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Landing on the ground with the easy grace of long practice, Buddy approached the house’s back door. Its white-washed clapboard siding was familiar-- friendlier feeling than it had been the first time he’d visited as a kid. Back then, he’d had no idea he’d marry Ellen, let alone move in with her mother and bring a whole group of people together under her roof.
Now, he opened the screen door with a rattle, stepping into the kitchen and out of the August heat. Mary, the woman he’d just been thinking of, was inside, of course. He grinned sheepishly, still a little on-edge with her by default. Nothing like a mother-in-law (even one he could acknowledge was pretty amazing) to keep a man on his toes.
“You seen Ellen?” he asked.
Mary didn’t look up from her kneading at Buddy’s question. She looked like a part of the kitchen, a moving part, but one as crucial as the fundamentals of the space-- a heat source, a storage place, a preparation space, and Mary. The gingham curtains matched her dress. She’d probably made them both. Her hands were firm, despite her age, pressing into the dough with intent.
“Upstairs with Sarah, isn’t she?” she answered neutrally.
“Just saw Sarah head out. Maybe Ellen’s still there though. Thanks, Ma!” Buddy said, then waited:
“I’m not your Ma,” she corrected, though without venom. Buddy smiled at the familiarity and ducked back out of the kitchen. The old wooden floorboards creaked underneath his bare feet. He savored the feeling, the sound-- spent a moment listening for the feeling of all the animals in the house. No termites, thankfully-- he’d caught the last attempt and nipped it in the bud. The new barncat they’d gotten, still being convinced to become an indoor cat, a small family of mice he hadn’t told Mary about yet, and a variety of insects and arachnids, crucial to the environment.
Through the window, he saw Seline working on her car, Myra lingering nearby with a cup of tea cradled in her hands. They’d stopped by for a few days-- officially to visit Sarah, but they’d all missed them. Maybe Seline would let him pretend to help, if he had a second later.
Each step was familiar as he headed up, worn by the footsteps of three generations of Fraziers and one generation of Bakers. Buddy avoided the loudest one by long habit. At the top of the stairs, he found Maxine, dressed up to leave. She had her hair in messy pigtails-- her new favorite hairstyle, Buddy thought-- and she’d slung her old pink backpack over her oversized jacket.
“Where’re you headed, Little Wing?” Buddy asked. He reached out to ruffle Maxine’s hair, only for her to duck out of the way with a laugh and an eye roll. She was almost as tall as he was now and taking ruthless advantage of it on the basketball court-- not what he’d expected at all when she’d been little. But nothing turns out exactly the way you expect, right?
“Irey and Jai wanted to hang out, so their dad’s gonna pick me up. I’ll be back at eight!”
“And you asked your mom first?” He raised an eyebrow. She definitely hadn’t asked him.
“Yes, Dad, of course. Love you! Bye!” She gave him a quick side hug before tramping down the stairs and definitely hitting the loud one on the way down-- not that you could tell. Buddy wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth or not, but Ellen would let him know. Besides, even if Maxine couldn’t take care of herself, there wasn’t much safer she could be than with the Wests.
He took a step forward and nearly tripped over one of Hazel’s toys, left out in the hallway. Keeping his swearing mostly internal, Buddy looked down at the little wooden car (a vehicle that had sparked much debate when they’d received it as a gift from Seline and Maya a year ago. Not his finest moment, but he did still worry that they were unnecessarily indoctrinating their daughter into the cultural hegemony of gas-guzzling consumer vehicles. Annie had said that Hazel was going to be exposed regardless, and they needed to teach her to think critically. Ellen had said the same thing. Sarah had rolled her eyes and called him a hippie, for all that she’d donated so much of her time to leftist causes… and Buddy had surrendered the fight.)
He picked up the car, holding it loosely next to his thigh as he meandered towards Ellen’s bedroom. Technically, it was his room, too, but he still struggled to sleep inside, so he let her have control of the space. The hallway was well-lit by the late-morning sunlight, motes of dust drifting in front of the window. It was warmer upstairs, too. Made Buddy want to channel a cat’s powers and take a long nap.
The faint sound of sniffling caught his attention next-- from Cliff’s old room. From Lucy’s room now, he corrected himself. The correction stung like disinfecting alcohol on an open wound. Buddy stopped. Closed his eyes. Spent a moment just breathing. Pulled himself together, because someone was in there and might need him. He could have his own time later.
Gently, he tapped on the door.
“Who is it?” Lucy’s voice, slightly hoarse, drifted from inside.
“Buddy. Can I come in?” He leaned forward, hand hovering over the door to press it open.
“...Yeah.”
Cool wood under his fingers, counterpoint to the steadily warming wooden toy in his other hand. The door opened with a quiet squeak, one that Mary would probably ask him to look at later, even though she or Seline would have better luck with it. Inside, Lucy was sitting on the bed, hands on her lap, curling into each other like she didn’t know what to do about them.
Despite himself, Buddy couldn’t help but compare the room now to the way it had been before. Cliff’s drawings were collected in one spot on the wall, a place of honor near the bed, instead of scattered around the desk and on the floor. A small, non-carnivorous, potted plant sat on the windowsill. The rug was clean, no crumbs to be seen. Most of all, the room didn’t smell like him anymore. Buddy inhaled slowly, tasting dust and the scents of the people who’d been in the room recently-- Lucy, with faint notes of Hazel, Maxine, Mary… and Annie, too, though barely. Had Lucy asked her for space?
“Hey,” he greeted quietly, pushing the door mostly closed behind him.
“Hey,” Lucy replied, wiping at her face with one palm.
“What’s going on? You wanna talk about it?”
“I… I don’t know. It’s-- Our old anniversary’s coming up, you know. Of course you know, he was your--” Lucy cut herself off, looking frustrated with herself.
“No, no. Tell me about it. Is this the anniversary of when you two started dating?” Buddy sat at the desk in the old, hand-me-down rolling chair they’d moved here after Ellen had upgraded hers.
Lucy ran a hand through her hair, looking just like her mother for a second as frustration crossed her face. She let out an explosive sigh and then fell back on the bed, looking up at the ceiling.
“We started going out around the time Mom and I moved up here. September.”
“Yeah? Right away?”
“No, it was a few weeks. We hung out before then, but we only made it official a little while before he and Max got kicked out of school.”
Buddy winced at the memory. Ellen had been right, back then, but it’d been frustrating to see his kids get screwed over by the establishment. The other kids in town never stopped giving Cliff trouble-- Maxine eventually figured out how they worked, though she preferred spending time with her family and close friends, but Cliff could never blend in.
“You made a good couple. I was impressed-- I never expected him to land such an even-headed girl, y’know? Cliff was always doing his own thing.” His drawings on the wall illustrated that, pictures of clawed creatures and sharp-toothed men fighting, interspersed with some of the paintings he’d been doing just before he passed. Buddy paused to look at one, black interspersed with red and brown in a swirl of what Cliff would describe as gore (Buddy might say something more like the natural way of all things… which would have pissed Cliff off, probably).
“He was pretty down-to-earth, I always thought.” Lucy sounded wistful. She was looking at the same painting-- seeing something different, Buddy thought. “He didn’t like people to know it, but he was always looking out for everyone. After what happened with his uncle… he told me once that he understood death better than anybody-- even you and Maxine, since it wasn’t permanent for either of you.”
Buddy sighed.
“Yeah, he probably did,” he admitted. He didn’t like to think of the cave where he’d found his son-- preferred to linger on the happier memories, like flying together. But the cave and Uncle Dudley had changed Cliff forever.
On the other hand, you couldn’t live without changing. Cold comfort, given that it’d been Buddy’s fault in the first place.
“I thought… for a while, that maybe if Evelyn hadn’t helped me, then maybe…”
“Oh.” Buddy frowned in sympathy, feeling a pang of empathetic pain in his chest. “Lucy… your death wouldn’t have stopped his. Karma… It’s real, sure, but it doesn’t work like that. We’d all just be twice as miserable. “
“You don’t know that,” Lucy said, voice tight with anger and sorrow.
Buddy did know that, though. For all that his memories were foggy, he knew he’d seen different worlds, all arbitrary, all with he, himself, dead, and all caused by a caveman’s accident millenia before. He’d seen the edge of the page before that, too. His mind had blurred that out; some sort of self-defense mechanism. Even now, though, he could sense the observer, just on the edge of his awareness-- watching in a different way than normal, but there. Let alone the writer, who was dictating his sorrows.
Still, he knew. He knew that his actions were his own. Destiny and fate might be real-- might have sent his son to his death for arbitrary purposes-- but they were all choosing for themselves everyday.
And, now, he was going to choose to say something comforting, something sane.
“You’re right. We can’t know every possibility. We’d go crazy if we did. But I think we can do best by Cliff by remembering him: talking about him, memorializing him, visiting his grave… By living ourselves as well as we can.”
Lucy rolled her head on the blanket, shock of curly brown hair nearly entirely obscuring her face. Buddy waited, patiently as he could. Hoped he’d said the right thing.
“Yeah… maybe,” Lucy tentatively agreed, not sounding entirely convinced. Buddy gave her the best smile he could manage, given the topic-- small and a little wobbly, but there. Lucy’s lips quirked, just barely.
“I think I wanna be alone again for a while,” she said.
“Sure.” Buddy pressed his hands on his knees as he stood up, feeling the ache in his knees as he moved. Man, he was getting older, wasn’t he?
“If you see my mom, can you let her know I can’t babysit Hazel tonight?” It sounded like it wasn’t really a question, but Buddy hummed quietly in agreement as he headed back out into the hallway. This time, he closed the door all the way behind himself. He fiddled with the wheels of the wooden car still loosely held in his hand.
Just a few more steps took him to Ellen’s room. He knocked again-- louder, this time-- on the doorframe, since the door hung wide open. A breeze drifted through the open window, cooling the room slightly. It smelled of late summer-- ripening things, heat on the still green vegetation, animals just beginning to think about fattening up.
“Hey, hon,” he said.
Ellen turned to smile at him-- Buddy couldn’t help but smile back.
“How’s it going?” Buddy asked.
Ellen sighed explosively and tossed herself back in her chair, slumping with her arms hanging at the side. That was answer enough. He laughed and entered, skirting their bed to get to her workspace (compressed into the bedroom, given how many people lived in this house). Absent-mindedly, he set Hazel’s toy car on the bedside table for now.
“Bad?” he clarified.
“Something like that-- the deadline’s still a while off. What’ve you been up to today?” Ellen set her pencil down distractedly, spinning the chair to face Buddy. He glowed under the attention, still delighted by it after all these years. Ellen was perfect-- better than perfect, even, because Buddy didn’t think he’d feel like anything perfect was real. He leaned down to press a kiss to the crown of her head. The faint smell of cigarettes clung to her hair underneath the fresh lilac scent of her shampoo. More stressed than she was saying, then.
“Just checking on everyone. I wanted to know if you wanted Sarah to sleep up here with you tonight; I was thinking of camping outside with Hazel to give Annie and Lucy a break.”
Ellen hummed idly, tucking her fingers through the belt loop of Buddy’s cut-off shorts.
“Does that mean you’re off the menu for tonight?” she asked with a smirk.
“I don’t have to be,” Buddy drawled, leaning in a little closer. Ellen stretched up to meet him, giving him a sweet kiss on his lips. They tingled faintly with it, and he shuddered. Reaching down to lay a hand on her shoulder, he tilted his head to deepen the kiss.
Ellen gasped into it, scooting forward--
“Daddy?”
Buddy jerked and turned his head after pulling away. Hazel was standing in the doorway, dark hair with a strand of white pulled back from her face in pigtails (to match with Maxine, who she idolized).
“Hey, Butter,” he stepped to the side and crouched a little, accepting Hazel’s hug as she approached.
“Hiya, sweetheart,” Ellen greeted, lifting Hazel up into her lap. She was nearly five already-- growing up so fast. It was hard to believe sometimes. Hazel smoothed down her old band t-shirt dress (made from one of Annie’s) and adjusted so that she was leaning against Ellen’s body.
“Well, someone’s comfortable!” Buddy grinned.
“Yeah,” Hazel agreed.
Ellen chuckled and ran a hand over her hair.
“I was listening to the birds.” Hazel’s pronouncement was serious, delivered with dignity. Buddy nodded, just as serious.
“And what did the birds say?” he asked.
“They’re hungry all the time. And they want to go South, since winter’s coming soon. It’s warmer down there.”
“That’s right,” Ellen agreed. None of them were sure if Hazel was like Buddy and Maxine or not. When she’d first been born, things had been… strange. But after that, Hazel hadn’t shown any abnormal abilities. They’d all met and agreed to keep an eye on her and see where things went.
“...One of them is a boy. He wants to stay in the house for the winter. ‘Cause he’s lonely. He couldn’t find a girlfriend. In the-- in the spring, so he wants to stay.”
Buddy exchanged a glance with Ellen. He stretched out his senses, running his mental fingers out over the morphogenetic field-- no birds in the house right now. One of the mice in the foundation was playing with a piece of straw. He checked the barn, too, but found nothing strange. Minutely, he shook his head at Ellen as he drew his mind back in.
“You’ll have to show us the bird later,” Ellen said, since Buddy needed a second to get his words back after doing that. He blinked to refocus, before agreeing.
“Yeah. I was thinking we could sleep outside tonight-- near your Mom’s tipi. It’ll be a good night for lightning bugs-- we can watch them together.”
Hazel hummed thoughtfully.
“Let me think about it.”
“Of course. Tell me at dinner, alright?” Buddy leaned in and tweaked her nose. Hazel giggled, nose wrinkling, before hopping back down.
“That’s my car!” she said, attention taken by the wooden car on the bedside table. She bounced over, hair just delayed enough to be a counterpoint, emphasizing her every step. In her hands the car looked much larger than it had in Buddy’s. A wave of fondness overcame him.
Without saying goodbye, Hazel headed out the door, probably to go put the car exactly where Buddy had tripped over it before. Her little footsteps pattered on the wooden floor even as she vanished around the corner.
“She’s just like you,” Ellen said, settling back into her chair. She swirled her finger in the air to illustrate. “Like a little whirlwind.”
“So that’s what you think of me.” Buddy clutched his chest in mock hurt. He turned to look at what Ellen was working on, since the mood had been thoroughly changed-- not ruined, he wouldn’t ever say one of his children ruined something, not again. Ellen still preferred to use paper for her initial drafting, so he was greeted with the sight of graphite-on-paper. Varieties of bread drawn in immaculate detail on a finished page off to the side, another sign that Ellen had been anxious about something. Normally, her drafts weren’t so detailed before she switched to her tablet.
“Ugh. Don’t look at it.” Ellen spun her chair and scooted forward, shuffling her papers around. “It’s for a magazine-- illustration of an anecdote. I just can’t figure out the ending.”
“What’s the trouble with it?” Buddy asked, tilting his head.
“This guy-- at the end, he’s described as having “an abstract look on his face.” I’ve been trying a bunch of different expressions.” Ellen pulled out one of the papers. It was crumpled, covered in different faces, all with expressions that Buddy could see were attempting abstract. “But none of them are right.”
Buddy hummed, reaching out for the paper. Ellen didn’t stop him from picking it up and examining it. The way the man’s mouth quirked here, the way his eyes had wandered to the side there, and…
“Abstract… Maybe the answer is… not to draw the face?”
“Avoiding the work isn’t an answer,” Ellen sighed.
“Hey-- no, what I mean is that abstract’s hard to define, right? Distant? So the answer might be not to define it at all?”
“Maybe,” Ellen conceded, holding out her hand for the paper. Buddy returned it, watched as Ellen set it on the desk and pulled one of her fancy erasers over. Carefully, she rubbed at the eyes and nose and mouth on one of the drawings, first leaving an ominous gray smudge and then the scoured-clean white of the paper beneath. She dropped the eraser to the side after finishing, clipped close nails drumming against the desk. They stared at the empty space where the face had been together.
“I don’t know if that was the answer,” Ellen said.
“Me neither.” Leaning down, Buddy pressed another kiss to her hair. “But I do know that you’ll make it work, whatever it ends up being.”
Mary’s strident voice called up from below, warning them that lunch time was upon them.
“Shall we?” Buddy asked.
“I suppose we shall,” Ellen replied, standing.
Together, they headed downstairs.