Living in Threes Read online

  Living in Threes

  Judith Tarr

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  November 20, 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-208-2

  Copyright © 2012 Judith Tarr

  Dedication

  For the real Meredith

  who has waited very long and patiently for her book to come out in the world

  Acknowledgments

  This book could not have existed without the help of many friends and colleagues.

  My agents, Russell Galen and Ann Behar, believed in it enough to let it go—and to encourage me to publish it through Book View Café.

  But before that could happen, this happened: a successful Kickstarter, a round 256 backers, and the wherewithal to transform a manuscript into a book.

  Thanks to the backers who have made it possible for Living in Threes to make its way out into the world:

  Cora Anderson, Richard Kirka, Marty Grabien, Gwyndyn Alexander, Kari Sperring, Kathleen G. Seal, Alan Hamilton, Robin Taylor, Marci Ellingwood, Carole Nowicke, Ingrid Emilsson, Lisa Clark, Kit Kerr, Meredith Tarr, Woj, Katja Kasri, Hugh Agnew, Marianne Reddin Aldrich, Val Kondrich, Nancy Kaminski, Kathleen Hanrahan, Robin Marwick, RJ Nicolo, Molly Kalafut, Elizabeth Bennefeld, Michael Gaudet, K. Case, Linda Antonsson, Frauke Moebius, Jenny Graver, Noriko Shoji, Deborah Sumner, C. Joshua Villines, Mary Ellen Garland, Lauri M. Weaver, Christy Marx, Shauna Roberts, Catie Murphy, Ruth Stuart, Adrianne Middleton, Paula Mikkelsen, Paul “Princejvstin” Weimer, Pat Knuth, Mary Kay Kare, Peter Aronson, Rebecca Stefoff, Joseph Hoopman, Di, Valerie Nozick, M. Menzies, Nancy Pimentel, Dawn Marie Pares, Leah, Beth, SAMK, Anne Walker, April Steenburgh, Margaret C. Thomson, Ashley with the Morgans, M.L.K. Ondercin, Jaakko Kangasharju, Mary Spila, Poppy Arakelian, Sarah Patrick, Helen Wright, Paula Meengs, HY Tesler, Patricia Burroughs, Nancy Barber, Maryanne Stroud, Amanda Weinstein, K. Kisner, Pat Hayes, Kate Elliott, Phil Freund, Ceffyl, Solveig, Regina A. Tarr (hi, Mom!), Marti Wulfow Garner, Kerry Stubbs, Amy Sheldon, Mary Caelsto, Pat Cadigan, Christine Swendseid, Heidi Berthiaume, Sue Wolven, Donna P., Melinda Goodin from Australia, Kate Kirby, Cameron Harris, Ron Chance, Alison Farrin.

  You are amazing. Thank you all.

  Chapter 1

  That was the absolute best and the absolute worst summer of my life, the summer I turned sixteen.

  Sixteen is a weird year. Make it sixteen with your dad off finding himself again—not that he’d been around much even before the divorce—and your mom in remission from ovarian cancer, and you can pretty much figure you’re being dumped on from somewhere.

  What I didn’t figure, and couldn’t ever have figured, was how bad it was going to get—and how completely impossible both the bad and the good part would be.

  Magic. It’s dead, they say. Or never existed.

  They aren’t looking in the places I fell into, or finding it where I found it, that wonderful and terrible summer.

  I had plans with the usual suspects: Cat and Rick and Kristen. They had their licenses already, got them before school let out. I was thisclose to mine, with the September birthday and being the class baby.

  It was going to be our summer on wheels, when it wasn’t on horseback or out on the beaches. We had it all mapped out.

  Then Mom dropped the bomb.

  I came home from the barn early that day, the day after the last day of school. Rick had the car, but his dad wanted it back by noon. So we’d hit the trails at sunup, then done our stalls and hay and water in a hurry with him already revving up the SUV.

  When I got home, wringing wet and filthy and so smelly even I could tell I’d been around a manure pile, Mom was sitting out by the pool.

  That wasn’t where she usually was on a Thursday morning. She still had her work clothes on, but she’d tossed off the stodgy black pumps and splashed her feet in the water.

  Her hair had all grown back since the chemo. It was short and curly, and still a little strange, but I liked it. I thought it made her look younger and prettier.

  She turned and smiled at me. She looked tired, part of me said, but the rest of me told that part to shut up. “Good ride?” she asked.

  “Good one,” I answered. “Bonnie only threw in a couple of Airs. And that was because Rick was riding Stupid, and she was living up to her name. Bonnie had to put her in her place.”

  Mom laughed.

  As long as I was out there, I figured I’d do the sensible thing. I dropped my shirt and riding tights and got down to the bathing suit any sane person wears under clothes in Florida summer, and dived into the pool.

  The water felt absolutely wonderful. Mom watched me do a couple of laps.

  Finally I gave in. I swam up beside her and folded my arms on the tiles and floated there, and said, “All right. Tell me.”

  She was still smiling. It must be something really good, to bring her out of court and all the way home.

  “I’ve been talking to Aunt Jessie,” she said. “She’s staying in Egypt this summer, instead of coming back home to Massachusetts.”

  I knew that. I talked to Aunt Jessie, too. She Skyped in at least once a week. Checking on me, and on Mom through me.

  But Mom was in story mode. I kept quiet and let her go on.

  “She’s really excited,” Mom said. “She’s made some discoveries that she thinks are very important, and with everything that’s been going on over there, she hasn’t been at all sure she can keep getting the permits. She actually got a grant, which is just about unheard of these days.”

  “She must be over the moon,” I said.

  “Oh, she is.” Mom paused. “It’s a big grant. Big enough for a whole team.”

  “Including you?”

  That came out of the way Mom was smiling—excited, as if she had a secret and she couldn’t wait to share. She’d been dreaming about Egypt for years, following all of Aunt Jessie’s adventures and reading and studying and talking about maybe someday, if she had time, if she could get away, if—

  There were always reasons not to go. First she had to make partner in the law firm. Then she got asked to be a judge in the county court, and that needed her to be always on. Always perfect. And then there was the cancer.

  So maybe she figured it was now or never. I could see that. Even get behind it. But I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

  Mom away for the whole summer? Was she really ready to leave me for that long? I didn’t have my license yet. How was I going to—

  All that zipped through my head between the time I asked my question and the time Mom answered, “Including you.”

  That stopped me cold.

  Mom grinned at my expression. “You really thought it was me? I wish, but there are a couple of big cases coming on trial, and I might be called to the bench for another one, and—”

  “You said you were going to take it easy this summer,” I said. “We both were. What would I do in Egypt?”

  “Learn,” said Mom. “Explore. Be part of something big.”

  “Florida is big enough for me,” I said. “What about Bonnie? And the trip to Disney World? And turtle watch? Turtle watch is important. The college needs us to count those eggs. That’s big, too. It’s real. It’s now. Not fifty million years ago.”

  “Four thousand, give or take,” said Mom, “and Disney World will keep. So will the turtles.”

  “Bonnie won’t. Bonnie needs me. She just got bred. We don’t even know if she’s pregnant yet.”

  “We will tomorrow,” Mom said. “You’ve got a week till you leave. It’s all taken care of. Visas, everything. Aunt Jessie’s been working on it for months. It’s her birthday present to you.”

  She’d never said a word to me. Not even a hint.

  “I hate surprises,”
I said. “I hate her.”

  “Hate me,” Mom said. “It was my idea.”

  “It’s your dream. Mine is to spend the summer with my friends and my horse. Not baking in a desert on the other side of the world. There are terrorists over there. Revolutionaries. Things get blown up. People get blown up.”

  “You will not get blown up,” Mom said.

  I pulled myself out of the water. “I’m not going,” I said.

  Mom didn’t say anything. I grabbed a towel off the pile on the picnic table and rubbed myself dry, hard enough to make my skin sting, and marched off into the house.

  For once in the history of the universe, none of the usual suspects was answering their phone. I barricaded myself in my room and went laptop surfing instead.

  I surfed for horse stuff and beach stuff and turtle stuff. Nothing whatsoever to do with Egypt. Who cared about sand and terrorists and old dead mummies? The only sand I wanted was right underneath me in Florida.

  When my phone whinnied at me, I almost didn’t bother to answer it. After all, nobody could be bothered to answer me.

  But the whinny was Cat, and she had an excuse. She’d been driving her kid brothers home from soccer.

  Crisis? she texted.

  Big time. But with the phone in my hand and the screen staring at me, I couldn’t manage to fit it all into 160 characters. Tell u tonight, I said. Still on for ice-cream run?

  8:30, she answered. Rick too. Kelly’s got a date.

  Normal me would have squeed and wanted to know all about it. Crisis me punched OK. See u then, and threw the phone on the bed.

  Mom was still home. I could hear her rattling around in the kitchen. Then the TV came on, rumbling away in the background.

  That was weird. I almost went to find out why she wasn’t going back to work, but my mad was still too new. If she thought she was going to wait me out, she could just keep thinking it.

  The computer beeped at me. The phone was lighting up with messages. Now everybody wanted to talk-text-email. All I felt like doing was crawling inside a book and pulling the cover over my head.

  I tried every book in my to-be-read file, and even in my favorite-dead-tree-rereads pile, but my eyes kept slipping away from the words. Finally I opened my laptop instead, but I shut off the wi-fi.

  It felt weird. Kind of guilty. Like telling the whole world to eff off.

  What I needed was my own words, or words that came to me. Words that weren’t about here or now. I needed to go away, really far away, deep inside myself where everything was different. Where I wasn’t even me.

  I’ve always told myself stories. I started writing them down as soon as I knew how. When I got my first computer that was all my own, I’d found the place where I could always go.

  I wasn’t always safe there. Stories aren’t about being safe. On the screen, where the words were, I was home—more than I was anywhere except in the barn or in my own house.

  A year ago, when the cancer came in, it was scary, but then there was the remission and I told myself that was it, we’d go on and nothing would change. Mom wouldn’t get sick again.

  But the world was different. I couldn’t trust it any more.

  The only world I could trust was the one I made for myself. The only light was on the screen, pale like moonlight, black like the sky between the stars. Outside it was a steaming hot Florida afternoon, with the sun beating down and the thunderheads piling up. In here, it was as cold as the truth I’d had to face, the day Mom came home from the doctor and sat me down and told me she was going to die.

  Today wasn’t anything like that. She was just dumping me for the summer—same as Dad used to do, till he stopped even bothering to show up. Just like Dad, she thought it was great. Romance! Adventure! All the things she’d never had time to do, so I got to do them instead.

  I closed my eyes and made myself go away. Skip over. Ignore. Forget. Be somewhere else. Be someone else—someone as different as it was possible to be.

  This wasn’t really a new story. Pieces of it had been in me for as long as I could remember, fragments of words, images, half-remembered dreams, but now it was all there: solid, whole, and so real I could taste it.

  Really, I could. It was bitter and salty, like a mouthful of ocean, or too many tears. When I opened my eyes, I was somewhere completely different.

  I was inside the story. Instead of me telling it, it was telling me.

  Chapter 2

  In all Meru’s world, she was sure of two things: that she was born to be a starpilot, and that wherever her mother was, however far she wandered, she would always come home.

  The message came over Earth’s web one bitter-bright night, when the air outside the house was so cold it numbed the back of Meru’s throat. She was the room she loved best in this world, high up in the family’s house. Its ceiling was a force field, and by night it was transparent. When she slept there, she lay under the stars.

  She had been sharing a webcircle with other star dreamers—Earthlings who dreamed of becoming starpilots. She and Yoshi, who had passed the tests and would be shipping out together to the starpilots’ school, were basking in a cloud of joy and awe and envy.

  It felt wonderful, and rather terrifying.

  “This is how it will be for the rest of our lives,” Yoshi said to her on an underchannel. “I don’t know if I like it.”

  “We’ll be ordinary enough at school,” Meru said, “especially at the start, when everybody knows more than we do.”

  “Ai,” said Yoshi. “You are right. I’m not sure I like that, either.”

  “It’s worth it,” she said.

  His agreement hummed through the weblink.

  The link broke abruptly. The message feed was corrupted, the words in it broken and blurred, but the priority tag was still on it, with the finder beacon that told Meru who had sent it.

  Meru linked to the beacon and followed it, braced for a long search down the starways—and came to an abrupt and earthbound halt.

  That should not have happened. She ran the search more times than she wanted to count, but the answer was always the same. Her mother, who should have been on the other side of the galactic sector, was on Earth, and close by. Something other than distance had garbled the message.

  It could be an error, or a ghost in the web. Implants wore out. They could malfunction. There was no need to panic.

  Yet.

  “Meru? You there?”

  The webcircle was still up, and still celebrating. Yoshi’s ping was like a hot wire across bare skin.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “But what? What happened?”

  “I can’t talk. I can’t stop. I have to go.”

  “Meru—”

  She shut him off.

  Her family gathered below, in the common room where everyone came together in the evenings, or curled in a warm and communal pile in one of the sleeping rooms. Meru missed the warmth suddenly, and the presence of all her cousins and the youngest aunts and uncles.

  But two words in the stream had come through without static or garble.

  Alone.

  And Danger.

  Meru’s mother was on Earth when she should have been exploring a distant system, and something was wrong.

  The web offered no answers. Meru took a deep breath and made herself be calm. She searched for a new message, or even a slightly older one that might have told her more, but there was nothing about a woman of Earth named Jian, daughter and aunt of the family Banh-Liu, mother of Meru.

  All Meru found was a babble of newsfeeds off the starweb. They were connected by a single key word: Epidemic.

  There were always waves of disease on other worlds, plagues that came and went, infected aliens and unprotected humans, then ran their course and disappeared. They never reached Earth; the Consensus that governed it had such strong protections, and such effective quarantine and containment, that there had not been so much as a sniffle on the planet in a thousand years. Earth was the saf
est place there was, and Consensus had every intention of keeping it that way.

  Jian must have been investigating a plague on one of the worlds she explored. Civilizations often rose and fell because of such things, and Jian would want to know everything: who and how and why, and whether the disease was still on the planet, waiting to break out again. It did not in any way explain why she was on Earth and sending such a weak and broken signal.

  She could not be sick. If she were, Earth’s protections would never have let her through.

  That was not as reassuring as Meru would have liked it to be.

  Over against the wall, a shadow stirred. Wings unfurled, half mist, half solid. Eyes glittered above a drift of fog that might have been a beak. The starwing stroked its half-substantial wingtip across Meru’s cheek, a touch like ice and smoke, but strangely warm inside.

  It always knew when she was sad or troubled—always had known, since her mother brought back the egg from one of her expeditions, and it hatched in Meru’s hands. No one else she knew had a starwing. It was like a piece of the stars, to remind her of where she was going, and to keep her company when she went there.

  She closed her eyes and let its presence soothe her. But not too much. She needed the sting of urgency.

  She started down the lift to the common room, to the family and community and consensus. She would tell them what had come to her, and they would tell her what to do.

  Alone, the message had said.

  Danger.

  Starpilots on voyage did not have community or consensus. They were alone with the ship and the stars. When danger threatened, they faced it—alone.

  Meru sent the lift down the back way, away from the family.

  She should have known it would not be that easy. No one was in the storage, but her cousin Ulani was in the kitchen, sitting under a lone, dazzling-bright light, finishing off the last of the pickled fish.

  “You hate pickled fish,” Meru said.

  “I’m teaching myself to like it,” Ulani said. She took a last bite, grimacing only slightly, and swallowed with an air almost of triumph.