A DAUGHTER'S LOVE

CHAPTER EIGHT - THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE

If there was one thing that Becky hadn't tried and she figured most high school students of this era had, it was coming to school with a hangover from drinking far too much the day before. From the moment that she'd dragged herself out of bed the morning, after getting a bit too tipsy the evening before and practically stumbled into the shower, if she could have had one wish fulfilled, it would have been to have skipped those Vodka shots and only stuck to drinking beer. But hey, you live, and you learn and seeing as she was still pretty much a rookie in the alcohol drinking department, she could chuck this down as an experience that she had to learn from and not do it again. And if she did, then at least not on a school night.

Her memories of the events of the past evening were slightly foggy as well, although she could vividly remember that her father almost had what you could call a drunken breakdown over the horrible misery of his romantic life. Which wasn't any wonder, when you consider that the girl that he was still truly in love with and had allowed to slip through his fingers, was solidly pressed down under the thumb of a violent psychopath. Not to mention that his so-called girlfriend was obviously only staying with him out of convenience and little else, something that was only adding to the pile up of misery for the poor boy. "It's no wonder that he feels like he has to put on such a ridiculous macho act, if he's constantly feeling that miserable inside", she thought to herself many times that morning and it made her want to confront Laura head on, to let her know face to face what her devious and cheating ways were doing to him. Even if Laura had more than enough reasons to be miserable too, Becky (as the true to the bones daddy's girl that she was) would always be on her dad's side, no matter what, and what Laura was doing to him wasn't just terrible from an ethical standpoint, it was downright killing him slowly. Had it been herself, then Becky surely would have found it hard to live with herself, let alone to look at herself in the mirror.

One girl that she'd figured would be sure to cheer her up was Audrey, who was as excited as could be to tell her all about her date with James. Although, they were more than a little bit of an odd couple on the surface, according to her they'd had a splendid time at the movies, and she was clearly holding up hope that their second date wouldn't lie too far into the future. Was this just Audrey imagining something because she wanted to believe it, however? Knowing her like Becky did already, it wasn't hard to imagine at all, but in any case, it had given Ben Horne's sole daughter a well-deserved evening's worth of escaping from her somewhat depressing life. There was definitely something to be said for that, regardless of how the immediate future would turn out for her.

As it played out, Becky wouldn't have to confront Laura about Bobby, seeing as Laura wasn't about to wait with confronting herself, on the first chance that she got to after she'd been sure to check that no one was in the girl's room with them.

"Did you do it with my boyfriend last night?" Laura accused her with an unmistakable scowl to match her rather poignant question.

"Do you really think so little of me, Laura?" she asked Laura back to try to diffuse situation, if she at all could.

"Why then, did he out of nowhere turn up at our house this morning to break up with me? I heard that you two were seen getting drunk together down at "The Roadhouse" last night, so what exactly happened between you two?" Laura sternly asked her, sounding like she didn't have the slightest clue why her now former boyfriend had decided to grow a pair of balls, all of a sudden.

"What happened was that someone finally took the time to listen to him! Jesus, Laura! Can't you see what you're doing to him, you selfish bitch?" Becky fired back, clearly to Laura's surprise.

"I'm a selfish bitch? You don't know the first thing about me, Becky!" Laura practically shouted back at her.

"I know that the only reason why you do things like the meals on wheels deliveries and play visiting friend to a brain-damaged guy, is to make yourself feel better over what you've turned into" Becky replied, now defiantly staring her adversary square in the eyes.

"And what's that?" Laura asked her, even though she must have known the answer deep down.

"A girl, who hates herself so much that the only way to relieve her pain is to make those that care about her feel almost as bad, as she does. But they never do, do they, Laura?" she stubbornly answered Laura, who for once was entirely lost for words. "Is that why you get off on emotionally hurting your boyfriend, just so that he'll eventually fall even lower than you have?"

Apparently, hearing the truth spoken like this was too much to hear for Laura, seeing as she practically sprinted out of that girl's room moments later, looking like she was on the verge of a total meltdown if anyone was. Honestly, at that point, Becky wouldn't have been surprised if Laura had never spoken a word to her again, which would have made her mission to save the same girl that she'd just told off in the most brutally honest way possible. close to being impossible. Still, at the same time she'd felt like it needed to be said, although she also had to concede that it could and perhaps should have been done in a far less accusing and much more of a supportive way.

If you'd told her then that it wouldn't be more than a few hours later before Laura had asked for a private conversation with her, she probably wouldn't have believed you. Nevertheless, this was exactly what had happened.

"I'm sorry that I accused you of sleeping with Bobby. He can be an immature jerk sometimes, but I know that he wouldn't dream of sleeping around on me with anyone, except for perhaps Shelly. I just keep asking myself what suddenly made him man up like that, when he's usually such an easy push-over" Laura confessed to her, again out in the girl's room, only it was now roughly three hours after the two girls had their small verbal bust-up earlier that day. As an added and unwanted bonus, she could also see tears beginning to form in Laura's eyes.

"I guess that I'm sorry for calling you a bitch earlier. It wasn't fair of me to judge you like that" Becky apologized, even if she wasn't sure that it came out all that sincere.

"All that you did was call a spade, a spade. Do you think that I want to live my life like this?" Laura sobbingly asked her, probably sounding far more earnest than Becky herself just had.

No matter what, she found herself taken aback by the way that Laura had just said what she said, and it only served to make her feel worse for having judged a book by it's cover, like she admittedly had.

"Why do you do it, then?" she asked the girl in front of her, who finally looked like she was prepared to spill some veritable beans to her.

"Do you think that you can handle hearing the whole truth and nothing but the truth?" Laura asked and although, Becky nodded back at her, she wasn't sure if she could. "The truth is that you were spot on about me. I hate myself, okay?"

"Why do you hate yourself, Laura? You have so many people in your life that love you and would do anything for you! We should all be so lucky!" she imploringly said to Laura, who looked like she was searching her brain for an answer, as much as she was fighting a tough fight not to have a complete nervous breakdown.

"None of them know the real me. How could they when I barely know who I am anymore? The only times that I've ever been able to be the good Laura that I've always wanted to be, is when I'm with James Hurley. Something about him brings out the best in me, I guess" Laura admitted, something that even came to Becky's surprise, in spite of her having already known (albeit only in broad details) what was going on between them.

"How long have you two ..."

"We haven't slept with one another yet, but I can't say that we haven't been building up to it. I still don't think that him and Audrey make any sense as a couple and it's because he belongs with me! There, I said it! I wish that I was her right now!"

"Then, tell him! Be honest about something for once in your life!" she implored Laura, who giggled nervously to herself at her suggestion.

"You really are still new around here, aren't you?" Laura semi-rhetorically asked her, prior to getting a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and lighting one up to calm her nerves. "I'm sure that there are high schools out there, where no one would think twice about it if the homecoming queen and a quiet outsider shack up, but it sure as hell isn't here. I can just imagine how my folks would react when I introduce them to my new boyfriend, who's a motorcycle riding and guitar playing hunk without any plans for his future, apart from getting the hell out of here! Anyway, he deserves to be with someone, who won't try to ruin his life like I almost did to Bobby, don't you think?" Laura reflectively asked her and took a deep drag of her cancer stick.

"Why can't it be you, Laura? Help me to understand!" she asked of Laura, who looked like she'd been hit with a wave of self-loathing, now that the floodgates had been opened wide.

"Because I'm broken, Becky. I'm broken and I don't think that there's any way to repair me anymore" Laura somberly told her, sounding as defeated as Becky herself must have, back when the drug addiction and her unhealthy dependence on her ex-husband Steven ran so deeply within her, that it felt like her only eventual salvation would come in the grave.

If she could do it though, then she was sure to her bones that Laura could do it too, and she sure as hell wasn't about to give up on her now. Especially not when she'd just been sent a clear-cut cry for help like this was.

After Laura's tearful confession, Becky made a solid decision to spend the rest of her day on cheering her up. This was something that she figured that her karma could use too, given that she was lying her butt off most of time and feeling guiltier over it by the day. In her younger days where the drugs had such a heavy stranglehold on her, she'd always had a simple reason for lying and it was the only reason that a true addict will ever need: To stop the withdrawals from getting too bad. She knew all too well from having felt how bad it could be at its worst on her own body that once you've crossed that line into full-out addiction, there is almost nothing that you won't do to feed your habit, including lying so much that you start believing in your own lies. Without that sickening catalyst to keep her going, she now felt guilty every time that she had to tell a lie, and there was no denying anymore that constantly living on a one was slowly eating her up inside.

Perhaps for this reason, it felt nice to get back to doing something that she loved doing back in her own time, this being delivering the meals on wheels dishes to the town's weakest souls with Laura, who'd had the same job as her years earlier. At its essence, the job was still the same, even if the great majority of the people that they delivered to wouldn't be the same as they'd been by the time that Becky would get hired, roughly twenty-seven years later. It was obvious too that Laura was a much-beloved girl among the recluses, handicapped people and elderly people, who made up the clientele on their route and she could remember all of them by their first name, something that Becky couldn't claim to be the best at.

One of the recluses on her route, a sweet and kind-hearted guy (according to Laura) with a bad case of agoraphobia named Harold, even seemed to have a somewhat of a crush on her, probably because she was one of, if not the only person that he spoke with regularly. More importantly, Laura had told her that she'd been careful not to appear like she looked down on him, in spite of his hidden illness that no one could see with the naked eye. In turn, Becky could only imagine how infinitely much it must have meant for a tortured soul like his to have a kindred spirit like Laura in his life.

Eventually, they reached the final stop on their route, an elderly lady named Mrs. Tremont and her young grandson, who lived with her. Laura had warned her in advance that the kid was more than a bit weird and that his grandmother seemed to be a bit senile, but Becky figured that she'd tried worse and as they walked up to the door, she was genuinely curious to see just how strange this kid could be. When they rolled their food trolley into the living room though, she was a bit shocked to see that it was a nearly bare room, with only a worn out couch, a coffee table and an armchair that the little boy (whom she figured was around nine or ten years old) was sitting on, as seemingly the only piece of furniture in there. The way that he stared at her too, gave her the willies and it made her want to get out of there as soon as possible.

"Hasn't anyone told you that it isn't polite to stare at people?" she couldn't help herself from asking the boy, who seemed generally unfazed by her question.

"Who are you?" the boy asked her, in an eerily monotone voice for someone his age.

"This is my friend Becky. She's helping me out today" Laura introduced Becky to this strange boy, who was looking at her like she was some sort of alien lifeform that he was intently studying to see what it did next.

"You're here, yet you're not supposed to be here. You don't belong here, do you?" the boy asked her without a hint of expression in his voice, while he kept staring intently at her.

"Have you met him before, Becky?" Laura asked her, now sounding more than a bit freaked out too.

"Not in this time" the boy answered for her before Becky could get an answer out. Not that she would have any idea what to reply at that moment, even if she'd been allowed to come up with some sort of lame excuse.

In any case, all that she could think of was to run out of the door in record time, while thoughts of how she was going to rationally explain her way out of this one filled her head.

"What did he mean when he said that you don't belong here, Becky?" Laura inquiringly asked her, sounding desperate to get some answers, after they'd met up again out in the delivery van.

"I don't know" was the best answer that she could come up with, albeit not exactly a great one.

"He said that you haven't met in this time. Is ... and I can't believe that I'm saying this. Is it possible that came here ... from the past or the future and you just don't remember it?" Laura asked her.

Perhaps it was the fact that she hadn't gotten nearly as far as she'd wanted to, when it came to getting closer to Laura's eventual killer (or kidnapper, whichever it was), or it could simply have been that she was getting sick and tired of lying her butt off all of the time. In that moment though, Becky made a snap decision to go for broke, the consequences be damned.

"2017, if you want to be exact about it" she told Laura, whose jaw literally dropped in what Becky had to admit was a pretty natural response.

"You're absolutely sure that you aren't some escaped mental patient, who's imagining all of this?" Laura finally asked her after a good couple of minutes to digest what she'd just been told.

"If I am, then why did that strange boy say what he did? I still haven't figured that part out yet!" Becky admitted, while Laura kept shaking her head in disbelief.

"Why are you here, then?" Laura asked her, still not sounding all that sure if she believed her own ears.

"To save you from being murdered. Or kidnapped, I'm still not sure yet. Maybe it would help if I took you to the spot, where they could potentially find you dead and wrapped in a sheet of plastic" Becky told Laura in her softest voice and even if it hadn't been her intention to, her words only served to freak out poor Laura even more than she already was. Not that you would have thought that it was possible.

No matter what, it filled Becky with a sense of inner peace to finally come clean to someone and if it had to be anyone, then Laura really was her only logical choice.

"Let me get this straight: You're Shelly and Bobby's daughter and if they don't have you, then this whole world ceases to exist. Did I get that correct?" Laura inquired on the short walk from the parking lot, down to where her body had washed up in a reality that now hopefully would never come to pass.

"More or less. An older version of you warned me in a vivid dream that I would completely cease to exist if it happened, which I guess means that I'll get erased from all of the other timelines too. The whole thing is severely confusing if I have to be honest and it's only bound to get worse, now that I'm telling you about what'll happen in the future. Or rather, what could happen. You know what I mean, don't you?" she asked Laura, who was looking as confused as Becky was feeling it.

"An older version of me? Didn't you say that I get murdered?" Laura logically asked.

"The way that I understood it, an alternate version of you was dragged out of one timeline by an FBI agent named Dale Cooper right before you were about to meet your doom. That version of you was then put into another timeline and she was the one that visited me in that dream, while the other version of you in the original timeline was still murdered. If this sounds like pure gibberish, then I was right there with you, but when you do a bit of hard thinking about it, it's the only explanation that makes any sense" she tried to explain to Laura, whose brain was clearly still trying to process it all. Not that Becky could blame her at all.

"Remind me to thank him, if I ever meet him! What if you change other things here in 1989? Won't this have a direct impact on the future too?" Laura brought up, like Becky could easily guess that anyone would in this most unlikely of situations.

"It has to, doesn't it? Anyway, I wouldn't start buying gifts for Cooper just yet, if I was you. Apparently, the two of you get stuck in some sort of limbo in between two timelines, from what I understood. The only way to get these future versions of the two of you out if it again, is to stop you from being murdered on February 24th" she continued to explain to Laura, as the pair of girls made it down to the riverbed where Pete Martell, on his way out on a fishing trip and in another timeline, would find Laura's corpse only twenty-two days from then.

"Does the name "Bob" mean anything to you?" she thought to ask Laura, as they stood and stared out at the picturesque scenery that Twin Peaks and the surrounding area was ever so rich on.

"Should it?" Laura asked her back.

"The giant that first visited me in my dreams, told me that "Bob" will be the one that kills you. It doesn't ring a bell at all?"

"The only one that I've ever known, who's named Robert, is a friendly old widower on my meals on wheels route and he's far up into his nineties plus he's been stuck in a wheelchair since the late seventies, so I can't imagine that it could possibly be him. Can you tell me anything else about this guy, so that I'll know what to watch out for?"

"Not really, but now that I think about it, the giant said that "Bob" was dead and he couldn't use his influence in any dimension anymore. Work with me here for a minute. What if "Bob" has only ever existed in the "Other Reality", the one that I come from, but because a new reality was created when I arrived here after his death, he can't be the one that kills you anymore, seeing as he's never existed in the first place here?" Becky theorized to Laura, who was one big question mark, going by her facial expression. "I know, it's very "Meta", but can you come up with a better explanation?"

"I guess not. What's "Meta"?"

"This whole thing is! Do you want to add another layer of strangeness to this day, or is your head already full of everything that it can take for one day?"

"Try me" Laura softly said, before she turned her head and they looked one another in the eyes.

"My memories of what happened in my own time are changing too. I think that it could be the future that's realigning itself through my new set of memories, but I still have my old set of memories too, so I'm becoming less and less sure all of the time which is the correct set anymore" she tried to explain.

"But you still remember me as having been found dead, don't you?" Laura asked, now becoming serious again.

"Either dead or disappeared. Until I start to remember it differently, you're still ..."

"Toast" Laura finished Becky's train of thought for her and for the next minutes, the two of them shared in some deep-rooted reflection.

"Are you sure that this is a good idea?" she nervously asked Laura, as they pulled into the parking lot of the sheriff's station.

"You tell me. If he's as open-minded as you say that he is, I can't imagine anyone better for you to come clean to" Laura answered her, while parking Norma's delivery van in one of the (strangely enough) many vacant parking spots that they had available to them.

"You don't think that he'll immediately have me committed in a nuthouse?" Becky dark-humoredly said to make what she was about to do seem less scary to herself, although it wasn't an entirely unlikely prospect.

"The only thing that I can wrap my head around for the rest of this day is that I have to get Norma's van back to her, before she sends a search party out to look for both of us! Talk about one for the ages, huh?" Laura darkly joked in return and Becky could only agree with her wholly. "For once, I plan on letting the rest of the world be what it wants to be and staying cooped up in my room until my bedtime. You have no idea how creepy it is to know that someone will murder me in a little over three weeks, if we don't somehow manage to stop it. Honestly, it's enough to make you lose your mind!" Laura said and yet again that day, struggled not to start crying uncontrollably.

"We'll find a way. With Cooper and Truman's help, we can ..."

"I'm seventeen years old, Becky! I don't want to die!" Laura exasperatedly told her and if anyone was feeling her pain at that moment, it was the girl in passenger seat next to her.

Who, as she stepped up to the sheriff's station, had to take a deep breath of fresh mountain air for courage, before she stepped through the door to do what had to be done if she was going to save Laura's life.

END OF CHAPTER EIGHT