Any Mothers's Son

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

Lay not on any soul a load which ye would not wish to be laid upon you, and desire not for any one the things ye would not desire for yourselves. This is My best counsel unto you, did ye but observe it. —Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh

oOo

Dr. Sharon Glen could set her watch to her moods. From the time she woke until noon she was eager; from lunch to dinner she was determined; from dinner to bedtime she was ambivalent. But once she had poked her head into Alec’s room one last time, turned off the lights and gotten into bed herself, the ambivalence gave way to anxiety and guilt.

The anxiety was for the technology in which her career lived and moved and had being. The guilt was for Alec. If the technology failed, Alec would be alone in the world except for his grandmother, whose condition at times made her unaware she even had a grandson.

It was the shock of losing Robert that had derailed Helen Glen’s fragile mental train. Her son had been the center of her universe, and when he had one day walked into the future and failed to return, Helen Glen had suffered a sudden and swift descent into Alzheimer’s.

Sharon could understand that. Her own universe these days revolved very much around Alec. He was their legacy—hers and Robert’s—the light of her life, the reason she put one foot in front of the other every day.

Sharon knew a certain guilty relief that her mother-in-law could have no idea what her work entailed. The Helen that had been would have told Sharon in no uncertain terms what she thought of a mother who, having lost her husband to his work in a very literal sense, was preparing to put herself at the same risk. But in those long moments of introspection between lying down and sleeping, Sharon recited Helen’s lines for her: You know what could happen to you. What are you thinking of if not Alec?

She did know what could happen. Only too well. Ten years—he had only Shifted forward ten years—a simple mission financed by the National Weather Service. He would assess the effects on climate of several large-scale Midwestern reforestation projects. He would search electronic archives, sample NWS data. Simple. But something had gone wrong—a power drop off, the technicians called it. It had caused the Temporal Grid to pull her husband into the future where it collapsed, killing him.

That had been two years ago. Now there were more safeguards, double and triple and quadruple checks and redundancies and backup systems. Spectral Shift technology was perceived as essentially stable and would continue to be so until another anomaly surfaced and another tripper was lost.

Sharon Glen was on countdown to her first future-trip. As a QuestLabs historian, she’d gone into the past a number of times. It had been fascinating, exhilarating, sometimes unexpected. But the future—that was different. Where the past was at least forensically known, the future was terra incognita. It was also where Robert had died.

Now, two days before her shift, she found herself fighting the sense that she was tying up loose ends. She spent as much time as possible with Alec. They had launched model rockets, played endless board and card games, solved computer mysteries, looked at family albums. And now, she thought of Helen.

“I’d like to visit Gramma today,” she told Alec at breakfast. It was Saturday and they had tentatively planned a trip to the beach with a friend. “We can drop by on our way to pick up Trevor.”

“Do I have to go in?” Alec’s eyes were eloquent with reluctance.

“No, you don’t have to go in, honey, but it would be nice for Gramma if you would.”

“She doesn’t know who I am half the time, mom. How can it be nice for her to get visited by people she doesn’t even know? Besides, I hate that place. It’s creepy.”

“Alec, you’ve never been inside. How do you know it’s creepy?”

It was true that in the two years Helen Glen had been in the high-tech high-care home, Sharon had never gotten Alec further than the manicured lawn. It was also true that Gramma hadn’t known him; worse, she had taken him for Robert. It had been a painful visit for everyone but Helen, who, for a brief span of hours, had been transported to her own quarter of heaven. Before the elder-care facility, she had had her own home—a place from which holidays seemed to originate and which Alec had begged to visit.

Sharon was doing the begging now. “Come on, hon. She might have a good day.”

Alec shook his head emphatically, poking at his yogurt with the tip of his spoon.

“Please?”

Alec sighed as only a severely put-upon eleven-year-old can. “Mom, please don’t make me go there.”

She relented, of course. She visited Helen alone. It had not been a good day, after all. Helen had not known her, and when she had tried to engage her mother-in-law in news of Alec’s exploits on the baseball diamond, Helen had vanished into a reality in which Robert—her precious only son—was a championship pitcher in the Bear River Little League. Sharon had salvaged what she could, absorbing facts about Robert she hadn’t known, wondering how veiled they were by time and neural degradation.

Sunday, she and Alec went to their local Bahá’í Center for devotions, had pizza for lunch, played miniature golf. Sharon tried again to get Alec to visit his grandmother. He would not.

“Old people are creepy when they’re like that,” he said and she barely resisted the impulse to slap him.

“They can’t help the way they are,” she told him and did not try to keep the anger out of her voice.

He was instantly ashamed. “I know. It’s just... scary.” He was silent for a few minutes, then asked, “Will you get like that?”

“I’m not that old.”

“I mean, like, when I’m grown up.”

“Folks on my side of the family have always been sharp as a tack till the day they die,” she reassured him. “My mom told me once that her great uncle Joseph died in the middle of a sentence in which he was expounding a theory of molecular biology.” She smiled, but Alec merely nodded and stared out the car window.

All in all, he made it harder by the day for her to be a field historian—to accept missions like the one she was prepping for. She was torn. Maybe it was something she needed to take to one of the QuestLabs counselors. She knew Alec was her first responsibility; she merely had to find that elusive balance between self and selfishness.

In the end, she left it with Alec. “Do you want me to cancel my mission?” she asked him.

His brow furrowed. “Won’t you get in trouble?”

“I might.” Especially since QuestLabs was sponsoring the Shift on its own dime for a study in culture and ethnology in future America. It would be more than an inconvenience to have to replace the senior historian on the project. And how many times had she assured them that she really wanted this type of assignment? She realized, belatedly, that this question should have been asked some time ago.

“You don’t have to do that,” Alec said, still looking a bit bemused. “I’ll be okay at Aunt Kathi’s house. It’s not like I’ll be there for a long time.”

True enough. A successful Temporal Shift literally took no time at all; if the retrieval was successful. Any timelag was purely for the benefit of the staff and machinery. You seemed to return only minutes after you left, regardless of whether you had spent hours or days at your post. Preparation and debriefings usually took longer than the Shift itself. Altogether, Alec would be with Kathi only a day and a half. In subjective time, Sharon would be gone for several hours.

Sharon found wry irony in that. Human beings had been looking for ways to make extra time for centuries. This was as close as they had come.

There were unsuccessful Shifts, of course. Like Robert’s. That was the way it was with Temporal Shift Technology. Either you came back on schedule, or you didn’t come back at all.

oOo

“Huh?” Sharon glanced up into her partner’s face.

“I said, ‘Are you ready for this?’” Trevor Haley repeated. “But I think you may have just answered the question. What’s getting to you?”

“Who says anything is getting to me? I was looking at our itinerary.”

“Sharon, you’ve been reading the same page for the past ten minutes. Either coordinates and time stamps have become a consuming passion for you or you’re zoning. Are you nervous?”

“Now that you mention it, yes, I am nervous. This is my first future-trip, after all.”

“I know.” Trevor sat down on the edge of the table where he and Sharon were assembling their gear, and leaned toward her. “Is it...is it because of Robert?”

Sharon wanted to deny it outright, but couldn’t. She murmured something about feeling more at home in the late 20th Century, then caught the expression on his face. She put her hand over his. “It’s okay, Trev. You can talk about it without throwing me into a deep pit of despair. And no, it’s not because of Robert—not directly, anyway.”

“So, there is something.”

He knew her too well. “It’s just...Alec. I wonder sometimes if I ought to give up field work—well, at least temporal field work—until he’s an adult.”

“It’s never easy to lose a parent,” said Trevor. He’d lost his seventy-year-old mother the year before to a new strain of influenza. “Besides, I doubt you could give up field work. You thrive on it.”

“I could if I had to.”

Was she whistling in the dark or did she really mean that? Temporal field work was heady stuff. Hands-on history. It made you feel like Indiana Jones and James Burke all rolled into one and blurred the distinction between the historian, the anthropologist and the archaeologist. It made you feel alive, aware, vital. All things, Sharon realized in a sudden epiphany, that had been all but snuffed out when Robert failed to return from a ‘routine mission.’ Was she replacing that relationship with temporal euphoria? More importantly, was she showering attention on her work at Alec’s expense or drawing emotional sustenance from it that mothering him should provide?

She didn’t think she was doing that; she made it a point, when she was with Alec to really be with Alec.

“You’re a great mom, Sharon,” Trevor said. “The best. And I happen to know Alec thinks so, too.”

“Mind reading, Trev?” she chuckled. “You’re just full of unexpected talents.”

“I’ve just known you a long time.”

True, she admitted as she gathered her goods into a shoulder bag, the design of which had been ‘sniffed’ from the window of a sporting goods store 50 years in the future. She had known Dr. Trevor Haley since her first days on staff at QuestLabs in ’78 as a junior associate. She was fresh from obtaining her Masters in History and her doctoral thesis was a biography of Magda Oslovski, the primary mind and driving force behind Spectral Shift Technology.

Sharon and Trevor had become instant pals. Robert joined QuestLabs a year later and her reaction to him instantaneous and profound. Fortunately, her feelings were reciprocated; they had married and Alec had been born a year later.

She had most often partnered with Trevor on her Shifts. Dr. Oslovski, still QuestLabs grand-dame, had a standing rule about allowing married couples with children Shift as a team. It was simply not done. Sharon had thought the rule a nuisance at first; now she could only applaud its wisdom.

At 1300 hours, she and Trevor were Shift-ready. Their electrolytes and hydration levels were checked, their seratonin levels elevated against post-shift depression. They were dressed in casual clothes carefully selected from fashions sniffed at their Shift point. Jeans and shirts—styles that had altered little for the better part of two centuries. Their target was Washington, D.C. 50 years in the future, their purposes mixed.

This was a “peek” as opposed to a “poke”—both terms borrowed from computer technology to indicate the scope of a mission. A peek was the minimal mission—no planned contact with future residents, no touching. It was little more than a manned sniff, which was done by a Totem, or Totable Environmental Monitor—an instrument package designed to gather images, sounds and environmental data on the Shift target. Sniffs, peeks, and pokes usually were run in that order, and future-pokes—which involved interacting with people in the future—were relatively rare. There had been only a handful that Sharon knew of in the 25-year history of QuestLabs.

Any Shift was, brief or no, an expensive proposition, so Sharon and Trevor would be performing a number of tasks for QuestLabs, for Stanford University and for the North American Parliament. It was a lot, Sharon mused, standing in place on the Temporal Grid, like being a member of one of the early space shuttle missions—performing a plethora of experiments in order to maximize the cost-effectiveness of the trip. Now scientists traveled in time and college students used the stock HTO/L shuttles regularly.

“Ready?” The question came from Shiro Tsubaki-Manyfeather, seated at the console from which she would monitor their journey. Beside her, fellow Lab Rat George Wu got baselines on their vital signs.

They nodded, gave a thumbs-up and waited while the Temporal Grid powered up. A dancing veil of light motes shimmered in an aura around the time travelers. The last thing Sharon Glen heard in 2091 was the sound of Shiro’s soft voice counting down.

“Shifting...yellow plus one...orange...plus one... red...”

The delicious tingle of the Shift cascaded down Sharon’s back, colors chased vividly before her eyes—yellow, orange, red. Her heart rate climbed. All delightfully normal. Only the colors were different; the past was cool, its spectrum contained blues and violets; the future was ablaze.

They shifted in the space of perceived minutes, forward 50 years to a set of coordinates ascertained by Totem to be clear of obstacles or traffic and close to their goal—the Library of Congress. The arrival coordinates were in the basement of a parking structure one block from the Library.

It could not have been more perfect. A cloak generated by the Grid afforded them invisibility over and area of four square yards. In practical terms, it allowed Sharon and Trevor to stroll into sight of any bystanders as if they’d just come up on a nearby elevator. Blending in completely with the contemporaries, they were just another pair of students with backpacks and laundry lists of lookups.

Sharon quickly found that the hardest piece of Shift policy to obey completely was the injunction to study the contemporaries without appearing to study them. It was hard not to gawk at things that had changed subtly or not so subtly: clothing, environment, architecture, people. Language was expectedly and subtlety different, and snatches of conversation contained colloquialisms that were familiar, but in unfamiliar contexts.

“That’s so tab,” said a middle-aged businessman to his female cohort as they moved purposefully down the sidewalk.

To which she replied, “Well, Erin is such a straight-jacket anyway, what other kind of investment could he make?”

“He could take a chance once in a while.”

“Erin? Take a chance? Like you said, he’s too tab.”

All of which showed the wisdom of Rule oOo14 in what the Lab Rats affectionately called Time Travel for Dummies: Don’t use slang.

Once inside the Library’s main sanctuary, Sharon and Trevor checked their wrist units for time and instructions. Sharon’s “specialty,” such as it was, was the gathering of health and welfare data. She wasn’t sure exactly how it had happened, but somehow a report on personal hygiene and health she’d generated from a poke into Regency London had earned her a solid reputation as a keen sorter of pertinent health data.

“Okay,” she said, “I think you’ve got the lion’s share of work to do. Let me know if you need a hand.”

“You bet. Nobody ever accused me of taking on more work than I have to. I’m sure you’ll be done long before I am.”

They parted, Sharon wafting on a wave of incredulity. No matter how many times she shifted, she was always overcome at moments such as these, by the sheer paradox of it all. This was work, this traveling through the waves of time, and she was struck by the sheer banality of the conversation she and Trevor had just had. Like a couple of students setting out to prepare for oral exams. In that anomalous context, the Library of Congress was a perfect symbol of Sharon’s calling. Aged stone and antique appointments contrasted with the latest in information retrieval technology.

Sharon was gratified that the technology was still recognizable. She located a VR bay, seated herself in its wrap-around seat and looked for a helm and gloves. There were neither. There were only a pair of flat screens about one foot on a side, that lay at approximately a 120 degree angle to each other. It took ten minutes, but with the help of some written instructions and careful surveillance of her nearest neighbors, she discovered that the canted screen displayed two-dimensional data and the horizontal screen displayed 3D holograms and served as a control panel.

She proceeded carefully through her checklist, delving into health and census records, checking birth rates, noting how natural disasters had affected the general health of the continent. That collection effort completed, she moved on to the brave new world of medicine. It was bemusing, she realized, as her task became more yawninducing, that a future-trip, for all its novelty and the terrifying sense of awareness it provoked, was not nearly as exciting as a trip to a less obscure past.

Alec would be in his early sixties now, she realized, and wondered what kind of man he had become. Moved by something that was more than curiosity, she toyed with the idea of entering his name into the search engine, but her conscience bleated. She stuck to her agenda.

She was in a Who’s-Who of medicine, when she found herself staring at the name Alec Glen. She hesitated momentarily, for the link was not strictly within her parameters, but in the end she followed the thread. What came up was beyond a proud mother’s dreams, for the name Alec Glen had both medical and political connections. Following her own inclination, Sharon pointed to the medical connection.

He would become a doctor and a researcher in the field of genetics. He would contribute to a cure for Hodgkin’s disease, would invent a supplement to stave off osteoporosis, would write a seminal paper on age-related dementia.

She was reveling in the glow of these discoveries when her watch reminded her that time was wasting. She returned swiftly to her legitimate research, downloading a sampling of medical research, trends, breakthroughs and new problems. She added to the general mix her own son’s contributions, wishing that Robert could be there to share her pride.

Sharon was still downloading when Trevor came to let her know he had finished his own research. She stifled a twinge of guilt that her digression might have cost her more legitimate research some time and tried not to look at Trev’s face, lest it prompt him to ask her what was taking so long.

It was as she completed a final download of information to her recorder that she dared to glance up and caught the flicker of something like worry in Trevor’s eyes. He wasn’t looking at her, though, just staring up through the tall front windows where a single wisp of cloud could be seen flung across the visible patches of sky—an abstract painting on three tall canvases.

She poked her head out of the pod-chair. “What’s wrong,” she asked, forgetting Rule #14, “The pol-scene got you jinky?”

“Ah...yeah. Yeah, you could say that. Hey, it’s politics.” He checked the time. “You about ready?”

“Just.” She logged off, slipped her computer back into her bag and could not resist the motherly temptation to glow. “I came across something really interesting while I was searching. Alec’s name.”

Trevor’s surprise was evident. “Really? You did? In what context?”

“As a noted researcher in genetics. He contributed to a cure for Hodgkin’s and I gather, to a greater understanding of aging.”

“Wow,” Trevor said. “That’s quite a coincidence.” He took her elbow and steered her toward the door. “Time’s a wasting.”

“Not considering where I was peeking.”

“I just mean... I didn’t mean to imply you were doing a personal peek. I just meant...Alec going into medicine.”

“Science. He’s been around science all his life. Some of our best friends are doctors and researchers. Besides, lately it seems as if medical research of one sort or another is all I do. It’s just kind of good to know... I guess I’ve been a little worried.”

“I could tell.”

She stopped just outside the library’s main doors and smiled up at him. “Well, aren’t you impressed?”

“Of course. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me all that much. Alec’s a bright child—the child of bright parents.”

“I don’t suppose you came across him in your virtual travels,” Sharon asked.

“What?” Trevor checked the time again and started down the steps. “Why do you ask? I was pursuing a completely different line of research.”

Sharon shrugged, attempting nonchalance. “I found a couple of links that suggested he had some political aspirations as well, that’s all. I didn’t follow it—thought maybe you’d seen something. I just wondered...”

Trevor was silent long enough to make Sharon think he hadn’t heard her or had gone off on one of his internal hikes. She glanced at him, her mouth open, but he was not gazing into the distant hills of his mental outback. There was an expression on his face she had seen only once before.

Zero at the core, she stopped walking, stopping Trevor as well.

“What’s the matter with you, Trevor? What did you find?”

“We need to get back to the Grid, Shar.” He took her arm.

She pulled it away. A woman passerby gave them a sharp glance. Sharon lowered her voice and moved a step closer to Trevor. “Not until you tell me what you’ve found. Something about Alec? What happens to him?”

Trevor lowered his head till their foreheads were touching and the woman smiled and continued on her way.

“Nothing happens to him,” he murmured. “Except that he goes into politics. I thought you might be disappointed. He apparently gave up his research to become a pol. Not exactly a progression his dear mother would be happy about, am I right?”

“Good Lord, don’t tell me he had a party affiliation or something like that?”

“No. No affiliation, but he was—or rather, will be—some sort of lobbyist for the medical PAC.”

Sharon shrugged. “Okay. I’m not wild about lobbyists as a rule, but at least it’s a good cause.”

Trev shook his head, straightened and smiled. “You’re no fun, Shar. You’ve mellowed too much with age.”

“Jerk,” she called him. “Let’s go.”

oOo

Sharon could not have said what made her open Trevor’s files. It was more than idle curiosity, less than suspicion. But she had known Trevor Haley too long not to know when he was embarrassed or uncomfortable and today, during the Shift, he had been both. The last time she’d seen that expression on his face—that sudden skittering away of the eyes—was at a dinner party when one of their colleagues had cracked a mean-spirited, misogynistic joke about Magda Oslovski and her husband, Vance.

Sharon’s own data drop was complete by the time she had changed her clothes and poured a cup of tea. She began riffling through her collection, preparing an index and overview for a morning briefing. She allowed herself a moment to linger lovingly over the information on Alec, then moved on reluctantly.

She’d spent perhaps a half-hour at this when some perverse demon drove her into Trevor’s domain. Anticipation building, she made a guilty search for the name Alec Glen. The search came up dry.

Puzzled, Sharon bent to her own work, but there is nothing so insidious and pervasive as fear, and Sharon had begun to fear, because she could think of no reason Trevor would fail to download the information on Alec, unless...

And that was her imagination’s stopping point. Was Alec destined to die a horrible death? Perhaps by assassination? What else could be so terrible that Trev wouldn’t let anyone see it?

The thought gnawed. She countered with stern logic. When she’d brought the matter up, his tone had been light and teasing. (Yes, even as his eyes crawled away to hide and his ears reddened.) He’d said Alec was a lobbyist—maybe his political career would be too unspectacular to warrant downloading. (But he might have at least done it for her, even though it meant bending the rules a bit.)

Stern logic was powerless. Not fifteen minutes had passed before she got up from her console and headed down the hall toward Trevor’s office. She would simply ask. Straight up. What did you find out about Alec? Just a mother’s fond and proud curiosity. No hint of inner panic. No what aren’t you telling me?

But Trevor wasn’t in his office. His console was on, his chair pulled back as if he had just left it. The palm unit was still in the docking slot. Sharon stood on the doorsill, indecisively, aware of the familiar buzz and wash of sound from the offices and labs—the murmur of conversations in the hall.

She came into the room, the door swinging closed behind her. It took only a moment to slip into his chair, access the palm unit and check its contents. She found what she had been hoping not to find in a folder separated from the main index and named simply “AG.” She contemplated downloading it to her own console, but realized that in any case, Trevor would know she’d seen the data if for no other reason than that she would confront him with it.

She prepared herself for the worst; she could not have prepared herself for the reality. Dr. Alec Glen, Ph.D., noted research scientist, had indeed given up medicine to take up a political career and crusade. He was the father of the Euthanasia Act of 2137, a piece of legislation that put into the hands of doctors and judges and review boards the decision as to when an individual should die. He was the first doctor to be certified for euthanasia; the first to practice it.

Sharon stared at the monitor for an eternity before she was able to will her hands to move, to dig further, to try to comprehend how her son—her son!--could make himself the proponent of such a heinous law.

No, not a law, an atrocity by which elderly people unfortunate enough to require institutionalization had their cases placed before a review board made up of medical doctors, judges, psychologists, clergy and ethicists. Based on a complex set of criteria, rules, conditions and formulas, a decision was made whether or not to euthanize. There was even a list of terminal illnesses for which euthanasia was the de facto “treatment” unless mitigating circumstances could be proven.

Sharon’s tears blurred the names on the list—cold, scientific names that said nothing of the suffering they inflicted: Myasthenia gravis, multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s. Some were conditions on which Alec would expend much time and effort during his medical career. It was as if he were trying to literally bury his failure.

Numbly, Sharon followed another link. She found numbers, statistics, a death roll. It numbered in the thousands.

Why?

“I was hoping you wouldn’t see that.” Trevor watched from the doorway, face grave. Gravity was something he didn’t do well under normal circumstances, but there was no hidden levity in his gaze now. “I guess I should have destroyed it. But, um, it’s a development the analysts will want to know about. Should know about.”

“You offlined it.”

He reddened. “Like I said, I considered destroying it.”

“For me.”

He shrugged.

“How?” She shook her head.

“How does it happen or how does it happen to be Alec?”

“Both. Either.”

“People live longer, but in the end they still deteriorate. People continue to have children. Population demographics indicate a glut of elderly people, inflicted with certain diseases and too few facilities to care for them. It apparently reached a crisis—will reach a crisis-in the mid ‘30’s.”

“Fine—a crisis. But how does a humane society justify this? How does a man with Alec’s background justify it? Here, it says he was supported by the religious right. Back at the turn of this century, that same lobby fought abortion, the death penalty and the right to die.”

“Ah, interesting, that.” He came into the room. “The new sensibility will hold that since death is reunion with God, and therefore not to be feared, it’s something to anticipate, not avoid.”

“’I have made Death a messenger of joy,’” Sharon quoted. “Yes, but a forced reunion? Decided by-by committee? This...this is shades of Logan’s Run. Fiction. My God, Trev, you can’t justify that by scripture.”

“No.”

Sharon glanced at the screen where an image of Alectobe gazed back at her, soberly. There was, in the handsome, but severe middle-aged man, a great deal of the boy.

“What do I do, Trev?” she asked.

He moved to lay a hand on her shoulder. ”What can you do?”

“Go back—forward—again and try to-“

“Sharon, come on. You know that’s not possible. It takes a team of Lab Rats to run the Grid, and Magda would never send you. Besides, what could you do there as you now that you couldn’t as you then besides create an anomaly?”

“Where will I be then, Trev, that I can’t convince him that what he’s doing is wrong?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know the answer to that one.”

“Then I have to do something here. Maybe I need to spend more time with him. Maybe—God, maybe it’s my fault.”

Trevor grasped her by both shoulders and swung her around to face him. “Shar, that’s ridiculous. You’re a great mom. And Alec knows you love him.”

“Maybe that’s not enough. Obviously that’s not enough.”

“Sharon...”

She glanced up directly into his eyes, capturing them. “Are you going to share this data with the Board?”

“I have to.”

She knew that. Of course, she knew that. “Trevor, what do I do,” she asked again. “My son is going to grow up to commit an atrocity that-” She lost her words, her thoughts, her direction and hiccuped on the horrid tightness in her throat.

“Let’s look at it carefully. Let’s let other analysts look at it.”

“He’s my son, Trevor.”

“What do you think you should do? Go home and tell him his future? What would you say? Sweetheart, I hate to tell you this, but you’re going to turn into a monster?”

She could only shake her head. He reached out to her again, laying a firm hand on her shoulder. “Go home, Sharon. Let me—let us get a handle on this. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Go home.”

The thought terrified her. “How can I go home? How can I see him knowing what I know?”

“You said it yourself: he’s your son.”

Her son. The son she couldn’t face. The son she no longer knew how to relate to. In the end, she called her sister and asked if she would mind keeping Alec overnight. A migraine, she said. She was desperate to see him—to hold him—but she couldn’t. Not yet.

She went home—thought about going for a swim. She always worked things out swimming—the soft, cool touch of water gliding over skin, the rhythm of arms, legs, and breath. But on her way out the door to the gym, she got sucked into Alec’s room and spent an hour sitting on his bed, holding a stuffed Tigger in her arms, staring at shelves covered with models of space shuttles, starships, the space station, the first commercial Delta Clipper. A child’s room; a simple boyhood jumble.

He had never shown the slightest sign of cruelty toward animals or people. He was kind, gentle, thoughtful of others. How did someone like Alec grow up to believe a committee of experts should determine the end of a person’s life?

Don’t grow up to be a monster. If it were only that simple, she would tell him that. But if she did and it was discovered, her career would be forfeit. Worth it, she told herself fiercely. Yes, but there would be no way to know if the words would alter anything short of future-tripping, and QuestLabs would never allow a follow-up visit.

What if he didn’t grow up?

The thought came stealthily, leaving a slimy trail of disgust. She recoiled from it, a torrent of icy horror pouring through her. Dear God, what kind of mother could conjure such an idea?

She experienced, for only the second time in her life, a complete cessation of thought and feeling. The first time was when she knew, without hope, that Robert was not coming back.

When her brain began to process thoughts again, it occurred to her to wonder if she would be sitting here now, having these thoughts if Robert were alive. Her heart came back online then, and she wept until she had no tears left. Then she slept, draped across Alec’s bed.

She did not sleep well. Her mind refused to shut down, now, when she so desperately wanted it to. Trevor’s call woke her, derailing the runaway train. He asked if he should come over; she told him “no.” He repeated the things he had told her earlier in his office. She listened and tried to believe.

oOo

She was not surprised to be summoned to Magda Oslovski’s office the next morning. She was exhausted, a prisoner of guilt, dread and confusion. Some of the dread evaporated when she saw that Dr. Oslovski was not alone. Her husband, staff psychologist Vance Keller, was there as well. Both wore expressions of compassion. Tears swam in Sharon’s eyes.

Magda rose and rounded her desk to enfold Sharon in a motherly embrace. She seated the younger woman almost gently at a table by her office window and took a seat opposite her, their knees nearly touching. She reached across and took Sharon’s hands.

“Trev gave us a full account of the situation,” she said. “I’m sorry, Sharon. I realize this must be hellish for you. There’s no way to prepare for something like this. The important thing now is that you not let this affect your relationship with your son.”

“How?” It was the mew of a lost kitten. “How can I not let it affect our relationship? I failed him, Magda. I will fail him.”

“No.” Vance Keller came to stand by his wife’s chair. His eyes were kind, his expression firm. “A human life is far too complex, both in nature and nurture, to assign cause to one factor—even one as critical as a mother.”

“Or the loss of a father?” Sharon asked. She couldn’t look at Vance. A surge of mixed guilt and resentment made her gaze too heavy to lift. “He knows how his father died. He knows I’m continuing in the same work. Maybe, deep down inside, he thinks that means I don’t care.”

“There’s no way to know what factors could contribute to...Alec’s future actions,” said Vance.

Sharon tried to smile. “I don’t suppose you could just send Alec and me back a few years. I’m sure I could talk Rob out of that last future-trip.”

Magda squeezed her hand. “Sharon, there’s no way to know what to adjust or edit in the past to change the present and future. That’s why we don’t do it. You can only edit the present.”

“What you need to understand,” Vance added, “is that there is only one thing you can do for Alec that we know will have positive effects—love him. And raise him the best way you can.”

They spoke some more, let her cry, comforted her, then let her go home to get Alec—to spend the rest of the day with him. She drove slowly to her sister’s house, trying to fathom what she had done—or would do—that her son would grown up so lacking in compassion and empathy.

As hard as it was for her to face, she could not deny that she saw the seed of that deficit already, saw it in his avoidance of his grandmother, his inability to comprehend her loneliness and alienation from the life she had known. He had never even been to see her in the place she was kept, safe from her own faltering faculties. He saw her only when she came out, and then, he was usually shy and aloof.

Vance had told her to do her best. So far she had failed to do that, afraid of stressing Alec too much in the wake of Robert’s loss. That would change.

She pulled into her sister’s car park and sat for several minutes gathering herself, afraid she’d be unable to respond to Alec. She needn’t have worried. At the sight of him, smiling at her from beneath a milk mustache, the strain of uncertainty fled. She hugged him extravagantly—a thing he seemed to relish—and drank him in, her son, the light of her life.

“Is your head okay, Mom?” he asked her when she finally released him. His concern seemed sincere.

She could only nod.

They had lunch at his favorite restaurant, a place crowded with baseball memorabilia, and which served dishes named for major league greats. She bought him a Russ Ortiz Mocha Freeze; they talked about the Giant’s season; they named their favorite players and tried to match them with their numbers.

They were walking back out to the car when she said, “Let’s go visit Gramma.”

He just looked at her.

“Okay?” she prodded.

“Can you take me home first? I got homework.”

“On a Friday?”

“I got behind this week—it’s make up.”

“You got behind.”

“My game last night went long.”

Oh, God, she’d forgotten he had a Little League game. “Oh,” she said weakly. “How’d you do?”

He shrugged as if it were of no importance. “We won... I pitched,” he added, damning her further.

She nearly groaned. “You can do your homework when we get home. I thought I’d invite Trev over for dinner. Would you like that?”

His face lit up. “Sure!”

“Good. Then we’ll go see Gramma, then go home so you can do your homework and I’ll call Trev-“

“Mom, please.”

“She’s lonely, Alec. She loves it when we visit her.”

“She doesn’t even know who I am. She asked if I was her neighbor’s grandson last time.”

“She’s sick, Alec. She can’t help what’s happened to her. She needs us.”

He subsided, but she recognized the mutinous set of his jaw.

It was one of Helen Glen’s better days. She remembered who Alec was. She even remembered that Robert was gone. She didn’t ask where he was. She asked about baseball and Alec thawed. He talked about baseball, school, his beloved lizard, Skinky. He thawed, warmed to her, smiled, laughed and promised to come again, soon.

Sharon felt a glow of warmth and accomplishment rise up to envelope her. For the first time since she had moved her mother-in-law here, she was not affected by the atmosphere of the place, which had always seemed to her almost a silent, ambient moan of loss and pain. It was hard to be here, but Alec had done it.

He had grown quiet again by the time they reached the car, and gazed around at his surroundings, seeming to notice the sun on the grass, the leaves glittering in the trees, the birds singing, the quiet walkways along which strolled or glided inmates with their visiting loved ones.

He was silent as they negotiated the wooded streets and headed home.

“Gramma had a really good day today, didn’t she?” Sharon asked rhetorically. “You could see she really loved visiting with us.”

“But we can’t be there every day. We can only go there sometimes, and in between, she doesn’t have anybody.”

Encouraging. He was empathizing. Feeling for his grandmother. “Well, she has friends there, honey, and her nurses and doctors.”

“That’s not the same thing. They get paid to be there. And sometimes I’ll bet her friends don’t even remember her—don’t even know she’s there.”

Sharon smiled. “Then I suppose we’ll just have to visit more often, huh?”

“Yeah.”

While she congratulated herself, he turned his face up to her, his eyes troubled.

“But it’s not fair, mom. Gramma shouldn’t have to live like that.” He blinked as if tears were threatening to come and turned his head away so she wouldn’t see them. Sunlight spattered his face, making him squint. “No one should ever have to live like that.”

END

© Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, 2006-2009

Browse Maya’s Bookshelf.