Chapter 15

There was a tightness to the atmosphere when I got back to the kitchen. I know that seems like a "Gee ... ya think?" kind of comment, but I want you to think about it like this. Imagine standing on the street, getting ready to cross, when with no notice, a car swerves around the corner and somebody starts shooting at you out of the window as it roars past. You don't get hit. Okay, now imagine the same scenario, but when that car roars around the corner, there is no shooter. Instead, the swerving car almost hits you, but then is gone into the night.

Both of those cause an upset in your life, obviously, but only one of them causes a monumental change in the way you look at the world. A simple, swerving car is something we understand, and can deal with. Accidents happen. But when somebody tries to kill you, the world changes in a way that changes you as well.

Nobody tried to kill Hannah, but the visual evidence, followed by her "investigation" of the events she had blithely walked into, was an event that changed the world, and Hannah herself, forever.

I'm going to risk one more analogy before I go on and describe the succeeding events.

Imagine you're taking a stroll in the night and a space ship lands in the park you're walking through. It's shocking on a number of levels. Maybe you didn't believe aliens existed. Maybe you're scared, because the only information you have to work with are all those old alien invasion movies. Maybe you're elated that you might get to be the first person on Earth to try to communicate with them.

How this analogy applies to Hannah is that first one. Her system of beliefs was required to change more or less instantly. What she had not believed could "be" was revealed to her in shocking detail as being very real indeed.

Hannah, within the space of an hour or two, was exposed to a new world in which her brother could love ... and make love to ... more than one woman. In fact, more than two women. And it was just as obvious that all three women loved him back. True, it wasn't the traditional kind of love that is in all the books and movies, and which we insist on teaching to our children. Our lives are full of those "truths" that are passed down in oral tradition, and which have even become codified in law. "Killing people is bad" is a good example. We make that a black and white decision when we talk about it with our children. But the fact is there are people in the world who need to be killed, because they are dangerous to everyone else. Oh, you can lock them in a cage, but all that's doing is killing them slowly.

The point is that Hannah discovered something that was so new, and so different than how she'd thought the world "was" that, like that person standing in the park looking at the glowing bulk of an honest-to-Pete space ship, her beliefs changed. Before this, I was just her brother.

Now I was a man who could somehow love multiple women, and make that work.

I know that's oversimplifying things, but I promised to get on, and you needed to understand this before I did.

And yes, I know that after I promised to only use one more analogy, I used two. Sorry. Sue me. You really need to understand why Hannah made some of the decisions she did.

And that's because none of us realized what was going on inside her while all this was going on.

For us, I was the brother who had betrayed her trust, and violated her daughter. For Kat, she was the girl who had dreamed of being with me like she recently had been, and was terrified that her dream-come-true was going to be ripped away from her. And for Hannah, she knew she was supposed to be furious, but was experiencing emotions, and having ideas that were way outside her comfort zone.

Basically, Hannah was thinking that, if I could handle three women ... might I be able to handle four?

Her daughter had described how all of this was the result of a long held dream coming true.

Suddenly, Hannah's fantasies about me were back, and now there was evidence that her dream could potentially come true too.

As I said, when I came in, the atmosphere was tense. Each of us, as I have described, had our own thoughts.

It was silent when I came in, and stayed that way.

I sat down. I looked at Kat, who glanced my way and then looked away.

I looked at Hannah, who seemed to be somewhere else in her mind.

Decisions had to be made.

"So what now?" I asked.

Both women stirred, moving around to no real purpose.

"Mom?" Caitlin's voice was high. "Why did you come here?"

"A woman can't visit her brother?"

"You know what I mean." There was a spark of confidence in Caitlin that had been missing for quite some time. "Did you think something was going on?"

"You mean sex?" Hannah barked another laugh. "Good grief, no. That was the farthest thing from my mind. I just came to ride with you on the way back home ... to have an adventure. You always talk about how much fun these trips are. I just wanted to see what it was like."

"Really? That's awesome!" Caitlin's voice was full of enthusiasm.

"I'm surprised you feel that way," said Hannah, dryly.

"Oh, come on," snorted Caitlin. "How many mothers want to do what their daughters love doing?"

Again, while we did not know it, Hannah received this in a slightly different manner than Caitlin offered it.

"Well, that's why I came," she said, her voice sounding odd. Imagine somebody saying, "That was a wonderful meal," in a voice that sounds like it should be used for, "I think my water just broke and it's time to go to the hospital." Her voice just didn't match what it uttered.

"Can we still do that?" asked Caitlin.

I didn't know what to think about that. I assumed Kat was simply trying to talk about anything other than what we'd been talking about. And I assumed that Hannah's intentions had changed.

"I don't see why not," said Hannah, in that same strange voice.

Now my imagination tried to supply a vision of what that might be like.

At one point, while I was on top of Kat, pressed deep and rotating my loins to get her off, I thought about our upcoming trip to return her to California. In the past, we'd visited primarily tourist traps, and had stayed in motels. I'd always gotten two rooms. As Caitlin squirmed and moaned under me, filled with my incestuous penis, I imagined camping out with her this year. When you camp out in a tent, you tend to go to bed early because it's dark and there's nothing to do.

I imagined something to do in the darkness inside the tent.

And I imagined us seeing more of each other's naked bodies, than of knick knack stands, six-legged cows and giant balls of twine.

Of course Hannah didn't fit into that vision of the trip, and I got back to thinking about renting two rooms and seeing more tourist traps.

I was pretty sure that, considering what everybody would be thinking about, it just wouldn't be the same carefree kind of trip it had been in the past.

"Do you really think that's a good idea?" I asked. "I can put you two on a plane and you'll be home in time to watch NCIS."

I smiled, showing them both how helpful I was trying to be.

"I just got off a plane," said Hannah. "I don't want to get right back on one."

"I think it would be great to take a trip together," gushed Caitlin. I was pretty sure she hadn't thought this out at all.

"Don't you think things would be ... uncomfortable?" I asked.

"Things are already uncomfortable," said Hannah. "All this is not going to go away. We're going to have to talk about it, and make decisions and all that. What better way to do that than on a long trip where all you have to do is talk?"

"What if we argue?" asked Kat, finally starting to envision what I was envisioning.

"I don't think we'll be arguing," said Hannah, and that strange note was back in her voice.

"I don't want to stop loving Uncle Bob, Mother," said Caitlin, with surprising courage.

"I'm aware of that," said Hannah. "I'm sure that's one of the things we'll end up talking about."

She stood, abruptly. For some reason my eyes went to her breasts, which bobbed up and down under the silk blouse she was wearing. I moved my eyes upwards, intentionally, feeling a little guilty for having accidentally ogled her, only to find her watching my face.

"Sorry," I said, knowing I was busted. Talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

"You certainly are," she said. "You're a piece of work, Bob. I had no idea you were half satyr."

"I'm not," I tried to argue.

"Oh yes you are," she said firmly. "There's plenty of evidence to support that position."

"Okay. I guess I deserve that," I admitted, reflecting on how she'd caught me sleeping with the musketeers, and then, within three hours had stared at her breasts. "What do you want me to do?"

"I haven't decided yet," she said, but she didn't sound too sure of that. "When do we leave?"

"Really?" asked Caitlin. "We're really going to drive home ... all three of us?" She had obviously been thinking about that, and didn't sound nearly as happy as she had when it had first been suggested.

"That's what I came for," said Hannah. "Does he let you drive?"

"Yes!" said Caitlin, distracted. "He says I'm a good driver."

"Haven't I said that too?" asked her mother.

"Yes, but you didn't really mean it," said Caitlin.

Apparently she was right, because Hannah didn't defend herself. "I think we need to get on the road soon," she said, instead.

An hour and a half later we had turned in Hannah's rental and were headed west.

I could go into nauseating detail about the conversation during that first leg of the trip, but I won't. Instead I'll just hit the high spots.

Such as Hannah's opinion that the reason Caitlin had fallen in love with me (her words!) was that she hadn't had an adult, male role model in her life. Chad's death had left a hole in the family that had never been refilled. So there had never been a man for a little girl to fall in love with, like most little girls do at one time or another, and then fall out of love with, at least in sexual terms.

Caitlin thought that was silly, and opined that, if that was what had happened, it would have happened that first summer, when she was around me for an extended period of time. She claimed she'd always known I was the coolest uncle a girl could have, but she hadn't started having "those" kinds of feelings for me until she was twelve or thirteen.

"I still don't want to marry him," she said at one point. "I love him, and I always want him to be in my life in a romantic way, but I know I can't marry him."

"That's not how the world works, dear," said her mother, who was sitting shotgun and turned sideways in her seat so she could see both the driver (me) and her daughter, in the back seat.

"I don't see why not," said Kat.

"And what happens when you do get married? You think your husband will think it's a ducky idea for you to run over to Uncle Bob's every so often and get your ashes hauled?"

"Who says I'm going to get married at all?" said Kat.

"If you think I'm going to my grave without grandchildren, you're not nearly as smart as your teachers think you are," said Hannah.

"Women have children all the time without being married," snorted Kat.

"Women other than my daughter," muttered Hannah, loud enough to be heard.

"It's way too soon to think about grandchildren anyway, Mother," said Caitlin, seriously. "That's years and years away."

"Not if you keep having unprotected sex," said Hannah.

That's a pretty good example of what went on for the first few hours. Then I guess they got tired of wrangling, because the conversation turned to where we were going, and what we were going to do.

It was roughly eight hours to Albuquerque, which has a lovely old town, and a pretty amazing aquarium, especially considering it's so far from the ocean. I'd been there as a kid, and thought the girls might enjoy it too. I remembered a little shop that sold kaleidoscopes I had been fascinated with. They were much too expensive back then, but it was a different world now. I had money, and I wanted a good one. And I was pretty sure the ladies would enjoy shopping in that area too.