The house showed the Granny a house schematic as it squeezed the children’s playroom smaller and smaller until they ran out screaming. It generated noise that cancelled out their wailing protests as it shepherded them up the stairs and into the front room. When they tumbled in, the house immediately trapped them in bright, puffy seats it popped up from the floor.
The selkie looked at the children. They froze.
Then the house produced tea, lemonade, Battenburg and sultana cakes, shortbread, ginger snaps, Arbroath smokies. The selkie took the cakes and scones, passed them on. Kept the fish.
“Dear,” she said to the husband. “It’s your house. I suppose you should decide.”
“That’s very kind.” But he thought she was talking about the cakes and took the last piece of shortbread from the tray. “Just like my mother’s, you know,” he muttered. She doubted the house could replicate anything that bland.
The Granny’s mother had always been distant, but everything she’d done could be interpreted as kindness. The selkie was a different beast. Her shoulders were broad; the hard winter fat made her sleek in her dress.
She had finished the smokies.
“I am she and not the dead,” the selkie said. She pointed her big forefinger at the husband.
“He is the dead.”
The world emptied out for the Granny and then rushed back in: this is what the house and the baby had been telling her and trying to tell her and she had been refusing to know.
She remembered waking this morning with the baby near and the wives cooing from the wallpaper. The construct was in the bed next to her as it had been for weeks. A construct she had asked the house to make. And she had asked the house to alter her perceptions until she could feel it beside her and not know it for what it was. It had been real enough to argue with her, drive her crazy the way he used to, and to spend the night in his office if need be. All the wives were grieving but she had been so angry.
“A sister of my other sister’s sister I would not trust told of eating his bones,” the selkie said. “I did not eat. I did not see.”
He had left a long and heartfelt message. He was old, felt alone, could no longer see his place in the world. He had spent a long afternoon searching out and erasing his backups. He was tired.
“I knew when he came into the water. He was a god apart from the gods who made us. But we sisters knew him. We would not eat of him.”
The Dead Mother rose up within the selkie, spoke again, “We are widows in the world. Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.”
Outside of her, the baby was crying. The baby: another orphan.
The Granny accessed the house’s backup circuitry, set apart from the house’s mind, and sent a message to Malik. She wanted out, wanted escape, wanted a car—but only for her, not the baby. Malik had been expecting her call. He had known, too. He asked her again to bring her baby but she would not. They came to an understanding and later there would be contracts; later, codicils.
The Granny opened her memories and remembered her insanity when she found he was gone. The wives, the baby, the house, even her mother were grief-stricken. The Granny had ignored them. Before his body was located, when the house could only say that his vital signs had ceased, she had shone a DNA stick over every surface in the house looking for something, anything, she could use to build a new husband.
The husband had walked, simply walked, pockets full of stones, into the ever-rising sea. He had collected rocks and pebbles for as long as she’d known him. There were bowls of them in every room. He wouldn’t let the house move until the farmers had gathered every rock he had marked for collection. She cursed the chips of slate, quartz, granite, soft sandstone, obsidian, basalt, andesite porphyry, foliated granite gneiss, biotite schist. She cursed the memories that persisted and the house sneaked a tranquilizer needle out of her chair. She pushed herself away from it and forced the house to bend to her will.
“Damn you,” she said to the selkie, to the Dear Dead Mother.
The wives had gone into the crib the house had made for the baby, had wrapped her in the Granny’s cape, were rocking her. “Never alone,” they said to her. “One of us,” one said. “Unnameable one,” they whispered.
The house walked the simulacrum of the husband out of the room. The wives tried to show the Granny the funeral she had missed, but she ignored it. The selkie remained quiet.
“Open the box,” the Granny told the house. “Let them do whatever the blue hell they want with my mother’s body. Lenkya’s in charge now.”
She left the room, leaving her new baby (so easy to do: she was her mother’s daughter) and her sister-wives, but the children appeared beside her.
“Ariadne, Perce, Ignored Girl. Poor little mice. Trapped here with no mothers and no one but the house to care. Lenkya will take better care of you. I shall miss you, little hellions.”
“Granny, we want to go with you!” said Perce, and he was knuckling tears from his eyes. The Granny could see Ariadne twisting the skin above his elbow, making him cry.
“A,” she warned. “Come on then, the three of you.”
She led them to the kitchen and told them she would teach them how to make toffee. The smell of burning sugar brought back memories of her own grandmother. Her grandfather had died in the Shortages.
She sent the littlest part of herself to the Hague (she didn’t want to miss a second of the baking) to wrap up what she could, to resign, and to recommend they hire someone from her own house to replace her. She would be on the fence at the best in Malik’s house, maybe even on the other side.
She felt rich and foolish taking time to make this dessert. The house flipped the replicator on and she nudged it off. She knew the children would enjoy the house’s toffee just as much as hers. But this was not about the physical making. This was memories and the future and the children looking at her and their own glassed memories and all of them remembering that the last time they saw the Granny, they had made toffee.
The house showed her an old Alfa Romeo floating outside the front door and Malik stepping out. The Granny was touched he’d come himself. Her ugly dog leapt out after him.
The children, faces smeared with toffee, hardly noticed her leaving. She whispered a good-bye message to the baby and told the house to deliver it later. She promised that her mother, the baby’s Grandmother, would be a better mother than she, the Missing Mother, could ever have been.
The house opened the front door and she let herself out. She spat out the house’s access keys, dropped them through the letterbox. Patted the door as she closed it. She’d miss her old house. She walked toward Malik but had to look back. The selkie was watching her from a window.
The baby was frantically sending her questions but the Granny forwarded them to the selkie. Her mother would be revivified by the day’s end and would see that the Granny had broken. She would bring up the baby and take on the house. Once her mother was sure Malik was satisfied with the deal, she might bring the house back to the island.
Lenkya sent a good-bye note with attachments from the house and wives as well as a copy of her original house contract with the appropriate clause highlighted that showed the Granny now had no rights to access the house or its inhabitants. The Granny was reading it and getting into Malik’s car when the house drew in its anchors and took off.
The Granny gave Malik a piece of toffee as he drove back to his estate. The toffee was good. Later, memory would say it had been the best the children had ever had.
Younger Women
Karen Joy Fowler
Jude knows that her daughter Chloe has a boyfriend. She knows this even though Chloe is fifteen and not talking. If Jude were to ask, Chloe would tell Jude that it’s none of her business and to stop being such a snoop. (Well, if you want to call it snooping to go through Chloe’s closets, drawers, and backpack on a daily basis, check the history on her cell phone and laptop, check the margins of her textbooks for incriminating doodles, friend her on Facebook under a pseudonym
so as to access her page—hey, if you want to call that snooping, then, guilty as charged. The world’s a dangerous place. Isn’t getting less so. Any mother will tell you that.)
So there’s no point asking Chloe. She talks about him to her Facebook friends—his name is Eli—but the boy himself never shows. He doesn’t phone; he doesn’t email; he doesn’t text. Sometimes at night Jude wakes up with the peculiar delusion that he’s in the house, but when she checks, Chloe is always in her bed, asleep and alone. The less Jude finds out the more uneasy she becomes.
One day she decides to go all in. “Bring that boy you’re seeing to dinner this weekend,” she tells Chloe, hoping Chloe won’t wonder how she knows about him or, if she does, will chalk it up to mother’s intuition. “I’ll make pasta.”
“I’d rather die,” Chloe says.
Chloe’s Facebook friends are all sympathy. Their mothers are nosy pains-in-the-butt, too. Her own mother died when Jude was twenty-three, and Jude misses her terribly, but she remembers being fifteen. Once when she’d been grounded, which also meant no telephone privileges, her mother had left the house and Jude had called her best friend Audrey. And her mother knew because there was a fruit bowl by the phone and Jude had fiddled with the fruit while she talked.
So Chloe’s friends are telling her to stand her ground and yet, come Saturday, there he is, sitting across the table from Jude, playing with his food. It was Eli’s own decision to come, Chloe had told her, because he’s very polite. Good-looking, too, better than Jude would have guessed. In fact, he’s pretty hot.
Jude’s unease is still growing. In spite of this, she tries for casual. “Chloe says you’re new to the school,” she says. “Where are you from?”
“L.A.” Eli knows what he’s doing. Meets her eyes. Smiles. Uses his napkin. A picture of good manners.
“Don’t go all CSI on him, Mom. He doesn’t have to answer your questions. You don’t have to answer her questions,” Chloe says.
“I don’t mind. She’s just being your mom.” And to Jude, “Ask me anything.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“What year were you born in?”
“Nineteen ninety-four,” he says and there isn’t even a pause, but Jude’s suspicions solidify in her mind with an audible click like the moment in the morning just before the alarm goes off. No wonder he doesn’t text. No wonder he doesn’t email or call on the cell. He probably doesn’t know how.
“Try again,” she tells him.
Vampire. Plain as the nose on your face.
Of course, Chloe knows. She’s flattered by it. Any fifteen-year-old would be (and probably lots before her have been). Jude’s been doing some light reading on the current neurological research on the teenage brain. She googles this before bed. It helps her sleep, not because the news is good, but because she can tell herself that the current situation is only temporary. She and Chloe used to be so close before Chloe started hating her guts.
The teenage brain is in a state of rapid, but incomplete development. Certain important linkages haven’t been formed yet. “The teenage brain is not just an adult brain with fewer miles on it,” the experts say. It is a whole different animal. In quantifiable ways, teenagers are actually incapable of thinking straight.
Not to mention the hormones. Poor Chloe. Eli’s hotness is getting even to Jude.
Of course, none of this can be said. Chloe thinks she’s all grown-up, and if Jude so much as hinted that she wasn’t, Chloe would really lose it. Jude has a quick flash of Chloe at five, her hair in fraying pigtails, hanging from the tree in the backyard by her hands (monkey), by her knees (bat), shouting for Jude to come see. If Chloe really were grown up, she’d wonder, the same way Jude wonders, what sort of immortal loser hangs out with fifteen-year-olds. No one loves Chloe more than Jude, no one ever will, but really. Why Chloe?
“Mom!” says Chloe. “Butt the fuck out!”
“It’s okay,” Eli says. “I’m glad it’s in the open.” He stops pretending to eat, puts down his fork. “Eighteen sixteen.”
“And still haven’t managed to graduate high school?” Jude asks.
The conversation is not going well. Jude has fetched the whiskey so the adults can drink and sure enough, it turns out there are some things Eli can choke down besides blood. Half a glass in, Jude wonders aloud why Eli can’t find a girlfriend his own age. Does he prefer younger women because they’re so easy to impress, she wonders. Is it possible no woman older than fifteen will go out with him?
Eli is drinking fast, faster than Jude, but showing no effects. “I love Chloe.” Sincerity drips off his voice like rain from the roof. “You maybe don’t understand how it is with vampires. We don’t choose where our hearts go. But when we give them, we never take them back again. Chloe is my whole world.”
“Very nice,” Jude says, although in fact she finds it creepy and stalkerish. “Still, in two hundred years, you must have collected some ex’s. Ever been married? How old were they when you finally cleared off? Ancient women of seventeen?”
“Oh. My. God.” Chloe is staring down into her sorry glass of ice tea. “Get a clue. Get a life. I knew you’d make this all about you. Ever since Dad left, everyone has to be as fucking miserable as you are. You just can’t stand to see me happy.”
There is this inconvenient fact—eight months ago Chloe’s dad walked out to start a new life with a younger woman. Two weeks ago, he called to tell Jude he was going to be a father again.
“Again? Like you stopped being a father in between?” Jude asked frostily and turned the phone off. She hasn’t spoken to him since nor told Chloe about the baby, though maybe Michael has done that for himself. It’s the least he can do. Introduce her to her replacement.
“This is why I didn’t want you to fucking meet her,” Chloe tells Eli. Her face and cheeks are red with fury. She has always colored up like that, even when she was a baby. Jude remembers her, red and sobbing, because the Little Mermaid DVD had begun to skip, forcing her to watch the song in which the chef is chopping the heads off fish over and over and over again. Five years old and already a gifted tragedian. “Fix it, Mommy,” she’d sobbed. “Fix it or I’ll go mad.” “I knew you’d try to spoil everything,” Chloe tells Jude. “I knew you’d be a bitch and a half.”
“You should speak more respectfully to your mother,” Eli tells her. “You’re lucky to have one.” He goes on. Call him old-fashioned, he says, but he doesn’t care for the language kids use today. Everything is so much coarser than it used to be.
Chloe responds to Eli’s criticism with a gasp. She reaches out, knocks over her glass, maybe deliberately, maybe not. A sprig of mint floats like a raft in a puddle of tea. “I knew you’d find a way to turn him against me.” She flees the room, pounds up the stairs, which squeak loudly with her passage. A door slams, but she can still be heard through it, sobbing on her bed. She’s waiting for Eli to follow her.
Instead he stands, catches the mint before it falls off the table edge, wipes up the tea with his napkin.
“You’re not making my life any easier,” Jude tells him.
“I’m truly sorry about that part,” he says. “But love is love.”
Jude gives Eli fifteen minutes in which to go calm Chloe down. God knows, nothing Jude could say would accomplish that. She waits until he’s up the stairs, then follows him, but only as high as the first creaking step, so that she can almost, but not quite hear what they’re saying. Chloe’s voice is high and impassioned, Eli’s apologetic. Then everything is silent, suspiciously so, and she’s just about to go up the rest of the way even though the fifteen minutes isn’t over when she hears Eli again and realizes he’s in the hall. “Let me talk to your mom,” Eli is saying and Jude hurries back to the table before he catches her listening.
She notices that he manages the stairs without a sound. “She’s fine,” Eli tells her. “She’s on the computer.”
Jude decides not to finish her drink. It wouldn�
�t be wise or responsible. It wouldn’t be motherly. She’s already blurred a bit at the edges though she thinks that’s fatigue more than liquor. She’s been having so much trouble sleeping.
She eases her feet out of her shoes, leans down to rub her toes. “Doesn’t it feel like we’ve just put the children to bed?” she asks.
Eli’s back in his seat across the table, straight-backed in the chair, looking soberly sexy. “Forgive me for this,” he says. He leans forward slightly. “But are you trying to seduce me? Mrs. Robinson?”
Jude absolutely wasn’t, so it’s easy to deny. “I wouldn’t date you even without Chloe,” she says. Eli’s been polite, so she tries to be polite back. Leave it at that.
But he insists on asking.
“It’s just such a waste,” she says. “I mean, really. High school and high school girls? That’s the best you can do with immortality? It doesn’t impress me.”
“What would you do?” he asks.
She stands, begins to gather up the dishes. “God! I’d go places. I’d see things. Instead you sit like a lump through the same high school history classes you’ve taken a hundred times, when you could have actually seen those things for yourself. You could have witnessed it all.”
Eli picks up his plate and follows her into the kitchen. One year ago, she and Michael had done a complete remodel, silestone countertops and glass-fronted cupboards. Cement floors. The paint was barely dry when Michael left with his new girlfriend. Jude had wanted something homier—tile and wood—but Michael likes modern and minimal. Sometimes Jude feels angrier over this than over the girlfriend. He was seeing Kathy the whole time they were remodeling. Probably in some part of his brain he’d known he was leaving. Why couldn’t he let her have the kitchen she wanted?
“I’ll wash,” Eli says. “You dry.”
“We have a dishwasher.” Jude points to it. Energy star. Top of the line. Guilt offering.
“But it’s better by hand. Better for talking.”
“What are we talking about?”
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 41