Impervious (City of Eldrich Book 1) (13 page)

Chapter 22

A
fter breakfast, Sid
and Wally were picked up by Gretchen, the city’s human resources coordinator.

“They’re making the rounds,” Russ told her. “Getting the gossip.”

“And spreading it?” Meaghan asked.

Russ merely smiled.

“So Gretchen’s a witch too? Are there any women in city hall besides me who aren’t?”

Russ shrugged. “A few. Annie down in the mayor’s office isn’t. It’s why Emily’s such a bitch on the political stuff. It’s the only place where she’s got any power. Magically, she’s totally outgunned. Unless she’s juicing and catches you one on one.”

“Like Natalie.”

Russ nodded. “Natalie’s pretty bad ass. Emily won’t get another shot at her. Not like that. Let’s hope you scared her enough so she behaves herself.”

Melanie offered to stay behind with Meaghan and organize Matthew’s journals and files. Meaghan accepted with an inward sigh of relief. She hadn’t realized how daunting she found the prospect of digging through the mess alone until Melanie offered to help.

There was something calming and grounding about Melanie. Sid and Wally were fun but exhausting after a while. It may not have been gender, but there was clearly something different about her.

Meaghan decided that she would continue to think of Melanie as “her” even if she was technically an “it.”

A world without gender—Meaghan couldn’t wrap her brain around it. And apparently the Troon couldn’t either. The gay vibe Sid and Wally gave out was definitely a
male
gay vibe. But Melanie—she reminded Meaghan powerfully of her mother.

Upstairs, Meaghan hurried to make the bed and jam the pile of clothes on the floor into the hamper. Melanie stood in the doorway as Meaghan tidied. When the room was somewhat presentable, Melanie walked to the table and sat on the chair not covered in paper.

“Where would you like to begin?” Melanie asked.

Meaghan surveyed the piles. “Um . . .”

“You’re handling this all rather well, you know,” Melanie said.

“No. I’m not. It’s been almost a week and look at this. I ripped a few boxes apart digging out stuff on Fahraya Monday night and then just left it.” Meaghan gestured at the paper-strewn carpet. “And I’m sorry I was so rude this morning. I . . . Russ set me straight. Like he always does.”

Melanie smiled up at her. “This is why you need to start at the beginning. You and Russ were still quite young when Matthew first learned of his ability. And then you left.” Melanie looked sad for a moment and then brightened. “I was there. Trust me. You’re doing remarkably well with the news.” She pointed at the other chair. “Please. Sit with me.”

Meaghan moved a pile of folders from the chair and sat.

“What do you remember from that time?” Melanie asked.

“Not much. Matthew was working all the time. We never saw him. When he was around, he was drunk or getting there. I don’t remember him and Mom fighting, but there was a lot of tension.”

“They would leave the house so you and Russ wouldn’t hear,” Melanie said. “You mother feared for his sanity.”

Meaghan remembered what her mother had told her in the dream. How she couldn’t accept what was going on. She nodded. “And then we left.”

“And then you left,” Melanie said. “Your mother did what she thought was best for you and Russ. Your father’s behavior was increasingly erratic and he was telling your mother things she was unable to accept.”

“So Matthew knew before we left about all . . . this?” Meaghan pointed toward the piles on the floor.

Melanie nodded. “And his response was to drive his family away and drink himself into mental collapse. At any time during this past week have you feared for your sanity?”

Meaghan, taken aback, took a moment to answer. “No. It never even occurred to me that I might be nuts. When the thing with Jamie was happening I didn’t have time. Then everyone kept wondering when I’d flip out. I wondered too.”

“Why then do you think you’ve avoided learning more since that day?”

Meaghan thought for a long moment. “I looked at a couple of things that first night. Some pictures of Jamie and his father I found. And after that, well, yeah, fear I suppose. But not for my sanity. I mean, I saw what I saw. And so did everyone around me. And I knew they were hiding something from me.” She smiled. “It was just a lot weirder than I could have imagined. So, the world isn’t what I thought it was. There’s no point in going crazy over that.”

Melanie reached across the table and took Meaghan’s hand. “Do you understand how rare that is?” Melanie’s small hand was warm, dry, and a bit scaly. “To accept what you see? To step out of your lifelong conception of reality into a new world as easily as you have?”

Meaghan squeezed Melanie’s hand. “God, you remind me of my mom.”

Melanie laughed. “I’m a blue-skinned, tusked hermaphrodite from another world.”

“Mom was a vegetarian. But we never held that against her.”

They both laughed.

“I think,” Meaghan said, when their laughter subsided, “what I’m afraid of is not being able to do the job. And . . .” She took a deep breath. This wasn’t easy to admit. “I’m so jealous of Jamie. I keep trying to remember that beat-up, traumatized kid in the photos I found, but I can’t forget all the happy family shots with Matthew. With my father.” She looked at her feet, ashamed. “Jamie got my dad at the same age that I lost him. That’s what I fear. All the bad memories that might be waiting in those boxes.”

“Or maybe,” Melanie said, “you’ll discover the world wasn’t what you thought it was.”

“Maybe,” Meaghan said. “Maybe.” She stood up, grabbed the first box in the line by the window seat, and set it on the table. “How do you want to do this?”

“Pull out the journals. Start at the beginning. You read while I start organizing the rest by topic.”

Meaghan nodded. She pulled out the notebooks. “Take the table. I’ll use the window seat.”

Meaghan moved to the window seat. She organized the journals by date, opened the earliest one, and started reading.

Chapter 23

M
eaghan read all
day. Russ brought up sandwiches around noon, and tea and snacks throughout the day. Melanie worked quietly at the table, organizing files and writing up an index.

After having to get up for the second time to fetch a tissue to blow her nose, Meaghan brought the box back from the bathroom with her. Every couple of pages, she read something that made her tear up.

Like the entry from October 20, 1980:

Back from Arizona. Meg wouldn’t see me or even talk to me on the phone. Liz won’t talk to me either. We had to do it all through her lawyer. But at this point I’ll take what I can get. I wish I could tell Meg and Russ about my life, about the reality of the world we live in. But after how Liz reacted, I know I can’t. Not
yet.

Russ was the only one happy I was there. He accepted all my bullshit without question, even if I could tell he didn’t believe it. But Liz only gave me an hour with him, and I could only see him with a court-appointed babysitter there to make sure I didn’t say or do anything crazy. So bullshit it had to
be.

Russ knows I’m hiding something. I don’t know what Meg suspects. She’s a smart girl, too smart for her own good in some ways, and sensitive. I do know she hates me. For good reason and I don’t know how to fix it, and if she hates me now, what’s it going to be like if she gets stuck with this whole mess? If the trait is genetic—I only hope I can find somebody else to take the job or I can somehow mend the distance between us enough so I have time to prepare her. Nobody should have to walk into something like this cold. If only I’d met Vivian sooner, if Lou had found me sooner, maybe I wouldn’t have scared my family
away.

Melanie had been right. The world of her childhood wasn’t what she thought it was. The names and details of the species Matthew had worked with were a jumble—she’d have to go back and do some indexing of her own, and she still hadn’t found anything about the war her mother and Natalie had mentioned. But what did come through, with aching clarity, was her father’s loneliness. With the exception of Vivian, Natalie’s mother, Matthew had, as he called it in his letter to Meaghan, “lone wolfed” it. While he grieved for his lost family.

No wonder he was so eager to step in and raise Jamie.

But that was still years away. The Matthew who wrote these early journals was barely sober, lonely, and full of self-loathing and regret. How had she never seen that in him? Because she refused to look, she realized. She buried her pain—her standard coping mechanism—and cut herself off from her childhood. She moved on. She’d have left Russ behind too, after Mom died, if he hadn’t fought to keep her from slipping away.

He’d done the same thing with Matthew. After Meaghan had given up on their father, Russ kept in touch by letter. Somehow, after Matthew’s visit, fourteen-year-old Russ had gotten himself a post office box and been clever enough to hide the letters from their mother. Russ hadn’t waited to restore contact until after Elizabeth died. There was nothing to restore because he’d never really lost contact in the first place.

Around four o’clock, she finished reading the journals from the seventies and early eighties, and decided she’d had enough for the day. Her head hurt and her eyes burned from all the crying.

But the fear was gone. Melanie was right. Meaghan was handling the shock of Monday remarkably well. For all her fear that she’d never measure up to her father, she realized now that she owned deep inside herself a clear-eyed strength that even he lacked. He had questioned things he’d experienced in a way Meaghan hadn’t. He struggled for years to let go of long-held beliefs despite being surrounded by evidence to the contrary.

Meaghan had yelled at her brother, cried a lot, and dog paddled in denial for a few days. The most self-destructive things she had done in the past week were drinking a few extra glasses of wine with dinner and watching too much bad TV.

She had always been pragmatic and unsentimental, but even she was surprised at the ease with which she’d fallen down the rabbit hole. Or maybe going through the looking glass was the better analogy. Everything—with a few striking size, color, and anatomical variances—looked about the same as it had before.

Some fantasy world.

“Melanie,” Meaghan said. “I’m tapped. No more reading for me today. Let’s go get a glass of wine. Or whatever you like to drink. You staying for dinner?”

Melanie set down her pen and surveyed the now tidy piles of paper surrounding her. “Wine is good. Bourbon is better. And dinner would be wonderful. Your brother is one of the best cooks in all the worlds.”

“You know you can’t live in Arizona as long as I did without developing a taste for good margaritas. What’s the Troon stance on tequila?”

“Olé,” Melanie said with a wink.

“Let’s see if Chef Russ has the ingredients.” Meaghan stood, stretching and yawning. “My brain hurts.”

She paused a moment, staring at Melanie. Meaghan was about to mix up a blender full of ‘ritas for a blue-skinned hermaphrodite from another dimension. Or was it a different planet? She wasn’t sure which. And it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. “I really am taking this well.”

Melanie nodded. “Yes. You are. Let’s see if Russ can make us some nachos to go with those drinks. And we need salt. I can’t abide a margarita without salt.”

Russ—assuming that Melanie would be joining them for dinner, along with Sid, Wally, and Natalie, who was their last gossip stop of the day—had already begun his dinner preparations.

“I also invited Jamie and Patrice and the kids if that’s okay. I thought we could do burgers on the grill. It’s really nice out there.” He gave Meaghan a cautious look. “You okay with so much company?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “Sounds fun. I could use some fun.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. “How did you get a post office box at fourteen?”

Russ laughed. “Crap. There goes another family secret.”

She stepped back. “Where’s Dad?”

Russ’s eyes widened in surprise. Meaghan always called their father by his first name. “On the front porch, I think.”

“I’ll go check on him, then I promised Melanie a genuine Arizona margarita if you’ve got the stuff.”

Russ nodded. “Might have to improvise a little, but it’s doable.”

“She wants nachos too,” Meaghan called over her shoulder as she walked down the hall.

On the porch, she found Matthew dozing in one of the wicker chairs. She sat on the settee and looked at him, really looked for once. A wave of tenderness broke over her and she felt her eyes fill again. He was so frail. But, she hoped, no longer alone. She couldn’t bear the thought that he still carried that loneliness within him.

Meaghan knew about lonely. She’d lived the last ten years there. It occurred to her, watching her father sleep, that the man who had written the journals she had just read had been several years younger than she was now.

Please, let him recognize me, she thought. After a few moments, his eyes fluttered open.

“Meg?” he said, still groggy. “Is that you? What are you doing here?”

She smiled. At last. “I live here. With you and Russ. I’m doing your old job.”

He looked cautious. “Which job is that?”

“City solicitor. And,” she added, hoping she wasn’t going to trigger any odd behavior, “the other job.”

Matthew’s eyes widened. “Russ?” he shouted. “Would you come out here?”

“I’ll get him,” she said, but Russ must have been waiting right inside the screen door because he was there before she could stand up.

“Russ, does Meg know about . . . you know?” He whispered the last two words.

“She knows, Dad. She saw Jamie change. She’s been reading your journals. I gave her the boxes of files you put together for her.”

“And she’s still here?” Matthew asked out of the side of his mouth.

“Yes, Daddy. I’m still here. No more secrets.”

Matthew sighed. “Well, that’s a goddamn relief. How long you been here?”

“Almost two weeks.”

“Where you been hiding?” he asked. “Or have I been . . . fuzzy?”

Russ reached down and squeezed his shoulder. “Fuzzy, Dad.” He gave Meaghan a meaningful glance, and then turned and went back into the house. This must be one of those almost lucid spells Russ had mentioned.

Matthew looked up at Meaghan and smiled. “So you live here? That’s great. Both my kids home at last.”

Meaghan leaned forward and took his hand. “Yes, Dad. Home at last.”

“Did Russ say you’d seen Jamie change? Did you see him fly? Helluva thing. You should see them when you’re their size.” He shook his head. “Fairies,” he spat. “People are so damn stupid. How they got fairies out of those brutal unwashed bastards is beyond me.”

“Jamie said the same thing.”

“He back to normal? Why’d he take the stone off?”

“Emily Proctor ripped it off his neck during our first meeting and ran down to her office with it. But I got it back and we got it on him. He’s fine now. He’s coming over for dinner.”

“The little shit’s a prince, you know,” Matthew said with a proud smile.

“I know, Dad,” Meaghan said.

Matthew yawned. “That was a good nap.” He stared at her, a furrow in his heavy brow. “I wish we had more time, but I’ll probably get fuzzy again. Don’t let that bitch Emily push you around. She scared of you?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Good girl. Keep her that way.” He yawned again. “Don’t think I’m done sleeping.” His eyes fluttered shut and then he opened them with effort. “Wake me up for dinner. Keep Vivian close. She’ll take good care of you like she took care of me.”

And he was asleep again. Meaghan wondered who he’d be when he woke up.