Chapter Sixteen
For the next several weeks, Suella often caught Natalie staring at her during various times. Most often, they would all be sitting at dinner together, with Nathan enjoying whatever pasta dish or poultry casserole Suella had put together and Natalie would eat slowly. She would gaze at her mother for long periods of time. Suella knew that it wouldn’t work to ask “What are you staring at?” Natalie must have been imagining what she’d look like in another thirty-eight years.
Instead, she would try to divert Natalie into another train of thought. “So what did you do in school today?”
Natalie would shrug, her twin blond ponytails bouncing against her shoulders. “Nothing.”
Suella forced a laugh. “You were there seven hours. How could you have done nothing?”
Natalie shrugged again, twirling pasta strands onto her fork. “We just do.”
That night after she’d cleaned up and put away all the dishes, Suella sat down to relax and review screens. She also reflected that it had been weeks since Natalie had found out The Truth and the sky hadn’t fallen. Still, she couldn’t relax. Natalie came out of her room and walked into the den. She wore a slightly pained expression on her face. “Mom, can I ask you something?”
Suella turned to give her daughter her full attention.
“Do you have any old pictures? Like from when you were my age?”
The question caused Suella to wince. “Why no, honey, I don’t. Why do you ask? Are you doing a project for school?”
“No. I just want to see.”
Suella swallowed. “I don’t have any pictures, sweetheart. I’m sorry. Do you want to know what I looked like when I was your age? I looked just like you do now.”
“You have no pictures on the computer?”
“No. I don’t. Back when I was your age they really hadn’t invented computers yet. At least not to where you could take pictures with them.”
Natalie pressed on. She stood straight in front of Suella, solidly as a miniature prosecuting attorney. “Do you have scrapbooks?”
“Scrapbooks,” Natalie repeated, narrowing her eyes at her mother, looking at her incredulously. “Monica’s mother has lots of scrapbooks with old pictures in them, from the 1990’s and even pictures of her grandmother when she was little. Don’t you have any scrapbooks?”
“Well no, honey, I don’t. I used to have things like that, but they must have been misplaced. Your father and I moved a lot when we were younger.”
Natalie sighed and looked down for a moment. She looked back up again. “What about grandma? She would have pictures, wouldn’t she?”
“I suppose so.”
“Could you call her? Maybe she could send us some.”
Suella reached forward to pat Natalie on the top of her head, and draw her in for a quick hug. “I’ll ask her sweetie.” When she released Natalie, she hoped that she would soon forget about getting a picture of her as a grade schooler.
The young age at which Natalie received her first period and the way she’d found out about her origin led Suella to endless explaining, after Natalie’s endless questions.
One day she asked the one Suella feared the most. “So, you carried me, right?” There was no need to lie and make things worse. If Natalie looked in all the right places, she’d find the answers herself anyway.
Suella took a deep breath. “No, honey, I didn’t.” Right there she could have volunteered all of the information but she chose to let her daughter draw it out of her instead.
“Well, who did, then?”
“Aunt Toni.” Suella winced, waiting for Natalie to either scream or shout with indignation. Instead, her daughter paused thoughtfully, her mouth forming a small “o.”
“How come we never see her then?”
To Suella’s relief, Natalie seemed bewildered by the reveal more than anything else. “Because, honey, she’s a busy woman. She’s in movies and netshows more today than she has ever been.”
“Can we at least have her over for Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Sure honey.” Suella let out a deep breath, glad to move on to another subject and another activity.
That fall, Natalie played lots of soccer. She could run fast and control the ball with her feet as if it had been glued there. Her coach had her play the entire game most times. On a cool afternoon around Halloween, Nathan finally came along to one of the games. As they put on their jackets for the drive over, they checked themselves in the vanity mirror in their bedroom. “Should I wear dark glasses and a hat?”
Suella looked back at him through the reflection. “Why? It’s cloudy outside.”
“Well, someone might recognize me.”
“So?”
Nathan laughed. “Well it’s my daughter’s game. It should be about her, not about me.”
“Nobody’s gonna care. Trust me.”
They arrived at the game and searched the bleachers for a good seat. Suddenly someone yelled out “Well looky what we have here! It’s Methuselah!”
Suella whirled around and saw a barrel-chested man wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a windbreaker over the top of it. For a moment, Nathan glanced at Suella and rolled his eyes around, as if to say “See, I told you so!” He then turned his attention to the big man, who had caused everyone in his bleacher section to turn and look toward Nathan.
“Hi everybody,” he said, nonchalantly. “That’s my daughter out there, on center.”
“That was some play you did! Throwing out two baserunners!” the Hawaiian barrel man said. A few other people voiced their approval along with him.
“Thank you,” Nathan responded, bowing gracefully. As he tugged Suella’s shoulder and started to sit down, he added “But don’t you remember the next inning? We lost!”
The barrel man waved a hand dismissively. “You’re still a winner in my book, my friend.”
A woman standing beside her had been looking toward Suella. “And this is your wife? She’s very pretty!”
“Yes, that’s what they tell me,” Nathan replied. Suella gave him a playful poke in his ribs. Together they settled in to watch their daughter’s team play soccer.
As always, Suella winced when she watched Natalie run up and down the field, bumping into other girls, running at them full speed. She wondered, all over again where the great love of sports came from. She’d swum on the parks and recreation pool team during the summer and during the winter went roller-skating, but that was it.
After about a half hour of watching the game, a boy and his mother approached Suella and Nathan. The boy held a magazine in his hands, while his mother did the talking. “Excuse me Mr. Worthy,” she said. “Would you be so kind as to sign my son’s program? It’s from that playoff game you should have won.” Her son held out a pen for him.
“Well that’s very nice!” Nathan exclaimed as he poised his pen to one of the scorecard pages.
The woman, who was a pleasantly plump matron in her early 40’s turned to
Suella. “Were you there, ma’am?”
Suella smiled at her thoughtfulness. “I sure was! I still haven’t warmed up from it. Do you know how cold it was that day?”
Everyone sitting around them laughed.
Nathan directed his attention to the boy and said “What’s your name, young man?”
“Travis!” he said, gazing at Nathan out of wide-opened eyes.
Suella watched him sign the page, with a caption “To my buddy, Travis!” with his trademark “NW” with a couple of scribbles underneath. After the boy and his mother receded away from him and moved further down the bleachers, Nathan turned to Suella and whispered. “Hopefully that’ll be the end of it.”
As if following his command, the people sitting around him turned their attention to the game, which to Suella seemed more fast and furious than usual. Suella marveled over how the girls seemed to
get bigger and bigger each time she came to see them play. She focused on her little girl, Natalie, running around in the thick of the action, chasing after the ball, kicking it, bouncing it against her knees or head, helping her teammates. After a few moments of this, the other players and the referees faded into the background and Natalie took on a warm glow of amber on the golden autumn day.
The action took the girls on the two teams close to the bleachers for a moment. Suella gazed into her daughter’s blue eyes, which were concentrating on the ground, the bouncing ball and the tangles of legs and feet. Suddenly, however, she felt a wave of nausea overtake her and her vision clouded over. Instinctively she reached her arms out to steady herself. One on side, her fingers brushed against Nathan’s jacket, and on the other side her fingers felt bristly wool. For a scary moment she couldn’t see. The next thing she knew, she was running, wearing shorts, watching a black and white soccer ball. Feeling the wind in her hair. She could see sharp details of the grass, the other players, and the referee who bounded up alongside her. When she realized what had happened, she jumped up and let out a loud yelp.
The wave of nausea swept over her again, though, causing her knees to feel like jello as she tumbled downward. For a split second she could not see and started to panic, but then two strong arms caught her around the ribs and held her. Her breath came out in short, raspy wisps. When she could see again she found herself back in the bleachers, being helped back down by her husband. She turned to look at him, seeing concern in his face and his eyes. “Are you all right?” he shouted. “You’re all white, like a ghost!”
She reached up, to brush strands of hair away from her forehead and found hot sweat there. “You won’t believe what just happened,” she said.
“Try me,” he replied. He sat her down on the bench and angled himself toward her, taking both of her hands in his. The people around them kept their attention on the game, every now and then jumping and shouting.
Suella told Nathan what had happened when Natalie rumbled past them just a few minutes before. She tried to keep her voice down so that no one sitting near them would be tempted to eavesdrop. While she spoke, she monitored Nathan’s expressions. Whenever he heard something that seemed outrageous to him, he would always cock an eyebrow upward. Yet, as Suella told him of her nausea and of becoming one with her daughter for a few seconds, he kept his gaze locked on hers.
When she had told him everything she could, he leaned back and opened his eyes wide for a moment, slapping his hands on his knees. “That’s quite incredible,” he said. “Has it ever happened before?”
“No.”
Nathan shrugged. “Well, it kind of makes sense to me. She was made from you, after all.”
When he put it that way, it all sounded so simple, so pat. The game ended not long after that. Nathan drove the Tesla when they left the soccer field for the ride home. Natalie always wanted to sit in the front seat so that she could splay her legs out in front of her, with her cleats resting against the firewall. Suella was quiet for most of the drive, gazing at Natalie, trying to recreate the experience she’d had out on the soccer field. As hard as she concentrated, though, her whole consciousness stayed in the back seat.
Later, when they arrived home, Suella quickly settled into the kitchen, to make them something to eat. Natalie always worked up a big appetite during her soccer games. While Suella chopped up vegetables for a pasta salad, Natalie walked through the kitchen a couple of times. She still wore her cleats, which made clacking sounds on the ceramic tile. Suella gazed at her again, wondering whether concentrating on her was the key toward making their melded consciousness begin.
Natalie stopped as she reached for a glass of water. She looked up at her mother and said “What?”
Suella shook her head and tried to smile. “Just looking at you, honey,” she said. “Can’t I admire my own daughter’s beauty every now and then?”
Natalie squinted as she placed the empty glass in the sink. “I guess so,” She started to walk away, toward the hall leading to her bedroom.
Suella called out to her. “When you were out there running on the soccer field, do you remember feeling dizzy at all?”
Natalie returned her gaze for a longer amount of time than Suella thought was appropriate for a nine-year-old girl. The fact that she was looking at her rather than staring out into space in thought told her she was thinking about the question instead of the answer. “No, I never got dizzy.”
“Okay,” Suella said, returning to her vegetable chopping.
Natalie had started to head out of the room and back down the hall, but stopped suddenly. “Why do you want to know?”
Suella decided that she couldn’t yet tell her about the phenomenon that had occurred on the soccer field just yet. “You looked a bit pale out there, playing.
I got a little bit concerned.”
“Oh,” Natalie said, over her shoulder as she resumed on toward her bedroom.
Suella had enjoyed the feeling so much she couldn’t wait to have it again. When would be the next time? At dinner? It wouldn’t be too much fun to have an out-of-her-body experience to discover how Natalie chewed her food. She had a feeling that it was something she had to let happen rather than something she could force to happen. Still, while the three of them ate dinner, Suella couldn’t help but to gaze at Natalie some more. The both of them were quiet. Thankfully, Nathan picked up the slack by talking endlessly about the soccer game, which had ended in a score of 8-7. “You girls gotta play some better ‘D’,” he said.
After dinner she helped clients for a few hours with a few security issues. She was glad it was all mindless work since she still obsessed back to what had happened on the soccer field. Natalie went to bed around the time Suella finished. What would happen if she opened the bedroom door and meditated on her daughter while she slept? Would she somehow shoehorn herself into the girl’s dreams? She decided to try it and see what would happen.
It never took Natalie long to slip into a deep sleep. She would breathe loudly every ten minutes, as if she’d been a dolphin swimming deeply and had surfaced for air. Suella could hear this even through the closed door. She twisted the knob one quarter of an inch at a time, listening to the lock tumblers click and clunk, until the latch opened. Suella opened the door wide enough for her face to peer through and she tried to block most of the opening with her body to keep light from coming in. And she gazed at her sleeping daughter.
Natalie had taken her ponytail holders out to go to bed and her long, lush hair flowed in swooshing curls around her face and forehead. Suella could see the innocent vulnerability on her daughter as she lay there with one hand lifted toward the bedpost, an extended finger grazing it. She slowed down her breathing and tried to focus all of her energies, all of her concentration on Natalie, yet still keep an open mind at the same time.
Suella thought she must have been standing there for fifteen minutes. She told herself all over again that this was not the type of thing she could force to happen. Just when she resolved to close the door and move on to something else, her husband bounded down the hall, freshly returned from a quick trip to the store. “Hey, hon! What’s going on?” he said, in a voice that boomed through the whole house. He turned around the corner in time to see Suella standing in Natalie’s doorway and added “What are you doing?”
Natalie woke up also, rubbing her eyes, squinting against the rays of light spilling in through the opened door. “Mom? What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Suella said, quickly closing the door and scurrying into the den before anyone could ask anything else.