by Anthology
Because she’s not going to wake up. You won’t have to stay here. You can just say goodbye and go home, like you planned. She sank her teeth into her cheek and forced the admission from her mind. She had more important things to deal with.
Sam was solemn, and for once not full of questions. A dozen platitudes rose in her throat and withered. Julie’s weekly Skype calls aside, the last time he’d seen her, he’d been a toddler at his father’s funeral. She was the aunt who appeared when parents died.
Becca flinched. She hasn’t.
You can’t tell him differently. It wouldn’t be fair.
He sat at the crate, hunched in on himself, and poked the old typewriter buttons. He hadn’t even lifted it out. Armed with a cup of earl grey and a chocolate biscuit, Becca sat next to him and waited.
“I’m writing a letter to Mum,” he said flatly. “But the letters don’t come out right.”
Becca leaned over; the typewriter produced the same gibberish she remembered from her childhood.
It had driven her father to distraction. His last unsolvable riddle: a perfectly normal, working, ordinary typewriter that wrote alien hieroglyphics. He’d kept it in pride of place in the lounge to puzzle out with his two girls, and taken it apart three times, even the electronic pieces and the 80’s-era solar-cells. What is it we do when we don’t know something? She smiled at his voice in her head.
But I can’t puzzle this one out, Dad. I can’t fix it. I just want her to go, to be peaceful and I hate myself for that. She squeezed the biscuit so hard it shattered, gazing down at the typewriter and its printed nonsense like it was a talisman.
Candice had packed it away after he died, along with all of his things, like he’d never lived here at all.
Sam stroked the yellowed paper standing stiff from the rollers.
“How many letters can it make?” he asked.
“How many do you think? Can you work it out?” Becca brushed biscuit crumbs from his hair while he screwed up his face.
“Twenty-six?”
“Come on, that’s a guess. You can work it out.”
This was met with silence. He peered at the paper, at the keys, fingers opening and closing individually.
“Forty…Fifty…eight.”
“Including the numbers and all the commas and things?”
More silence while his finger hovered over each of the number and punctuation keys.
“Eighty…six?”
“There you go.”
Sam shook his head, blonde curls shivering like Julie’s pixie-cut did. Used to. “But it makes more than eighty-six different letters.”
Becca pressed her lips, her mother’s “that’s impossible” dismissal pent up behind them. Julie had said he was bright. Even if you doubled the keys, there seemed to be far more printed letters than the typewriter could physically type, none of them familiar. She released her breath with a smile.
“Your mother and I used to pretend it was a message from someone far away,” she said. “It’s what made me become a programmer, trying to figure out puzzles like that. We kept everything it printed in that binder, there. Maybe you can figure it out.”
Sam lifted the almost-full three-ring binder, flipped it open. Becca’s eyes stung at the sight of Julie’s margin notes, the backwards ‘a’s she used to write as a child, and she ruffled Sam’s hair.
***
The hospital ward echoed with clicks and hums and machine-driven breaths. Julie lay, too bruised and too still, with Candice curled over her.
“Mum! Guess what I found!” Sam burst in, a hurricane of enthusiasm.
Candice glared, barely shifting from over her daughter. “Hush, sweetling. Your mummy is sleeping, she needs to get better.”
“But I want to tell her about the codes! It’ll make her feel better, it’s really interesting!” He shook Julie’s shoulder gently. “Mum, I have to show you something.”
“No!” Candice slapped his hands away and fussed over the tubes Sam had minutely disturbed. “You mustn’t touch, Mummy is very fragile,” she snapped. “Nurse!”
“But”—Sam’s voice squeaked—“Mum always feels better when I hug her. She said so.”
Becca wrapped her arm around Sam’s shoulder, squeezing him while she tried to swallow the cannonball in her throat. “You can give her lots of hugs when she wakes up, okay?” She rubbed the crown of his head like her father used to do. “We just need to be careful of the tubes and things, mate. They’re very important.”
Sam snivelled. “They look uncomfortable.”
“It’s okay, she’s asleep, she can’t feel them. Why don’t you tell her what you found?”
“You said she’s sleeping, she won’t hear me.”
“She’ll hear you in her dreams, love.” Becca shot a look at Candice, who still crouched over Julie like she was shielding her, and hardened her voice. “The doctors said it’s good for her to hear things.” She lifted Sam onto the foot of the bed and pulled the typewriter pages from her bag. Candice snatched the papers and waved them under Becca’s nose.
“Not your father’s nonsense again! Nothing but broken junk.”
“It’s a code!” Sam grabbed at the paper. “Someone is sending coded messages and we have to work them out!”
Candice sucked in her breath, and arranged a honeyed smile. “I know you want your Mummy to get better, because you love her very much,” she said softly. “You want to help look after her, don’t you?” She curled one arm around his shoulders, easing him off the bed. “She needs you to be a big boy so you can help her. Can you do that for her?”
Sam nodded mutely, clearly confused about where code investigation fell in the spectrum of “being a big boy.”
Becca stepped forward. “Mum—”
Candice’s head whipped up, and the sweetness vanished from her face. “I don’t want to hear any more of it. You’re under my roof. You’ll put that thing away when you get home. Or better yet, throw it out.”
Becca clenched her jaw, but couldn’t find a retort. Candice had always hated Dad’s obsessions. It didn’t matter what it was: if she didn’t understand it, it wasn’t allowed.
Candice lowered her voice theatrically. “Julie needs him right now while she gets better, not silly distractions.”
“I thought it was interesting,” Sam mumbled.
“It’s just broken, my sweetling. There are more important things right now.”
***
Sam barely said two words the whole drive home. He hunched in the back seat, hugging his knees and smearing ink-stained tears across his cheeks.
“Careful with those,” Becca joked, nodding to the pile of crumpled typewriter paper she’d retrieved from Candice before they left. “You don’t know what they say, yet. It could be important.”
He didn’t reply. To him, she was still just a face from a laptop. What did Dad do when I was this upset? He loved his puzzles, his what-ifs. Sometimes he’d be so engrossed he’d forget to eat, chewing pen lids into scraps until Candice dragged him down to dinner. Becca smiled to herself, then clenched her cheek muscles in place.
What if Julie does wake up? Even just some of her, she might still be Julie.
I can’t live with Candice again.
Nine days left. Then she had to be on a plane home. Or not. She shook her head. Focus on Sam. His smile made Julie’s fate—and her own—less terrifying. Besides, Julie had named her godmother. He was Becca’s responsibility, now.
“You know what you need to do?” she asked in her best detective voice as they pulled up at the Earl’s Court Road traffic light. “We need more data. For instance, there are more letters than keys. So does each key match a certain set of letters? Is there a pattern?”
Sam frowned. “I don’t know,” he said huskily.
“You don’t know?” Becca turned and gaped at him, mock-aghast. “Well, what is it we do, when we don’t know something?” Sam shook his head mutely. Becca mimicked her father’s exuberance: “We find out!”
<
br /> The slightest of smiles tweaked Sam’s cheek. Becca leaned between the front seats and whispered. “I won’t tell her if you won’t.”
Becca blurred through the morning and afternoon cleaning walls and light switches and other things that didn’t need cleaning, to the plunks of Sam on the typewriter in the living room. Until—
“Auntie! I figured it out! And it’s talking to me!”“
Becca raced in, half-expecting he’d taken it apart.
Sam sat in the living room surrounded by open books of dense text, studiously writing in his Buzz Lightyear notebook.
“What do you mean, kiddo?” Becca peered over his shoulder.
“You said I should work out whether the same keys make the same symbols—they don’t,” he announced, in a tone like he was receiving the Nobel Prize. “So I thought it might be random, but it’s not. I counted one hundred and twenty-seven different letters, and there are patterns. Lots of patterns.”
Becca remembered to close her mouth. She and Julie had played with this for months as kids. How had they never noticed that? And Sam had, all by himself?
“So I looked through Dad’s old books Mum kept, they tell you how to crack codes, by looking for patterns and how many letters and whether the patterns are big or small, and—” he ran out of breath and gulped air. “There was one where it’s not based on letters but on sounds. Fo-somethings.”
“Phonemes,” Becca murmured, half-entranced. She flipped through the books next to Sam—cryptography books. His father had been Military Intelligence. Julie had never said doing what, only that he’d had a knack for languages and numbers.
“That’s why there are so many letters. It’s writing out exactly what he said, how it sounded. And then it started talking to me.”
“Now Sam,” Becca heard her mother’s tone in her voice and winced.
“I’m not lying! Look!” He pushed his notebook under her face. Becca frowned at the jumble of English words.
“It’s backwards,” Sam said helpfully. “The words, I mean. They started at the end of the message.”
“Why is it backwards?”
“Why is it writing in an alien language?”
“Point made.” She took the notebook. “Uncle Sam,” she murmured, reading backwards. “I guess Uncle Sam came through after all, I can see the shuttles flying.” A grin spread over her face at the beautifully impossible—her father’s grin. “That’s not you, Sam. That’s what people sometimes call America, like it’s a big brother. I think he’s a soldier or something.”
“Like Dad, in Afghanistan?”
Becca caught her breath. Careful.
“I don’t think this is your father, sweetheart.”
How do you know? It could be.
“Is he in trouble?”
The phone rang.
Digging her mobile out of her jeans, Becca silently thanked the universe for the reprieve. “Could be, but it sounds like reinforcements have arrived. Hello?”
“Ms. Willoway? This is Cromwell Intensive Care.”
The world paused. Becca sank onto a plate on the coffee table, legs quivering.
“Your sister is awake.”
***
“She’s going to be fine,” Candice’s insistence shrilled across Julie’s vacant stare.
“It’s brain damage, Mum,” Becca whispered. “You can’t make it better. It doesn’t just heal like a broken bone. You don’t know if she’s still in there.”
Candice rounded on Becca. “Of course she is! She just needs rest. We’ll take her home this afternoon, we’ll get her better.”
Becca frowned. “Straight from the ICU? Don’t they want to keep her for observation or rehab?”
“I insisted. She needs her family, not faceless caretakers. They’ll send a physio-nurse to check on her twice a day. They gave me a list of things…I can manage, just like with your father, when he went.”
Candice really does love her. And you. And Sam.
Becca stared at the vacant woman who looked like her sister. Julie’s eyes followed people when they spoke, and she moved her lips as spittle slowly slipped out the corner of her mouth. Gone, though, was the laugh, the flash-in-the-pan grin, the need to be into everything, understanding everything, the intensity when she listened like she was reading off the back of your skull. Gone was the banter which wound up offending people as often as not, the wit that invented codenames for Candice’s tactics in their Skype calls. Gone, even, was the bitter resignation at returning to Candice’s clutches a widow, Sam in tow, and that steel-eyed determination to climb free again. Nothing in this stranger’s face was Julie.
Becca crumpled against the bed, but the tears wouldn’t come.
Candice wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pressing her into her perfumed jacket, and soothed the nape of her neck. “She’s going to be fine. You’ll see,” she murmured in her soft voice, the motherly voice from Becca’s childhood fevers. She pulled a tissue from her purse and gently blotted at Becca’s dry cheeks.
“Sam shouldn’t see her like this.” Becca glanced out the window where Sam quietly wrote a letter to the lost soldier who might be his father.
“She’s his mother. He’ll love her whatever she looks like.”
“Except she doesn’t really look like she loves him, now. He won’t understand—”
“He should know she does,” Candice said sharply. “She needs him. She won’t get better without him to come back to. So no more of that nonsense. I know you gave into him. Head full of fluff just like your father. Soon as we get home, you’re putting that thing back in the attic where it belongs.”
Back in control. Becca opened her mouth to protest, to explain the new wonder. She just lost her daughter, whatever she says. She needs this. Instead, she said, “Yes, Mum.”
Why do I keep excusing her?
Candice nodded. “We may as well get it over with, then.” She opened the ICU door and beckoned Sam inside. “You can say hello, now, sweetling. She’s coming home with us this afternoon.”
Sam bounded in, pulled up short.
“Mum?” The lost tone in his voice sank like a knife in Becca’s ribs.
“It’s okay, mate,” Becca murmured. “Her brain is bruised, so it’s hard for her to move. But you can still tell her all about the soldier.” Becca shot a hard look at Candice. “She’d like that.”
Candice raised her eyebrow, but said nothing.
***
The typewriter disappeared into the attic to make way in the living room for Julie, her equipment, and pills. Sam sat beside her on the fold-out bed with his notebook, filling the otherwise silent room with his theories until Candice snapped.
“No more nonsense, that’s enough!” She snatched his notebook up. “Your mother needs rest and care, not silliness and running about.”
“Mum,” Becca said, clearing plates from dinner.
Candice spun on her heel. “And you, as bad as your father, nothing but a waste of time and energy, leaving the work to everyone else.”
Sam started to cry. Becca opened her mouth, but Candice cut her off with words from twenty years ago: “Don’t start with me, young madam.”
“He needs this. He’s seven years old!”
“Old enough to grow up. You both are. Other people are more important than nonsense!”
“Oh, like ‘she’s going to be fine,’ that kind of nonsense?” The words shot out of Becca’s mouth before she could stop them. She stepped forward, hand stretched out as if she could snatch them back.
Candice’s face paled, her mouth an ‘o’ of shock, two pink spots of fury in her cheeks. “How dare you talk back to me.” Her voice dropped to a growl. Becca flinched. Candice snatched up the gravy boat, marching into the kitchen with notebook and gravy.
“Mum,” Becca began, but Candice didn’t pause. “Mum, I didn’t mean it, I—”
Candice threw the notebook in the bin, dumped the gravy on top of it, and slammed the boat in after so hard it shattered. She turned to
Becca, hand half-raised for a slap. Clenching the plates to stop them rattling in her hands, Becca fought not to flinch again. Sam hugged his knees, heels slipping off the edge of the seat, and Candice seemed to suddenly remember him. The hand dropped to rub his shoulders.
“It’s time for bed, sweetling,” she said. “In the morning, you’ll see this was for the best, for your mother.”
Sam slunk off to Becca’s old room. Becca glared in the silence.
“You shouldn’t have taken it out on him,” Becca said softly.
Candice stiffened and whipped the tea towel off the rack. “You know not to answer back.”
***
Sam didn’t appear for breakfast. Becca checked every cupboard she’d hidden in as a toddler, the ivy behind the house that Julie had always made her cubby, under every piece of furniture she could lift or wriggle into, even up the apricot tree in the rain. No Sam.
“Why would he do this?” Candice fumed. “Doesn’t he know how hard things are already?” She all but wrenched the cupboard door off its hinges. “This is what I’m talking about, running away instead of learning to cope!”
“He was coping, in his own way. Not everybody has to cope your way!” Becca shot back.
Candice sucked in a breath in shock. Becca plunged ahead, using anger as courage.
“Why did you have to destroy his notebook?” she shouted. “Why do you always have to win?”
The slap came out of nowhere. Becca reeled against the wall, her cheek on fire.
“I raised you better than that,” Candice spat.
“Dad raised me. You just controlled me. There’s a difference.”
Candice raised her hand for another slap, but Becca swatted it down and shoved past her into the cluttered hallway. “Check the street!” she shouted before Candice could follow. She barged into her room and snatched her bag from under the bed. I can do it. I’ll just leave. It’s my life. I’ll fix things with Rick, go to work, drinks with the guys, live my life. I love Julie, but I’m not helping her here. Becca shoved her clothes in the bag with numb hands. She’d find Sam, and then she’d…