Project Sapling: Part 3:3

Chapter 29

It would be a week and a half before MacKenzie was released from the infirmary and the move from the barracks to on-base housing took place. It was still, most technically, a form of a barracks, and we would still be expected to comport ourselves as though we were living in the enlisted block, still subject to inspections and regulations and rules, but the important thing was that it was a private residence with a lock on the door. It was a modest dwelling, a row-house with walls joined to others just like it, but it had a pair of private bedrooms, one upstairs, one downstairs, a kitchen, a private bathroom, an office space, and a common space. The officer’s bedroom on the ground floor was larger, and with Mac’s leg still healing Idris would be sharing it to assist with medical recovery, which was apparently a sub-specialty, while we would be expected to share the Aid’s room that adjoined the office upstairs between us.

The sheer relief that washed over Oscar as the lock to the private room clicked was palpable. His father’s visit had shaken him, and he had been quiet to the point of sullenness since as the rest of our class of recruits filtered in out of the field and took up more and more of the space in the barracks with unknown bodies, almost letting his temper get the better of him twice when the same pack of older boys had attempted to start something.

Having never had to deal with people like this personally other than Eddie – my time in school had been mostly marked by people avoiding me, so far as I could remember, not overtly picking on me – I had little advice to offer to him, nor insight into their ways. So far as I could tell, they had simply decided to torment Oscar spontaneously without any clear motivation. He had explained to me that it was a problem that followed him, and that his entire way of being was the likely cause, and therefore nothing could be done to dissuade them.

What I could do, and did, was put my own body into the equation, glare up at whoever was attempting to put their smug smiling face too far into my brother’s personal space, attempting to get him to try to remove them with his fists, calmly reminding them that we were both in the limbo land that was a first-year Teacher’s Aid. Oscar, more knowledgeable in the ways of bullies, cringed over this, knowing with stone certainty that this would only add fuel to the fire of their tauntings.

We had quickly learned that among the staff and the students older than us, there were two camps: Those who were happy MacKenzie had taken the only empty staff slot to come up that year, and those who would have preferred Eddie and were angry that Mac had returned from the field at all. Among that second camp, it was apparent, we were both wanted men. Word hadn’t managed to spread about what I had done to Eddie on Conscription night, but it was known that he had been packed up and sent back East where he came from in disgrace on the next medical chopper going that direction. Grandad had declared loudly, when confronted publicly on where the officer had vanished too, that Eddie had made a fool of himself and shown his whole ass to the entire senior staff, and if General Preston liked him so much, then General Preston could take him back.

It was widely speculated that MacKenzie had been the source of his need for a medical lift, and after a hushed conversation with Grandad it had been decided that until further notice, that was a rumor to let stand. The entire unit that had volunteered from the Eastern front along with him had been transferred back there with him as well, but there were still those, like Oscar’s gang of tormentors, who had apparently liked him and were resentful of his absence. Any of Eddie’s remaining loyal comrades would be less inclined to pull something nasty on the newly promoted Lieutenant than they would on a raw recruit, even if she was a Teacher’s Aid, a position that granted heavy responsibility and zero authority.

It had been after I diffused a third instance in which Oscar would have ended up in an unpleasant situation either way that his temper flared at me, declaring loudly that he didn’t need my help.

“I never asked you to fight my battles for me!” he snapped, his voice cracking high in frustration.

“You shouldn’t have to ask, that’s what having your back is about!” I had retorted, equally frustrated. “You can’t always be the one having to save my ass, sometimes you’ve gotta let me do the rescuing or else this ain’t an equal exchange, I’m just a goddamn distressed damsel!”

That had made the tension drain out of him for a moment, and he had laughed, awkwardly. “I don’t think anyone could mistake you for a damsel in distress anymore. Distressing, maybe...”

That had made me laugh.

When the door to our room shut behind us and we were presented with pairs of identical narrow beds, desks, and dressers flanking a single, wide window, the boy I had met in the field showed back up in Oscar’s skin. It was like switching off a light, the way his shoulders relaxed and the muscles in his face released. “So who gets what side?” He asked, looking from bed to bed. “Does it matter? Were we assigned, or...”

I shook my head, and placed my duffle on the right-hand bed. “I’ll take right if it’s all the same.”

His response was to drop his duffle onto the foot of the lefthand bed, slide the toolbox of paints and brushes under the bed, and then flop face-first onto the blanket. He refused to move from the spot for several solid minutes, limbs twitching with sheer relief.

Several days later, his father visited again.

He was carrying another package. The first thing out of his mouth was that he had checked the regulations, and that there was nothing wrong with what he was about to do, but that he understood if Oscar didn’t want the thing he held.

He then extended the package, folded simply inside a paper grocery bag tied up with string into a present, as though he held something infinitely precious to him and terribly fragile, his face open and haunted.

When Oscar untied the string and opened the paper package, he got so far as a small corner of denim and red yarn poking out the brown paper before bursting into frantic tears and clutching the package to his chest tightly, stuttering out a thanks and wiping at his face, obviously ashamed of crying.

“What is it?” I asked, gently, wondering how something as simple as denim and yarn could do something like that to him, and he shook his head, clutching it tighter.

“I’ll show you later,” he promised, and raced back upstairs to our room to place the thing on his bed in wait for ‘later’, returning to allow his father to take him to the mess for his required extra meal.

That order was grating on him worse than anything else yet. I watched the way he pushed his food around his plate, stared at it for long moments between bites as though not comprehending what the food was or how to move it from plate to face, and knew that we were facing trouble when it came to the category of feeding Oscar up to regulation weight. He had confessed, after I called him on the fact that half the time he never managed to finish what was on his plate, simply rearranging most of it before consuming a few spoonfuls of vegetables and if lucky a bite or two of meat, that he wasn’t used to the amount of food being thrust upon him and that he had a hard time eating much even when he was afforded access to a bounty, feeling simultaneously that it had to be a trap to get something out of him, and intrinsically less worthy of the food than those around him. I had watched him attempt to hand out second helpings of dinner before feeding himself on so many occasions over the course of our time in the bush that I knew exactly what he was talking about.

It was a thin quilt.

Patched together from fragments of oddly shaped denim in several shades and textures with a consistent tight stitch in fine red cotton yarn, it was ugly in the most beautiful way, clearly the work of loving and patient hands making do with what they had to build something better. His hands moved over it reverently as he told me that his mother had made it for him, and his sister had taught him how to patch it himself before she left. I understood, then, why his reaction had been what it had been. I would have burst into tears as well.

My mother had yet to contact me.

Hildie, with the new baby Abigail in her arms, had appeared a few days after we had returned from the field, hugging me and screaming bloody revenge over my face until I told her that I had already used it to fend off bullies, and then informed her that I had gotten my own revenge for the act with my knees. She had demanded to know everything, her easy mirth returned to her along with the light in her eyes and the spring in her step with the healthy, happy, gurgly baby girl, smelling of milk and that strange, sweet, fresh-baby smell, cuddled constantly to her chest in a wrapped shawl. I had told her the story, leaving out nothing that I could remember, and she had quailed at the idea of the danger that I had been in, but been in awe of my tenacity and loyalty to my companions.

She was thrilled to see Marz again, letting them hold Abigail and thanking them profusely for finding me out in the field, and Marz had shrugged off that thanks and thrown it casually in Oscar’s direction, making the boy blush and duck for cover.

Hildie was absolutely enamored with Oscar, declaring him to be ‘the cutest thing since sliced bread’ whatever the hell that meant, and insisting on her privileges as a Mother to hand him a pocket full of sweets. Overwhelmed by the handful of dulcitas, he had fled, cloistering himself in our barracks with an excuse of needing to clean his gear.

I knew for a fact he had polished every piece that could be until they had shone earlier that day, and had finished pressing his spare uniform several minutes before Hildie had arrived. When Hildie finally left, I found him sitting cross-legged on his bunk, the toolbox his father had delivered open in front of him and candy nowhere to be seen, pencil and drawing pad in hand. He hid the paper, setting it face down on the bed and sliding it under one knee in a single fluid motion that tucked it safely out of reach of grasping fingers. He really had spent his life in constant fear of bullies, even within what was supposed to be the safety of his own home. “So that’s your stepmom? Somehow I was picturing someone... Not twenty-two?”

I snorted. “Did you miss the part where my daddy liked child brides?” I reminded him, sitting down behind him on his rack and flopping backwards, staring up at nothing.

“I’m not saying it was a rational expectation,” Oscar admitted, absently, the soft rustle and scuff of graphite over rough paper betraying his resumed activity. I hadn’t seen him use the box until then, having taken the Prince up on his offer to keep the precious object secured. He must have gone to find Sir Acton directly after leaving us. “Just that it did not compute that she’s like younger than my sister?”

I sat up, looking over his shoulder at the paper he was working on, resting my chin there and pressing into his back, feeling him stiffen and then relax at the contact.

“It’s not done,” he said, nervously, instinctively covering the drawing with one hand before I could get a good look. “Anyway I’m not any good and it’s not interesting.”

“Stop badmouthing my brother and show me the damn drawing,” I quipped, tugging at the edge of the drawing pad. He relented, and revealed a rough sketch of a woman’s face, wavy curls framing features too alike to Oscar’s to be anyone but his sister. He wasn’t that bad, whatever he said, if I was easily able to identify the Lady Lieutenant from a pencil sketch. “I wish I could draw like that,” I mused. I was encouraged toward active, useful skills, and had never found the time to learn how to make a face look like it had a thought behind the eyes. “She’s really your sister, you think?” I leaned into him harder, shifting my own legs to bolster his sagging weight, knowing that this moment of drained tension couldn’t last, and soon he would fill back up to bursting with worries and unspoken thoughts and be stiff and hard and cold again, twitching away from every slight touch and flinching at the sounds of boots coming down a hallway. “I thought she was you, for a second. She even sounds like you, a bit.” I hesitated, and then said what was on my mind, knowing it would inflate itself and eat at my own peace until I had. “Do you regret coming back here? You could have gone and found her, I mean...”

He stiffened under my touch, whole body going ridged and hard and tight again, and I knew I had misspoken.

Finally, he set the picture back down on his covers, turning the pad of paper over again so the image was facing the blankets. “No,” he said, simply, and I felt him deliberately relax himself back into me, forcefully pulling himself down from the ceiling. “She never came back for me,” he said, finally. “If she wanted me, she would have.”

I had other thoughts on the matter, but those were ones that I needed to let grow and inflate a little before I could let them out for him to see.

“Besides,” he mused, leaning his head onto mine, “then I would have lost the sister who did chose me...”

He had put away his pencil and pad, and closed up the box again, securing it with a shiny, imposing lock and burying the key in the bottom of his footlocker before taking the box and placing it on the Prince’s desk, to immediately be sat upon by the luxurious white cat known as Rice. She was, of course, a synthetic cat, and I had known that for years, and knew that the presence of such a hellish cross between nature and fabrication had made my father’s hatred for all cats only increase. Sir Acton, I knew, believed that the adaptive artificial intelligence drive that powered the logic module on the device was sufficiently advanced and complicated to be comparable to the addition of an electronic soul to the things, which my father found utterly heretical. What I knew, was that they were capable of learning, possessed individual quirks that did not seem to replicate the way an algorithmic generation should, and were prone to the usual sort of dumbass tomfoolery that natural cats were. To whit, I had no idea whether Rice was deliberately guarding the box on instructions, or being a cat with a new object to sit on. In the end, it didn’t matter, because the outcome was that one of the Prince’s extra sets of eyes was keeping a close watch over Oscar’s treasure chest, and that was enough.

We went to dinner, and I watched Oscar push his meal around his plate, afraid of his food and upset to be given so much at once. Finally, I resorted to warfare, stabbing at the carrots on his plate and eating the thing while staring into his face. “Hey, what–?”

“Well eat it or don’t, don’t just fiddle with it!” I retorted, grinning evilly. “Honestly why you let yourself get loaded up with food you know you won’t eat and will only go in the trash is beyond me,” I added, choosing to be just the slightest bit vicious.

I wished I could take it back as soon as it had left my mouth. His face went tight, eyes going wide and brows knitting together, and he started to breath irregularly, almost hyperventilating. I knew that look. “N-not my f-fault they’re making me f-fill up a stupid c-card that says I’ve taken the f-food! I’m trying, okay, I... It’s not like I want to waste it, I just... Can’t, okay? It’s hard. I don’t.. It’s not something you’d understand.” He shook his head, then stabbed several carrot rounds with his fork and forced them into his mouth. “Listen, I am trying my best, I am doing the best I can, I just... I’m used to grabbing a handful of something here or there, not this much at once?”

That clicked. I understood what had to be done. I let him ‘do his best’ to finish his meal in the allotted timeframe, then before he could take what remained to the trashbin and depart, scooped up the half-full plate and grabbed him by the hand, marching him up to the officer in charge of the mess for the day, placing the plate on the counter, and standing as tall as my frame would allow me. “This boy has been critically malnourished at home and hasn’t finished a plate since he arrived. What provisions are there for him taking away the food he was issued so he can finish it later?”

I was blinked at several times before the officer’s eyes skittered from my nametag, correctly spelled on my uniform blouse in even embroidered stitches and lacking all the charm and humor of my brother’s left-handed pun, then to Oscar’s, and then light dawned. “Oh you’re them. Hold on.” She returned a moment later with a green plastic shell-case stamped “Official Ration Box” on top followed by a number which she recorded, along with his name and serial number in a booklet reserved for this purpose, and proceeded to instruct Oscar on how to pack up his left-over meals, and that he could stow them in the Prince’s office, but that he was to return the empty box at next meal or face discipline. Oscar quailed, but did as instructed, taking the box and signing his name in the record book.

He wasn’t the only recruit on base who was allowed the privileges of extra meals and takeaway boxes, since one of Grandad’s earliest edicts toward Recruit Safety was to enact a minimum fighting weight. Anyone whose family had failed to adequately feed them had the responsibility now to do it themselves, and they were expected to do so. When Oscar had balked on the second day about needing to eat extra meals, Grandad had told a grizzly tale about a recruit whose weight had been insufficient to properly deploy their parachute, whose plummeting death on drop day had ensured the extra ration tickets were issued without complaint. I had no idea whether this was a made-up story to frighten him into compliance, a half-truth about a child who now lived in Cascadia under a different name, or an actual event that haunted him. He told it with the same chilling, far-off deadpan either way, and Oscar had accepted that four meals a day was a thing he was required to do until he weighed at least ten pounds more than he did now.

Now, I had ensured that he was required to actually finish those meals. He wasn’t grateful. I knew better than to expect that. I simply hoped he would be less skinny by this time next year. I knew admittedly very little about teenaged boys still, the closest I’d ever come to one being either Eddie, a bad example, or my neighbor Chris, an even worse example, albeit for completely different reasons, but I did know that they weren’t supposed to be so skinny as to count ribs and see the ridge of his hipbones. This was something that made me lividly angry, having seen the sheer imposing bulk of his father. I couldn’t quite tell whether Oscar’s state was a result of his father taking the lion’s share of everything and leaving little for his son, or the boy’s own horror at the idea of becoming his father driving him to emaciate himself in the hopes of staying the size he was now for ever. I suspected that the answer actually lay at the crossroads of the two. Either way, it wouldn’t do, and it was my job to fix it.

It was on the course of the quest to fatten up Oscar that I found my mother.

Almost a week after our move to the private residence, with the last of our class finally filtering in out of the field, I had confronted Grandad about the problem, and demanded access to the infamous sweets kitchen. I had seen how Oscar had reacted to sugary treats, and knew my weapon of choice was going to end up needing to be pastry. He had laughed, and informed me that the culinary class was open enrollment and elective, and that he would put my name on the list. I corrected him, informing him that any class I was in had better have a spot for my brother. That had made him laugh harder, but he informed me that Oscar had in fact already been added to the enrollment list before I had bothered. Grandad, of course, was just as perceptive of the problem as I was, and just as aware of the solution.

The first class period in the pastry kitchen, Ondine arrived with a package of supplies from the quartermaster. She dropped it on the counter, haling our classmates, a pair of girls one quarter ahead of us in the middle of a complicated assignment, and turned to hang up her gear.

She froze when she saw me, face going slack and shocked, evidently unprepared.

When she unfroze herself, her first reaction was not to reach out and embrace me or cry my name, but to swear creatively and jerk her whole body into an exasperated pose. “Goddamn Geckos never brief me on anydamnthing!” she cried, throwing up both hands in frustration. “Fucking hell happened to your face, child?”

“You know each other?” The curious Vasquez, bright eyed and dark haired and devoted to her girlfriend, had apparently already met Ondine.

“Her stepmother goes to my clinic.” Ondine’s voice was deadpan, staring at my face with a level of scrutiny that most people I had encountered had yet to have dared. “Care to step outside of the classroom for a moment, Cole?”

I followed her, silent and simmering over, out into the hallway, and then turned, arms crossed over my chest, to stare at her, my hot rage obvious.

She winced. “Badger told me you’d figured it out. Didn’t say you’d be here, though.” She glared through the door to where Oz was busily instructing Oscar in how to cut butter for a basic pastry dough. Turning back to me, she hesitated, then sighed. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around sooner. I’m a doctor in my daily life, as I’m sure you’re aware, so my free time isn’t that reliable. Never know when a sudden delivery is going to wreck my weekend plans!” She said it with a manic grin and a forced laugh, and I knew she hadn’t been so late in contacting me out of a busy schedule. I said nothing, waiting for her to continue. Whatever she had to say to me, I would listen before I said my peace.

I was too busy drinking in the sight of her to speak, anyway. I hadn’t expected not to be unnerved by her scars this time. Somehow, the knowledge that I had in fact been several times engulfed in flames only to come away unsinged had turned what had been in my mind some terrible manifestation of my guilt and horror at her death into a concrete sign that she was alive, not just a sad and angry ghost.

Finally, she continued. “Look, I... I’m sorry. I’m here now, that’s what matters, right? It’s good to see you. I heard, about your face, I just... Hearing doesn’t quite cover it...” she reached out, attempting to touch my now-healed scar, and I stepped sharply out of the way.

“Ask,” I snapped, simply, glaring harder.

She stared, taken aback, and then a moment later blinked, and nodded. “I’m sorry. May I?”

I hesitated, and then nodded, and leaned into her hand as she touched my face, closing my eyes.

She was real.

The other students in the room had seen her, reacted to her, spoken to her.

I could feel the callused points of her hands and the warmth of her skin.

I opened my eyes to find that my mother was crying, silently, holding my face with one hand and plastering the other over her mouth to stifle any noise in a motion I knew all too well.

Not knowing quite what else to do, I leaned into her touch farther, and she reached out quicker than my eye could follow with the other hand and pulled me into a crushing hug so tight I felt my bones grind on each other. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, rubbing her face on my hair, her tears unceasing. “I’m so sorry I failed you, baby...” She took me by the shoulders, pushing me away from her to arm’s length, looking me up and down with teary eyes, face ranging from horror to shock to sadness and all interspersed with overwhelming joy. “Look at you,” she marveled, grinning through her continued weeping. “You look all grown up and ferocious...” She shook her head, looking away from me and taking a deep breath, words running dry. Finally, she looked back into my eyes, shaking her head and smiling sadly at me. “You know, he was right. You do look just like Art...” The words were quiet, soft, and without malice, but they shook me nonetheless, and I shook myself out of her grasp, taking a deliberate step backwards and out of her range.

She looked pained.

I knew I must have looked suddenly livid.

She stared at me wordlessly for a long time before turning, opening the classroom door again and calling inside. “Oz. I’m taking her for a walk. We’ll be back, she can make up the lab later.” With that she closed the door, and indicated that I should walk with a sharp jerk of her head.

Finally able to take in the full sight of her, I was aware that her rank dictated compliance, and followed her. I already knew how to make a puff pastry, anyway.

Ondine appeared to be serious about the walk. Exiting the building and forging a path to the kennels, Ondine explained her rank to me as “lieutenant at large,” and further explained that that meant she was an all-around errand-boy for the senior staff. With that in mind, she entered the kennel with a loud groan, and leaned in to sign the record book, adopting a tone of exasperation, and said “Badger says Junior Junior needs an extra walk today. Don’t even know what I said to piss him off this time...”

Collecting a leash and a trainer’s kit with treats and waste bags, Ondine entered the kennel, telling me to wait outside, and returned with one of the creatures emphatically referred to as Dogs. This creature looked for the most part like a large coyote, shaggy gray fur and golden eyes and pointed, soft ears. Where things got difficult was with the number of legs, and the fact that it had preceded Ondine out the door by crawling sideways around the doorpost at a height of four feet. The actual portmanteau for these monsters was “Coyoterantulas,” apparently, but in speech, they were only ever Dogs.

Leading the Dog, which she explained in a businesslike, offhand tone was named Junior Junior, and belonged to the Brigadier General, to a well-worn perimeter trail, she set a pace too brisk for talking as the Dog jumped to the chainlink fence, rattling it loudly as it skuttled forward at shoulder height at breakneck speed. When we were out of earshot of the nearest buildings, covered by the noise the fence was making under the grasp of the Dog, Ondine slowed her pace, and turned to look at me again.

“It wasn’t an insult, you know. I didn’t mean to upset you. I... I understand, how hard it must be to be told that...”

“No you don’t!” I snapped it before thinking. “You don’t know one bit what I–”

“Shut up an listen.” It was an order, not a request, but still in a gentle tone that I hadn’t heard in years. I was silent. She hesitated, biting her lip and frowning for a moment before finally continuing. “I did love him, you know. He was a beautiful soul, at his core, and a beautiful man on the surface. I went with him willingly, because I was in love with him, and I believed he would take care of me. And he did, in his way, for a while.” She had looked away from me, facing directly ahead of her and seeing not the path, but the past. “He had a lot of pain in him, and it drove him to try to purge it by passing it on, and that’s never the right option. I’m sorry, sweetheart, that I failed to protect you from him.” She shook her head. “He needed to control his life to feel alright about himself, and when that life went far more uncontrollable than he could predict, it did... bad things to him.”

“I can’t believe you’re defending him!” I blurted, ignoring her order to silence.

“I am not defending him, Erica, I am explaining him, so that maybe you can understand that when I say you look like him, I mean the man I followed willingly, not the monster I was trying to leave when – when he –” She stopped, dropping the Dog’s leash and pressing both hands tight over her mouth to stifle back the sudden wracked sobs, eyes gone wide and unseeing – or rather, seeing nothing but the past.

I snatched the leash of the obliviously continuing Dog, halting his progress, and watched her as she worked to master herself once again into someone who had survived Arthur Cole, not someone who still called herself his victim.

Finally, she caught her breath, wiped frantically at her face to dry her tears, and turned to smile brightly at me, shaking her head. “What I mean when I say that, baby, is that you are the most radiant, lovely, beautiful, shining thing I have ever seen, and I am so happy to see you again.” She shook her head, laughing manically again to herself, and I waited, still wordless. “I’m so sorry I haven’t contacted you sooner, I’ve done all I could to let you know I... But with the government the way it is, and your uncle Will pulled all the strings he could just to get me my new identity even when the case got dropped, and I just... We couldn’t risk it.” She shrugged, shaking her head. “I was not allowed contact with anyone from my old life save my handler and the field agent until the case was concluded,” she intoned, as though reciting a written bullet point, rolling her eyes. “Case is over now.” She shrugged, shook her head again, and sighed. “Can talk to whoever the hell I want to.”

“Case?” Hildie had told me when I had first reencountered her that she was a secret agent on a mission to stop my father before he rallied another band of religious zealots to his cause and went around cleansing the countryside again.

I had, of course, believed she was making something up and playing a game.

My mother now confirmed for me that this had never been a game.

The aim had been to gather information about the possible reformation of the Miracle Church with the aim to overthrow the local government of the territory and establish his own little theocratic Free State, like some terrible mockery of the Fruitlands in the middle of the Rathdrum prairie.

I knew well enough that had once been exactly his plan, take a town and make it his own. I had no idea if that had continued to be his aim, or whether that was an elaborate concoction fabricated by Uncle Will in order to find some way to make good on the years of hardship his family had endured for nothing.

We continued to talk, walking the Dog along the perimeter fence, until the end of the class period, at which point she delivered me unerringly to the next classroom I would need to be at. Not all of my questions were answered, but I no longer felt the ache of abandonment when I considered that my mother was alive and lived nearby.

Oscar was waiting for me, a seat to his right reserved by one long leg, looking worried.

I flopped down in the seat, glancing down at my bookbag under it, which he had evidently brought for me from the Teaching Kitchen, and thanked him.

“Moms are badass,” was all I said in relation to my conversation with Ondine, leaning back in my chair, ruffling my hair back into place and grinning to myself. Hildie was a goddamn hero, for my books.

I opened the bookbag, pulled out my history book, and opened it to the first lesson of the rest of my career.