I found myself thinking desperately, Oh, dear God, if that could only be true! Some days I wished Mayleen had had the heart trouble so she’d have less energy to devote to dissension, dissatisfaction, or to discovering new injustices she had suffered. Some days I thought Mayleen was sixteen going on two, and Maybelle was sixteen going on fifty.
Bryan stopped and turned toward us, asking, “Who’s that man staring this way, Margaret? Is he staring at the girls?”
“Billy Ray Judson,” I said quietly. “You know his parents, Bryan. Judson owns that farmland north of the Conovers’ place. We’ve met them and the younger half brother and sister several times. They were at the Ruehouse Festival last month.”
Bryan nodded, forehead furrowed as he dredged up the memory. “Oh, yes. James Joseph is the boy, the girl’s name is Hanna. James is a nice, polite boy, but even if we know the family, his brother shouldn’t be directing that sort of stare at a schoolgirl.”
“I’m not a schoolgirl,” said Mayleen. “He likes me, that’s all. You don’t think people should like me?”
“Of course people should like you,” I said with a degree of desperation, wagging my eyebrows at my husband, who ignored me in favor of returning the Judson boy’s stare with a slightly censorious one of his own. “Your father just means you’re a little young to get involved with someone Billy Ray Judson’s age.”
Maybelle started to say something, thought better of it, and tugged her sister by the hand. “Race you to the house,” she said.
“I’ll just walk,” said Mayleen, sauntering slightly away from our family group to smile enticingly at the Judson boy.
Bryan started to say something, and I snarled, “Don’t,” in my firmest voice, locking my arm through his and speeding my footsteps to abbreviate the whole encounter. Maybelle moved along quickly at my side, asking her father a question about the clinic, thus deflecting him from saying, thinking, or doing anything about Mayleen. Meantime, I considered for the thousandth time the subject of twins. Twins should be similar, and identical twins should be identical; but Maybelle had all the goodness and good sense of any two normal people, and Mayleen had none at all. That fact was both frustrating and painful, for in any future I could imagine, Mayleen would carve out a hard and unrewarding life for herself.
This line of thought led inexorably to another: It was probably best that my first babies, the twin boys born soon after Bryan and I arrived on Rueful, had died at birth. Mayleen and Maybelle had been the second set, and we’d stopped there. I no longer grieved over the two dead children. Though Maybelle was a kind, good girl, if the two who had died had followed the girls’ pattern, there might have been at least one like Mayleen. Having even one more like Mayleen would be insupportable. I simply could not have managed.
This little exchange had hooked me on one thorny link of an endless chain of interlocking memories, all of them embarrassing or hurtful, all of them inappropriate for a woman who had just been to the Ruehouse! I made myself look at the clinic up ahead, pure white, shining like a beacon, without a spot on it. Wrong word. I derailed again, wishing my life could be that spotless, gritting my teeth in fury and ordering myself, STOP THINKING. Stop regretting. Stop chasing yourself around like a dog after its own tail! The memory chain went only one place! Back to Earth on the day the proctor came, never anywhere else!
During our first couple of years on Tercis, while Bryan was teaching me to help him in his work, he had told me I was a natural healer. Since virtually all of what Bryan called “healing” I found intensely embarrassing and distasteful, I’d choked on that accolade. Sometimes I thought my repugnance was some failing in myself, other times I wondered if any solitary child reared without intimacies on Phobos, as I was, could grow up to be comfortable with the duties “healing” required. Doing it for sixteen years hadn’t made it any easier, but the bargain I’d made with myself required that Bryan and the children never know how difficult and disgusting I found it. I’d kept that bargain! They didn’t know, but I did. I’d found no way to keep myself from knowing it, hour by hour, rue it on Rueday though I would. I sometimes felt it would have been easier to labor in a Cantardene mine with a whip at my back than to do the things Bryan expected of me.
As we mounted the porch, I glanced back to see Mayleen flirting and giggling with the Judson boy. The Judson man. He had to be at least in his midtwenties. I stared, openly disapproving, until he shrugged and turned away. Mayleen waved and called after him before unwillingly joining the rest of us.
“It’s nice to have paint on the house,” I remarked in the complacent, calm voice I’d practiced until it became second nature, the one that carried just the right message of everything’s lovely, everything’s just fine I ran my hand along the door molding. “It really looks wonderful.”
“Never saved the life of a painter’s son until this spring,” said Bryan, with a wry twist to his lips. “So this is my first paint job as a fee. Pity the boy didn’t get sick a decade or so ago.”
“Better late than never, Daddy,” said Maybelle. “You always say so.”
He did always say so. He always said a good many things: that every day was a beautiful day; that our troubles had all been worth it; that each year would get easier; that we had a good, pleasurable life; that we’d done the right thing; that he was better off here than on Earth. Maybe he really believed it, but I’d been too busy atoning for Bryan’s self-sacrifice to have entertained the notion it had been anything but a martyrdom for
