged. "I'm not Ellis."
"Sadly, no," Helena mock-sighed, "he has all the persistence in the world and he whimpers less. Buck up, Claudia, we have a gloriously long string of failures ahead of us." Twisting around so she could lean toward Myka, she said, "You recall, do you not, that I bought doughnuts a mere two weeks ago when Drew also had friends staying over? What's happened to the woman who, if only for public consumption, maintains that sugar is to the human body as global warming is to the planet?"
"She had a baby in her 40s, that's what happened to her." Myka yawned and rested her head on Helena's shoulder. "I'm so tired, babe. Take Drew and Colton with you, but make sure they don't fill the box with sticky buns and cinnamon rolls. Leave room for a couple of plain cake doughnuts."
"Because the plain cake ones are healthier than sticky buns or cinnamon rolls," Helena said dryly.
"Uh huh," Myka mumbled, working her head into the crook of Helena's neck.
It wasn't even 9:00 when the last of their guests left, although Helena felt that she was swaying on her feet. Pete, Cindy, Steve, and Claudia had washed the dishes, including the chafing dishes, and put away the leftover appetizers and cake. The clean chafing dishes and the no-longer-so-spotless tablecloths were waiting for the caterers to pick them up; the gag gifts were also stacked on the table pending their final disposition. Myka was with Ellis in the nursery, and Helena, as her part of their nightly ritual, let Shep out into the yard. He deftly avoided Ellis's "learning center" on his way to a far corner where he briefly squatted before galloping to the tree that housed Drew's pirate ship. Helena had followed him at a much slower pace, and she heard his happy bark as he ran up the stairs to join the boys. Stopping at the bottom of the stairs, she called up to the treehouse, "How are you doing up there? Do you need anything?"
"We're okay," Drew shouted back.
"Your mom is sending us out for doughnuts tomorrow morning, so don't load up on that Crunchberry cereal or whatever it's called."
"You know what it's called. You just don't like saying 'Cap'n,'" Drew accused her, knowing her too well. "Is Mom okay? She's letting us have a lot of doughnuts lately."
"We'll keep an eye on her. If she says you can have pizza for breakfast, we'll take her to an urgent care."
He giggled, his voice still light and clear, a child's voice, and she felt a premature pang at the realization that the days he would remain a child were steadily becoming fewer. He would turn eleven in October. She stood for a while longer next to the stairs, listening to Drew and Colton cheerfully insult each other as they played a video game (the treehouse lacking no electronic device, power source, or Internet connection that she and Claudia could, working together, provide). She started her walk back to the house only to see one of the shadows crisscrossing the year detach itself from the others and move to intercept her path. For a moment she thought it was Myka out to discover what was taking her so long, but Myka wouldn't be wearing a skirt suit at home; in fact, Myka never wore a skirt suit.
"Come to wish me Happy Birthday, have you? You have through Wednesday of next week. We were celebrating it early."
"I needed to find where I had put your present," Irene said. "I'm old and forgetful."
"The former, yes, the latter, no," Helena scoffed.
"Not so true anymore," Irene countered with no noticeable regret. "Claudia's continuing to grow into her role as caretaker and as she does, my powers diminish. There will be a day, not far off, when the transition will end."
Helena had put on a sweater before she left the house, but Irene's words seemed to have stirred up an even cooler breeze, and she hugged her chest tightly. Before she had returned to the Warehouse, to Myka, she thought she would welcome her passage from a world that was never quite familiar enough, but she no longer felt ready to leave. This world would always be foreign to her on some level, but it held her wife and her children and they, in turn, held her. It was by far the sweetest of the various imprisonments she had endured. "Promises, promises, Irene," she said flippantly.
Irene chuckled. "I didn't bother to wrap it. I know you're the kind who simply rips the paper off." She handed Helena the gift.
It was a book, slim and leather bound by the feel of it, and though it was too dark to read the title, Helena could trace the outline of the letters on the cover. "H.G. Wells," she said quietly. "What's this?"
"A chapbook. That's how your brother described it when he gave it to me." Irene paused, waiting for Helena to erupt, but Helena said nothing, her fingers going over and over the letters. "I met him during the war. He was old and in ill-health and not convinced that darkness wouldn't prevail. How he knew that I was in London, how he knew to find me, how he knew that I would recognize your name, I never learned. He said that he hoped you might still be alive, that you had achieved some measure of happiness, but that if you were no longer among the living, you might have left behind a child or children who would appreciate it." Helena felt Irene's hand, surprisingly warm, on top of her own. "I always believed you would find it too much, so I didn't tell you about the book or his visit. I don't think you'll find it the burden you would have in the past."
"What's in it?" Helena asked hoarsely.
"I don't know," Irene said. "It wasn't my story to read. It's yours." Helena didn't see Irene's smile very clearly, but she felt its sadness. "Sometimes I think the greatest gift we can receive is to know that we'll be remembered. He remembered, Helena."
She had been going to ask Irene where she had met Charles, what he had been wearing, whether he had stayed long enough to have a cup of tea (he had always enjoyed a good conversation over tea). She wanted to be able to see the tobacco flakes on his vest, the watch chain he invariably failed to polish; she wanted to see the drape of the blackout curtains over the windows (if there had been windows) and hear the whine of the planes defending London overhead. She wanted to imprint all of it on her mind as though it had been her memory to recall and not Irene's. She opened her mouth to ask one of those questions or maybe just to plead "Tell me" when she realized that Irene was gone.
Helena saw him then, Charles, as she sometimes saw Christina and, with lesser frequency, Lebecque, as if her past were a room she had left to attend to something else and which would remain undisturbed until she chose to enter it again, the decades she had been away no more than minutes. He was finishing one of their books, an early one, and he was waving the last page at her, the ink not even dry. "This is our immortality, Helena, not these silly inventions of yours. When the grappler has been surpassed by something equally as clever and of greater utility, people will still be reading our stories."
Myka was in their bedroom, waiting for her. Ellis was with her on the bed, on his back, burbling as he tried to fit a onesie-covered foot into his mouth. "He wouldn't settle down," she said apologetically. "I thought he might relax and go to sleep faster if he was with us." She looked readier for sleep than he was, yawning as she pointed at the book. "I don't remember seeing that gift."
Helena stifled a laugh that she was certain would have had more hysteria than humor in it. She kicked off her shoes and stretched out beside them. "Irene gave it to me a few minutes ago." Myka merely nodded because, of course, it was what Irene did, suddenly appear. "It's from my brother." Then Helena did laugh, and it didn't have the wild, wavering note in it she had feared. It sounded warm and fond and faintly incredulous, as if Charles, embarrassed at being so late to her party, had set it outside their door and crept away before he could be discovered. "She's been keeping it for the past, oh, 75 years or so."
"Maybe you ought to read from it. You know how I can't resist H.G. Wells." Myka had adopted a teasing tone, but her eyes were serious and she was stroking Helena's hair. Ellis had stopped working his foot into his mouth and was blinking owlishly at her, expecting a story too.
Clearing her throat and wishing she knew where she had left her reading glasses, Helena flipped to the first page, marveling at how new the book looked and felt, the leather soft and the pages still white and crisp. "An author, especially one of some renown, will often refer to the name by which he is known to the world as the mask behind which he hides, small and ordinary by comparison. In my case, H.G. Wells isn't a mask, he's a figure, a character for the stage, created whole from the imagination of two people, one being the very unremarkable man writing these words and the other being one of the most beautiful, brilliant, and ultimately tragic souls I have ever known. Without her, there would have been no H.G. Wells, only a scribbler of adventure stories, easily consumed and as easily forgotten." Helena stopped, unsure whether she could go on until she felt a slight push, although neither Myka nor Ellis had moved. Ellis, in fact, was already asleep, eyelashes as black and delicate as the minute strokes of a pen fanning the skin beneath his eyes. She felt her shoulder prodded again, much as Charles would poke at her when he was impatient for her opinion on something he had written. She had best get on with it then. "She was born Helena Augusta Wells on September 21, 1866 . . . ."
END