Take two
Okay
We’re asking for a revelation
Yeah, you know
We deserve to know the truth
You say you got the information
Yeah, we know
And that’s why we’re mad at you
But we’re not feeling very trusting
And we’re both inclined to shut you down (out)

Do you think it’s gonna be
Okay?
Don’t know if it’s gonna be (okay)
Gods, I hope we’re gonna be (okay)

We want a real explanation!
Oh, you know?
Better cough it up, old man
We’re sick of your manipulations!
Oh, you know?
Then just be truthful, if you can
But since we forgave you for something you didn’t do
You’re already actin’ like we’ll understand this too

Do you think it’s gonna be (okay)
Don’t know if it’s gonna be (okay)
Gods, I hope we’re gonna be (okay)

We’ve heard all your justifications
Yeah, we know
You just want us to know why
You’ll have to pardon our frustration
Yeah, you know
Well, we still need a little time
But don’t assume things’ll go back to the way they were
We’re both gonna treat you the way we think you deserve
Do you think it’s gonna be (okay)
Don’t know if it’s gonna be (okay)
Now I hope we’re gonna be (okay)
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh yeah
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah…

Ann dug her nails into the crumpled top of the paper bag and banged on the door of Room 102 with her other hand. “Damn it, Mordecai, I can hear you in there!”

“Ticket to Ride” ceased with a squeal. There were footsteps and Erik answered the door, frowning and clutching the violin and the bow. Mordecai stood behind him with his arm in a sling — which Calliope, Erik and Milo had decorated with acrylic flowers — and a white plaster cast that said JENNIFER on it in big red letters with a pink poodle sticker. He leaned towards the open door with an expectant wince.

Oh, goddammit, that’s right, Ann thought. Due to the interloping street gang, Mordecai was not capable of playing a violin and Erik was going to be extra protective.

Hey, Ann. Lucy is going to want more and more formula because she’s getting bigger, right?

Yes, Milo, I think that sounds about right…

Ah, but we’re supplementing with cereals and soft foods, so in actuality, even though she needs more nutrition, she’ll want less of it to be formula, and she’ll taper off eventually!

Yes, Milo, that sounds about right too. You’re really clever. I’m sure you can figure this out.

Ann put on a smile and crouched down to Erik’s height. “Hello, Erik, dear. It’s such a lovely day. I thought you might like to go down to the school. I put some things together for Seth.” She offered the paper bag, containing a random assortment of canned goods and a couple pieces of fruit from a bowl on the kitchen counter. “It would be awfully nice of you to take him a little bit of lunch, wouldn’t it?”

Erik did not respond to the smile or accept the bag. He backed off a pace and glanced suspiciously from Ann to his uncle and back again.

Ann increased the wattage of her smile, leaned forward and nodded for him. Okay, Erik, I know you are not that stupid. (She had hoped it for a couple seconds there, but no.) I also know you hate things being upset and I am offering you an out. Maybe it’ll all be cleaned up by the time you get home, right? Right?

She had already dealt with Hyacinth and Calliope and Lucy while she was in the kitchen packing the bag. But that was Hyacinth she was talking to, so she didn’t have to be subtle. Cin, I have something personal to discuss with Mordecai and I need you to get Lucy and Calliope out of the house. Do you think you could take them to the park? She then had to firmly insist that she did not want to talk about whatever-it-was with Hyacinth, while sorting through various canned goods and trying to remember if Seth liked tomato soup, but that was no difficulty at all.

Trying to convince Erik not to stay and try to fix this himself, on the other hand, required a gold medal in implied communication. And smiling.

Hey, Ann, do you suppose that’s a linear or an exponential progression?

I don’t know, Milo. You have a lot of data on Lucy feeding. Why don’t you try to extrapolate?

“It would be very, very nice of you, dear,” Ann said, smiling like a person who would never, ever do anything to hurt Erik’s uncle or even consider it. “We’ll be all right for a little while.”

“Dear one, it’s okay,” Mordecai said. “Ann just wants to talk for a little. I’m sure it’ll be very boring adult stuff.”

“Taxes!” Ann said brightly.

Erik sighed. He handed the violin to his uncle and took the bag from Ann. He couldn’t point fingers at them and go, I know this is about the brownies, because he didn’t know. And even if somebody invisible flat-out told him it was (Well, you guys?!) it might make Ann even more mad to find out everyone but her knew about the brownies and they’d all been lying.

He turned his head and checked the kitchen on his way out. Yeah, she got rid of Auntie Hyacinth too. If it wasn’t the brownies… maybe he didn’t want to know what it was.

They waited until the door closed behind Erik, and then gave it a little bit extra, just in case.

“Ann…” said Mordecai.

“Mordecai, you have one final chance to tell me the truth about this and show me a scintilla of respect, and if you have been lying to me about multiple things we will go over them one-by-one.”

“Is Milo listening?” Mordecai said.

Ann scowled at him. “I am not stupid. I told him they were having a sale on bulk formula downtown and asked him to calculate if it would be cheaper to buy all the formula Lucy will be needing right now — and how much of it I should get. He is busy.”

Mordecai’s wary expression melted into one of pained confusion. He’d just had a sudden flash of what was really going on here and now he couldn’t unsee it — like he was at the movies and his 3-D glasses fell off.

Half of Milo is doing a complicated math problem… While I talk to the other half of Milo — which lied to the first half to get him to do the math to distract him — about the brownies with drugs in them — which half of Milo still doesn’t remember because I hypnotized him. And, let’s be fair, probably because this half of Milo — which I am talking to — is really good at keeping things from the other half of Milo.

And all of this is because neither of us — and I am including one half of Milo in that — wants all of Milo to have some kind of nervous breakdown about his girlfriend (one half’s girlfriend, not the other half’s girlfriend) hurting him with drugs. This is how he protects himself, one half at a time.

Dear gods, no wonder it was so easy to treat them like two people. It was impossible to parse them the other way!

Mordecai set the violin on the floor and pressed a hand over his eyes, as if to physically replace the 3-D glasses required for this portion of the feature. “Calliope made the brownies,” he said. “But, Ann, it wasn’t on purpose, and she didn’t lie to you. I did that. She only went along with me afterwards because I told her it was the best way to deal with this, and she didn’t like it. This isn’t her fault.”

“I know that,” Ann replied, teeth clenched. “That is why I am not yelling at her. I am yelling at you. I have often suspected you have a low opinion of me, Mordecai…”

She stepped over the violin, though she might’ve stepped on it, and closed the door behind her, so that the necessary volume wouldn’t bring down Maggie, the General or Barnaby.

“As a person,” she added, coldly. “But hiding something from me that I need to know to keep Milo safe, apparently because you don’t think I am capable of dealing with it appropriately, is telling me that you don’t even think I can do my one job — no matter what sort of a thing I am!”

“Ann…” Mordecai picked up the violin and stowed it on the top shelf of the closet, which had the appearance of bowing to Ann and then running away.

He approached again only cautiously, with one hand held up. He was incapable of unconditionally surrendering due to the sling.

“I know it was wrong, but you can’t think…” He caught himself. This was not a good time to be telling Ann what she thought. “I-I don’t think, and I didn’t think, that you could find out something like that about Calliope, at that point in your relationship, and still just… forgive her and go forward from there. You barely knew her, and you didn’t have any reason to trust her. I didn’t want that to be…”

…the only thing you thought about when you looked at her, but that was more telling Ann what she thought, so he didn’t say that.

“I didn’t want that to define your whole relationship. I thought it might be a little easier for you to forgive me, because you’ve known me… and… and that still didn’t happen for a very long time, even then. If you had cut Calliope off like that…”

“If you had treated me like an adult human being, I would’ve known Calliope was apologizing about making the brownies and not telling Milo about the drugs and not putting cooking oil in his hair!”

Mordecai needed a moment for that… and then he still couldn’t untangle it. “…What?”

“I could have spoken to her about it and made my own decision if I had any idea what really happened and you kept that from me!”

“Ann, I know you are very, very mad right now, and you have every right to be, but do you honestly…”

“Sh!” She cut a hand at him. She shut her eyes and smiled. She nodded evenly but she wasn’t saying anything. Aloud.

Mordecai closed his mouth. …And now half of Milo has some comment for half of Milo, perhaps about baby formula or women’s shoes, and we have to handle that this way so he can keep up the pretense that some small part of him is still safe…

…I think it’s three pounds for a sinq or something, Milo.

Wow! That’s a good deal!

Yes. Yes. It is.

You don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, do you, Ann?

I will check the packaging very carefully, Milo. I promise you.

…Are you guys talking?

Just about the shopping, Milo. I have time.

A few moments later, Ann opened her eyes and frowned. “All right.”

Mordecai spoke very gently, “Ann, I have known you a long time, and I don’t think… I-I could be wrong, and even if I’m not wrong I’m still sorry… I think if a strange person moved into the house and hurt Milo that badly, Calliope or any person, you wouldn’t have let them apologize to you. I think… I think if we’re really being honest here, you know that too.”

“It was still my decision to make!”

“It was Milo’s decision to make too. But he couldn’t right then, and you were ready to do it for him. If I let you make that decision right after he almost bashed his head in on the basement wall because of what she did, you would’ve taken her away like you caught him playing with a loaded gun, and he wouldn’t have what he has with her now.”

“When you lied to me, you made it your decision, not mine or Milo’s, about what he needed to be safe!” She swept nearer, darting a finger at his face. “You didn’t know Calliope either! I know you think you are very, very smart and you know just everything about people, but she almost broke Milo and you decided right then and there that we needed to get to know her better and give her a second chance? That is… That is so damn arrogant and so damn dangerous!”

She turned from him with a swirl of pink taffeta, shaking her head in disgust. “If it was so important to you that he have a girlfriend, why did you want him to base the relationship on some… some fantasy of a perfect person who never harmed him instead of… of a mentally-deficient drug addict who got him wasted on poison brownies and then hurt him so badly that I almost lost him forever!”

Mordecai felt as if he were belted into the Gravity Drop at Papillon Island and the motor had just kicked in. Okay, we are no longer just arguing about me being a liar and Ann being overprotective. The bacon has fallen out of the frying pan, and we need to be very careful we don’t burn down the house.

He drew a deep breath. He didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Ann… You asked me to help him forget it… You remember that?” She had threatened him about it, actually, but mentioning that part would invite a lot more yelling. “You decided he wasn’t allowed to know anyone hurt him at all.”

Ann was sucking ragged breaths through her teeth with her hands fisted at her sides. She looked about ready to explode out of her dress, or at least split all the seams. “You saw,” she said. She turned, lifted her head, and glared at him. “You saw what she did to him, and I felt it. I am the one who knows things. I am the one who keeps him safe. Do you think… Do you think having that memory would do him any good at all? Do you think he needs to have that all pain happen again when it still hasn’t stopped happening from the first time?”

Ann… What memory?

“Oh, shit!” Ann cried. She threw up both hands — STOP! — and then clutched them against the sides of her face. She smiled again. Her fingers dug in. She shook her head. She was looking past Mordecai at nothing at all. No, honey, we’re not talking about you. No. Of course we’re not. It’s nothing to worry about. Are you all done figuring out…?

Yes you are. You are talking about me. You’re talking about… When Calliope… When Calliope hurt me…

Trying to get rid of a memory when you did not have access to divine magic was not a sure or simple thing, Mordecai knew. It was like having a piece of chewing gum stuck in the tread of your shoe. Or something worse. No, I can still smell it. Get the hose.

No matter what you did, the mind knew it was missing a piece of something somewhere. Not like forgetting an address or a phone number or the name of that guy in that film, that was a form of natural erosion. You weren’t using it and it went away when you weren’t looking. Being made to forget, taking a pickax to the mind, that left a hole, and you kept coming back to look at the damn hole. Gee, what happened there? Oh, yeah…

He’d done very well helping Erik to forget… whatever it was about Milo. (And, oh boy, he really wished he’d asked some more questions about that. It might’ve helped him out a little now.) Even then, Erik came back and asked him for help about it every once in a while. Uncle? I need you to help me put it back where I can’t reach. Like a box of rat poison or something else that needed to go on a high shelf away from curious little hands.

And he was pretty sure Erik still had access, no matter how high up the thing was, but he knew he wanted to forget it and he’d responsibly put the thing back up himself if it happened to fall down — sometimes he needed a boost, that was all.

Ann and Milo had never asked him for any help with the thing about the brownies. Ann had not been on speaking terms with him for most of that time, but she would twist herself into a pretzel doing anything to protect Milo — if he needed the help, she would’ve gotten it for him.

Whatever Milo had managed to do to himself, whether he was two real people or one extremely crazy one, it seemed to have resulted in a secondary presence in his mind that could prevent him from climbing shelves or examining mysterious holes. Wait. What happened in between where I was drawing with Calliope and then I was under the table? Didn’t I…? Oh, look, Milo! Pretty shoes! Or maybe she had him on a lead and she could guide him away, or she hid stuff like a sleight-of-hand artist — like Diane. Whatever it was, as a system, it seemed to work incredibly well.

But Mordecai had a sinking feeling the system was breaking down.

“Milo, it wasn’t to hurt you,” Ann said softly. “You know her. You know how she is. She doesn’t do things like that. She hurts people sometimes, because she isn’t thinking about what she’s doing, but it isn’t on purpose. She likes you. She liked you and she still likes you. Please, please understand…”

Why would she do that if it wasn’t to hurt people? Why would she put bad things in food and just leave them? Oh, gods, Ann, the kids!

“I know,” Ann said. “I know. I know.” She held her head and shook it slowly, back and forth.

“Ann…” said Mordecai.

“Shut up!” she cried. “Let me fix this! I can fix this! Just let me fix it!”

Milo… Milo, she… She likes to take drugs. She… She must like the way they make her feel. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but she never had anyone holding her down and making her. It’s fun for her. She must’ve thought… if anyone had a brownie, they would just have fun. Even the kids.

That is crazy. That is crazy-thinking. That isn’t even like Seth, Ann! He had to! And now when he wants them, he doesn’t want to want them. He still knows it’s bad! She just… She likes them?

Ann felt a frisson of disgust and shuddered. She paled and put hands over her mouth like she was trying not to be sick. “No…” slipped out faintly. Milo, you liked them. When you didn’t know it was hurting you, you liked how it felt. You ran out and bought a brownie the very next day because you thought you might feel that way again.

Ann shuddered again and gasped, just half a breath. “Oh…”

“Ann…” She was bent almost double. He put his arm around her shoulders. This might conceivably result in two broken arms, but he couldn’t leave it like this. Was it possible he had finally broken Milo? “Ann, let’s sit. Please. Let’s sit.”

“Mm…” She nodded, and leaned heavily against him while he guided her down. They weren’t near enough to make one of the beds, but there was a rug here.

“Can you talk to me? Can you tell me what’s going on in there?”

“No… No…” Essentially, Milo was just as mad and hurt at her for taking away his decisions and lying as she’d been at Mordecai. “I’m not a good person…” She said it aloud because if she thought it, Milo would hear it, and he might agree with it.

“Yes you are. I know this is confusing and it hurts, but you are not a bad person…”

“Please don’t talk now,” Ann said. “I am so busy right now, please stop talking…”

He nodded. But she hadn’t snapped his arm off or pushed him away, so he kept holding her.

Milo… This doesn’t change things. I know you’re mad at me right now, but it doesn’t change things with her. It doesn’t take away how kind she’s been to you, and how nice you’ve been back to her, and how much you like each other. It’s just… It’s an accident you didn’t know about. Like when she played the music and scared you. Or when you reached over her and you knocked the cup with the water on her painting…

That didn’t hurt her, Ann! She smiled right away and she said it was okay and it looked neat and it didn’t hurt her!

You have hurt her, Milo, and you know it. You know how bad it made you feel and how much you wanted to take it back. And you know she decided to like you anyway, and how good that makes you feel.

Not like drugs.

No, not like drugs.

Ann sniffled and rubbed the heel of her palm over each eye. “It might be okay… Don’t talk to me yet, but I think it might be okay…”

…She held me. I couldn’t… I couldn’t stop like she wanted, but she held me anyway. Ann… I hurt her hand.

Not on purpose, Milo.

No, but… She knew right away. She didn’t get mad or cry. She only knew me a little bit, but she already knew I wasn’t trying to hurt her.

Yes. That’s true.

We were drawing… She wanted to know if the button would replay static. I thought she was so funny! Maybe it was the drugs.

I don’t think it was, Milo. Not just the drugs.

I wrote words, Ann. It… The drugs made me feel like I was safe. I know that was the drugs. But I wrote words and she liked it. I said… I said she was so pretty… I said I loved her.

Ann was sobbing. Mordecai managed to snag the tissue box with his foot and he put it in her lap. It was difficult to hand her a tissue and keep holding her, but once she got the idea she pulled them out on her own, one after the other. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Yes, that’s right.”

Ann, she liked it! She drew a big heart around everything! But then I… but then…

Yes, Milo, I know. Now we both know.

Ann… Why did you take that away from me?

Ann clutched Mordecai’s leg so hard it made him cry out. She did not seem to notice and curled her fingers as if clinging to a ledge. “Oh, no. No, no, no, no…”

After a moment’s hesitation, he slipped his other arm out of the sling, picked up her hand and held it. If she broke him, Hyacinth could fix him. “Ann, I know it’s hard. Can you talk to me?”

Ann focused and looked into his eyes. “Please make him stop hurting…”

It was like being torn in two. Being so mad and so hurt and so sorry, all at once. They were used to being two, they were two, but not this sensation of pulling… of tearing…

I SAID I LOVED HER AND SHE LIKED IT! She didn’t even get a chance to say she loved me back. I could’ve said it again! I could’ve said “I LOVE YOU” instead of “let’s kill Ann and get married!” I COULD’VE SAID THAT AND SHE WOULD’VE LIKED IT AND SHE WOULD’VE BEEN LOVING ME ALL THIS TIME INSTEAD OF TRYING TO FIGURE OUT IF SHE CAN AND I NEVER WOULD’VE HURT HER AND WANTED TO DIE! WHY DID YOU TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME? WHY DID YOU LET HIM TAKE IT AWAY? WHY DID YOU TELL HIM TO TAKE IT AWAY? WHY DID YOU MAKE ME FORGET I LOVED HER?

“Because it wasn’t important!” Ann shrieked. “Because you don’t understand what those words mean! Because you didn’t then and you still don’t!”

Ripped through. She felt loss, and from him… only this coldness. The wind blowing between them.

She clapped both hands over her mouth and spoke in a rapid mouse-whisper, “Oh, gods, no, please, I’m sorry…”

Mordecai pulled her hands down and leaned in. “Ann, I need you to talk so I can help you. It doesn’t have to make sense, I can still try to understand, but I need you to keep talking, okay? Out loud. To me or him. You understand?”

“Yes,” Ann said faintly. “Yes. Milo, please talk to me. Please. I’m so sorry. He wrote… on the paper. They were drawing and he wrote on the paper. He said ‘I love you.’” She shook her head, wide-eyed. “But he said ‘I love gears’ right under it, Em. He thinks… He thinks it means the same and it’s not. Please tell me you understand that. It’s not the same!”

He nodded. “I know. I know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s really stupid we have the same word for both.”

“So it’s not bad I let him forget that part,” she said. She was still shaking her head, as if she didn’t even agree with herself. “It’s not bad. And he didn’t need to know how she was kind to him when he was hurt… not and remember being hurt. She was kind to him after that.” She smiled, but still shaking her head. “Lots of times!”

He put his hand on her shoulder, the one he could. “You are not a bad person, and I know why… I know why we did that. I helped you do it. But I also get why he’s mad at you, okay?”

“Yes.” She curled over and hid her face in her hands.

“Is he yelling at you or ignoring you?”

“He won’t talk.” She sobbed again. “I can’t help feeling how he feels. I think if he had a suitcase, he’d throw it at me.”

Mordecai did not have any context for single suitcases and suicide — or murder in this case. He was aware Milo and Ann had some suitcases, in the closet upstairs, that was all. He knew this was bad, just not that bad. “Do you think he’ll listen to me?”

“I don’t know.” She laughed sickly. “We might as well try, he won’t to me.”

The red man drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. I do think I am very smart and I know everything about people. I am arrogant. I am smug. And I damn well better be right, because I need to be even smarter than I think I am to fix this. He reached out and touched Ann’s chin, tilting her head up. He watched her eyes. He was talking to someone who couldn’t move or talk back to him again. Someone he couldn’t even see.

“Milo, I don’t know, and I can’t know, if all of this would have been any better or easier if the two of us hadn’t been lying to you… And to each other. I think you have had precious little happiness in your life and I’m sorry you lost some of it, any of it.

“But you need to remember about the pain. You were in so much pain, Ann and I couldn’t think about anything except trying to stop it. We didn’t know if you could survive being in so much pain. We took happiness away from you, maybe even love, but we gave you time to get on top of the pain. We took the decision away from you too. It was your decision, about whether to still be in pain if you could remember Calliope holding you, and how happy she made you. But you were too hurt to make that decision.

“And it is very, very hard to watch someone be hurt… so much harder than being hurt yourself. Especially if you have something you know how to do to make the hurting stop. Do you know how hard that is?”

Ann winced and pressed a hand over her chest. Pain there, but… It wasn’t cold. “He… He has some idea, yes.”

I hurt Erik. They told him how I wanted to die after I hurt Calliope, and he was crying and he needed me to hold him and say I was going to be okay, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t fix it when I hurt Calliope. If I could’ve made her forget me and go live somewhere else and never see me again but she wouldn’t be hurt anymore… I would’ve done that. Yeah. Back then.

I think… I think she would’ve hated that if she ever found out about it. She likes it here so much.

And me. She likes me.

“We were very lucky in that the things we took away from you didn’t get lost forever,” Mordecai said. “It’s okay to be mad about this. You should be really, really mad about this. Especially since we waited so long to tell you, past a lot of times it could’ve made a big difference and now… now maybe it seems like you had a really pretty flower but we hid it from you until it died. And we didn’t even understand about how great a flower it was and how much you would’ve wanted to have it, because we were stupid.

“But the memories are still there, they’re yours and you can have them again. Maybe they’ll make a big difference going forward or maybe they’ll just be something nice to have — but even though Ann and I were really stupid with them, we didn’t lose them. You didn’t lose them. And after you’re done being mad at us and feeling hurt about what we did, you can pick them up and use them and like them. And I think… I think they hurt less now than when it happened. A lot less. Don’t they?”

Ann nodded slowly.

“That’s a present you get on accident because Ann and I were trying to protect you,” Mordecai said. He made a smile, a small one, then he set it aside. “It doesn’t make up for us doing it badly and hurting you. I think you would rather have less-stupid friends than lots of time to ease the pain, but it’s not nothing.”

Ann laughed, a better laugh than before, if still a bit sad. “Milo says, ‘You guys hit me over the head and stole my memory and all I got was this lousy sticker.’”

“Milo has an excellent sense of humour,” Mordecai said gravely.

Ann smiled at him. She shook her head. “Em… Are you just playacting with me or… Do you really believe I’m me?”

“I am doing whatever it takes to help my friend in an emergency situation,” Mordecai said.

Her mouth tightened. She swallowed and nodded. She knew it was something like that, but it still hurt to hear. Not yes or no, but, “it does no one any harm to treat you the way you want to be treated, and I do it because we are friends.”

Oh, Ann, please don’t cry. I’m still trying to be mad at you.

She did anyway. “I appreciate… I do appreciate… your friendship.”

He held her. And he offered her soup. And then a cookie, like she’d sold him some blood. She finally got it out that she’d just had peanut butter and jelly, even if that seemed like an eon ago. So then he said, “tea?” and she said, “okay.”

She was on her third cup, and he’d managed to get half a cookie into her — when the back door banged open and Seth staggered into the kitchen holding Erik against him. He said, “Hyacinth!” and then, “Mordecai!” and then, “Erik!”

Ann abandoned the other half of her cookie in her cup of tea, put both hands over her face and tipped back in her chair. She said, “Damn.”