Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  ***

  Evvie left Gwen to her thoughts and her misery.

  She took her confusion, her worry, and her shuddering heart upstairs. She needed quiet, needed space to (fall apart) think. To process it.

  Mark was already in the shower, washing off the sweat and grime and dirt of a day’s worth of dusty work in the barn. The room held the faint hint of barnyard and next spring’s harvest. His clothes were draped over the wicker chair in the corner. Evvie suspected that he had helped Basil and Gwen bury the spaceship: there were long dark streaks of soil that ran up the shins of the jeans. Keeping one ear open for Gwennie, Evvie tidied the bedroom, putting Mark’s clothes into the laundry hamper, turning down the sheets. She refolded the laundry on the foot of the bed, put it all away, dusted the top of the dresser with a sock destined for the wash.

  Anything to keep her hands busy and her brain occupied.

  When she’d run out of things to do, she sat on the edge of the bed and waited. When Mark came out of the bathroom he was in a fresh tee-shirt and jeans. Neither of them wanted to drop into unconsciousness just yet.

  Not with strangers (soldiers) in the house.

  Not with this new world under their roof.

  “How you feeling?” Mark asked, sitting beside her. He smelled like soap and cheap shampoo. Evvie locked her hand with his, grateful for the warmth and support and solidity of him, the blunt fingers, the rough bitten-down nails. He didn’t seem ruffled at all, which Evvie knew was mostly just the stoic farmer act. Inside, he was churning just as much as she.

  “I don’t know anymore,” Evvie admitted softly. “Aliens? Time travel?”

  “It’s a hell of a lot to swallow,” Mark agreed.

  Evvie licked her lips, debated telling Mark what she had learned. She decided to share — she needed to. Whatever they spoke of would stay between them. Evvie felt like it was building, words like pressure behind that lump in her throat that could strangle her.

  “Gwen talked about what happened,” Evvie blurted.

  Mark said, “Yeah?” There was a world of curiosity in that one syllable.

  “Said it was nothing like those B-movies with the guys in rubber suits. That they were running. Needed help and shelter.” She pressed her face into his shoulder, took a shaking breath. Then Evvie told him everything: about Gwen’s team and the way Specialists were suddenly being assassinated, and their covert training, and the mole.

  Evvie left out the parts about Gwen and Basil and Kalp’s relationship, about same-gender marriages, about proper alien family units. If Evvie didn’t talk about it, she wouldn’t have to deal. But Mark’s lazy drawl masked a keen mind. He had to have inferred at least as much from Gwen’s sobbing confession on the back lawn as his wife had.

  “Imagine that, Evvie,” Mark said, bypassing the elephant sitting on the tips of each of their tongues. “Can you imagine waking up in the morning, seein’ one of those things, all spaghetti limbs and lope shoulders and furry faces, walkin’ its kid to catch the school bus at the end of the lane? An’ it’ll be normal?”

  Evvie tried to envision it, a creature in a plaid shirt and rough worn jeans, all blue and furred and humanoid…or human-ish — or whatever reaching adjective was amateurishly employed to evoke a head, two arms, two legs, upright walking and emotive in the old pulp serials of her brother’s youth. The sort of heavy-handed fantasy from which the plot of this wild day felt as if it’d been pilfered.

  “One of ‘those things’ betrayed them,” Evvie whispered. “That’s why this is happening. I think…”

  “Their…friend?” Mark asked, not comfortable with the concept.

  What about VD? Evvie thought suddenly, absurdly. Have they cured them in two thousand twelve? What if the aliens brought something new with them? What about that gay disease? All these fags, allowed to marry, allowed to take more than one lover…is that where the world is going? “Wise up,” Gwen said. Like it’s the dark ages. She chewed her bottom lip for a second, tried to see it from Gwen’s perspective. She’d grown up in a world where men could marry men, where women could marry women, where AIDS and gays and those sorts of things sounded…common. Here Evvie was reacting like her own mother when Evvie had told her that pre-marital sex was okay, and she had —

  Oh.

  Oh.

  Mark narrowed his eyes at Evvie but said nothing. Evvie wrenched her mind back onto the conversation. “‘Those things’,” she repeated. “I just don’t get it, I guess. I mean, the Specialists and everything, I understand that. But not the…not the assassinations. If they wanted to take over the planet or, or something like that, then why kill only the Specialists? We gave them our trust, opened our arms to them, and they…now they’re doing this.” She didn’t have to explain what this meant, they both knew.

  “I dunno,” Mark said. “That don’t seem right. Like Basil said.” Mark pronounced it Bay-zil. “Why go to all that trouble? Especially if they knew that the Institute could follow them. They had to have known Basil had a Flasher doohickey. ‘Less they don’t know that it won’t work?”

  “I know,” Evvie agreed.

  “Like me pushin’ that tractor into a pond and then hollerin’ to people to come see. It don’t do anything in the end but get you in trouble.”

  “I thought you said the McKinnion boys did that,” Evvie said suspiciously. “And that they framed you.”

  Mark shifted in his jeans, which suddenly seemed to be too tight. He turned his head to stare at the baby monitor on the bedside table. “Hear that? Gonna go check on Gwennie,” he said, and bolted out of the room.

  The only sounds coming over the little speaker were Gwennie’s soft, even breaths.

  ***

  Sleep was coming to no one tonight.

  Evvie gave Mark a head start and some thinking room, then went back downstairs to fetch another bottle. Gwennie would be waking soon, hungry and soiled. Gwen was on her knees on the floor of the sub-basement, talking in low murmurs with Basil, handing him a tool occasionally. Basil made little head jerks, grunts of understanding, but his eyes never left the device in his hands. A little tip of a moist pink tongue poked out of the corner of his lips.

  Evvie went over to the fridge, pulled out the bottle she had prepared before dinner, set it in the little pot of water they left on the stove for the purpose of heating it.

  There was the rustling sound of clothing and the padding of socked feet across the kitchen floor. “Why aren’t you asleep?” Gwen asked from over Evvie’s shoulder.

  Evvie felt a smile wanting to tug at her lips. “Why aren’t you?”

  “Nightmares,” Gwen admitted straightforwardly, and something hitched at the back of her throat.

  “Want to talk about it?” Evvie asked.

  “Not particularly.” Evvie heard rather than saw Gwen lean back against the counter across the kitchen from her. “You know, I’ve always wondered why you never planted anything in the dead patch above the strawberries.”

  Evvie chuckled. “I won’t be able to rotor-till there without breaking the tines.”

  “But the grass will never grow back. High foreign metal content, maybe?” Evvie heard her snort, partially a laugh, partially hysteria. “In advance, I apologize for the stupid lie about the Europe scholarship. I should have thought of something better. You knew the whole time. I must have sounded like an idiot.”

  “I already forgive you,” Evvie said. She was not surprised to realize that she meant it.

  “And…and the fight too. The…the last thing you said to me was, ‘I have something to tell you — ‘, but I hung up. I cancelled my cell, moved away. And all you wanted to do was warn me about this.” Gwen made another strange sound, gestured up at the house, at Evvie, at this. “I suddenly have so much more sympathy for Marty McFly.”

  Evvie turned off the element, put the bottle on the counter to cool a bit, and turned to face her. “Who?”

  She shook her head. “Never mind.” Her eyes went huge. “That’s why
you always laugh so hard at the breakfast scene!” She clapped her hands to the side of her head and said, “Ow. I think I just gave myself a mini-stroke thinking about it.”

  Evvie felt the smile trying to slide across her lips and let it come. “I can’t understand half of what you say.”

  Gwen dropped her hands to her sides with a shrug. “Be thankful I’m not speaking in Welsh. I do that when I’m tired.”

  Evvie chuckled, and the exhalation of humour felt good (a relief).

  “Tea!” Basil shouted from the sub-basement, his voice sudden and plaintive. “Teeeeaaaa! Get us more tea, love?”

  “What’d your last servant die of?” Gwen shouted in return. The acerbity was still there, but now Evvie could see the affection underneath it.

  “Answering back!”

  “Har, har,” Gwen deadpanned, even as she moved to the sink and began to wash one of the dirty mugs. “Damn Basil and his tea. I never drank this much tea before I…Oh!” Gwen said, standing up straight suddenly, craning her head around to look Evvie in the face. “In grade four, when I come home with a black eye, Annalise McNeil really did start it…and I didn’t mean to rip my new jeans in grade seven, oh, and I totally hated that froufrou thing you wanted me to wear when I was the Fall Fair Queen and if you have any love for me at all, you’ll burn it the minute Esther Boycott shows it to you.”

  Evvie sucked in a little breath. “You were the Fall Fair Queen?”

  Gwen grinned. “Yeah. I was the first one they let wear jeans to the social.”

  “Why?”

  She blinked, something just occurring to her, and lowered the sudsy mug. It clinked against the edge of the sink. Her grin turned mega-watt (real). “You accidentally set fire to the dress.”

  ***

  Evvie padded upstairs to give Gwennie her bottle and Gwen and Basil their privacy. Evvie wasn’t quite sure what she expected the privacy to lead to. Surely they wouldn’t make out in the basement, especially not with their respective exhaustion and the tenseness that the urgency of the situation brought. For all of their sitting and talking, they were still on a time limit.

  Mark stayed upstairs to give Gwennie her feeding, needing something to anchor him, something solid and meaningful, something familiar, something to hold on to. For a while, Evvie sat in the rocking chair by the window and just watched. When the bottle was empty, Mark began to whisper soft, crooning things to Gwennie and Evvie felt a little like an interloper.

  She took the empty bottle back downstairs to the kitchen, planning to wash it and refill it with formula. They always kept a prepared bottle or two in the door of the fridge. She had no intention of eavesdropping any further on Gwen and Basil, but the soft sound of the cassette player in the sub-basement breathing out a tinny rendition of Chicago’s “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” piqued her interest enough for Evvie to stand at the sink with her ears open.

  “Where did you find that?” Basil’s voice murmured softly, above the tell-tale clinks of his mechanical debris.

  Gwen’s reply was just as soft. “Dad always kept his mix tapes in the cupboard under the TV.”

  “Mmm, this song makes me want to dance,” Basil said.

  Gwen’s laugh was light, but melancholy. “You haven’t danced since…hm.”

  “About time then, innit?”

  The click of tools being set down into his little tin toolbox, the shuffle of socks against carpet, the soft fap of hands in hands. Palm to palm. No sound but their soft, deep breaths, the slow susurration of an intimate, slow sway. A long, low sigh.

  “You never cried for him,” Basil whispered, so low that Evvie almost didn’t catch it. She let her hands rest gently on the edge of the counter, noticed absently that they were balled into white-knuckled fists.

  “I’m not sad,” Gwen said.

  Basil chuckled again. Evvie could imagine his soft belly, warm and pillowing, bouncing slightly against hers. “You’re a horrible liar. You cried for Lalonde, and Ogivly, and Derx. You even cried for Barnowski, and he used to drive you up the wall. You sat there and did the Ceremony of Mourning with their Aglunated. You and Kalp and…oh. Why won’t you do it for him?”

  “Why should I? The others lost their Aglunates. I only lost a traitor.”

  “What if he wasn’t, Gwen?”

  “Basil, please. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “But, the component. It wasn’t what I first thought it was. What if he — ”

  “No.”

  Feet moving away from each other, the cassette suddenly snapped off. An angry crash of tools being hurled into the wall, and Basil’s rough shout: “And you wonder why I don’t sodding come home!”

  Evvie took a step back, shoved her hands into her pockets, and gasped for the air that suddenly evacuated her lungs.

  “We are seriously not having a domestic in my parents’ basement!”

  “Why not? Seems as good a place and time as any! At least we’ll be talking about it!”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  A sharp wail from above their heads put an abrupt end to the argument.

  “What the hell is going on down there?” Mark called down the stairs, voice raised over Gwennie’s misery.

  “Nothing,” Gwen called back, mutinous and petulant.

  It was such a reflexive, daughter-like response, it actually made Evvie gasp. She’d be hearing that word in that tone again, no doubt.

  When Gwen stormed up the short flight of stairs and towards the back of the house, Evvie shrank back into the shadows and hoped she wouldn’t be noticed. Gwen was too preoccupied with her ire to see Evvie, and she was safe. Evvie heard the stomp of boots being jammed on feet, the crash of the screen door slamming against the cement wall of the mud room, and a frustrated litany of multi-lingual cussing that seemed to reach the stars.

  ***

  The old axiom was true, and the kettle was taking its sweet time.

  It seemed an eternity passed, one long, endless night of muted, damp suffering before the little whistle cut through the thick air. Carefully, Evvie poured out two cups of soothing Earl Grey tea, let them steep, and carried them downstairs. Tea seemed to be the tool of comfort and confession tonight, and who was Evvie to break tradition? The house was turning into a Hemingway story.

  “Time to take a break yet?” she asked softly, knowing that Basil had probably heard the kettle, heard her come down the stairs.

  He sighed, rubbed his eyes with broad, calloused thumbs, and set down his screwdriver. “Yeah,” he said. His eyes slid sideways to the new black scuff on the cream wall, and he winced. “Sorry.”

  “Nothing a little paint can’t fix,” Evvie assured, handing him one of the cups.

  “Cheers.”

  “So how does it work?” she asked, nodding at the conglomeration of half-melted sleek black plastic and anachronistic chunky wires and metal shards. Something triangular and melted sat off to the side, obviously discarded but clearly something far beyond the scope of any kind of technology Evvie had ever seen before. The silverish thing from the ship’s cockpit was now wired into the nest of technology that Basil had been attacking so vigorously all night.

  Basil shrugged and tilted one corner of his mouth down. “I can’t legally tell you. But, you know the transporters in ‘Star Trek’?”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing like that.” He smirked.

  Evvie returned it. “Cheeky.”

  She surveyed the collection of dirtied mugs peppering the carpet around him, including Gwennie’s pink elephant sippy cup, and wondered if she should have fixed something stronger, like black coffee. Or a double of whiskey.

  Basil seemed content though, holding the cup under his face, drinking in the warmth, and the steam, and the sweet, thin, spicy scent. He shuffled on his bum over to the couch and propped himself back against one of the arms. Evvie sat in the loveseat nearby and let him savour the tea, the silence, the moment of respite.

  “Suppose you heard all that
,” he said, halfway through his cup.

  “Hard to miss,” Evvie answered, equally soothingly.

  “She’s wound up,” he explained softly. “She’s…she hasn’t grieved. Any of it. It’s not…healthy, issit? Doesn’t help, me barricading myself in my lab as I do, but I have to…I have to fix this, before someone else loses their…”

  “Aglunate?” Evvie tried warily, fumbling on the unfamiliar word.

  He cut a calculating glance at her, but decided to let the evidence that Evvie had heard more than just the shouting part of the fight slide. “Someone is trying to wipe out the Institute. We’ve trained as best we can to defend ourselves, each other, but…I think they’re going back in time, getting rid of those of us that they can’t assassinate, perhaps the ones that took to the training better.”

  “Gwen is one of those?”

  Basil nodded, mouth curled on the edge of the mug. His upper lip was smooth, as if no scruff had ever grown there, and Evvie was struck for a surreal moment by the gentleness, the kindness and intelligence that he radiated. Not exactly the most manly of men, but his shoulders were broad and his arms were (comforting) thick, his mind keen. Sheltering.

  “So maybe they came back here to get rid of her that way.” He touched the rim of the cup to the centre of his forehead, held it there, using the heat to soothe away what appeared to be a concentration-headache. He had been squinting at his little electrical components for hours. Too long. “Only it’s a rather silly thing, innit? Time fixes wounds like that, seals ‘em back up. People go missing, someone else will always step up, fill the role, so they achieve nothing. Nothing ‘cept, you know…dead babies.”

  “I suppose I should be proud,” Evvie said, allowing herself a light chuckle, trying to raise his spirits, trying to turn from a less morbid, less immediate subject. “My daughter is a strong woman.”

  “Stubborn,” Basil corrected. “Belligerent, obstinate…God, really mulish when she puts her mind to something. Couldn’t kill her unless she wanted t’be killed.”