Cent: "Imaginary Girlfriend"

Mom and Dad didn't play fair.

If they'd forbidden me from ever seeing Joe again, told me never to visit Jade and Tara, I would have gone to them immediately. Mom and Dad didn't even mention the people who'd been injured, or the potential for injury to others.

It would have been redundant. I couldn't even think about the guys without seeing Caffeine's face, bloody and bruised.

I guess you could say life didn't play fair.

I walked a great deal, mostly in the desert in West Texas. It was meaningless that this was closer to New Prospect than the Yukon. After all, for me, New Prospect was milliseconds away no matter where I was. I wasn't separated by space and time.

The separation was an act of will harder to overcome than mere distance.

I remembered that Dad had walked here after he'd lost his mother. This was where he'd done his grieving but I didn't know whether this thought helped me or not.

Would it be any less painful if my friends, if Joe, were dead? It was almost more painful that I could be with them, at our regular table at Krakatoa, in a heartbeat.

By agreement, whenever I left the cabin, I scribbled my destination on the whiteboard in the kitchen. It would've made me furious if they'd insisted, but it hadn't been like that. Mom and Dad had started doing it anytime they left the cabin, along with when they expected to return, and they asked me to do it, too.

Not told.

So of course I had to.

That's how Dad knew where to find me, walking along a mostly-fallen, rusted barbed wire fence that had stopped being an effective barrier sometime in the middle of the previous century.

"Hey."

"Hey."

He handed me a water bottle, still cold from the refrigerator in the Yukon, and walked along beside me.

I was irritated and I made up my mind to jump away if he said anything, but he didn't. He was just there, not even looking at me, but at the desert around us, seemingly lost in thought. My irritation gradually faded and I realized I was glad he was there.

I finally broke the silence. "Are you thinking about Grandmother?"

Dad looked back at me, almost surprised, as if he'd forgotten I was there. He raised his eyebrows. "No. About your mother, actually. Not mine."

"Oh. I thought..." I waved my hand vaguely at the ocotillo, gravel, and creosote bush.

"I was thinking about that same time, yeah. Did you know your mother had broken up with me right before I found out my mother had died?"

I blinked. "No."

"Your mother didn't know about my jumping, yet. I hadn't lied, exactly, but because I hadn't told her everything, I'd certainly misled her. When she found out she was furious."

Dad glanced sideways at me and away. He looked embarrassed.

"I'd done this thing-helped a New York neighbor get away from her abusive husband-but he was a cop and it brought me to their attention." He laughed humorlessly. "Do you see the irony?"

I thought about it. "Like me helping Grant, Tony, and Dakota. Or the chukri girls. Unintended consequences."

"Yeah. Anyway, when I was out here back then, I wasn't just thinking about my mom's death. I was thinking about your mom, too. Thinking I would never see her again.

"Hard to say which hurt more or even where one hurt stopped and the other began."

The desert blurred and I blinked moisture away from my eyes.

It's not like I can say he doesn't understand.

"I miss Joe," I said. The feeling in my chest, of incipient sobs, waited, just below the surface.

Tentatively he said, "You only went out a few times."

That nearly made me jump away. I stopped and turned my back to him and took a deep breath. When I turned, I could tell he regretted saying it, but I went on. "Are you trying to tell me what I feel doesn't matter? I know what Mom would say about that."

"True." He shook his head ruefully. "I'm afraid I come by it honestly. Back when I made the mistake of sharing my feelings with my father, he would do much the same thing-though, I suspect, without as good a motive. He did get better, at the end, though. Maybe there's hope for me."

I glared at him.

"No excuses, ma'am," he added.

I don't know why that should've made me laugh, but it did, and the threat of tears died down. "You're an evil man."

He nodded, and we resumed walking.

I kept expecting him to talk about the danger of trying to see Joe or Jade and Tara, but he didn't. Instead he showed me some coyote tracks in an arroyo and pointed out a long-limbed black-tailed jackrabbit stretching up to eat leaves from a sagebrush.

"What were you going to do, when you thought you'd never see Mom again?"

Dad frowned. "I'm not exactly sure. I wasn't that in touch with my feelings back then. Mostly I was numb." He gestured at a ledge in the side of the arroyo, like a bench eight feet off the ground, then jumped there to sit on it. He patted the stone beside him.

I joined him. The stone had been in the sun all afternoon and was much warmer than the air. It felt good against my legs as I leaned against Dad.

"I had started work on the Eyrie, and the physical labor helped a bit. But it was hard. I was solitary before I met your mother and it seemed probable that I would go back to that when I was done."

"Done with the Eyrie?"

"No. I thought I'd go back to the Eyrie when I was done finding my mother's killers. I was thinking of it as my hermitage-going back to being solitary. But your mother reached out to me and we got back together."

I blurted, "Joe can hardly reach out to me. We didn't break up! I don't think he's angry about my keeping my secret, 'cause I don't know!"

Dad put his arm around me and I glanced at his face. The corners of his mouth were hooked sharply down and there were tears in his eyes.

I'd been able to hold it together against my own sadness, but his proved too much. The sobs broke free, and I curled in on myself and cried and cried.

And Dad cried with me.

Dad jumped me to the cabin hallway, held my arm while I stumbled into my room and sat on the edge of the bed. He helped me off with my boots, and I fell back onto the pillows. He kissed me and pulled a comforter over me.

The sobs had stopped, but not the tears, and I lay there, angry with myself, with my helplessness, but unable or unwilling to move.

I heard Mom and him talking in their room but I couldn't make it out. At one point Mom's voice raised almost to a shout and then they moved the conversation downstairs.

They rarely raised their voices with each other and, even if they did, it was more likely to be Dad than Mom. Mom was the calm, reasonable one.

At some point I really did fall asleep because I awoke to find the lights out. I was hungry. I was miserable, but still hungry, so I went downstairs.

Mom was on the couch before a crackling fire of pinon logs. She stood when I came down the stairs. "There's food."

"What kind?"

"Oxtail."

"Mmmm."

She pointed at the couch. "I'll bring you a bowl."

She cooks it all day long so the meat is tender and the broth rich, then makes fresh gnocchi before serving. I don't know how long it had been waiting for me but it was as good as ever.

I was not quite as miserable after I'd eaten.

"Where's Dad?" I felt guilty for breaking down like I had, for causing him to cry.

Mom said, "He had to go talk to someone."

I picked up my bowl and got up. Mom made an abortive grab for it, but I was already standing. "Need some water. Do you want some water?"

Mom looked undecided, her mouth open without speaking, but then she shrugged. "Put on the kettle, please."

I went into the kitchen and did that, and got spring water for myself, from the tap. I took a gulp and my eyes strayed to the whiteboard.

My last destination, Desert near the pit, and ETA, back by dinner, had been wiped through, though you could make out the faint lettering of the dry-erase marker still. Mom's Warehouse and back by three PM were also imperfectly erased. Dad's line, by contrast, was dark and fresh. New Prospect, back by 9.

I blinked. New Prospect?

"Mom! What the hell is Dad doing in New Prospect?"

I sloshed water out of my glass and it fell, soaking cold, onto my sock.

Mom sighed and I realized she hadn't been thinking about what she wanted to drink. She'd known that I'd see the whiteboard if I went into the kitchen and she'd been trying to decide if she should keep me from seeing it.

I went back to the living room.

"Now, Cent-"

"If you don't tell me, I'm going to go find out for myself!"

"I'm going to tell you!" she said quickly.

I came back down off my toes.

More slowly, Mom said, "Sit down."

I sat down at the end of the couch, took off my wet sock, and threw it down onto the hot hearth where it steamed and sputtered.

"Don't blame me," Mom said, "if that catches fire."

"Stop trying to put me off." I stretched out my foot and raked the sock away from the fire. "What is Dad doing there?"

Mom took a deep breath. "He's talking to Joe."

My jaw dropped open. After a moment I said, "Why?" Then, "Doesn't that put Joe in danger?"

She nodded. "Yes. Your father and I quarreled about that. But he said you deserved as much of a chance as we did. Your father and I, that is."

"A chance for what?"

Mom looked away. In a barely audible voice she said, "Happiness."

Something flickered in the corner of the room and we both turned our head. Dad was there.

He was not alone.

I thought I was all cried out.

I probably terrified him, first by jumping across the living room to right in front of him, then by sobbing into his shoulder. But, except for flinching as I appeared in front of him, he took it well.

"Shhhh," Joe said, squeezing back, stroking my hair with his hand.

"We'll be upstairs," Dad said. I didn't hear them leave, but when I finally looked up from Joe's shoulder, we were alone before the fire.

"What did he tell you?" I asked.

"That you were an irritation of the spirit and-"

I filled in the rest, "-a great deal of trouble."

He nodded and pulled me back and kissed me. When we separated for air, he said, "But for all that, he said you were probably worth knowing-if I was willing to put up with the danger of being killed or tortured."

"That part was no joke!" I said.

Joe said, "I agree. You're worth knowing."

"Not that part!"