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The next morning, when Karen woke up, head aching, face puffy and blotched from crying all night, feeling wrung through, only to find a note slipped under her door that read “I’m sorry – V.”, she knew what she had to do.
Splashing water on her puffy sore red-rimmed eyes did very little to improve her appearance, so she did what she had to do and headed to the kitchen.
A lifetime of habit had Helen always rise with the dawn, but Karen had hoped to avoid her. There was no avoiding her, not sitting at the kitchen table drinking a steaming mug of coffee.
“Good morning, Karen,” Helen said, voice rough from the party’s celebrations. She looked up as Karen walked stiffly over to her, thrusting a folded piece of paper at her.
Helen accepted the paper, frowning. “What’s this?” She looked up at Karen, and concern washed away the frown. “Karen, honey, you look awful! What happened, what’s going on?”
Karen clenched her teeth against the wave of despair that washed over her. “My resignation,” she managed to say, her heart shattering, the deep black hole inside her tearing away the pieces, leaving only pain, only heartache, only sorrow. All the things she’d tried so hard to avoid.
"Your resignation?" Helen stared at the piece of paper in her hand, opened it, scanned it quickly. "'I hereby resign as your nanny. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. I love you all, Karen.'"
Karen felt the tears start to well up in her eyes and she quickly blinked them away.
"Karen, sit down, please?" Helen said, stretching her arm to push out a kitchen chair, inviting her to sit.
Karen sighed, seeing no way out of the discussion, and sat.
"What's going on?" Helen asked.
"I can't keep... working for you, Helen."
"First of all, you're not an employee," Helen said. "You're... well, you're family."
Karen couldn't stop the tears then, and she buried her face in her hands.
"Helen, I'm so sorry, I know you must be so disappointed in me," Karen sobbed. How could there be any tears in her left? Surely she had cried them all out last night.
"Disappointed?" Helen shook her head. "No. Never. Confused, yes. Concerned. But not disappointed. Just... tell me what's happening."
"I can't stay here any more," Karen said, sniffling. Helen reached across the room and brought back a box of tissues. Karen blew her nose and wiped her eyes. "I can't. I'm not strong enough. I tried, Helen, I promise you, I really, really tried."
"Strong enough for what? What did you try?"
Karen spoke the words that revealed her weakness, hoping that Helen wouldn't hate her. "I'm not strong enough to not fall in love with your daughter."
Helen stared at her for a long, drawn out moment, long enough for Karen to feel the icy corkscrews of panic start to pierce her misery.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I never thought it would happen! I tried to dismiss it as as as - just a teenage crush. I said she'd grow out of it. But she hasn't! And I can't fight it any more. I love her. It's wrong, I know it is, but I can't help it, I love her, I want to be with her all the time, I want to hold her and tell her I love her, I want her to say the same things back to me. No one has ever made me feel the way she makes me feel, not even... Anyway. That's why I have to leave. I'm sorry. I've packed my things and I can call a taxi. You won't have to see me any more."
Helen took a long pull of her coffee, then set it down with great deliberation. Finally she asked, "Not even who?"
"What?"
"You said, no one made you feel like Violet does, not even... and you stopped yourself."
"Oh," Karen said in a small voice. She took a deep breath. "My first... I mean, I'd had other... girlfriends, before, but nothing really serious. Nothing like Kate. She was... really something. Beautiful, smart, fun to be with, cool... and older. I was seventeen and she was twenty-one, and she wanted to be with me. Me! I couldn't believe it. We met at a party and she called me a week later and invited me to this jazz coffee bar place she knew about and we listened to jazz and poetry and drank coffee. It was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me. She was the coolest thing that... Anyway. We did that for a couple of months, and a few other things. Dating, but we didn't call it that, because labels were for squares, man.
"And then one night after a movie we went back to her apartment and... did things. Things I wasn't ready for. I mean, we'd made out and stuff before, but we'd never gone all the way. And I didn't want to say no, and risk losing her. So I didn't say no, and things happened, and I wasn't ready for those things, and I started crying, and she got angry at me for being a such a dumb school kid. And I wanted so badly to make it right, to keep being with her, to make her happy. But she stopped calling me after that. I guess I wasn't cool enough any more. And pretty soon I stopped calling her."
Helen reached over and took Karen's hands in her own. "Honey, what happened to you was horrible. What that person did to you was not your fault."
"It was years ago," Karen said dismissively, as though that forgave it. "I was just a dumb school kid, heads over heels stupid in love. In what I thought was love. I was wrong." She sniffed and blew her nose. "But I'm not wrong this time. I love Violet, I know she loves me, but the only way to stay in the right in this situation is to remove myself from it. I can't stay here, being in love with her, being loved by her, and risk doing the same to her that was done to me."
"Oh honey, no, no!" Helen said, shifting around the table to lay an arm across Karen's shoulders and pull her into a hug. "You could never do that to her, not ever! I know that, Bob knows that, we all do! You're not capable of being that... that..."
"Selfish?" Karen muttered. "Oh, I can. My parents were right, I am selfish. You don't know, Helen."
"Your parents? The people who threatened you, tried to control you, and then abandoned you? Those parents?"
"When I got my powers... well. Supers were still in hiding, but I still wanted to help people," Karen explained. "I thought I could do it, you know, discretely. But my Mom caught me sneaking out of the house one night, using my powers.
"'Don't you know what'll happen to us if you get caught?' my mom screamed at me. 'Always thinking of yourself!' my dad yelled. 'Never a thought for your poor mother!' As if they ever let me think of anything else. So I opened a portal to run away, and my dad said 'if you leave, don't bother ever coming back.' I said, 'I'm your daughter' and he answered 'my daughter is dead, you freak' and mom started crying and I ran, opening portal after portal until I was so far away I couldn't find my way back if I tried."
"Oh Karen," Helen said, hugging her tight and letting her cry. Silent tears trailed down her own cheeks, tears of anger and helplessness and sorrow that this wonderful, intelligent, caring young woman should have grown up with such ... monsters, she wanted to call them, knowing they weren't monsters, just all too human.
Helen stroked her hair, holding her tight, fiercely protective. Karen hugged her back, shoulders shaking with silent sobs as Helen murmured quiet reassurances into her teal hair. When Karen's sobs finally quieted, she pulled back and reached for the box of tissues.
"Now I don't want to hear any more talk about leaving," Helen said. "You are family, no matter what happens, one way or another."
Karen looked about ready to cry again, but she was smiling, so Helen assumed they were happy tears.
"And for what it's worth," Helen added, lifting up Karen's chin and pushing her teal hair out of her face, "I would be absolutely delighted if you were to date Violet. Proud, in fact."
Tears did spill from Karen's red eyes then, and she wailed "Oh Helen!" as she threw herself into Helen's arms.
"Shh honey, shh," Helen soothed. Karen sobbed, nodding against Helen’s shoulder, and mumbled an apology.
"Let's make some breakfast," Helen suggested gently. "Maybe the smell of bacon frying will wake this family of slugabeds."
Karen laughed and blew her nose, again.
"And when she gets up, you and I and Violet will have a girls day, I think," Helen continued, pulling Karen to her feet and leading her into the kitchen. "And once we've been pampered and beautified, we will have a talk about what will and won't be considered acceptable behaviour between you two, as a couple."
Karen felt her cheeks redden and was about to reply when Bob, dressed in just his pajama pants, came thundering down the stairs.
"Remote!" he yelled, and the device flew out of the couch cushions and into his hands.
"Bob, what on earth?" Helen began as Bob clicked on the television.
On the screen, a breaking news report was showing a scene of chaos, taken from the street near New Urbem City Hall.
"-showed up out of nowhere and began issuing demands!" the reporter announced. "And then he blasted some police officers and-" Behind the reporter, some boys dressed in far-too-big-for-them police uniforms were being chased by a caveman wearing the tattered rags of what might have once been a police uniform.
Helen dropped her coffee mug, smashing it to pieces. On the television screen, a bald man with a scarred face, wearing a supersuit of purple and green with an hourglass on his chest, shouted something at the reporter, who dodged behind a car. The cameraman was only a second slower.
Bob’s face had gone pale as a sheet, and Karen didn’t think it was from too many rum and cokes the night before. He looked over at his wife, clearly horrified.
“Timekeeper,” the Parrs said together, and the fear in their voices immediately spread to Karen.