Empire Games Series, Book 1(42)

“Coffee first. Your room’s waiting for you: I left the bedding off to air, but it’s same as always. River’s in class but he’ll probably be home by six—”

“Gramps?”

“He’s out, as usual at this time of day. He volunteers at a Goodwill shop. Not Goodwill, a different charity, but you know what I mean.” Emily retreated toward the kitchen; Rita followed. She hadn’t seen her mom in three months. There was more gray in her hair, and her cheeks seemed to sag more than ninety days could account for. “Don’t worry, by the way, I’ve finished all my work today. I was thinking about cooking up a feast for tonight, seeing we’re a full family.” She smiled. “Want to help me shop for food?”

“Oh, Mom. Yes, but you don’t have to—”

“The hell I don’t! First you’re off to Seattle on that hand-to-mouth thing, then you disappear for a couple of days, and the next I hear is some horrible news—an attempted abduction? And we’re visited by a couple of men in black who tell us everything is going to be fine, then you barely write, much less call, for weeks and weeks—”

Her mother’s shoulders were shaking. Rita stared for a moment, then closed the gap and hugged her. “Listen, it’s going to be all right. But—” She hesitated. “I’m going to have to ask you about my, uh, birth mother: everything you know about the … before you adopted me—”

“Oh, hon.” Emily sniffed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that. Or it could wait for another few years. Until everything was a bit … calmer.”

“Calm.” Only her mother would use that word to talk about the biggest national trauma of the century. “Mom. Listen, it’s okay. They, uh, gave me a job. I think so they can keep an eye on me. The DHS, I mean. It’s just that I need to know everything you know. For my own safety?” She heard a whine threatening to climb into her voice, made herself stop talking.

“I get that. Thing is, hon, we didn’t know anything. No, that’s not quite right. I mean, yes, Kurt suspected something. A bit. But we didn’t put two and two together until after 7/16. We thought it was just the usual sort of problem, that your birth mother had just been unlucky and you could live a normal life. It wasn’t until after 7/16, and the visit from the FBI, that we realized who she must have been.” Rita let go and took a step back. “Well, I mean I, I never met her! It mostly went through the lawyers. But her mother—your grandmother, I guess—Kurt knew her, and he introduced us this one time and she seemed perfectly nice.”

“Wait.” Rita shook her head. It was too much to assimilate quickly. “A grandmother? You mean, I’ve got a grandmother?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Her mom shrugged uncomfortably. “She was on crutches, Rita. She had MS. A few years later Kurt said he’d seen her and she was in a wheelchair. Then she disappeared. This would have been, oh, late 2002 or early 2003. A while before 7/16. Months, maybe a year.”

“She disappeared? How come?”

“I don’t know. Ask your grandfather; he might know some more. But Rita, you’ve got to understand—we didn’t know. Nobody knew about the world-walker thing. Or the bombs. That all happened years later, and we only figured it out when the FBI came and interviewed us after 7/16. All we knew was that this nice lady, a friend of Kurt’s, whose daughter had got in trouble at college, and was looking for adopters. And Franz and I were never going to have babies ourselves.”

“Oh, Mom.” The coffeemaker began to hiss, then clicked loudly. Rita moved instinctively toward the cupboard with the mugs. It was something to occupy her hands with while her brain tried to catch up.

“I hope you don’t think I blame you for any of it.”

“No, Mom. I don’t. Fat-free or half-and-half?”

“I’m on fat-free again. I’m sorry. I thought you were better off out of it, not knowing. It wasn’t your fault. I can’t believe your birth mother had anything to do with it—or her mother, for that matter. I honestly thought it was all in the past and there was nothing to worry about anymore … until they came and started asking us questions about you a couple of months ago.”

“Mom? Here’s your coffee.” Rita tried to conceal her disquiet: of course they’d have visited Emily and Franz as part of her background check. Why wouldn’t they?

“Thank you, dear.” With a visible shudder, Emily pulled herself together. “Then I need to go shopping. Come with me and you can catch up on all the gossip.”

*

That evening, after an exhausting family dinner—almost a mini-Thanksgiving, with a distinct subtext of gratitude for Rita’s delivery from whatever durance vile she had been consigned to by the DHS—Rita walked home with her grandfather Kurt. It wasn’t much of a walk, but it put some distance between Rita and Emily’s hand wringing, Franz’s quiet concern, and River’s brattish teenage-brother act. “Come in, come in,” Kurt mumbled as he held the front door open for her. “Out of the heat.”

It was hot in Kurt’s abode too: he kept the upper floor closed off, sleeping in the downstairs den next to the living room and venturing up top only to shower. But it was cooler than the desert evening outside, and it was quiet, with only her usually taciturn grandfather for company.