The Best of All Possible Worlds (9 page)

Or not. But the image almost made me giggle, which would have been unfortunate.

Of course, it was all very sedate and proper. I was intrigued that the Sadiri monks
didn’t seem very distinct from the Benedictines. Their garb was different, but there
was no separate building, no invisible bisecting line that said “Here be Sadiri.”
The Cygnian guestmaster and his Sadiri counterpart showed us where Dllenahkh would
be quartered, took us to the refectory for a little refreshment, and then saw Fergus
and me to the door, where we bade Dllenahkh farewell.

The flight to the homestead took less than ten minutes. I asked Fergus to set me down
a little way from the main house so that the noise of the engines wouldn’t alert them.
Fittingly enough,
that meant I had the chance to run into one of my most favorite people in the world,
my thirteen-year-old nephew Rafi. He was coming from the direction of the orchard,
carrying a bucket of starfruit. At first he squinted at me in a very puzzled way,
then recognition transformed his face into a wide-eyed, open-mouthed shout of happiness
as he dropped the bucket and ran toward me. His exuberant warmth blew out uncontrolled
like a hot gust of savanna wind, singeing me with a burning yet benign energy that
matched his rough boy hug.

Rafi has always been a beautiful boy, with his mother’s amber-brown skin, his father’s
wavy brown and blond-streaked hair, and big brown eyes from both parents. He’s also
my godson, and I adore him. He’d write me long letters filled with sketches and stories
and send them by post that took at least a week to arrive. I’d always write back immediately,
usually sending a small memory disk with games and other entertainment that I knew
he’d enjoy. I doubted his parents were aware how often we corresponded. He had begged
me not to tell them, and I indulged him, secretly glad to be the favorite aunt. I
dreamed that we’d go traveling together when he was older and I was retired and properly
eccentric. We’d ride elephants in the savanna, or join the crew of a sailing ship,
or something.

It felt silly to say it, so I never did, but I always felt like I’d never want any
children of my own as long as I had Rafi.

“You haven’t come to see me in
ages,”
he complained, tugging me by the hand to the main house.

“Well, I’m here now.” I laughed. “Boy, go get that fruit. You can’t leave the bucket
lying in the road so.”

He gave a grimace and went to quickly gather up the scattered fruit. I snagged one
from the bucket as he came back. There had been mangoes under the starfruit, and I
hadn’t had a proper
Montserrat mango in years. It was warm and fragrant when I held it to my cheek.

“Ahh,” I sighed.

“If you came to visit me more often, you could have as many of those as you liked,”
Rafi said pointedly.

I smiled at him, pleased at his clean, honest indignation, mock persuasion, and adolescent
sarcasm. “I love you too, boy.”

“Maybe I should move to Tlaxce,” he hinted as we walked on to the house.

“Maybe you should,” I said, even more pleased. As if Maria would let her golden boy
out of sight, but at least he had thought about it.

Maria came onto the veranda wearing a blue cotton dress, looking very matronly and
homely with little Gracie clinging to her side, still sucking a thumb. She looked
older than me, older in a way that only two children and homestead living can accomplish,
but happy, both happy to see me and happy in general. I hugged her hard and tousled
Gracie’s hair affectionately. She looked a bit too shy to hug just yet. She didn’t
really know me.

“Oh, Grace,” Maria sighed as she smiled at me and ushered me inside. “Only two days?”

“I’m lucky it’s even that much,” I said, letting Rafi take my small bag. The living
room was full of memories, all stuff my mother had handed over when she gave up the
homestead after Papa’s death and retired to a condo on Tlaxce Lake.

“Look who’s here, Ioan!” Maria called out.

He came into the room, dusty and sweat-streaked from working outside. He wore his
hair longer, brushing his shoulders, the gilt bands in the seal brown even more fiercely
bleached by the sun. He was still lean, still handsome, still golden. He had been
my fiancé once. My heart stumbled as a flood of half-remembered
yearning seemed to pour out from him and envelop me. His eyes glowed with an inhuman
warmth, and I thought I heard a whisper in his voice … 
Shadi
. A strong memory to echo so loudly.

“Hello, Ioan,” I said, and smiled proudly at how ordinary I sounded.

“Shadi,” he said, breaking out into a huge, radiant smile. He’d always called me by
my middle name. In a few quick steps he reached me and hugged me, picking me up half
a meter from the ground in his fervor. “You came back. I knew you’d comeback.”

“Well,” I said breathlessly, looking over his shoulder at Maria’s beaming face, “just
for a little while.”

He stepped back suddenly, looking anxiously at my uniform. “Man, I’m filthy. Sorry
about that.” He brushed at a few reddish stains on my shirt and trousers where the
clay soil had transferred and left its mark.

“Don’t worry. Time I changed out of this, anyway,” I said, gently pushing away his
hands.

After changing clothes, I started for the kitchen, hearing the familiar clatter of
meal preparation. As I passed the door to the small pantry, something made me turn
my head. There was Gracie, standing on a stepladder, glaring at the top shelf, where
a cookie jar sat just out of her reach.

“What are you doing up there? Come!” I demanded.

She tumbled from the stepladder into my outstretched arms for a hug. I squeezed her
skinny four-year-old frame with a gleeful grin. She may not have been my favorite,
but she was my namesake and it was early days. Maybe if she learned to write long
letters …

“Hey, you two.”

The voice was close enough to make me jump. Ioan stood behind me and wrapped his arms
around both of us, bending
past my cheek to smack a kiss on his daughter’s forehead. The slight stubble of his
jaw grazed my skin. I took a half step sideways, trying to keep our bodies from brushing
together. He didn’t seem to notice, or care, because he moved with me in a slight
sway, appearing to relish the lengthy embrace.

“Two of my favorite girls,” he murmured, then finally let go.

I turned around and set Gracie in his arms. “I’ll go see if Maria needs any help with
dinner.”

He put Gracie down. “Sweetie, go see if your mother needs any help.”

She dashed off silently.

“She’s so
obedient
,” I said accusingly. “Did she even
have
the terrible twos stage?”

“Not really, no,” Ioan said, looking after her with a smile.

“Not like her mother, then. She drove me mad when she was two.”

“Shadi,” he said, and that was all he said, but something in the tone made me duck
my head down and walk to the door, which, unfortunately, meant going past him.

He seized me by the wrist. “Shadi, look at me.”

“No, Ioan. That doesn’t work on me, remember?” I tugged my hand free and kept going,
trying to ignore the echo in my head … 
Shadi … Shadi
.

At dinner, Maria kept talking about how long it had been. The first few times, it
was heartwarming, but then it became almost nagging. When she started talking about
how I could have stayed a homesteader rather than going to university, Rafi and I
exchanged weary, eye-rolling looks. Maria missed it and made the mistake of trying
to enlist Rafi’s help.

“Rafi’s always talking about how much he misses you, aren’t you, dear? Wouldn’t you
like it if Auntie Grace lived with us on the homestead?”

I was startled. How did we get from “visiting more often” to “moving in entirely”?

“I think she should live her own life,” Rafi muttered.

Maria was furious. “Rafi! You apologize to your aunt right now!”

“It’s all right, Maria, he—”

Ioan overrode my protests. “Your mother’s right. Apologize.” Rafi glared at him. “You’re
always messing things up. I hate you!”

Now I was shocked. “Rafi!”

He pushed away from the table and stood up, giving me a look that was both anguish
and reproach. Then he shook his head in frustration and ran out of the room.

Little Gracie looked wide-eyed from parent to parent, jaws motionless, her last mouthful
still bulging in her cheeks.

“Teenagers,” Ioan said carelessly with a reassuring smile, smoothing his daughter’s
hair. “They hate everybody at that age.”

He looked at me, still smiling. His foot gently bumped mine under the table, and for
a full second I didn’t feel inclined to pull away. Then something buzzed on my wrist,
distracting me. I slapped at it absently, and it went away.

I kept up my
mask of indifference pretty well, but that night Ioan haunted my dreams in a way
he hadn’t done in years. Memories and might-have-beens tangled in a mad jumble. I
remembered how it felt when our hearts and minds came together at a time when I thought
I love you
meant forever. I dreamed I had never left; I was in Maria’s place, and Rafi was truly
my son. It made me angry and confused.
The ability to know another’s mind does not preclude the likelihood of misunderstanding
it
. That
was true. I knew that all too well, and that’s why I hadn’t married him. Then why
was I dreaming about him again?

I avoided him by spending more time with Maria. It was her I’d come to see, anyway.

If anyone had asked me what I was looking for, I couldn’t have answered them. Some
things you know more by intuition than by reasoning. I told myself that I just wanted
to be reassured that Maria was happy and Ioan was behaving himself, but to tell the
truth, her unwavering contentedness was beginning to aggravate me. What with that
and the dreams, mostly I just felt guilty and mad at myself. Then one afternoon, after
a large Sunday lunch, when we were sitting in the living room with the children sprawled
on the carpet playing cards, Maria tried a little too hard.

“You know, we could use another pair of hands on the homestead,” Maria said. “You’re
helping those Sadiri with their homesteadings. Don’t you think family should come
first?” Her smile was oddly fixed.

I frowned a bit at that. “Why would you say that? You know it’s not like that.”

“Then explain it to me. Here you have people who love you, who want you to be part
of the family, and you act like you can barely stand to see us!” Her voice cracked.

Rafi stiffened, not looking at her but listening hard. Gracie stood up and went to
stare out of the window. Ioan sat straighter and made a movement as if about to rest
a pacifying hand on his wife’s shoulder, then seemed to decide against it.

“Maria, you’re not making sense!” I said, aghast that she looked on the edge of tears.
“What’s the matter with you?”

“You can have him if you want, you know. That’s the only thing keeping you away. You
can have Ioan,” she cried out, right in front of the children and all.

I was thunderstruck. Then, when she finally burst into tears, I knew. Ioan went to
her, speaking to her quietly. She got up and left the room without looking at anyone,
and after a moment, still silent and expressionless, Gracie followed her. Rafi stayed,
eyes wide with something like fear as he stared at his father.

I knew how he felt as I too stared at Ioan. “That was you. I
know
that was you.” I got up and backed away from him.

“I didn’t mean for her to get that intense. She always was a little too susceptible,”
Ioan replied with a sad, sweet smile.

“You bastard,” I said. “I warned you: if you hurt her, if you hurt any of my family,
I will deal with you!”

“I’m not hurting them,” he protested. “I take good care of them. They’re happy.”

“Happy little puppets,” I spat, gripping my right wrist in an effort not to slap him.
“I should report you to the authorities.”

“You won’t,” he said simply. “You love me. Never stopped.”

“It doesn’t work on me, Ioan. It never did, and that’s why you couldn’t keep me. That
and a small problem you have with honesty. You like life to be easy, don’t you, with
everything and everyone exactly as you like.”

“It was just a mistake, Shadi, but I do love you. I shouldn’t have given up on us.
I want you to stay. We all do. Can’t you see that?” He was pleading now, using words
and gestures alone, unpracticed and desperate.

My gaze rested on the one person in the room I trusted. He looked up at me helplessly.

“Rafi loves me so much that he’s willing to let me go,” I said. “That’s what I see.”

Rafi jumped up and grabbed my hand, and we ran out of the house. I didn’t know where
we were supposed to be running to or why, but it seemed like a good idea to get as
far away from Ioan
as possible. Unfortunately, when I glanced back, I saw that he was right behind us,
moving at a leisurely pace, knowing we had nowhere to go.

But Rafi knew where to go, and in a little while a growing, humming vibration that
had been pressing on my ears turned into a recognizable noise. It was the shuttle,
landing once more in the field near the orchard. Fergus disembarked first, looking
moody and suspicious as usual. Dllenahkh followed. He wore a novice’s robe with the
hood up, which I thought rather suited him and gave him a very peaceful air. They
came walking briskly toward us over the grass.

Dllenahkh looked almost relieved to see me. “We have been calling you for some time.
Did you forget our departure date?”

I looked at the comm on my wrist. Fourteen missed calls—when the hell did that happen?
And was it really Sunday already? “Fergus, Dllenahkh, I’m sorry! My comm must have
malfunctioned, and then I forgot. I don’t know what to say.”

Ioan came to my rescue. “I’m sorry. The reception out here is so variable. And we’ve
been completely monopolizing her—it’s no wonder she forgot.”