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He was used to the stares.
No, he wasn’t.
But he was at a point in time when the mission eclipsed his discomfort.
Maybe it was his decade spent with the Eridians. Maybe it was the years floating through space alone, unsure if he’d make it home. Unsure if he’d left his first real home. But knowing the mission was more important than the emotions that dictated it. Eva had taught him that.
The truth was that he’d once been asked to be brave and could not muster up the courage. Not even for one person. Not even for one.
Not until Rocky.
And his friend had taught him more than he could ever fully understand. More than he’d been able to acknowledge.
The truth was that when he’d told Rocky everything he’d met him with, “Grace has one final mission.”
He’d been surprised. “How so?”
“To say goodbye.”
Leaving had been hard but in the end he’d known that he must. He must complete one more act of bravery. Maybe because he had a point to prove. Maybe because he understood what it was like to hold something until it broke.
There was no telling how old she’d be by the time he got back. Rocky estimated in her eighties, but the truth was that Ryland didn’t even know how old he was. He guessed he was in his fifties but living in an atmosphere he hadn’t been born into had weakened his bones, thinned his muscles and given him a slight stoop when he walked.
It was time to go home.
It was time to leave home.
Now he was back on earth and finally given license to do what he’d come home to do. He now walked down the corridors of hospice care and it seemed incongruent that that was where they would reunite. Would she even recognize him? Would she care?
She always cared. If he went by his gut, which he rarely did, he might even say she cared too much. When Eva looked at a spreadsheet she did not see numbers and percentages. She saw the pros and cons of starving Peter to feed Paul. Eva had been given the task of answering the trolley problem for once and for all and she’d chosen well. At least what was left of humanity largely agreed she’d chosen right.
When Ryland stopped at the room number he’d been given he was awash with the scent of antiseptic covered by a faint mist of baby powder and the slight scent of the bouquet of roses on her nightstand.
“Eva,” he whispered so low the nurse did not turn.
Eva was laying in bed, her hair long and gray. Her eyes were closed and her face was lined. She was thin, but everyone was thin. Food rations had made obesity a thing of the past and anyone with too much fat reserves were viewed with suspicion.
She’d grown old like he knew she had but to see it with his own eyes was another thing altogether.
“Oh,” the nurse said, freezing in her spot and looking at him wide eyed. “Doctor Grace,” she said, despite them never having met before. The last time he’d been on earth her parents had been children. Still, news traveled fast and his reentry to the earth’s population had overtaken the news feeds for – well, it still took over the newsfeeds.
He had places to be. Things to do. He had debriefs and interviews to go to. He knew too many things the rest of the world didn’t know and there was no telling how much longer he’d have to tell it. The cancer diagnosis had come with his medical eval on returning to earth. He’d come home just long enough to say goodbye.
Everyone wanted a piece of him and maybe it was a good thing that he’d been such an object of fascination to the Eridians because it had prepared him for this homecoming. The world welcoming home the son who had saved them, resentfully, against his will, ungratefully.
Yet, no one had asked him about that. He’d simply been declared a hero, no questions asked.
And he knew who he had to thank for that. In covering her own sins, Eva had covered his cowardice.
“Is she awake?” he asked the nurse.
Before she could shake her head there was a slight moan from the bed and the nurse changed trajectory to say, “She’s having a good day.”
“When I asked they said –”
The nurse looked sad for a moment. “Any day now. Sooner rather than later. She knows that.”
“May I?” he asked, pointing at a chair beside the bed.
“Don’t tax her.”
Try as he might, he couldn't help but smile. Once upon a time she’d thrived on people taxing her.
Eva’s eyes were opened and she tracked him across the room, her pale green eyes taking him in and he’d never been good at deciphering other’s emotions. What was she feeling? Regret? Embarrassment? Satisfaction that if earth could be reborn, she’d made the right choice. Even if it cost her her humanity.
They’d tried to keep him from here. The nebulous they who thought they controlled his life and his actions. Once upon a time he would have deferred to this headless group of people who made the world work. But he had something up his sleeve. He had what they wanted and he could refuse to give it until he got something in return.
“Why? She’s already dead,” one scientist had spat out when he’d refused for the seventh day in a row to give any debriefs until he’d been given permission to see Eva. He hadn’t even been sure she’d still be alive, but he figured that if he could hold on for so long, she could too.
“I’ve said what I’ve said. I will speak with Stratt first.”
“She is no longer in charge of –”
“I will speak to her, or I will speak to no one.”
They’d tried to wait him out but then some president or diplomat or however they ranked themselves these days finally gave in and said to put him on a jet to America where she’d had her treatments and was now in hospice living out her final days.
So Eva was dying the same as he was. What a pair they made.
“Hello, Eva,” he said softly as he pulled the chair to her bedside.
She lifted one hand and pointed to something behind her with one trembling finger. He turned to see the xenonite figure Rocky had made of him so long ago.
“I wondered if you got that,” he said, taking the small figure, smiling when he thought about that other meeting years ago. “And I take it you got my message, too.”
The faintest hint of a smile brightened her eyes and in that moment he would have given just about anything to hear her voice. The husky timbre, with her German accent and clipped consonants. The way she never smiled, but when she did it was always like she held a secret in her hands. Maybe she did.
“I guess this is where we argue over . . . everything,” he said, placing the figure in her hand, watching her grasp it in a loose fist. But then he shook his head. “Nothing to do or say, really. That’s why I’m here. I doubt you . . . regret it. Not when it worked out so well.”
But he was cut off with the slight shake of her head that rustled her pillow.
“No?”
“N– no,” she said, so softly he wouldn’t have caught it if he hadn’t seen her lips move.
“You never made a bad choice that didn’t need to be made.”
“N–no.”
“We can agree that you saw more in me than I saw in myself.”
Her eyes grew shiny and if he didn’t know her better he might have suspected they were unshed tears.
“The earth is saved and I had a large part in that. So did you, Eva. Let’s leave it at that. You were given that power and . . . you didn’t abuse it. You made the choices that everyone else was too big a coward to make. I respect that. I accept that.”
A thin rattle passed her lips and he helped her sit up just enough that he could put a glass of water to her lips and help her take a sip through a straw. She barely drank anything before sagging back against the bed in relief.
“I could say thank you,” he said, taking hold of her hand like he’d never had the courage to do when they were younger. “It would be the truth to say thank you.”
Her green eyes were hooded with fatigue and old age and the illness that ravaged her body.
“Just like it would be truthful to say I’d once tried to hate you.” He laughed without mirth. “It didn’t stick though. I did my best, couldn’t do it. Especially not after –” He waved his hand in the air as if to say ‘everything I’ve experienced since the moment you drugged me to now’.
“It was an adventure and I’m a hero and I’ve done things other people can only dream about. That was you. That was you believing in me. There’s nothing to forgive, Eva.”
A lone tear escaped the side of her eye and he squeezed her hand tighter.
“Now,” he said, sitting back in his chair and wracking his brain for what to say next, “which do you want to hear about first? Do you want to hear about the day I met Rocky? Or do you want to hear about the first time I realized I was brave? When I learned that you only had to be brave for one person?”
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth and he nodded his head, settled into his chair and held onto her hand.
“Great,” he said. “I’d been awake for a few weeks when the computer blared with an announcement that Blip A was on the horizon –”