by Red Monster
Disclaimer: All characters belong to Marvel Comics, except Meg's absent relatives. Meg belongs to Marvel too, but so far they haven't even bothered naming her, so it looks like I'm stuck with the job of developing her a little. This story is an unauthorized (but nowhere near secret) sequel to DuAnn Cowart's Silent Treatment and Poi Lass' Speechless. I advise reading those before you get into this. Not making any money, don't sue. Parody, I really don't care. Feedback me or I'll find your home address and share it with Rhona. If you want to archive, ask me first, and I will send you an HTML copy.
June 12th
Ever since Theresa moved in with me, I've felt there's a distance
between us that she doesn't want to bridge. I'm not mad at her, I'm
just concerned. It's not like her life's been all caramel apples
and pony rides, what with her drinking problem, all that
viciousness on her father's side of the family, being a mutant,
growing up without a mother, and then losing her voice and powers
in a terrible incident. I wouldn't be happy if I were her. It was
little short of a miracle that she opened up long enough to tell
me that much, since she's barely had the will to unfold her arms
since she's been here. She's been going to AA meetings since she
fell off the wagon while I was away at the reunion, and that
seems to help. Her posture is a little more relaxed, not so much
hunching over and looking around the room through her eyebrows
anymore. She's waking up earlier, which I guess means she's
falling asleep faster. Still, she's got this "I hope you don't
ask because I'd rather not say" thing going on. We're
starting Sign classes tomorrow, hopefully that'll help her open
up a bit. Until then, while she's keeping so much to herself, how
does it make her feel to think she has no one she can talk to?
June 13th
I used to write about myself in this journal; my thoughts about
the world, my recordings of the things I was doing, even a little
poetry here and there. Now, my niece gets an awful lot of air
time on these pages. I guess I could say I'm writing down my
thoughts about a new and very different person in my life, but my
own son has never occupied my writing as much as Theresa does.
This could mean any of 3 things. 1. I'm getting bored with myself.
2. I feel guilty about letting Glenn go so easily, and I feel the
need to be someone's mother again. 3. I'm so worried for Theresa's
sake I can't help but write think about her all the time, which
means I write about her a lot. I'm most inclined to go with the 3rd
one, since the first is utterly preposterous, and the 2nd
sounds like something a 50's housewife would say. So I'm worried
out of my skull for this niece of mine, my second cousin Maeve's
daughter, whom I barely know, to the point of letting her take
over my journal. You know what? I'm glad I'm so worried about her.
I'm not going to stop obssessing over the poor girl until she
stops giving me a reason to wring my hands every time I lay eyes
on her. Until I can see that she's happy, this is her book.
June 25th
Sign classes are going well. We're doing this so Theresa can
"talk" without a piece of paper, and so that I can
understand her. So far, it's not really doing anything for our
rapport. Theresa's asking me about myself a little more often,
but she still doesn't have much to say about herself. It's an
improvement, though. I'll give it some time.
July 18-19th
Someone upstairs has a lively sense of humor, I tell you.
Yesterday, I forced Theresa to sit down and have a
conversation with me. I made her tell me about her friends. So,
she started telling me about James. My God, she is taken with
that young man. He helped her quit drinking and put her problems
above his even though his were nothing to sneeze at, he's so
sensitive and caring and sweet and there-for-her despite being
just as tortured as she is. Great pecs to boot. I found
myself falling in love with him just from listening to her. But,
they're just friends, she insists, it never went any farther than
that, bloody unlikely it ever will. I told Theresa she
needs to get her claws into him before he gets snatched up by
some other woman and she ends up settling for some inhuman
bastard like my ex-husband.
Then the lively sense of humor kicked in. This morning, as I was pouring out the coffee, I heard a knock on the door. Theresa was still in bed, so I went to get it, and there stood this tall-dark-handsome young man with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. "Hi, I hope I have the right house. Is Theresa here?" he asked me. "Yes, she's here, she just hasn't gotten up yet. Are you James?" I said. He looked really surprised and said "Yeah, how did you know?" I told him I just took a wild guess.
So, I let him inside and took him into the kitchen for coffee. While we were talking to each other, getting acquainted, Theresa walked in. She saw James sitting at my kitchen table and looked like someone just threw a glass of ice water in her face. James saw her walk in, and he stood up and said "Hi, Terry." She laid her hand on her chest and started hyperventilating, the most noise I've ever heard come out of her. James walked over to her and took her shoulders in his hands, he said "It's okay, Terry, it's just me. Don't tell me you've forgotten about your old friend Jimmy already!" Slowly, she calmed down. I chuckled and said to James, "I don't think Theresa expected you to drop by." Theresa smiled and reached up to hug him. So we all sat down to breakfast together. For the rest of the day, it was hard to find those two not holding hands.
July 20th
Theresa and James dragged themselves out of bed before I did this
morning, hell, even before the sun decided to grace our part of
the world with its presence. I ventured out to the back porch to
find them sitting on the swing. James was whispering something
into Theresa's left ear, and she was holding a pen and Post-It
pad in her hands, but not writing. While he filled her head with
his words, she had her head leaning slightly back, her lips
creeping towards a smile, her eyes closed.
I left them alone. Not about to interrupt those two, I was.
This afternoon, I found them swinging around on the rope swing I set up for my son when he was a little boy, doing their best impression of Tarzan and Jane. James was yodeling away (though I'm sure he'd call it his "Tarzan yell") and wearing a makeshift loincloth that I'm sure was on my table last Thanksgiving. Theresa was wearing...um, I won't get into that. They were having fun, which was a great relief to me. So, I hopped on back to the house, left a note on the front door, and absconded off to Starbucks.
About an hour before writing this, I cornered Theresa as she came out of the shower (one of the few times I was able to catch her away from James) and dragged her into my bedroom for a few words in private. I told her, with a huge smirk, that I'd seen her and James playing Tarzan and Jane. "Just friends, are you?" I said.
She picked up a pad and pen and wrote, since her Sign vocabulary isn't very big just yet, Okay, I admit it. I missed Jimmy more than I let on, and we got a little exuberant.
"Exuberant?" I laughed. "Theresa, I've seen more clothes on a pygmy!"
It was warm today, she wrote with an obstinate look on her face. She then turned and walked out. I fought the urge to shout after her, "You two are awfully friendly, I notice!"
Now I'm wondering how she'll feel after he leaves. He can't stay forever, no matter how much I wish he could, and she's living with me for a reason.
July 26th
At around noon today, the phone rang. I looked on the Caller ID,
and the number was one I didn't recognize, and it certainly wasn't
from this area. James looked over my shoulder and picked up the
reciever.
"Hello?" he said. "Already, why?...What's the big emergency?...I've only been here a week...Well, that depends on your definition of a few days!...okay, okay, fine, I'll come back."
"Who was that?" I asked after he put down the reciever. Theresa stood between us and looked concerned.
"That was Beelzebub," he said glumly. "Our team is sending over an aircraft to come get me. You see, I've stayed a little longer than I told them I'd be gone."
Why won't they let you go back when you want?, Theresa wrote.
"They have a point, Terry. If I'd planned to stay a week, I should have told them I'd be gone a week. Besides, there's been some mutant violence in San Francisco lately, and a lot of anti-mutant rioting in reaction to it. So, they don't want the team to be undermanned. I'm sorry, Terry."
Right now I'm watching James get ready to depart. He and Theresa are on the front porch, I'm sitting on the living room couch to write this. The sun is on its way down, and so is a snazzy-looking little plane, vertically descending to my soybean field. Theresa is clinging for dear life to James, and from the way her body's shaking, I can tell she's crying. Silently, of course. I wonder what she'd sound like if she had her voice. But, the point is moot, because if she had her voice, she wouldn't be living in my house and crying into her best friend's shoulder. James separates himself from her, and holds her shaking hands while he kisses her forehead. They're walking out into the soybean field together. Wait a minute, is she going back with him? No, she's not. The plane is taking off, and Theresa's silhouette is still in the field. Now, she's running back towards the house. She bolts through the front door, still crying desperately, and runs into her room, which used to be Glenn's room. I have to cut this entry short.
July 27th
Last night, after I put down my writing, I went into Theresa's
room to talk to her. She was lying on her bed, shaking like Saint
Vitus, with tears pouring out of her eyes. Not that I could see
her eyes, covered up by her hands. I sat down at her desk,
feeling utterly stupid. I didn't know what to do to comfort a
hysterical 24-year-old woman who's been disabled for less than
half a year. I said to myself, Megan, you don't know what she's
going through. You were free as a bird at her age; she's trapped
by her own body. Don't pull the "I understand" line,
because she's not going to fall for it. Just talk to her.
"You really love James, don't you?" I said.
It's not just that, she signed.
"Do you want to talk about it, dear?" My God, I said that with an Irish accent, and I've lived in this country for nearly 40 years. I must have been tense as a high wire.
I don't have my voice, or my powers, or my old life. My friends are in another state, and I can't even stay sober without those damn meetings anymore. She had to spell out some of the words by letter, but her hands were doing their job.
While Jimmy was here, I pretended the writing and signing was just because I wanted to use my hands. I didn't worry about my voice, and it was SO nice to have Jimmy around again. She signed the word "so" very big. When I'm with him, I know someone is looking out for me. Still spelling out some words, yet her hands stayed steady while her body racked violently.
Out there on the porch, I thought about going back with Jimmy. But, I can't, because what would I do once I got there? I'd be dead weight back there. So, thinking about that, and leaving Jimmy again, I started crying. Only then I realized, I can't even cry anymore! Look at me, Meg, I'm just dribbling and shaking like an invalid! Do you hear anything?
I have nothing to do with myself, I can't protect myself anymore, I can't say anything to most people without having you there to speak for me. I'm handicapped, and the people I love most are a thousand miles away. After their maddening dance in mid-air, her hands went limp and dropped back to the bed with their exhausted arms.
I touched her shoulder, and once she was looking at me, my hands assumed their positions. I don't know what to say., I signed to her. I'm glad you told me this. I don't sign nearly as well as Theresa. My hands aren't as practiced as hers, but she understands. The distance is gone. Now I can see, up close, just how much she's hurting.
Nothing I can do will make Theresa's voice recover any faster. If it recovers at all, that is. I can't glue her life as a mutant "terrorist" heroine back together, or make her alcoholism vanish like a leaf in a fire, or fix it so that she can venture out by herself without the slightest risk of danger. Hell, no fully-abled woman has that, but just a few months ago, Theresa had her own defense against the nebulous threat of the night that normal women are always hiding from. Now, she can't even scream for help. I can, however, and will make sure Theresa doesn't feel alone, like a helpless creature depending on the good grace of a stranger for her survival. From here on out, I will be there for my niece. No, wait. For my daughter.