"The Oak and the Ash" (3/9) by Parda August 2004 CHAPTER 2 - MEMORIES (continued) The next morning, after another long and luxurious "present-opening"--this time in their bed, instead of on the couch in the sitting room--and after she had showered and dressed, Alex tidied their room, straightening pillows, picking up things. She didn't open the photo album. She knew what she would find: pictures of their family over the years, at the beach and in the Highlands, John growing from a teen to a young man, the twins moving from infancy to adolescence, herself growing older--and Connor always looking exactly the same. Alex set the photo album on the bookshelf and picked up their evening clothes from the floor, then went downstairs to eat, already thinking of what still needed to be done for Connor's birthday party that night. He was four hundred and ninety-seven years old. "That won't be enough plates, Sara," Alex said that afternoon, looking over the dark expanse of mahogany in the dining room and counting the delicate green and white circles of china, matching them to the people staying in the house--four couples (Duncan and Susan, Rachel and Mitzi, John and Gina, Connor and herself) and four teens (Sara and Colin, of course, and Susan's two children from her first marriage: Paula and Tom)--then adding one more for Cass, who was due to arrive at five. "There are only twelve; there should be thirteen." "Oh!" Sara said, tossing her long shining hair off her shoulder as she looked up from her task, a bundle of white linen napkins still in her hand. "I forgot to tell you. Right before she left last night, Cassandra said she wouldn't be able to make it." "Oh," Alex said in return. She straightened the fork at the place setting in front of her. "Did she say why?" "Something about an old friend and her having to leave town." An Immortal? Or one of her ever-growing string of boyfriends, the last of whom had called Alex "ma'am"? "She dropped off Dad's birthday present really early this morning, while you were still upstairs," Sara said, walking around the table and laying down the napkins. "It's another set of drawings of the family, like usual. Dad hasn't added them to the book yet; I think they're still in the parlor, if you want to see." "Maybe later," Alex said. She'd had enough of pictures last night. She gave the knife a twitch to the right, a little closer to the spoon. "Cassandra would have made an unlucky number, anyway, so perhaps it's for the best." ~~~~~ Three weeks later Cassandra moved to London, and somehow, she and Alex didn't find the time to see each other before Cassandra left. Alex spoke to her briefly on the phone and wished her well, and Cassandra said good-bye. In May, Alex went shopping for baby presents for John and Gina. She never saw the car that hit her as she was crossing an Edinburgh street on that cool spring day. She heard nothing: not the crunch of metal, not the shattering of glass, not the screams. She never remembered the ambulance ride to the hospital, and she never knew that Connor was by her bedside for days, holding her hand. People told her of these things later, and she supposed she had to believe them, because there had obviously been some sort of accident. The cast on her leg and the bandages around her ribs and on her face were real enough. Her pain was real. Her scars were real. "You are very lucky, Mrs. MacLeod," the doctor said, her brown fingers wandering over the bandages, her brown eyes peering at an x-ray of Alex's ankle, but Alex didn't reply. "Some therapy, yes," Dr. Janaswamy said. "You will have to practice walking, but in time, it will be good." She nodded and smiled, no doubt well-pleased with a job well-done, then stood and picked up her clipboard, ready to move on with her rounds. "No skiing this winter, I take it," Alex commented, trying to be upbeat. Dr. Janaswamy's smile disappeared, and she stopped halfway to the door. "Mrs. MacLeod ..." She came back and sat down on the chair near the bed. "Mrs. MacLeod, your ankle was badly damaged. Very badly. I cannot recommend that you ski. Ever." Alex let that settle, suddenly grateful for the dulling effect of the drugs. "Dancing?" she asked next, the word brittle and controlled. "Yes," came the careful reply. "With a partner to lean on, you won't need your cane--" "My cane?" Alex interrupted, hearing her voice going shrill and helpless to stop it. "I'm going to need a cane? Just to walk?" "Mrs. MacLeod," came the calm and authoritative voice of the doctor again. "I do not think you understand. Your ankle was nearly crushed. The other surgeon suggested amputation below the knee. But we operated and repaired much of the damage. You have both legs, and after a year or so of therapy, you will walk again." But not easily, quickly, or well. She wasn't an Immortal. She would never heal instantly with tiny blue sparks. She'd been growing older, and now she was defective as well. Permanently. For the rest of her life. "You are very lucky, Mrs. MacLeod," the doctor repeated on her way out the door, and Alex supposed that had to be true, too. "More flowers for you, Alex!" the perky blond aide announced cheerfully from the door. "Lovely ones, too," he said, coming into the room with an enormous vase of nodding daffodils in his arms. He set the vase on a table in the corner. "There's a card here, from Cam." He squinted at the writing. "No, that's not it. From Cass." Of course. "Give them to someone else," Alex said. "I have enough flowers here." "If you like," the aide said dubiously, picking up the vase again. "And the card? Would you like me to read it to you?" "No. Throw it away." ~~~~~ Cassandra sent other cards and letters, books to read and puzzles to do, but Alex was busy with doctor's appointments and surgery and learning how to walk again, and she never got around to opening any of the things Cassandra sent. They stopped coming after a while; Alex wasn't quite sure when. Throughout the long months of therapy, Connor was helpful, patient and sweet. Alex tried to be, but it was hard. "A glass of water?" he would offer. "Soup? Tea? Something to read? Shall I carry you down the stairs?" until Alex wanted to scream at him and tell him to go away. She hated being helpless, being sick, being tired and hurting all the time. "I know it hurts," he said to her once, and she nearly snapped out: "How the hell would you know?" because Connor didn't know pain. No Immortal did. Oh, they got cut, they bled, they even died, sometimes in screaming agony, but that was just a nodding acquaintance, a quick "nice to meet you," and then the pain was gone and they were fine. They didn't have to live with it, day after day, night after night. They didn't go to sleep with pain curled up beside them on their pillows; they didn't wake to see it grinning at them with bared teeth, just waiting to gnaw its slow and torturous way through muscle, tissue, and bone. They didn't know pain intimately; it didn't live inside them and devour them alive. Immortals also didn't have scars. "Plastic surgery is a long process," the doctor explained, while the long angry scar throbbed from Alex's hairline to her jaw. "You must heal in between each procedure." And with each healing, came more pain. "Some more medication, Alex?" Connor would ask, being patient and unfailingly kind, and reminding her every single time he trotted up or down the stairs to cater to her needs that she would never be able to run or ski again. "Water to wash it down?" Go away, Alex wanted to say. Just go away. She didn't want the medication; she didn't want to have to need it. She didn't want to be dependent on drugs just to get through the days--and through the nights. She did go without once, for nearly a week, to prove to herself she could, but she ended up despising herself even more, because she was absolutely horrible to Connor and to Sara and Colin, and they didn't deserve that. They were only trying to help. So Alex smiled at Connor and took the medication and the water and said thank you, because it wasn't his fault that he was an Immortal, and it wasn't his fault that she'd been hurt, and she loved him and he loved her, and that would make things better soon. It always had before. But the problem hadn't moved away with Cassandra. It simply had a new name. ~~~~~ "Sara!" Alex yelled up the stairs. "Sara!" After a maddening minute, Sara appeared at the top of the stairs, slouching low-hipped against the railing, wearing a lime green T-shirt above a black miniskirt and a sullenly stubborn expression on her face. "It was your turn to clean the kitchen tonight, Sara," Alex reminded her. "Sorry," she said, but she didn't sound that way. "I forgot." "Again?" "I've been busy." "Doing what?" Alex demanded. "Homework." "You have housework to do, too. We all have chores in this family, and--" Sara rolled her eyes and sighed, and Alex stopped cold. She'd heard that sigh before. "Clean the kitchen now," Alex ordered. "But, Mom--" "Now," Alex insisted, and Sara sighed again. She thumped down the stairs and dragged herself off to the kitchen, then started banging dishes around. "Don't break anything, Sara," Alex warned from the dining room. >From the kitchen came the sound of shattering glass. Alex shoved back her chair and marched as best she could with her cane to the kitchen door, ignoring the grinding pain in her ankle that shot clear up to her hip. "Sara!" "It was an accident!" Sara yelled back. Her hands were covered with soap suds, and her bare feet were surrounded by splintered shards of bright yellow glass. "My grandmother's bowl?" Alex said in disbelief and rage, and her eyes burned with sudden tears. "You broke my grandmother's bowl?" "It was an accident!" Sara repeated, near tears herself, but Alex didn't believe it, didn't believe her. She didn't believe Connor, either, when he came later that night to plead Sara's case. Sara had always been his "princess," just as he had always been Sara's "white knight." Sara's friends from college liked Connor, too. "I could go for some of that," Aleah said, her words as hot and sultry as the summer air shimmering above the sand of Breezy Point beach. "Aleah! That's my dad!" Sara said in scandalized reproach, even though Sara (and Colin) had known of immortality and Connor's real age for years. Alex stopped short with her hand on the door. Through the screened window, she could see Connor stripping off his T-shirt while Colin retrieved a Frisbee from the waves. The girls were lying six feet away from her, sunbathing on the deck. "It is?" Aleah shrugged one naked shoulder, her naked breasts moving, too. Her oiled body gleamed lithe and perfect in the sun, a black G-string her token attempt at a bathing suit. Alex was wearing a sedate one-piece suit (to hide some, but not all, of her scars), and that was covered by a head-to-toe caftan (to protect her skin from the sun and wrinkles). A wide-brimmed hat was in her hand. Aleah grinned and said, still saucy-hot, "I like older men." "Find a different one," Sara ordered Aleah crossly and flopped back down on her towel. Aleah only shrugged again then set about oiling all her limbs. Any man could go for some of that. Alex turned around and limped back to her room then changed into slacks and a shirt. In the kitchen, Rachel and Mitzi were playing canasta, the game Alex's mom had always called "the old ladies' substitute for sex." Rachel was old now, seventy-six, still an attractive woman, gracious and poised and elegant, but still old, with completely white hair and age-spotted hands, with artificial knees and a quaver to her voice and wrinkles on every part of her face. In just twenty-two years, Alex was going to be as old as Rachel was now. "Want to play canasta?" Mitzi asked, and Alex said, "Yes." "Want to play?" Connor asked her later that night in their bedroom in their Hudson Street apartment, his eyes alight with invitation, his smile as charming as ever, his body as young and supple and perfect as it had been over twenty years before, when they had first met, when she had been young and beautiful, too. "No." She said yes to a walk by the Hudson River a few days later, and they walked hand-in-hand in the park as they used to do when they were courting, once again laughing, contented, in love. Until Connor kissed her, and a passing teen said, "Gross! That guy's giving the tongue to his mother!" and his friends hooted with laughter and jeers. Connor went rigid, and Alex clamped his wrist hard. "Connor," she called to him, for his eyes had gone dark with cold killing rage, and he trembled under her hand. "Connor!" she said again, and when he looked at her Alex summoned all her acting skills and smiled. "Let's go home." "That boy needs a lesson in manners," Connor growled, his gaze following the group of teens. The boy hadn't said anything that Alex hadn't already thought. "Please, Connor," she said, and she didn't have to manufacture the tremble in her voice or the tears in her eyes. "Take me home. I want to go home." As she had expected, Connor's chivalry overpowered his outrage. He walked her home. "I want to make love to you," he told her that night, and Alex smiled at him and said yes. Later, after he was asleep, she cried. The next morning, Alex told Connor she would walk arm-in-arm with him, not hand-in-hand, and she asked him not to kiss her in public again. "Damn it, Alex, you're my wife!" Connor said, barefoot and wearing only a pair of jeans as he paced their bedroom floor. "I won't hide that. I don't care what other people think." "You did," she pointed out, sitting quietly on the edge of their bed. "And so did I." "One punk kid who needs--" "Yes, he was rude, because he was indiscreet enough to say what other people only think. But they do think it, Connor, and they're going to think it more and more as the years go by. We knew this would happen, Connor," Alex said, making herself be calm and logical about it, so she wouldn't start to cry. This was hard enough for Connor; she wasn't going to make it worse. This wasn't his fault. He couldn't help being immortal. She had no reason to be angry with him. "We talked about it before we got married." Connor was looking out the window, his back to her, one hand braced on the wall. She could see his frustration and anger in the flexing of his fingers and the tightness of his shoulders. Those beautifully sculpted muscles that she loved to caress were moving just slightly under the supple skin. "You don't introduce Rachel as your daughter anymore," she said, showing him the way. He turned and came to kneel before her. "You're my wife," he pledged. "I'm your husband. I'm proud to be by your side ... always." She took his hands between her own, like a lady of old accepting the service of her knight. "Connor, I'm not asking you to lie or hide me away, but we shouldn't advertise what you are. When we're in public, we can just make it easier for people to assume other things." Like seeing her as Connor's mother--and eventually grandmother--the elderly widowed Mrs. MacLeod. "You can be as gallant as ever, chivalrous, considerate, all of those ... just not passionate." Connor was shaking his head. "Alex--" "I don't want them to look at me that way!" she finally burst out, and where logic and reason had failed to convince him, the threat of her tears prevailed. Connor agreed instantly, willing to do whatever he could to make her happy. Except he couldn't make her happy, not anymore, no matter what he did or didn't do. Sara caught the worst of Alex's anger that summer, beautiful blossoming Sara, with her shining hair and soft smooth skin, with the boys calling her everyday, with the men following her everywhere with their eyes, while Alex trailed along beside. Sara, her father's little princess. Sara, who had her entire life ahead of her. Sara, who seemed more and more like Cassandra every day. It was early in August, the last day of their visit in New York, when Sara was talking about going back to college the next week, chattering on and on about her classes and her prospects, her boyfriends and her girlfriends, Aleah included, and about how Cassandra had taught Sara so many wonderful things: scrying and dreams and listening to the heartbeats of trees--things of course that Alex didn't know and couldn't know, since Alex had no such powers, no amazing psychic talents, no special abilities like them--when Alex was seized by the sudden and overwhelming desire to slap Sara hard across the face. She didn't do it. She walked out of the room and down the stairs, her hands trembling, still shaking all over with murderous rage, because it simply wasn't fair. But she couldn't fix it. No one could. The problem wasn't Cassandra, and it wasn't Sara, either. It was Alex herself. That maggot of death had lain submerged and waiting all these years, slow-growing, inevitable, relentless. Ripples had revealed its presence, its slow turning and burrowing inside, but through the years, every single time, Alex had turned her face aside and pretended it wasn't there. She couldn't pretend anymore. She'd realized that this summer, when she'd gone to see Tommy Maclure. She always visited her longtime friend and co-worker whenever she went back to New York, but this time she'd had to drive to Connecticut, because Tommy was dead. The grass was bright green on his rectangle, the new stone still white. "Thomas Patrick Maclure," the inscription read. "29 September 1967--12 April 2016." The college intern she'd first met a quarter of a century ago, the curly-headed kid with a love of historical reenacting and a storehouse of horrible puns, the friend who'd warned her against marrying Connor MacLeod but come to her wedding anyway--gone. Forty-eight years old, burned to death in the fire from a terrorist's bomb one beautiful spring day. Death came to others, too. Catkin, Sara's pet cat, had died in September, and in early October, Alex's mom had written to say: "I'm sorry to tell you that Lynn Siddons died last week." Lynn's obituary from the hometown newspaper had been enclosed, and Alex had read over and over those few sparse details that close out a life, the words shaped into odd rectangles to make room for the ads for heating oil and new brakes, the scrap of paper to be clipped out then left to yellow and fade. "A 1980 graduate of Valley High," the paper read. (Alex and Lynn had sat next to each other on the school bus nearly every day from kindergarten to twelfth grade.) "Teacher at Franklin Elementary school, active in community affairs. Died at home." (Asthma attack, Alex knew, but newspapers never told you why.) "Survived by her parents, her husband, Kevin, and their two children. Services will be held at the Gardiner funeral home on Tuesday afternoon." The paper had said nothing of Lynn's abhorrence of peanut butter, nothing of the time she and Alex had accidentally dyed their hair green right before their high school prom, nothing of Lynn's passion for making the perfect margarita or of her love for hiking and canoeing and the way she had picked up daddy-longlegs on Girl Scout camping trips and terrorized the other girls, nothing of her. Lynn Siddons was gone, just as Tommy was gone, just as Alex herself would someday be gone. Alex couldn't hide from that anymore. And she wasn't going to hide anymore. Not from herself, and not from Connor, either. She was tired of hiding. Alex wiped the tears from her face with her sleeve then pushed aside the winter coats and crawled out from the darkest corner of the closet in Colin's bedroom, where she'd hidden after leaving Connor in the kitchen thirty minutes ago. She had heard Connor looking for her when he'd come upstairs, but she hadn't wanted to see him so she hadn't answered, not even when he had opened the door to Colin's bedroom and called out her name. Alex had held her breath until he'd turned and slowly gone away, because she had desperately needed to cry, and she couldn't stand for Connor to see her that way. Besides, Connor hadn't answered her either when she'd first come home tonight, so why should she have answered him? At least Connor wasn't sitting in the bedroom right now, waiting for her to emerge from her wallow in self-pity. But she had to see him. She had to make him see her. She knew that now. Alex walked to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, brushed her hair, and straightened her clothes. Then she went downstairs to look for her husband, so that he could see her as she really was. ========= (continued in part 4)