Chapter 5

"Oh my God! Patrick... ?" she whispered, her voice stricken with sorrow.

I looked at her calmly. I just wasn't feeling very forgiving right at the moment. What she said in the next few minutes was going to go a long ways in determining what would happen in the next two days. I knew I would probably forgive her; hell, in many ways I already had. But I was tired of playing games with her as I had for twenty-some years. If I only had two days left with her, it would be two days in a real husband and wife relationship, as a loving mother to our girls, not two days of bullshit. Otherwise, it wasn't going to happen. I could already remember her as she had been; I wanted something new, better, or I would keep what I had.

"Patrick... ?" she pleaded again. I looked at my watch. I knew I was being cold, but for some reason I felt she needed to know what it was like to be treated with indifference. Not that I believed that's what she had intended all those years, but that's how it appeared to me. In a way I knew I was being a shit, but I felt it was necessary.

"Time's wasting, honey. Say what you have to say, or we'll be here all night. You only have two days, dear." I tried to sound nice about it, but even to me I seemed cold.

Elizabeth looked at me with a sad, desperate look on her face, a haunted look in her eyes.

"Oh God, what have I done?" she whispered, more to herself than anyone else. She turned her back to me and her shoulders shook as she stifled a couple sobs. I saw Cindi reach over and squeeze her hand. Both Amy and Cindi looked at me quickly. There was no anger or condemnation in their eyes; I think they knew this was coming someday. They just had a pleading look in their eyes, begging me to do something.

I saw Elizabeth square her shoulders and face me again. Her eyes were wet, but she was not crying; she had a resigned look in them. I felt a twinge of sadness as I noticed they looked dead. She was already a dead woman; I could see she was preparing to leave in sorrow.

"If... if it means anything to you, if it helps, I haven't been with Jeff for over five years. We were only together... that way... three times. It was my fault, not his. Please don't think less of him for it. I don't know of any male that could resist a pretty, sexy, crying, hysterical woman. I don't know what happened, or how. We just ended up together one night.

"I had just returned from one of the many war scenes I covered. I don't even remember which one; there have been so many. I was devastated. I had covered an especially nasty scene, dead families everywhere. There was one that reminded me of you and the girls. I was as shaken as I've ever been. Jeff saw how shook up I was and gave me a hug to comfort me. I don't know what happened. The next thing I knew, we were in bed together.

"I'm sorry, Patrick, I really am! I was just so lonely and desperate, I missed you guys so much, and I just needed someone to cuddle with. It wasn't supposed to get out of hand. I know you probably won't believe this, but everything was all right until I thought of you. Then I just lost control, and he never had a chance to stop it. It wasn't intentional or planned. We both felt guilty afterwards and swore it would never happen again.

"It did, though. Two more times. I wish I could say those were accidents too, but that excuse only works with the first one, if then. After that, you should know better and stay away from each other. But we really were good, close friends. I just never expected anything to happen.

"Jeff did the right thing, the difficult thing. He told Grace about it. I was surprised at how calmly she took it. I guess their marriage has always been unconventional. She wanted to meet me. I became close to her and the twins. They were like my family away from home. They really reminded me a lot of you guys. Grace even let me know in so many words that Jeff was available if I really needed someone, but both he and I knew we had taken as many chances as we were prepared to take. I always had a sinking feeling it would come back and haunt me, and here it is. Besides, I didn't love him; I love you.

"I don't know what to say, Patrick. I wish I could take it all back. I wish I had had the guts to tell you as he did Grace. I wish a lot of things. I wish I were not here right now. I should have just left well enough alone and gone back after the rescue. I was a fool to think I could be mom and wife for two days and it would work. I'm sorry."

"You said you missed us so much and you were so lonely. Why didn't you just come home, or at least call? If you were only with him three times, what did you do all those times when you didn't come home?" I asked.

"What did I do? I went to parties. I got drunk. Other times I would get depressed and then walk through the really bad parts of town and wait for the gangs to jump me. Then I beat the shit out of them. It felt good. I spent time with Robert. Mostly I lay in bed and cried. I prayed I would die. When I knew the end of the cycles was near, when I knew you had invoked that protocol, I went to Peter and begged him to let me be the one that died to even out the numbers. I knew all along I was going to die; I just didn't know when. I just wanted out so bad. I'm remembering why now.

"As for coming home, I couldn't. It just wasn't that simple."

"Why not, Mom?" Cindi asked, tears in her eyes. "You knew we loved you. You knew Dad would forgive you for what you did. Didn't you care about us enough?" she sobbed. Elizabeth looked stricken.

"Oh no, honey! I loved you guys! I... I just couldn't!"

"Why not, Elizabeth?" I asked gently. It was time to get to the crux of the matter. I felt I knew the answer, but the girls needed to understand, and Elizabeth needed to understand. She had made a huge mistake and she didn't even realize it yet.

"I couldn't! I knew I was going to die. I couldn't put you guys through that. You would be devastated when your Mom died if you had been close to me. I just couldn't do that to you," Elizabeth explained. I saw Amy and Cindi give me a puzzled look.

"So, let me see if I have this straight. You were afraid that, after 14 years of a wonderful, close family life, being a loving and special mother to your two little girls and a loving wife to your husband for 23 years, we would be devastated when you died. So instead, you stayed away, being a stranger, depriving your girls of that loving family life, making them miserable and feeling unloved for 14 years, depriving me of the love of my wife for 23 years, just so we wouldn't feel sad when you died? Twenty-three years of loneliness for you and me is somehow better than twenty-three years of happiness followed by a period of grief? A period of grief we were going to go through anyway when you died, because we never stopped loving you, because we couldn't just blow it off as you apparently could. Fourteen years of not having a mother was somehow better for your children? Tell me, Elizabeth, how did that work out for you? Are you feeling overjoyed and fulfilled yet? Are you happy yet? I know the girls and I have just been ecstatic about how you spared us all that pain.

"God damn it, Elizabeth, do you know what you've done? Do you have any idea what it was like to have to hold those girls every night, listening to them cry, missing their Mom, and having to make up an excuse as to why you were not there? An excuse that I knew damn well they were smart enough to see through? I had to lie to them because of you. Do you know how that made me feel, for 14 years? Do you even know me well enough to know how much I hate to lie to these girls, how much I hate to lie at all? Do you even remember that there are times when a young girl needs to talk to her mother? I had to explain their periods to them, for heaven's sake!

"Yeah, Megan and Victoria were there, but they weren't their mothers, damn it! You were. They wanted their Mom! They had to settle for their Dad, because he was the only parent they had. There are things they will never know, never experience because their Mom was not there to show them. I had to give up my career so that I could be there for our girls. That's OUR girls, Elizabeth!

"How could you just blow off those sweet girls like that? If you had a problem with me, I would have given you a divorce. I wouldn't have liked it, but I would have done it. But all those girls wanted was a mommy, and you gave them the impression that you just couldn't be bothered. They loved you, Elizabeth! They still do. Didn't that mean anything to you? Does it mean anything to you now? Does the fact that I love you, God knows why, mean anything to you?"

I saw the devastated look on Elizabeth's face, the look of horror in her eyes as it finally dawned on her that she had made a huge error.

"Oh God... I... I really fucked up, didn't I?" she whispered, almost to herself. "I thought... it would be better... Oh God, I'm sorry! That just doesn't make it better though, does it?" she sat down abruptly, put her head in her hands, and sobbed.

"I just wish you had told me, Elizabeth. I wish any one of you that knew what was going on had said something," I said quietly.

"Don't go there!" I heard a young girl say, her voice dripping with danger. We all looked at Julie, shocked. Her eyes had a fiery sparkle to them. The room had a pink cast to it.

"Don't you even go there! Don't you dare blame this on your daughters, or the rest of us!" Julie took a deep breath, trying to calm down.

"Damn it, we are the children. You two are supposed to be the adults. If you can't handle your own relationship, it's not up to us to take care of it for you. Nobody told us about this; we figured it out on our own. Maybe you could have too, if you had paid a little more attention to her and what she was doing! Why are you just now talking about this instead of years ago when anybody could tell she was having an affair?

"And you... what the hell is the matter with you? You had a man that the rest of us would gladly give up everything to be married to and you don't come home and are out fucking someone else? Did you think you'd find better? Did you? Find someone better?" Julie gasped, so upset she was having difficulty breathing

"It wasn't even Victoria or Megan's place to clean up your mess. You two got married knowing what you were doing. For better or for worse, remember? Did you mean it any more this morning than you did then? Or are you just as fucking clueless now as you were then?" Julie got up and ran out of the room, sobbing. Megan glared at both of us and ran after her. We all stared after her, dumbfounded.

"What is it that bothers you about this, Son?" Dad asked. "Is it that she had sex with another man? Hell, she and you both were wiling to do that at your bachelor party. What's the problem here?"

"She should have told me," I said.

"Yeah, she should have. How would you suggest she should have done that? Like you told Victoria, your wife in the last cycle, about your making love to Cindi? As I remember, Victoria found out when she caught you in bed with her. Or how you informed her about your late night liaisons with Katie? Seems to me you tried to keep that secret from everyone. Or maybe how you informed her about what happened on the camping trip with Amy? She had to discover that herself. Or how about the first time you played around with Megan in the last cycle? You tried to avoid telling her about that one, too.

"Those times happened with a different wife, different circumstances, but the same idea, Son. So tell me again what Elizabeth was supposed to have done differently that you haven't done yourself, since you're such a sterling example of telling when you stray. Just because one of you didn't do it right doesn't give the other the right to screw up also, but it ought to at least teach you not to be so damn smug and self-righteous about it." I saw Katie looking at the floor, red faced.

By the time Dad stopped for a breath, I'm sure my face was red also and I know my mouth was open. Was I really being that big a hypocrite?

"Don't take it so hard, Son; it's how we are. We men are always jealous, and the women sexy and horny as hell. People screw up, make mistakes; happens all the time, to all of us. Either you live with it, or you walk away. Elizabeth made a mistake, but look at it from her flawed reasoning. She couldn't tell you why she stayed away; why would you expect she would be able to tell you about her affair? They were connected. She knew how jealous you would be; she is one of the few of us that knows about who we are and what we're like. She's a very troubled woman, Son. That should be obvious from the fact that she chooses to die instead of living with her family. You have no idea, and probably never will know, just how severely Bandor affected her by what he did. She's mentally unstable and often makes bad decisions. Once she made the decision that she was going to distance herself from her family, it was inevitable that she would have sex with someone else sooner or later. Sex is too important to us, too tied in with surviving, to avoid forever. It's amazing that she only did it three times. That's probably only because she had no powers, and because she really did love you. I honestly don't know how Megan lasted as long as she did."

"So, what do we do now?" Elizabeth sobbed. "How do I fix this?"

"I just want it to go back to the way we were before she and Jeff happened. Can't you do that?" I asked my Dad.

"Sure I can, Son. You need to consider very carefully the consequences, however," he said seriously.

"Like what?"

"If I change things back that far, who knows what it changes. Cindi may never die in the last cycle, which allowed us to be successful there. Sandi would never have been made, so Sammi wouldn't be with us now. Or, Elizabeth would never have gotten so depressed that she offered to die at the end of the cycle. Two people would still have to die. Do you want to take the chance that one of them might be Amy? Or Cindi? Sweet Becky or Katie? Or that Julie and Sammi would just not come through? If that happens, Eric and Jessica are not born. Elizabeth is not there to eliminate all of Bandor's fighters in the last battle, because she is not mentally unstable enough to take a one-way suicide mission. All your girls become his sexual slaves, have their powers sucked out, and you all die. Even if that worked out, he might not die without the added power of Eric and Jessica. That's only the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of other things that could be different also.

"No offense, but is all that worth it just because you got your male pride and ego damaged, because Elizabeth had an affair and didn't tell you about it? Because your girls figured out something that you could have just as easily found out too, and didn't tell you about it? Just because a man you didn't know at the time, and has only recently become a friend, didn't take you aside and say, 'Hey, by the way, I fucked your dead wife? She was really good!'

"Would you really have done that if the roles were reversed, knowing she was already dead and it couldn't possibly make any difference? What's more important here? Did you really think life and marriage was going to be a bed of roses with no thorns? Hell, Son, you knew Elizabeth wasn't the most stable plant in the garden when you decided to marry her. I know you did because I warned you about it.

"Grow up, Son," he said, smiling to rob his words of offense. "Go out into the real world and see how many women have affairs. See how many of the children know about it and say nothing. In most of those cases, the wives don't even give a shit that they are hurting their husbands. Elizabeth at least had the good grace to be upset about it. She was overcome at a time when she was weak. Was it her own fault? Absolutely. Is it reasonable to expect that it hurt you deeply? Absolutely. Should she be condemned for it, and sent away in tears because of a mistake she made years ago? That's for you to decide.

"I will tell you this, however; if you send that woman away without forgiving her and properly saying goodbye to her, you will regret it for the rest of your life, and you will never, ever have the chance to make up for it. She will definitely be gone forever and you will never see her again. Are you prepared to take that chance? Do you hate her that much? Are you ready to make the same mistake she did? Deprive your daughters of their mother, or at least two days of happy memories of her, because of your faulty reasoning and high standards that you hold her to when you don't follow them yourself?

"The ball is in your court, Son; if you require some token from her to prove her repentance, then tell her what it is so she can decide if she can do it or not. Or, just send her away. But do something; she is my sister and one of my dearest friends, and I am tired of seeing her cry."

Dad watched me carefully after he finished speaking, waiting to see which direction I would jump.

"I have nothing to offer you to prove my sorrow, to show I love you. Words mean nothing because I have no credibility with you anymore. I will offer the only thing I have left." Elizabeth stopped speaking and took a deep breath. I could see her lower lip quivering as she tried to keep from crying.

"Please, Patrick, tell me I'm forgiven and I'll leave right now and never bother you again. It's all I have to offer. I wanted these two days with you and the girls more than anything I have ever wanted in my whole life. I'll give them up, just to show you how sorry I am and how much I regret what I did. I know you wouldn't want to make love to me anyway now, so it would remove the need for you to pretend. Let me kiss my girls and I will go, if you'll just tell me I am forgiven! Please?"

"How would you go?" I asked quietly. I saw the last vestige of hope die in her eyes as I asked that question.

"Ama... the young girl knew this might happen. She told me how to contact her. She will take me away," Elizabeth sobbed quietly.

"Ironic, isn't it? I have wanted to die for years. Now I regret more than anything that I'm going to die now, all because I'm an idiot and a fool. Bandor was right; I really am as stupid as he said I was. God, what a fucked up life I've led!"

I saw the hopeless, dead look in Elizabeth's eyes. I saw the sorrow, the regret, the resigned look that everything she held dear in her life was gone. I saw the almost panicked look in Amy and Cindi's eyes as they stared at me, waiting to see what I would do. It was enough.

"Please, Daddy? Please?" Cindi begged.

"She apologized. She's sorry. Make up to her, please?" Amy whispered in my ear.

I was shocked that she would offer what she did. I knew how important these two days were to her. I could never, would never ask her to give that up.

All I ever wanted was to talk to her about all of this. All I ever wanted to hear was that she was sorry. I just wanted her to admit what she did. I wanted her to realize what she had done to me and to our girls. She had admitted her error and offered in recompense the thing she valued most in the world. It told me she was serious. It was enough.

"Please, just tell me you forgive me and then let me go!" she pleaded.

I sat back on the couch, closed my eyes, and leaned my head against the back.

"I can't do that, Elizabeth," I said quietly. I heard several gasps in the room. Both Amy and Cindi squeezed my hand tight.

"Ok, I understand. I don't deserve forgiveness for what I did," she whispered in a dead voice. "Please take care of my girls," she whispered.

"I can't do that, Elizabeth; I can't let you go because we haven't finished our two days together yet," I continued as if I hadn't heard her.

There was total silence in the room. After about three seconds, when it sunk in, I felt both Cindi and Amy rub their thumbs across my fingers softly. It was their way of saying 'thank you!'. They knew I really liked that.

When I looked up, Elizabeth was staring at me, an unbelieving, hopeful look on her face. I saw Julie and Megan walk back into the room just then.

I held my arms out to Elizabeth; she slowly walked over as if she was in a daze. I pulled her down on my lap, wrapped my arms around her, and kissed her. I heard her gasp and then she just melted into my arms, kissing me back frantically. We kissed for a long time. I heard the girls clearing their throats.

"The house is burning down!" Sammi hollered playfully. We ignored her.

"Julie's having her baby!" Megan hollered. We ignored her too. She wasn't pregnant again... I hoped. There was the night Megan broke up with me, though...

"Get a room!" Katie giggled. I threw a pillow at her.

"My turn!" Becky pleaded. We broke apart at that one.

"Patrick, I..." Elizabeth started.

"I know. We'll talk some more later. We still have some things to straighten out before you go. Do I have to start kissing you again to shut you up?" I asked. She nodded her head vigorously, so I did. I heard Katie make gagging noises in the background. Then I felt a hand on my arm.

I looked up and saw Julie standing there, looking forlorn.

"Me too?" she whispered sadly. She looked so lonely. Elizabeth noticed and nodded to me, slipping off my lap. I grabbed Julie, pulled her down on my lap, and proceeded to kiss her thoroughly. She kissed me back almost desperately. I reminded myself that I needed to spend more time with her.

Julie sat in my lap, her arms around me, eyes closed, just enjoying the closeness. I could feel her trembling. I knew why she was so needy all of a sudden. It had taken a lot of guts for Julie to say what she had said. In her mind she had betrayed me. I would have to talk to her later, let her know she did nothing wrong.

It sure felt good, holding her. She was special. Megan looked at me, her expression torn between happiness and thankfulness that I was taking care of her baby, and sadness and regret that it wasn't her. I needed to talk to Megan soon, and see if we could get this all straightened out.

I was wiped out. It was time for bed. I saw Elizabeth talking to Megan in the corner. I looked down and saw that Julie was asleep on my lap. Poor thing; she'd had a hard day, watching her family fight with each other.

I tickled her lightly to wake her up. She whimpered, swatted at my hand and snuggled closer, holding me tighter. I finally gave up and carried her into her bedroom, laying her on the bed. She kissed me as I lay her down.

"I love you, Patrick," she whispered and fell back to sleep.

I hate it when all the girls disappear. It means something is going on. I walked back out into the living room and everyone was gone, except Elizabeth. Maybe they just went to bed.

Elizabeth walked over to me and held me, her head on my shoulder. It felt nice.

"Megan needs to talk to you," she whispered into my ear. I groaned.

"Tonight? Now? I'm tired. You should know; it's all your fault!" I smiled to show her I was kidding. She bit my ear.

"Please. You really need to talk to her tonight. She might not have the guts tomorrow."

"God, I'm tired. Tonight?"

"You still love her, don't you?" Elizabeth asked, looking worried. "She hasn't destroyed that with all her stupidity, has she?" She looked embarrassed. "Geez, talk about the pot calling the kettle black!"

"Yes, of course I still love her," I said.

"Then talk to her tonight. You can sleep anytime. You're not going anywhere tomorrow," Elizabeth implored me. "I'll send her in."

I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes, trying to keep from going to sleep. I really would have preferred to handle this another time, but Elizabeth seemed to think it was important. If it resulted in moving towards a resolution of the problem with Megan, then it would be worth it to lose a little sleep.

I heard a faint noise, and then I felt someone sit next to me. I reached out my hand and took the hand of whoever was sitting there. If I lived to be a hundred, this time, I don't think I would ever forget how that hand felt. I recognized it right away.