We Sing It Anyway #7
I turned around, suddenly certain of what I was going to see, and there he was, standing on the stairs and gripping the bannister like he thought it was about to slip through his fingers and vanish.
Like me, he didn’t look like he’d showered in quite some time.
Unlike me, he had the additional visual signal of a short, unkempt beard, which crawled up his cheeks and down his neck until his face was an unweeded garden.
He’d done nothing to groom or even it out, and tufts of various lengths jutted from his chin and jawline, dark brown speckled generously with gray.
He was wearing a stained shirt and plaid shorts, and looking at the group of us with dull, disinterested eyes.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Elsinore,” he acknowledged, still eyeing the others. “And Sarah. Are the two of you getting along again?”
“Trying to,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Harrington,” said Sarah.
“Good. I don’t like you kids fighting. Makes things too tense around here.” His voice remained level, almost disinterested.
His emotions were another matter. Hope was spiking off of him, hot and fierce and practically scorching.
It mirrored the hope surging off of both my brothers—tender and confident from Artie, anxious and insecure from Arthur.
They were standing in two very different places.
Artie was still thinking of Dad as he’d been before he’d started grieving for everyone he’d ever loved, one by one.
First his son, then his wife, and then his son again.
Artie had his own face and his own abilities and very little reason to fear he wouldn’t be accepted.
Arthur, on the other hand, couldn’t pick up on Dad’s emotions anymore. He looked like a stranger, his body’s responses to stress were a stranger’s instincts, and he knew how deeply our father had surrendered to his sorrow even before the Johrlac had come.
Dad finally looked directly at the two of them, eyes flicking back and forth between the pair, then finished descending the stairs. He walked straight for Arthur, sweeping him into a tight embrace. “We missed you, son,” he said.
Arthur made a choked-off sobbing sound and clung to him.
Artie’s hope flared, becoming confusion, and then, slowly, understanding. He shifted a little closer to Sarah, resting his chin against the side of her head.
Dad lifted his head and turned to look over his shoulder at Sarah and Artie. “You really my boy?” he asked.
“I am,” said Artie.
“We both are,” said Arthur.
“You’ve been different people long enough that I guess that isn’t all that strange,” said Dad. “How’d you come back?”
The question was vague enough that it could have applied to either one of them, and they knew it. They exchanged a glance.
“Sarah didn’t actually delete me, just shoved me so deep into my own psyche that I couldn’t come back, and wasn’t aware of the passage of time,” said Artie.
“And when the Johrlac brought him back to the surface in order to establish their right to punish her, they removed me from his brain and put me into a spare body they had sitting around for just that sort of situation,” said Arthur.
“And do we get to keep you both?”
“Yes,” said both of them, and “Yes,” said Sarah.
Dad smiled.
“Good enough for me,” he said. Letting go of Arthur, he crossed back to Artie and hugged him, firmly, before planting a kiss on Sarah’s forehead. “I always knew you’d find a way to fix things,” he said fondly. “My favorite mathematician.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Sarah. Artie gave her a one-armed squeeze.
Arthur looked doleful, and I took a step back, squeezing his shoulder with my right hand.
“Dad?” I said. He looked around at me. “Can we set Arthur up in Mom’s office? He can’t share the basement with Artie. He’s not Lilu anymore.”
Dad’s eyes momentarily widened. “That’s going to be an interesting challenge for all of us,” he said. “But yes, we can clear out and repurpose your mom’s office. She’d have been happy to do it. Anything for her children.”
“Would she still have seen me as one of her children?”
Arthur sounded as miserable as he felt. Dad turned back to him.
“Yes, of course,” he said firmly. “Arthur, you have two dead aunts who haven’t seen that as any sort of reason to back off and stop meddling, and a whole colony of intelligent rodents that already see you as a god.
A new body isn’t nearly strange enough to have made your mother do anything but tell you that you need to get a haircut if you’re not ready to commit to growing it out.
She’d honestly be a lot angrier about my beard than she would be about your appearance; if anything, she’d gloat because you’re blond now.
‘See, even when he has to give up my genes, they win out.’” He said the last in an eerily perfect imitation of my mother’s tone and timbre, enough to make me grateful that I hadn’t been holding anything. I would definitely have dropped it.
“Really?” asked Arthur.
“Promise, champ,” said Dad.
“I need a new name,” said Arthur.
“How about our middle name, James?” asked Artie.
“Won’t work. Annie adopted a new brother, and his name’s James,” said Arthur.
“A new brother? How does that work?”
“Everybody’s getting bonus brothers these days,” I said. “They’re the hot accessory of the season.”
“I don’t think you really want to start arguing against new brothers,” said Sarah, voice gentle. She still wasn’t moving away from Artie, and I realized abruptly what was different about her.
Her emotions weren’t shrouded behind a veil of choking grief and self-recrimination, the way they’d been since she first woke up after her trip to Iowa.
I hadn’t done anything to lessen that grief and guilt, to be completely clear: if anything, I’d worked hard to encourage it, taking every opportunity to remind her that she was to blame for the loss of my brother, for the fact that my mother cried every night.
But now that guilt was gone, replaced by weary satisfaction and something that felt very much like joy.
She was remembering how to be happy, and I realized that I wasn’t angry about it. She deserved to be at peace. After everything we’d been through, maybe we all did.
“How about Orin?” asked Artie abruptly.
I blinked at him. “How’d you get there?”
“It’s Arthur Curry’s Atlantean name,” he said. “He’s—”
“Aquaman,” said Arthur. “I could get behind that. Not my favorite hero, but he’s a good one, and there are some similarities. And it’s still a human-sounding name, which is better than I’d get if I asked the mice.”
Artie made a face. “Friends don’t let friends accept new legal names from religious rodents.”
“I guess not,” said Arthur, and smiled at him, hesitant and hopeful. Artie grinned back.
“Do we have any clean sheets?” asked Dad.
“You do now,” said Mary, appearing behind him on the stairs with a laundry basket in her arms. “And you’ve got me for the evening. I’ll help get Jane’s office into shape for demihuman habitation.”
“Thank you, Mary,” said Dad.
She smiled at him, expression going sweet and oddly maternal. “It’s the least I can do. We’ll get everything sorted.”
“And I’ll go shave,” he said, rubbing his chin with one hand. “I feel like I could use it.”
“You really could,” she affirmed. “Go on. We’ve got this.”
She might have been exaggerating in the moment, but as it turned out, we really did got this, as long as “this” was getting both my brothers situated in their respective rooms. Artie’s dismay when he saw that most of his possessions had been stripped from the basement was a towering shock, and calmed only when Orin admitted that he’d just boxed everything up and stored it in the garage.
“It wasn’t mine, and I didn’t want to look at it anymore, but getting rid of it felt wrong,” he said, downtrodden.
Artie shook off his surprise and said, “I guess I can understand that. I would probably have done something similar. And this way my things won’t be all dusty.” He grabbed hold of Sarah’s hand and pulled her with him back down into the basement.
I watched them go, deciding not to comment on the fact that my older younger brother was locking himself in his room with a girl. They were both adults, and after everything they’d been through, it wasn’t my place to tease. Especially not when Orin so clearly needed me to distract him.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go see what we have to work with.”
Mom’s office was on the second floor, and had been closed off since her death.
In a way, that was a good thing: it meant we’d be dealing with dust and mustiness, not with the incredible mess Dad and I had been able to make of the rest of the house in her absence.
I opened the door and stopped, blinking.
Mom’s file boxes, which had historically taken up more than half of the floor, were gone. So was her desk, a massive IKEA monstrosity that had always loomed over her like a hardwood-and-steel gargoyle. Instead, Rose and Mary were in the center of the room, assembling a bedframe.
Well, Mary was assembling a bedframe. Rose had managed to find a beer somewhere, and was cheerfully critiquing Mary’s assembly efforts. Both of them paused and turned to look at us as we stood in the doorframe.
“Hey!” said Rose, waving her bottle cheerfully. “Want a beer?”
“I didn’t touch the dollhouses,” said Mary. “Thought you might like the company.”
There was a shelf of dollhouses above the space where the desk had been, carefully arranged and surrounded by tiny fences and astroturf “lawns.” A few of them even had elaborate gardens, filled with ribbon roses and doll-sized sprays of plastic flowers.
It was beautiful and pastoral and a little strange, and Orin’s relief was radiant as he looked at the shelf and smiled. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “Thank you.”