Songbird (Bellator Saga Book 7)

by Cecilia London

  “That wouldn’t have been fair to either one of them. Jess never would have agreed to go.” Tom stacked the papers neatly before placing them back in the envelope. “You need to file these with our other important documents. All in the same place.”

  So they’d know what to grab when they had to run. “Why do you think she did it?” Christine asked. “Her best friend from college was their guardian. Why us?”

  “You know why.”

  Christine stood up and started pacing. “Jess is barely grown. Marguerite and Sophie are still children. They shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of decisions made by adults who have little to no regard for their welfare. They shouldn’t be judged by the sins or the deeds of their parents. They shouldn’t have to flee a country they love because they don’t recognize it anymore. I—”

  “Chrissy.” Tom rose to embrace her. “They’ll do it because we’ll be there to help them. Because they’ll do what they need to do to survive. You’ve learned how to do it. So will they.”

  Christine burrowed into his chest. “I can’t believe it’s come to this. Do you know what Caroline told me?” She choked on a sob. “She said she knew we’d raise the girls to be good people if something happened to her and Jack.”

  “We would,” Tom said, his voice hitching.

  “She trusts us so much. More than we deserve.” More than she deserved, to be more precise. How could she possibly live up to what Caroline had asked of her? It seemed impossible.

  “Whatever it takes, Chrissy. That’s what we’ll do. She’d do the same for us.”

  “Well.” Christine pulled away from him, wiping her eyes. “We’d better prepare, then.”

  *****

  They’d been driving for hours. Doubling back, changing course, switching routes, all to end up in some seedy roadside motel in a part of New York Christine hadn’t even known existed. The five of them cramped into a single dingy room. They’d stayed in a few non-AAA approved places the past few nights but this one took the cake.

  Tom had taken care when checking in, scoping the place, making sure it was as far off the beaten path as possible. When they’d first started out he’d wanted them to take turns driving and sleeping in the car but Christine pointed out that wasn’t healthy. There were two growing girls with them, and they needed to respect their physiological and sociological needs. A soft bed. A semi-warm meal. A chance to feel like normal human beings.

  Of course, Christine assumed Marguerite and Sophie had never stayed in a rat’s nest like this one. She could practically hear the vermin crawling through the walls. This place encouraged her insomnia like little else could. It was after midnight; she hadn’t bothered looking at her watch because it gave her a headache. And she hated to toss and turn when there were other people in the room who were quite capable of getting a good night’s rest, so she’d sneaked into the bathroom to wage war with her sleeplessness.

  She heard a knock. “Mom? You all right in there?”

  Jess. She unlocked the bathroom door and opened it a crack. She must have been in there longer than she thought. “Come in,” Christine said. “I don’t want the light to wake anyone up.”

  Jess hopped into the tiny room, shutting the door behind her. “They’re all fast asleep,” she said.

  “Do you need to use the toilet? Was I keeping you awake?” Christine asked. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Jess studied her with a critical eye. “Is everything okay?”

  What an incredibly loaded question. Had she intended it to sound that way? “Metaphorically or literally?”

  Jess laughed softly. “I should have been more specific. Is there anything immediately wrong?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Christine said. As if that couldn’t be more obvious.

  “Neither could I.” Jess stifled a yawn. “Too tired, if that makes sense.”

  “Been a rough few days,” Christine observed.

  “More than that. Years,” Jess corrected.

  Christine attempted to flatten the cowlick at the back of her daughter’s head, but one stubborn tuft of hair stood straight as a rod. “Have I told you how I feel about this particular shade of violet?”

  “No.” Jess grinned. “And there’s no point in trying to tamp that thing down. Nothing works—pomade, gel, anything. Don’t try that mom spit thing either. That’s just gross.”

  Her daughter should have been in graduate school. Or at her first real adult job. She deserved to have a life, a meaningful existence. To spend her days and nights worrying about that unruly cowlick or what color to paint her nails or which eyeshadow to use or the next book on her reading list or how to dress for the weather tomorrow because, you never know, there could be a forty-degree swing in the span of a day because Pennsylvania. Instead she was helping her parents break any number of laws. Immoral and unethical laws under the circumstances, but still. “Your father and I shouldn’t have made you do this. We could have figured out some other way.”

  Jess frowned. “Is that what you’re worried about? You think I don’t want to be here?”

  Christine knew she was a target. Knew her daughter was a target too. And the children they were escorting across the border? They were almost as big a prize as their parents. A fact that Christine had tried to keep from Jess. Although she was a smart young woman. She was perfectly capable of putting two and two together and getting four.

  “It’s not safe.” Christine shook her head back and forth. “For any of us but especially you.”

  Jess grabbed her shoulders. “Stop. Don’t work yourself up. You get all loopy when you’re sleep deprived and it’s the middle of the night and your brain is working overtime.”

  Was that what she did? She’d never noticed that personality flaw before. Could she now blame all of her missteps on fatigue? “It’s not safe,” she repeated.

  “Mom.” Jess ran a hand through her very spiky, very purple hair. “All of the adults in this hotel room know the risks. We know why we’re here. Every one of us.”

  It was easy to forget her daughter was of age. Children could grow and change and evolve and even create families of their own, but to their parents they remained eternally young. “I have a bad feeling,” Christine whispered. “Something’s not right.”

  Jess let out a bitter chuckle. “A lot of things aren’t right. That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.” She gestured toward the outer room. “Those girls are counting on us. On you.”

  The weight of the world was on Christine’s shoulders. It seemed unfair to shift the burden onto her twenty-two-year-old daughter. “I want us all to be safe.”

  “We will be,” Jess said confidently. “It’ll work out. You’ll see. You’re doing the right thing.”

  Her daughter, who had probably seen more homophobic propaganda and heard more discriminatory remarks in the past year and a half than she had in the rest of her life, was giving her a pep talk. The optimism of youth. Christine wanted to bottle it, sell it to folks who had forgotten the simplicity and beauty of human kindness. Of a single word or act. At times Jess seemed too good for this world, but Christine never voiced such an opinion aloud. Too trite.

  “We need to get some rest,” Christine said. “Both of us. Another long day tomorrow.”

  “Probably reach the border,” Jess noted.

  If anything was going to happen, it would almost certainly take place within the next twenty-four hours. “Probably.”

  “If you need to keep talking, we can.”

  Did she? Was it a want or a need? Was it necessary to delineate the two at this point? Christine wanted to be safe. She needed to feel empowered. She wanted to cry. She needed to scream. She wanted to keep her child alive and well and happy. She needed to realize she didn’t have that ability. Not now, not before, not ever.

  “Mom?” Jess squeezed her hand. Christine must have drifted into her thoughts again. It had been happening more and more as the odometer spun and the journey dragged on.

  “I’m fine.” Chris
tine tucked an imaginary hair behind Jess’ ear. “Go to bed. I just need another minute or two.”

  “I can stay. Are you sure?”

  She gave her a weak smile. “I’m sure.”

  Jess smiled back. “I love you, mom. A lot.”

  Tom and Jess were the demonstrative ones. The loving ones. The two members of the family who could take a compliment, wrap a bow on it, and bestow a better one on the person who had given it first. Christine had never figured out how so much goodness could be contained within two people. It seemed odd not to spread it around more, not to proportionately dole out those virtues to everyone, instead of allowing kindness and decency to overflow among the few.

  The gnawing in her gut grew stronger, fiercer, more desperate, verging on panic. She pulled Jess to her, holding her in a hard hug. She didn’t say anything, listened to the two of them breathing, neither speaking, neither breaking the embrace. Her daughter had succeeded as a point guard in spite of her stature, and she remained the same height as her mother. Good for quality hugging, although Christine had never taken full advantage of it. Jess held on as tightly as she did and didn’t pull away until Christine let her arms fall to her sides. Her daughter wordlessly gave her a kiss on the cheek, slipped through the door, and left her alone in the bathroom.

  Christine didn’t sleep a wink that night.

  *****

  I’d been mistaken. Horribly mistaken. Flat-out wrong, to use a more precise term. I should have never stepped over the threshold. It pained me to admit it, because I normally took pleasure in being correct. There were no more surprise memories of Flint popping up in the décor, but the filmy gauze of the past remained. Every nook and cranny carried intimacies, every last square inch of the house had a ghost, every possession had its secrets. Complete and absolute quiet proved deafening.

  I managed three nights of near insomnia and the echoes of ethereal voices in my head before calling my realtor and putting the house on the market.

  Chapter 5

  Most parents dread The Talk with their children. I was no exception. Unfortunately, I was the anything-but-rapt audience of one for said talk and Susannah was giving the presentation.

  She meant well, I’m sure, chock full of self-reproach, Ativan, and good intentions. Little did she know that good intentions not only paved the way to hell but made the journey exhausting. The Ativan was… probably fine.

  Regardless, in the few months since I’d left office, our mutually separate contrition had returned with a vengeance. I was able to store most of mine in a shiny new condo downtown while the house in Bryn Mawr lingered on the market. I still wasn’t all that comfortable in my new residence, so when Susannah invited me over for dinner on a night when Jacob was conveniently away from home, I accepted.

  We’d had a seemingly uneventful meal, which gave her the perfect opportunity to catch me with my guard down. Our relative traffic jam of emotions meant that despite all my protests and all our painfully unresolved arguments, my properly medicated and overly enthusiastic daughter was valiantly attempting to make up for all the damage we’d done to one another by setting me up on a date.

  “He’s perfectly nice,” she said.

  Nice. Not captivating. Not debonair. Not he’s not even slightly intimidated by the fact that you were briefly the leader of the free world. She’d been dropping hints about this man on me for months and the only adjective she’d been able to scrounge up to describe him was nice. “I’m sure he is,” I said. “But—”

  “Don’t say you’re not ready.”

  It would have been the height of petulance for me to respond with you’re damn right I’m not ready, so I tented my fingers in a noncommittal attempt at restraint.

  “I’ve been trying to get you used to the idea,” Susannah said. “Warming you up. You were also busy running the country at the time. Details didn’t seem necessary.”

  Details were absolutely necessary, in my not remotely objective opinion, but I wasn’t about to say that out loud. She’d indeed dropped hints, and I’d been careful not to pick them up with anything other than cautious unease. I was at a loss as to why she felt this was the next natural step in the process, unless she felt like doing this somehow let us both off the hook when it came to communicating our grief to one another.

  “I’m not ready,” I said, my voice coming out much wobblier than I’d intended.

  Susannah had started our little chat while facing me from across the room. Physical proximity never suited us all that well, though we were getting better at it. She sat down next to me. “Mom,” she started.

  She only pulled that one out when she was feeling affectionate or guilty. If I was in the maternal doghouse, I’d get a long, drawn out mother, but we preferred not to use any forms of address at all. We were getting better at using terms of endearment. Not as frequently as some other families, but working them into our dialogue on a more consistent basis would imply a level of intimacy we had yet to attain.

  No, life as a private citizen was not going well for me. At all. One could almost make a very coherent argument proving that I’d regressed, since I was no longer forced to interact with the public on a daily basis. I holed up in my condo whenever I could, venturing out for occasional visits to see Caroline and little else. What else could I do? I lacked motivation. I wanted out of the public eye. I just wanted to be left alone for a lukewarm second. If that was a thing. I’d find out how I could make that a thing.

  Healthy, no. Problematic, yes. And my daughter erroneously assumed that the solution to all of my problems was… a man? I didn’t outwardly identify as feminist but I thought I’d taught her that there was more to a woman’s identity than simply being attached to a man. Did she think that was all it took for me to be happy? Had my relationship with her father been distilled down to a single male-female insert plug-Tom into slot-Christine dichotomy? If so, I’d clearly failed as a parent.

  Which was a distinct probability.

  Grief is much more difficult to handle when the timeline plays out in front of other people, which was part of the reason why I was so eager to keep to myself. I was a public figure, ergo everyone knew my private life by default, ergo everyone knew my husband and one of my children were deceased, ergo they passed their judgment on whether I was grieving too much, too little, or just the right amount. Because human emotions are required to be held to some odd Goldilocks standard. I’d been granted a reprieve while in the White House, but the gossipmongers and judgment-passers from previous years had returned, and in greater numbers.

  Any public and private decrees as to my proper behavior were made worse by my—ahem—somewhat deserved reputation as a stoic, perhaps even standoffish politician. Any dating partner would know of my past, no matter how recent or distant. Whether that worked in my favor or to my detriment probably depended on how much of an asshole said dating partner was. And I didn’t want to speak with, let alone date any assholes. Tom had been a magnificent man, a teddy bear of a husband and father who had been far too good for me, and I wasn’t about to tarnish our relationship by taking on someone who needed rehabilitation. I had enough issues to begin with.

  But I had to try to explain how I felt to Susannah, awkward though it might be.

  “I don’t want my troubles to be some millstone for a man I don’t even know,” I said.

  “It’s just a date,” she said.

  Again, she meant well. She probably thought this was one way in which she could provide readily perceptible evidence that she really was trying to pay attention to her mother, even though we’d both made it clear that routine emotional distance appeared to suit us just fine. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

  Except that we were terribly broken, and I had no idea what tools we needed to start putting us back together. Would agreeing to a date somehow placate my daughter and ease us toward recovery? Or would it backfire with comically disastrous results?

  No child wants to think about their parent having sex, being sexy,
watching sexy things, wearing sexy clothes, thinking sexy thoughts. But I’ve never been a fan of the just a date concept. What was the point of putting myself out there with someone unless that someone was a person worth spending time with? I didn’t just mean sex, of course, but casual wasn’t my thing. Especially since most men viewed me as a trophy and not as an actual living, breathing person.

  “I was married for over thirty years,” I said.

  “I am aware of that, mother.”

  With that, we inched away from each other again. Literally and figuratively. “I’m high profile. Nothing is ever as simple as a date or a chat or a smile. I can’t escape complication.”

  “Which is why I’ve prescreened all of your future beaux.”

  Susannah had spent the past few years in Paris honing her international arbitration skills and becoming more continental, but there was no need for her to sound that pretentious. “So, you’re like an online dating filter for mature ladies?” I asked. “Helping me eliminate the men who don’t deserve a swipe right?”

  “Please don’t make Tinder jokes. My psychologist has her hands full already with me.”

  I’d been doing my best not to engage in default snippy responses when confronted with opinions or statements I didn’t like, so I took her hand, patting it lightly. There. That was good mothering, right? “I know you mean well.”

  “I do.”

  “I just—I feel like this should happen more organically.”

  Susannah sighed. “Mom, you are the least spontaneous person I know. It’s not like you’re cruising around Philadelphia looking for eligible men. Organic is code for impossible and you damn well know it.”

  “You’re trying to force my hand.”

  “Yes,” she said bluntly.

  Points for candor, I suppose. “What if my hand is content where it is?”