From: bewalton17@aol.com (BEWalton17)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.quantum-leap.creative
Subject: QL: The Enemy (Chapter 15)
Date: 2 Dec 1998 05:04:46 GMT
Message-ID: <19981202000446.27332.00000947@ng-fc2.aol.com>



                         CHAPTER FIFTEEN
     He left the Project like a thief, avoiding notice, leaving no
word as to his whereabouts.
     He'd had another long session with Beeks earlier.  This time
he'd spilled his guts, about everything.  She'd listened carefully
and sympathetically, even helping him sort out exactly what his
feelings were wherever they were unclear.  And yet, he felt no
different.  She hadn't been able to do anything to make the guilt
go away.
     Tina had been in the control room with Gushie and Sammy Jo
Fuller, doing a routine diagnostic.  Ziggy was submitting with no
complaint, which was unusual, but everyone was acting unusual
lately, and Al could think of no particular reason why the hybrid
computer wouldn't follow suit.  He wondered if they knew he'd
noticed how they all walked on eggshells around him, or that he
thought that if he had to endure that dance of evasion again, he
might scream.
     So he'd slipped along the back wall, and into the corridor
that led to the surface.  His car was waiting in the sandstone
garage; he climbed into it gratefully, turning off the intercom
system.
     And now he drove hellbent through the waste lands, not knowing
where he was headed, or caring whether or not he got there.  It was
the speed that mattered, racing against the devil, against time,
and against himself.  Against himself most of all.
     The road wound snake-wise through the sand, the tiny edge
lights blinking a bright warning red.  The State police would no
doubt be alerted to him by now; the road sensors reported every
thirty seconds or so.  Al didn't mind.  There wasn't a Statie in
the country that could keep up with the turbo-charged government
prototype, even before he'd started modifying her.  It wasn't
flying, but it was as good as it could get on the ground, and
sometimes, if you really put yourself into it, you could almost
feel the ground fall away behind you, see the horizon expand, feel
the blast of the g-forces as you tore away from the pull of the
Earth's gravity...
     Al had been grounded for nearly fifteen years, ever since his
eyes had started to weaken.  They still weren't bad; it just took
a little adjusting to find a good reading distance, and sometimes
he wore glasses for the strain.  But rules were rules.  He wasn't
20/20 anymore, and his wings were effectively clipped.  None of his
friends were flyers, and none of them really understood what it
meant to give up the sky.  
     Ruthie might have understood, of course; if she'd been born in
a different decade, she might have been up there herself.  It was
Ruthie he'd thought of the first time he'd flown a plane, Ruthie
riding pillion on the Harley he'd bought with his summer stock
earnings when he was sixteen, her arms wrapped tightly around his
waist as she shouted Faster, go faster! into the wind.  That had
been nearly ten years before he fell out of the sky into the
Vietnamese highlands, and nearly thirty before she'd left him
standing in the cold florescent light of a faceless courtroom.  It
was his best memory of Ruthie, the only one that wasn't touched
with guilt, and the only one he would never share with anyone
except Ruthie herself.
     He hit a fork in the road and stopped to flip a coin.  Heads,
right; tails, left.  Heads.  He eased the steering wheel to the
right and blasted off again.
     He'd called her earlier, after talking to Verbeena -- hoping
for what, he didn't know.  She'd reached for the disconnect button
as soon as she recognized his face on the vuphone screen.
     "No -- wait, Ruthie.  Please."
     Her hand stopped, but her fingers still hovered over the
button.  She had aged, he noticed; her hair had thinned somewhat
and her face had grown gaunt, but the aging was more obvious in the
way she moved, and in the emptiness behind her eyes.  "What do you
want?"
     "I'm not sure."
     She laughed, a harsh, bitter sound.  "So, what else is new?"
      "I've been thinking about you, Ru."
     "Is that so?"
     "And about Nate."
     "You're a little late on that score, Albert.  You should've
been thinking about Nate fifteen years ago."
     Al winced, and waited for the disconnect signal to show up on
his screen.  It didn't.  Ruthie just stared into the viewer,
waiting for him to go on.  He didn't know what to say.
     Somewhere in the background, he heard a door open.  Ruthie's
eyes darted over her shoulder.  "You're late," she said to someone.
     A teenage girl with dark hair and eyes appeared at the
periphery of the screen.  A pair of figure skates was draped over
her shoulder.  "Sorry.  Practice ran late."
     "You should've called."
     "My humblest apologies."  The girl walked away with a sardonic
tip of an invisible hat.
     "Your daughter?" Al asked.
     Ruthie nodded.  "Miriam.  Misi.  She thinks she's going to
Olympic tryouts for '04."
     "Why shouldn't she?"
     Ruthie looked at him blankly.  "If you're calling to give me
parenting advice, Albert, I somehow suspect I can live without it."
     "I'm not."
     "Then what is it?  I really don't want to talk to you."
     Al closed his eyes and thought, then opened them again. 
"Ruthie, if there was one place in our lives, between us, that you
could change, just go back and change, what would it be?"
     "I'd stay in _shul_ the day I met you," she'd said, and
disconnected.
     Al had stared at the flashing screen for nearly a minute, then
turned it off, picked up his jacket, and left.
     Another intersection, another coin-toss.  This veered him to
the left.
     Nate would've been twenty-one the previous February.  He'd be
finishing college now.  Al wondered what school he would've gone
to, and what he would've studied there.  Would there be some girl,
someone special?  If so, what was happening to her now?  Was she
wandering around, lost, drifting from man to man, certain that one
of them was the one she was looking for?
     Hell, he thought.  It could be Tina.
     There were buildings coming up fast on his right, and
somewhere or other he had missed the last turn away from the town. 
With a resigned sigh, he downshifted and let up on the gas.
     Beeks thought he was crazy.  She didn't say so in so many
words -- the headshrinkers never did -- but it was pretty clear
what she meant.  She spent a lot of time trying to cure him,
anyway.  She talked a lot like Sam did; It wasn't your fault, was
a perennial favorite, along with There was nothing you could have
done.  Many of his friends and a couple of his wives seemed to feel
honor-bound to alleviate any guilt he had ever felt.  
     The problem was, this time he really was guilty.  There was no
way around it, or under it, or over it.  And he was getting tired
of the people around him telling him that what he felt wasn't
valid.  Besides, even if it *wasn't* valid, for awhile at least it
was *useful*.  No one else seemed to understand that.  Sam could
use it as a lever to pry him away from Nate.
     He pulled into a gravel parking lot and stopped the car.  The
silence was suddenly deafening.  He got out and gulped cold desert
air into his lungs.  He reached into the car and pulled the keys
out of the ignition, surprised to find that his hands were shaking.
     The red stone building rose in front of him, light beckoning
through the front door.
     Why am I here?
     He knew.  
     He climbed the steps slowly, and pulled open the heavy wooden
door.  Across the foyer, two narrow doors were set into the wall,
leaning chummily against each other.  His hands were no longer
shaking as he stepped inside.
     He sat, crossed himself, and said, "Bless me, Father, for I
have sinned..."
                               ***
     Misi Weiss had recognized the man on the vuphone screen
immediately.
     He had changed -- pretty drastically -- but there was no
mistaking him.
     He was the boy from the River Ward series, the only paintings
of Mama's that were still considered gallery-worthy.
     And that meant he was Nate's father.
     And that *further* meant that he was -- 
     Click.
     -- about to get hung up on.
     Misi was surprised it had lasted as long as it had.
     Mama blew through the kitchen like a whirlwind, slamming
drawers and cupboards; Misi stayed in the shadows under the stairs,
hoping she would remain unnoticed.  Her coach, Peter Nagaya, and
her partner, Derek LeClaire, who both considered her a grandstander
-- she'd cost them five tenths of a point in their last meet, when
she'd tried to do a triple axle instead of a double from a throw
and landed on her ass -- would be surprised at just how talented
she was at becoming invisible.
     As long as Misi could remember, her mother had been subject to
dark, furious moods.  She never lashed out at the people around
her, but the moods were frightening nonetheless.  When her parents
had gotten divorced, Misi had originally wanted to stay with her
father, but it had freaked Mama out so much that she had
acquiesced.  Besides, Mama lived closer to the rink, and the rink
was always a blessedly cool haven.  There was something about the
chilled air, or about soaring above the ice balanced on Derek's
arms, that made everything else go away.
     And, to be fair, it wasn't always awful with Mama.  She had
more good days than bad ones, and Misi never for a moment doubted
that she was loved and cared for.  Sometimes too much.
     Mama had started her skating when the doctor had told her a
sport would be good for her weak lungs.  Daddy had wanted her to
try track or baseball, but Mama had watched her watching the
skaters on television, and knew that, whatever the financial strain
(and it was considerable), this was the right sport.  
     But the first time she'd seen Misi thrown six feet across the
ice, she'd tried to pull her from pairs, and her first serious
injury (a knee problem that had been fixed to Misi's satisfaction)
had brought shrill demands that she stop training altogether. 
Daddy had defused the situation, but Mama still made her opinion on
the subject known at every possible moment.
     After all, she had Already Lost Nate.
     That, if anything, was the refrain of Misi's life.  Nate the
Great, the brother she had never known, who could apparently do
anything and everything (except skate) better and sooner than she
had.  Nate was dead, and Mama blamed his father, although it
sounded to Misi like the moral equivalent of blaming the weatherman
for a lightning strike.  She supposed Mama kept her sense of moral
superiority by screaming her head off every time it looked like
Misi might break a nail.  At least that was what Daddy said, or
what he meant when he said, "Your Mama Already Lost Nate, honey. 
She doesn't want to Lose You Too.  One of these days, she's going
to see that you know what you're doing."
     Misi was almost fifteen.  She was still waiting for that day. 
Daddy told her not to give up hope, even though he himself had been
a victim of Mama's mood swings (he'd made the terrible mistake of
encouraging her to get back to her painting, and she'd slapped him
with a mental cruelty charge; he'd left quietly rather than put
anyone through the process that would inevitably follow).
     Mama appeared in the kitchen door, a silhouette against the
bright ceiling light.  "I see you back there, Miriam."
     Misi stepped out into the hall.
     "You're going to wreck your eyes spending all that time in the
dark."
     "My eyes are fine, Mama."
     "You're spending too long at the rink, Misi.  I don't like
it."
     Misi held her tongue.
     "Did you get a ride home from someone, or were you waiting for
a bus out there in the dark?"
     "Derek's father drove me home."
     "And if I called him, would he tell me that?"
     "Yes."  This was true.  Misi preferred taking the bus -- it
made her feel more self-reliant (hell, more *self*) -- and Derek's
father had agreed to say he'd dropped her off any time Mama wanted
to know.  "Was that Nate's father on the phone?"
     Mama leaned against the door.  "Yeah."
     "What did he want?"
     "I don't know."  She shook her head.  "He asked me what I
would change in our past, if I could change anything."
     "And you told him you'd rather not have met him?"  Mama
nodded.  "Is that really true?"
     She thought about this for awhile.  (Oh, man, it's going to be
a long one if she's this thoughtful, Misi thought.)  "No, I suppose
it isn't," she said.  "It's sort of a pointless thing to ask, don't
you think?  Even if you *could* go back and change something, how
would you ever know whether or not it was an important thing?"
     "I don't know, Mama."
     Mama went into herself for a minute, then came back out.  "I'd
keep Nate home where he belonged," she said finally, and brushed
past Misi into the living room.
     Home where he belonged, Misi thought.  So instead, you want me
to stay home where I *don't* belong.  Great.
     But someday, that would change.  Daddy had promised.  Someday,
Mama would learn to live with what happened to her son, and let her
daughter go about the business of living.
     So Misi waited.
     And waited.
     And waited.
                               ***
     Tina was on the phone with her stepmother when Nathan
Calavicci's chance of survival edged above fifty percent.
     There was no great flash of knowledge; there wasn't even an
announcement from Ziggy when it happened.  It just happened.
     Jenny had called maybe twenty minutes before, and they'd been
chatting pleasantly about this and that ever since.  Tina wasn't
really paying attention.  Jenny was only ten years older than she
was, and they had become good friends after the initial shock. 
Tina just pretended that Jenny was sleeping with someone other than
her father, and everything was fine.
     It hadn't always been; Tina remembered being painfully
embarrassed of being seen with her, especially when her father was
with them (well, truth to tell, she still didn't like to be with
both of them, even though she was in no position to throw stones
anymore).  She'd thought it demeaning to her father, whose sole
interest in Jenny was obvious to anyone who looked at them.  It had
also seemed unfair to her mother, who, after all, could never be so
young and beautiful again (Tina figured another divorce was
probably imminent now that Jenny was nearly forty; her father would
no doubt want to trade up again).  Mostly though, she'd been
weirdly jealous.  Jenny was so close to her age that the wedding
had felt more like an adoption than a marriage, and Tina had never
wanted a sister.
     Out of nowhere, she thought: Sheesh... no wonder Nate hates
me.  I'm closer to his age than Jenny is to mine.
     "Chrissi?" Jenny said on the other end.  "Christina?"
     "I, uh... Jenny, I, like, have to go."
     He likes heavy metal, but he doesn't dress it.  He wore an
earcuff for awhile, but he never pierced his ear.
     "Are you okay?"
     "Yeah, look, something's going on here... "
     He met me at Al's door once and said "Does your mother know
you hang out with him?"
     "Okay, I just wanted to tell you -- "
     "Tell me later."  Tina hung up with no further ceremony and
ran for the door.
     His eyes are dark blue.  You once thought, If he were only ten
years older...
     The thoughts began to get confused as she ran down the
corridor, and to fade as she entered the control center.  By the
time she found anyone to tell, they had dissipated.  Nonetheless,
she knew it was, like, happening.  Somewhere back there or out
there or wherever it was that the Leaps really happened, it was
happening.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Barbara