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Mindoir’s mid-morning sunlight dappled the cream-coloured blanket that had been spread over Jane Shepard’s father. The rise and fall of his chest distorted the shadows the leaves cast upon him.
They’d done a great job rebuilding the colony, especially considering the slaver attack had been less than a year ago. While still in progress overall, the colony’s primary hospital had been quickly restored. Nestled in a shallow valley, trees all around, the hospital’s surrounding nature was meant to be restorative.
Jane was anything but. She felt tired – she hadn’t slept properly in months as her father’s health steadily declined. The hospital machinery he was hooked up to emitted soft, repetitive – almost soothing – noises, but even amidst the calm, Jane couldn’t sleep. She pulled her knees up to her chest in the chair she was sitting in as she thought back to the call she’d made earlier that day.
Her mother wouldn’t be coming. Again. She’d ask Farah Kaya to look in on them both. Again. It would have been maddening, but Jane was too exhausted to be angry – or feel much of anything.
A beep sounded at the door that indicated someone wished to enter. “Come in,” Jane offered. Then, as the door whooshed open to reveal her father’s guest: “Hello, sir.”
Lieutenant Commander Anderson smiled at her as he crossed the threshold. He’d been by more than a few times over the last few weeks. “Good morning, Jane.”
She didn’t feel like returning the smile, but felt obligated to make some kind of friendly exchange. “Beautiful day.” Her tone was hollow, dry, and a little insincere.
Anderson nodded. “How are you holding up?” he asked as he cast his gaze to her sleeping father.
Jane shrugged. “Fine, I guess.” She didn’t want to get into it.
Anderson glanced back at her, concern in his eyes. “Hm. And your father?”
“Well… he’s still dying slowly, sir,” she responded without a hint of irony in her tone – just blunt honesty.
The lieutenant closed the space between them and placed a hand on her shoulder. Together, they watched her father in silence.
After a time, Anderson ventured, “Your father tells me you’ve been thinking about enlisting.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
“He thought I might be able to talk you out of it.”
Jane’s eyes clapped to Anderson. “What? Why?”
“I think he’d rather his only child didn’t commit herself to a life of service,” Anderson explained thoughtfully, his own eyes still on the sleeping hospital patient in front of them.
“Hm. And how might you try to sway me, sir?” Anderson was a career man himself, very well positioned and decorated for someone his age. She didn’t think she’d buy what he was about to sell her.
“Well, I’d tell you that it’s a lonely life,” he began, and Jane did remember the point at which his wife had stopped showing up at various Alliance functions.
“I don’t know if that’s true for my parents,” Jane countered.
At that, Anderson turned to look at Jane. “To that, I will offer you two points: the first is that your parents are the exception. The second is that I’m not sure you can make that argument anymore.”
Jane visibly winced. She appreciated his honesty, but it did sting a little, knowing that others were picking up on her mother’s lack of visitation. “You can’t blame that on the Alliance,” Jane returned. “They moved my father here so that we could be close to her assignment. They gave us a place to stay.” The Shepards had been assigned a pre-fab in a block of Alliance-owned units reserved for military families on leave.
“They did get that bit right,” Anderson acknowledged.
In the morning light with her father lying in front of them, at his most vulnerable that anyone had ever seen him, Jane was unafraid to make her next point. “And, sir, with all due respect, I think you could have saved your marriage – but you chose the Alliance instead.”
Surprising her, Anderson laughed. “I can’t argue with that.” He eyed her. “You won’t be swayed, will you, child?”
“Not by you, sir,” Jane answered with a half-smile.
He sighed. “Will you tell him I tried?”
“You got it, sir.”
Jane and her father were playing Go Fish later that day when Farah Kaya came by with her adult son – and Jane’s crush – in tow.
“Farah – Reuben,” John Shepard greeted their guests warmly from his hospital bed.
Jane’s father had served with Reuben’s, who died in the First Contact War. While Jane had known Farah for most of her life, it was only recently that she’d gotten to know her quite well.
“Care to join us?” John invited them.
They obliged and Jane dealt the cards for Bridge on the hospital overbed tray. Farah chatted brightly, making sure the Shepards had the things they needed, offering to review Jane’s schoolwork before she submitted it to her teacher back on the SSV Einstein. All things Jane appreciated but wished her own mother would do.
“And how are things going with you, Reuben?” Jane’s father asked as he picked up a trick of cards.
“Not so bad, sir,” Reuben replied, shifting a card from the left to the right side of his hand. “As far as brain dissections go.” He was joking, of course, about his PTSD treatments.
Her conversation with Anderson in mind, Jane asked, “Do you regret enlisting?”
Over the top of his cards, Reuben levelled her with a look that said he really didn’t want to do this here. Jane was about to apologise when Farah said, with a faraway quality to her voice, “Reuben was a natural. Everyone said so.”
Reuben shrugged. “It was just what I was meant to be doing. Can’t regret that.” He glanced at Jane’s father before saying, “Can’t deny it either.”
John sighed and looked at Jane. “I just want you to be safe.”
“Sir, if I may… If it’s what Jane wants to do, wouldn’t it be better that she’s happy instead?”
“Reuben, enough,” Farah said, a warning tone in her voice that was simultaneously terrifying and amusing. Scolding a 26-year-old as if he were still a child.
“Sorry, ma’am, sir,” he apologized to the two parents, chastened.
Jane unsuccessfully suppressed a giggle. Reuben winked at her.
John smiled and shook his head. “All right,” he said in a final sort of tone. “The lot of you, get out, please. I’d like to get a nap in before they serve me dinner.”
“Speaking of dinner, come home with us, Jane.” Farah’s invitation, while warm, was more of an order than an offering. “Meals don’t come out of a vending machine.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She stood and bent over her father to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Love you, Papa.”
John gave a soft chuckle; she hadn’t called him Papa in years. Then he’d gotten sick. “Love you too, Pen.” He smiled at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling, all his warmth and love in them. Every now and then, in a moment like this, Jane would forget, however briefly, that he didn’t have a tube in his chest draining the fluid from his lungs.
As they left his room, Reuben inquired, “Did he just call you ‘Pen’?”
Jane laughed, only slightly embarrassed. “It’s short for Penthesilea. She’s an Amazonian queen. He calls me that when he knows he’s lost an argument.”
Just after oh-two-hundred hours that night, Jane’s console lit up. Her eyes snapped open; the pinging sound it was making wrenched at her gut and filled her with fear.
That the call was coming from her mother was even more terrifying.
Numbly, she listened to Hannah, whose voice sounded damp as she spoke through tears. Jane didn’t want to hear it. If everything could just stop, just pause forever, right now, then she would never have to hear the news that her mother was delivering.
Jane ended the call, and screamed into her pillow – a low, keening ululation of utter and unbearable devastation as the world lurched forward – her father no longer in it.
Jane sat stiffly, staring blankly out over the burgeoning crowd of attendees at her father’s funeral. She recognized many faces, but was unwilling to speak to any of them. She started when she felt a hand upon her shoulder.
“Jane Shepard,” came a familiar dual-toned voice.
She looked up into the face of her friend, Rascus Klyniak. “Rascus,” she said, a little surprised. “You’re here?”
He flared a smile at her “No thanks to you, dimwit.” He and Jane had had enough video chats by now that she recognized his amused tone. “Your mother thought you might like a friend’s support. No humans like you enough, eh?”
At that, she laughed. But it did not escape Jane that her mother had, yet again, sent someone in her place.
He squeezed her shoulder. “I am sorry for your loss, my friend,” he said softly. “It’s clear, seeing so many here, that your father was a great man.”
“Thanks,” she whispered. “He was.”
“Your family has got to be the most turian set of humans to ever exist,” Rascus mused, and Jane felt pride well up in her heart. “But I think, Jane Shepard, that you may need some reminding of my advice to you on the day we met,” he ventured gently. “A lot of people are here to support you and your mother. Own your role, my friend. Greet them as a Shepard should. Show them you are thankful.”
She let out a shuddering breath, then nodded. “You’re right,” she acknowledged; then, mock-grudgingly: “As usual.” And she stood, to comfort others at her own father’s funeral.
“I want to thank all of you for attending today,” said Hannah Shepard from the podium. They’d run out of tables – a large number of people were standing toward the back of the room – and they’d also gone well over time. “While I’m not surprised at our numbers today, it is humbling to know how well-loved John was.
“My husband and I met on a military base back on Earth,” she began shakily. “He was actually on leave visiting his parents, and I was sixteen.” She said through a smile, “My father was not happy to learn that his daughter was seeing some jerk in his mid-twenties.”
The crowd chuckled. Jane shot Reuben a furtive look, and he determinedly did not meet her eye.
“But I could see, even then – and I think my father could too, really – how great of a man he was,” she went on. “The man you all know today. Knew,” she corrected herself, shaking her head a little. “Full of honour and warmth. Intelligent. Hilarious, too.” Some appreciative nods and knowing smiles in the crowd. Hannah’s voice grew soft. “I’ve been wondering, since he was – since the cancer was deemed terminal, how would I know how to live without him?” Her voice broke then, and she cleared her throat.
“Then I look at our daughter, the young woman we raised together, and I see so much of him in her.” Hannah looked out into the crowd and found Jane, seated at the table closest to the podium, and held her gaze as she spoke, “She has been as brave as John ever was. Resolute, like he could be. Focused – stubborn, really,” she added, and the crowd laughed as Jane smiled in spite of herself, ducking her head. “So, I suppose I don’t really have to live without him after all. He lives on through this beautiful gift he gave me seventeen years ago. For that, to him, I say, thank you. And to my daughter, I love you, and” — her voice caught — “I’m sorry.”
Jane stood then and went to meet her mother on the podium to embrace her. While it seemed like the right thing to do, the thing perhaps her mother needed most in the moment, the act was fairly robotic. Maybe eventually, someday, Jane could forgive her mother, but she would be hard-pressed to forget that Hannah Shepard, an Alliance military rising star, had proven herself to be a coward.
And Jane Shepard would prove, as much to herself as her mother or anybody else, that she was no such coward.