Chapter 25

The passion involved in the make-up sex took the tension out of the air. Mindy had a string of orgasms as he rocked on top of her. It wasn’t until he sagged, covering her, that they noticed Christine, standing beside the bed, staring at them.

“Mommy?” she said. “What you doing, Mommy?”

“I’m just saying hi to your daddy,” said Mindy.

Christine knew the word “Daddy,” but she wasn’t sure just what it meant. She knew that this person had been at the house before, and had read her stories. She knew Mamma kissed him like she kissed her and “Patick.” She’d never seen him without his clothes on. What had drawn her initially was just looking for Mommy when she got bored with the puzzle. Then, when she found her, and Mommy was making different noises, she investigated. They were happy noises, kind of like when Mommy was tickling Patrick. So the mere fact that the man was lying on top of Mommy didn’t bother her. She just watched. It was interesting.

“You go pick up your toys and then you can say hi to Daddy, too,” said Mindy.

“He too big,” said Christine, pragmatically. “He squish me.”

“Not like this,” laughed Mindy. “He’ll just give you a hug.”

“Otay,” said Christine. She turned and toddled out of the room.

“This is going to be different,” said Bobby, pulling out of her.

“You have no idea,” said Mindy.

Bobby’s original idea had been to gather them all up, put them in the van, and take them back to his ... castle. He was disabused of that notion, though, and they began to make plans, together. He had two more days before he had to report for work, but Mindy felt it would take longer than that for them to make all the arrangements that needed to be made.

They did make a decision to get married in Glenrock, instead of Indian Springs. There were a few people at school who Mindy wanted to invite, and it didn’t matter to most of Bobby’s relatives where the ceremony took place. Mindy knew that Jane wanted to ‘help’ with the wedding, seeing it as a dry run for when Melissa hopefully met a man and got married. Mindy wanted to go see the house, and Bobby had already purchased and installed approved car seats for the kids, so the next day he drove them to Glenrock. While he unloaded his stuff from the van, Mindy and the kids wandered through the house. Mindy imagined decorating it and talked to Christine about living in a new room. Together, mother and daughter “made plans” about what color to paint the walls, and where things would go in the room. Mindy wasn’t sure Christine actually understood what it all meant, but it was fun.

When they went to get in the car to go back to Indian Springs, Mindy looked at him and asked, “Don’t you want to change into something less formal?”

“I have stuff in the back of the van,” he said. “I need to wear this to talk to Melissa.”

“Talk to Melissa?”

“My mother and I have gone to great lengths to keep her from finding out about us,” he said. “That’s going to have to change, now.”

“Oh,” said Mindy. “She’ll be a senior this year.”

“Yeah. And she’s going to have to live with the fallout of us going public. I thought the uniform might help her ... um ... accept it.”

“Don’t you dare intimidate her,” said Mindy.

“I couldn’t intimidate Melissa if I pulled her over in my patrol car,” said Bobby.

“This might be hard for her,” suggested Mindy.

“Maybe, but she’s going to find out, and I feel it’s my job to tell her.”

“When?”

“Before I come back to start work,” he said. “You and Mom will have your heads together, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then Melissa needs to know why.”

It was true that Melissa still didn’t know anything about the pairing of her brother and the high school music teacher. That was partly luck, but mostly because Melissa, as she traversed her own high school years, was too busy to worry about what her brother was doing. He was going to college, and he came home every once in a while, but that was all she paid attention to. In the summers, when he was there all the time, she was off with her friends the majority of the time. He always worked at the lumber yard and she didn’t care where he was in the evenings. She knew Mindy Middlesex was a frequent visitor to their house. In this case “frequent” simply meant “more than any other person ever visits.” But she also knew her mother and Miss Middlesex were friends. She had accepted that friendship in almost exactly the same way the members of the congregation at church had.

She wasn’t in music classes, but Melissa still knew the music teacher, probably better than any of her students. Mindy spent enough time at their house that an easy almost-friendly relationship had developed. Not that it was really a “relationship.” She actually knew Miss Middlesex’s children better than she knew the woman herself. That’s because Jane babysat for them a lot. Sometimes it was when Miss Middlesex “needed to go do something” or was “grading papers” or some other reason Jane gave her daughter for why she was babysitting. Melissa liked the kids and helped watch them, sometimes. She changed her very first diaper when her mother was busy with Christine, and Patrick was dirty. It convinced her to resist the efforts of Todd Pilgrim to get in her panties on dates. He’d been trying harder and harder to do just that, recently, but the last thing she needed was to have to do this all the time.

Melisa looked at her big brother curiously. She had to admit he looked good in his new uniform. It came home to her, suddenly, that this was all real. She’d known what Bobby was doing, away from home at college, and after he proudly announced he’d been accepted at the trooper academy, but she hadn’t really paid much attention to it. Her mind resisted imagining him as a real trooper. Now, though, as he stood there, tall and slim and somehow dangerous looking, she felt small again. She remembered the first time he’d been allowed to take the car out alone. She’d been so jealous. She’d felt so child-like.

“What?” she blurted. He was just staring at her. He’d said he needed to talk to her, privately. But he wasn’t talking. “What?” she said again. “Are you going to arrest me for something?” She’d only spoken because she was nervous. That was crazy. Why should she be nervous around her own brother? But she was, and it bothered her.

“Do you need to be arrested for something?” he asked.

When had his voice gotten so deep? She shivered.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t do anything!”

“That’s what they all say,” he said.

A stab of panic shot through her, and then he smiled.

“Then what do you want?” she asked. A note of whining entered her voice.

“I need to tell you something. It’s something really important, and I need you to try to understand, and not freak out.”

Melissa was seventeen. She had a good imagination, and she’d seen lots of movies. That imagination flashed through things like “cancer” and “He’s arrested my boyfriend,” and, “He found the bong hidden in my closet.” It wasn’t her bong. It belonged to Cindy Watson, who had stolen it from her brother Jerry. Cindy was convinced that Jerry would jump straight to heroin if he kept smoking pot. In the few seconds that followed his solemn pronouncement, she thought about a dozen things that might “freak her out,” but the one person she never thought of was Mindy Middlesex.

“I’m getting married,” he said.

She wanted to throw something at him. He’d gotten her all worked up and it was about this?

“You mean you finally met a blind woman, who’s been living in the wilderness all her life, and doesn’t know any better? Gee, congratulations.”

Melissa thought she was being cute, and at the same time admonishing him for being all theatrical. The problem was, he didn’t react in proportion to her barb.

“So you don’t care,” he said. “Okay. I guess that’s all I need to know. I guess that means you’re ready for the fallout when this happens, and don’t need any time to prepare.” He put his hat back on, tilting it slightly forward like all the highway patrol guys did. Melissa had always thought that looked goofy. Her mind shoved that side, though. What did he mean by “fallout”?

“What fallout?” she said.

He looked angry. She felt a little shiver go down here spine again. This wasn’t Bobby. When had he changed into a grown up man? The epiphany she’d had about this all being real surged back as she realized her brother was all grown up. Suddenly, she didn’t know how to talk to him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. That’s what you said to adults who were unhappy with you. It usually got things on the road to settling down. “You’re getting married and that’s important. I shouldn’t have joked about it.”

Bobby wasn’t quite as “grown up” as his sister perceived him to be. It was still possible for him to react emotionally, and her flippancy, married to the fact that they had such a long history, together, caused him to lose control. At least that’s how he thought of it as he said, “I’m marrying Mindy. And just so you know, we’ve been in love since I was a senior, and both Christine and Patrick are my children. That’s the fallout I thought you might want to be prepared for when it becomes public.”

He hadn’t intended for it to come out like that. He’d thought about it a lot, and had imagined himself talking about how you can’t choose who you fall in love with, and how sometimes it just happens, even when it shouldn’t. He was going to lead up to it slowly, rationalize it ahead of time, so that when she finally got the news, it wouldn’t be too much of a shock. And that was just the marriage part. He hadn’t planned on telling her he was the father of the kids - which made her their aunt - until she’d gotten used to the marriage part. It had come out of him like a weapon, though, designed to shock ... to hurt. And he felt awful about it as soon as he blurted it all out.

He didn’t know what to do. He wished he’d brought the wand. He could have told her to accept the news as if it wasn’t any big deal. He could have used the wand on her, like Mindy had used it on those school board people.

Irritation replaced guilt as he admonished himself for even thinking about using the wand on a family member. He turned to leave.

“Wait!” gasped Melissa, literally jumping to her feet, using the springs of the bed she’d been sitting on the edge of to assist her. Her hands clawed for his belt, which was thick, substantial, laden with all manner of mysterious things, like Batman’s utility belt.

Her hands came to rest between his handcuff case and the extra magazine pouch for his pistol. Distracted as he was, he reacted by training, rather than as a brother, responding to his sister’s actions. His left hand gripped hers, with his fingers on her palm and his thumb on the back of her hand. He lifted, turned and rotated his hand 180 degrees, bending her wrist so painfully that she dropped to her knees without conscious thought. Her, “Owwww!” burst out at the same time he realized what he’d done and he let go instantly.

“I’m sorry!” he gasped, as he knelt on one knee to help her up. “That was just instinct. You touched my gun belt!”

“Geez!” she complained. “Chill out, why don’t you?”

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I was just worked up because you didn’t care about...” He sighed. “Me and Mindy,” he finished, softly.

Melissa felt like she was the one who had been raised in a cave, and had just come out into the sunlight for the first time. She marveled at how she could endure such a fundamental change in such a short time, and as if she was watching a movie about it in her own mind. She’d come into this room as Bobby’s kid sister, assuming he’d treat her like a kid because that’s always how he’d treated her in the past. But now she realized he hadn’t intended to do that at all. She’d acted like a kid, but obviously he’d been trying to share something important with her. And it was important. Part of her had freaked out. What he was saying was impossible, of course. It was insane ... couldn’t happen in a million years. Except another part of her knew it was true. All of it was true. The world had changed in an instant. Or maybe she’d stepped through an invisible door into another dimension. It didn’t make sense, but it was true anyway. All this had flashed through her mind in the fifteen seconds since it had blasted out of his mouth like an explosion in the movies.

Melissa wanted to understand this, to evaluate it. She wanted to know how Bobby had found the door to this alternate dimension. When she realized he was leaving, she imagined being stuck here, in this room, unable to get out and make sense of any of it. That’s why she grabbed for his belt.