The Silver Thread (13 page)

“A hooptie?” Talvi repeated. “What type of automobile is that?”

“An ugly one,” Patti answered. “It’s camouflage, but you can’t miss it. It’s got a bright orange door.”

“I see…” Talvi said slowly, looking at the keys in his hand. “So Annika’s waiting for me to drive her home?”

“Dude, there’s no way she’s gonna drive herself,” Jill said. “She’s blowing chunks.”

“Are you coming along for the ride, or can you behave yourself?” Talvi asked Chivanni.

“Hmmm, dancing or vomiting…dancing or vomiting. I think I would rather go dancing,” he replied. “And I promise; no fairy magic.”

Talvi left enough cash to cover dinner and a generous tip, and excused himself from the rest of the party as he gathered his wife’s leftovers, and then gathered his wife.

This ought to be interesting
, he thought to himself as he escorted Annika down the sidewalk, wondering what exactly a ‘hooptie’ vehicle was. He found it soon enough. It was quite a piece of craftsmanship, painted in brown, black, and olive green camouflage, except for the passenger side door, which shone a blinding shade of blaze orange. Patti wasn’t joking when she said it looked like someone had gotten sick on it.

Yes, this ought to be very interesting, as I have no bloody idea how t
o drive.

“No no, that’s for the turn signal,” groaned Annika from the passenger seat. She had the window rolled down, hoping some fresh air would help, but it also let in the cold rain. She didn’t really care though. She felt awful.

“You said it was to turn on the headlights, love,” Talvi said through tightened lips.

“You pull the end to turn on the lights,” she insisted again, clutching her stomach. “And you push all the way up for the right turn signal, and then all the way down for the left turn signal. You seriously haven’t ever driven before?”

“There’s a first time for everything, love,” he said, trying his best to sound confident. He followed her instructions to the letter, though it was some time before he was able to master how much to press on the brake and the accelerator, and they were traveling along just fine when Annika abruptly said,

“Pull over!”

“But there isn’t any place—”

“There’s a driveway right there! Just pull over!”

Talvi turned sharply to the right and there was a loud crash. They had rammed the car smack into a huge tree…beside a driveway. Annika unbuckled her seat belt and opened the passenger door, and immediately heaved while Talvi leapt out to tend to her. Being that there wasn’t much he could do, he gathered Annika’s hair in his hands so it wouldn’t get messy, but there was nothing left in her stomach to make a mess. Every time he thought she was going to say she was ready to go, she would lean forward and dry heave some more. Within a few minutes, Talvi could hear a siren, and a squad car with two police officers pulled up in front of them. He turned around and saw an old woman scowling at him from her front window. No, it probably did not look too innocent from her point of view, with Talvi holding Annika’s hair back as she rested on her knees, bobbing forward. He smiled and waved to the woman with his free hand, and she yanked the curtains shut.

“License and registration?” one of the officers inquired.

“Registration for what?” Talvi asked, still standing beside Annika. He gave her his handkerchief to wipe her mouth.

“The vehicle registration, sir,” replied the second officer, helping Annika back into the passenger seat. “And we’ll need to see your driver’s license.”

“It’s not my bloody vehicle,” he said irritably. “I have no idea where the driver’s license and registration for it would be.”

Annika sighed and turned to open the glove compartment. The entire drawer fell out of the hinges, dumping dozens of papers, baggies, a scale, and candy wrappers onto the floor of the car. Her hand flew to her forehead as she let out a groan, but this time it wasn’t the nausea.

“Sir, I’m going to have you step over to the side of your vehicle,” said the second officer, and tried to lead Talvi away from his wife, but he refused.

“It’s not
my
vehicle, I tell you,” he insisted. “Can’t you see my wife is ill? I just want to get her home!”

“I’m going to need a tow truck and a canine unit dispatch,” the officer said into his radio, and took out his handcuffs. “Sir, please turn around and place your hands behind your back.”

“
Ring…rin
g…ring
…”

“Come on James, you always pick up your phone,” Annika muttered to herself. “Where the hell are you when I need you?” He was likely still out with everyone else, making a night of it.

Annika hung up the phone, and hesitated. If all her friends were out at a noisy bar, none of them would hear their phones. Who did she know that would be home on a Friday night? Danny would be, but there was no way in hell was she going to call him. She pondered the thought of sleeping on a cold, hard bench for a few minutes before she dialed the only other number that would be guaranteed to answer.

“Hello? Who is this?” a deep, muffled voice answered.

“Dad, it’s me. I’m um…I’m at the police station.”

“What the hell for?”

“Well, it’s complicated.”

“What the hell did you and Charlie do now?”

“Please Dad, just come get us.”

“Fine…I’ll be there as soon as I can,” her father grumbled.

Annika sat down in the chair by the phone for what seemed an eternity, until an officer led her through the door to the lobby, where her dad and Talvi were both waiting. The two men couldn’t have looked more different; Talvi incredibly tall and thin, with thick, black hair and smartly dressed, while her dad was of average height, hiding his larger than average beer belly under a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt, with a Trail Blazers knit hat pulled over his thinning sandy hair. Yet both of them shared the most painfully awkward expressions she’d ever seen. She quickly signed herself out and the three of them walked out the doors of the police station in complete silence.

“Dad, I’m so sorry,” she said, not looking at Talvi as they climbed into her dad’s jeep. Her father made no immediate reply as he drove away in the opposite direction from their house.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Home. I’m too tired to drive all over town and drop you kids off. You two can sleep at our house, and deal with your friend’s car in the morning.”

“Mr. Brisby, I, I sincerely apologize for inconveniencing you this way,” Talvi said. “I’m so sorry to have disrupted your evening. I never should have borrowed Patti’s car. I wasn’t thinking.”

Annika saw her father shake his head a little, and then was surprised to hear him chuckle and say, “You were thinking alright, pal. Just not with the right head.”

Annika’s eyes opened wide and she stared at Talvi, who seemed just as shocked. “Your mother’s going to shit a brick when she finds out about this. The way those hens at the salon cluck, it won’t be long at all before the whole roost hears about Faline’s daughter and son-in-law getting arrested for ‘lewd and lascivious behavior.’”

The rest of the car ride was free of conversation, and even with the decreased traffic, it seemed to take forever to reach Annika’s parents’ home.

They walked into the small, dark house and she started to head up the stairs to her old bedroom. Her dad followed behind her, pointing to the living room when Talvi stood in the entryway looking confused.

“You get the couch, buddy,” her dad said. “And just to let you know, I’m a light sleeper and have a brown belt in Jiu Jitsu. Catch my drift?”

Talvi nodded, and Annika scurried up to bed. There would be no unintentional
or
intentional daughter-defiling going on under that roof tonight; that was for sure.

Annika awoke to the familiar smell of bacon frying and coffee brewing. Ah, it was Saturday morning at her parents’ house. She washed her face and trotted down to the kitchen, where she found Talvi sitting at the table with a breakfast plate, a cup of tea, and a glass of orange juice, chattering away with her mother as if he were the boy from next door. They both looked up at her as she came into the room. It was surreal, to see them sitting side by side at the kitchen table.

“Well, well, well,” her mother said with a wry smile, putting her hands on her hips over her purple pajamas and pink robe. “That’s a fine way to meet your
husband
, young lady! Although after your un-ladylike behavior last night, I don’t think I can call you that anymore,” Annika felt her face grow warm, but she soon recovered.

“I think everyone in this room is aware that we were wrongfully accused,” she smirked, and smoothed her wrinkled dress.

Her mother walked up to her, apparently not as upset as she had expected her to be. Then she surprised Annika by giving her a huge hug.

“Sweetie, I’m so sorry for what you must have gone through while you were missing in Europe,” she said, hugging her tighter. Annika shot a confused look to her husband from over her mother’s shoulder. “Talvi told me everything.”

“What do you mean,
everything
?” Annika asked as she was released from the embrace, and glanced from her mother to her husband with suspicious curiosity.

“I explained how you must have fallen and struck your head whilst hiking, and that I found you wandering about the woods near my family’s home, babbling
en français
,” he informed her with a radiant smile. The light was absolutely dancing in his eyes. “You couldn’t recall where you lived, and since my eldest sister is a doctor, I brought you home with me, so that we could at least look after you until your amnesia wore off. Your excellent French led us entirely in the wrong direction in our efforts to get you home. We wasted months scouring the missing persons reports from France instead of Bulgaria or anywhere else. I finally brought you to Paris to see if anything would trigger your memory, and shortly after we arrived, you disappeared on me and had your parents come collect you. And here you went and told them you were with fairies and wood nymphs the entire time, and had gotten married to an elf.” He gave an amused little laugh at her shocked expression and turned to her mother. “I get that all the time because of my ears, but I was born this way. I suppose Annika’s creative side likes to color things up a bit, even if it’s at others’ expense. Was she this much trouble when she was younger, Faline?”

“Heavens, no,” her mother said, shaking her head. “Come on; let me have another look at this ring he had specially made for you.” Still recovering from her husband’s tale, Annika held out her left hand for inspection, while her mother tucked her light brown hair behind her ear as she squinted at the twinkling band.

“That ring is gorgeous. What kind of writing did you say this was inside of it, Talvi?”

“Oh, nothing you would recognize,” he said cheerfully. “It’s an ancient language that most people have never heard of, although my bookish brother and I speak it at home with a few friends of ours. He’s an absolute fiend when it comes to studying rare languages. The phrase on the ring is an old saying which doesn’t translate very well, but it means that true love is capable of crossing any distance. Even if she couldn’t remember where she lived, your daughter was still charming enough to win my heart for eternity.” Faline cooed at the romantic explanation and walked back to the stove as Annika poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down across from Talvi.

“And has your bookish brother ever needed your dad to come get
him
out of jail?”

“Well, actually…um…never,” Talvi said and fussed with a few strands of hair. “Finn is very responsible. He would never find himself in that situation. I believe Annika is a bad influence on me. I’ve never been in trouble with the law before.”

“That’s right, blame the victim,” Annika said as she rolled her eyes, then stirred some sugar into her coffee. “I don’t think last night was that big of a deal, in the grand scheme of things.”

Faline’s eyes opened wider.

“You don’t think getting arrested is a big deal?” she asked, opening a cupboard to take out a few more plates. “You’ll have to repay your dad and I for the fines, by the way. You know we can’t afford that right now, Annika. We’re still paying off the last minute plane tickets to Paris we bought to bring you back home.” She set the plates on the counter with a
clunk
beside the stove, and started to fill one of them with food.

“Don’t trouble yourself over the fines and the tickets, Faline; I’ll take care of my wife’s debts as soon as I’m able to exchange more of my currency,” Talvi said as he winked at Annika.

“Do you mean to tell me that you’re a well-to-do trouble maker?” she asked, putting a plate of hash browns, scrambled eggs, wheat toast and applewood bacon in front of her daughter, which Annika started nibbling right away.

“Only if it will improve your opinion of me,” came his snappy retort.

“You know, money doesn’t solve everything, but it definitely helps,” Faline said, snickering to herself, before returning to the kitchen to fix her own plate. “There’s bacon on the stove, if you want any, Talvi.”

“Thank you, but I don’t eat animals,” he replied as he slathered jam on his toast. “I do appreciate the gesture, however.”

“Oh, are you a vegan?”

“Aren’t those the vegetarians that don’t take things like cream or honey?” he asked, eyeing his heavily buttered and jammed toast, and then his wife, who nodded. “I am most decidedly
not
that. I can’t imagine a world where I willingly deprive myself of cream and honey. I enjoy it far too much.” He turned towards Annika when her mother wasn’t looking and sank his teeth into his toast with far more sensuality than was necessary.

“Is it a religious thing, then?”

Talvi chewed slowly while he thought of a response, all the while inching his foot up the back of Annika’s calf from underneath the table.

“One could call it that, for lack of a better explanation,” he said politely before taking another bite of his toast. He was now coaxing his foot up her knees, towards her thighs. She would have enjoyed it more if she wasn’t starting to feel sick again. She set down her last piece of half-eaten bacon, and heard her stomach make a familiar sound.

“Fair enough. Help yourself to seconds, although you could probably have thirds, you skinny thing. There’s plenty of food,” she said, fixing a plate for herself.

“Why, thank you, Faline,” he said in between taking licks of buttery jam from his fingers with deliberate strokes of his tongue. “I usually do help myself to seconds and thirds. My appetite tends to be quite insatiable.”

“You sure don’t look like you eat that much. You must have a hollow leg.”

Talvi snickered to himself and ceased licking his fingers, pulling his foot out of Annika’s lap just in time as Faline set a pitcher of orange juice in front of him. He poured the women each a glass before refilling his own.

Annika gnawed at her toast as she waited for the unpleasant feeling in her stomach to pass, but she knew it wasn’t going to go away. She’d felt it dozens of times over the past few months, and last night had begun exactly like this. Maybe this time would be different. Yeah, right. She knew what was coming next.

“Are you feeling alright sweetie?” her mother asked, smiling at her daughter. “Did you drink a little too much last night?”

“No, I didn’t have—” Annika clapped her greasy hand over her mouth and bolted from the table to the bathroom upstairs. She heaved again and again, until she thought her stomach was empty. She ran the faucet and gargled before rinsing her mouth out, but when she returned to her chair, she didn’t feel any better.

“Are you alright?” Talvi asked from his spot across the small table. “You don’t look very well at all.” He narrowed his eyes in concern, trying to determine what might be the cause, before he took another sip of his juice.

“Well I think I’ve figured out why you two got married so fast,” her mother said with a suspicious look in her eyes. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” There was a crash of glass as a puddle of orange juice spread all over the floor underneath Talvi’s chair. He stooped down to blot up the mess with his napkin while Faline helped collect the pieces of broken glass.

Annika moaned while another wave of nausea came rolling up in her stomach. It was one thing to be paranoid of being pregnant, but it was something completely different to have her own mother say it out loud. It made it more real than ever before. She clamped her mouth shut and found herself kneeling in front of the toilet once more, vomiting until she swore her mutinous stomach was attempting escape from her very body. Slow moving footsteps approached and someone passed through the open door, before shutting it for some privacy. She opened her eyes to see Talvi kneeling beside her with a glass of water.