“What about your parents?”
“They’re dead.”
“Dad’s family?”
“He was an orphan.”
“No cousins either?”
Marie shook her head. “It’s just you and me against the world. We’re it, kid. Get used to it.”
Dezzy blinked to clear the past from her present, then looked up at the social worker, “I’m an orphan?”
The social worker shook her head. “Technically yes. But we’ll contact your extended family. Do you know if any of them might be able to take you in?”
Dezzy shook her head and wiped at her eyes, “I don’t have any other family.”
“Um, our information is that you do. Why do you think you don’t?”
“Mom said she didn’t have brothers or sisters, and her parents were dead.”
The social worker looked surprised, then said, “We’ll have to see.”
Mrs. Jacobsen offered to let Dezzy stay with her overnight so she could stay with someone she knew. After getting all the particulars and Dezzy’s agreement, the social worker said it’d be okay. Even though she didn’t think she’d be able to, after a small glass of warm milk, Dezzy fell asleep on Mrs. Jacobsen’s couch.
~~~
Dezzy woke on a foldout bed in Mrs. Jacobsen’s second bedroom. The horror of the night before crashed down around her. But then she noticed the sound of conversation from the front room. After a quick run to the bathroom, she followed the voices out front.
Timidly, she stuck her head around the corner. Moments later, she cried, “Mom!” and ran across the room to leap on her mother.
Her mother tightly hugged her back.
Arms around her mother’s neck, she exclaimed, “There was a mistake, right? It wasn’t you!”
Her mother just squeezed her tighter.
Dez reveled in the warmest hug her mother had ever given her. Then she began to worry that her mother hadn’t said anything. And she didn’t smell of cigarettes. And she was softer, not so bony. Dez slowly pulled back to stare into a face that looked like her mother’s but wasn’t. A face soaked with tears. Soft blonde hair, rather than her mother’s harsh platinum. A softer, kinder-seeming face that looked like her mother’s, but was somehow younger. A face more like Dez’s own, but older.
Dez blinked blurry eyes, then choked out, “Who’re you?”
“I’m your mom’s sister Rilee,” the woman replied. “Your aunt…” She blinked a couple of times, then murmured forlornly, “Dezzy, I’m so sorry about your mom. And I’m terribly sad to meet you this way. I-I’m, I’m sorry. I wish this hadn’t…” A long pause followed, then again, she said, “I’m just sorry about everything.”
Dez pulled back a little further. “Mom said she didn’t have any brothers or sisters. And that her parents were dead.”
Aunt Rilee nodded. “When she left us, she was really mad. She said we were all dead to her. I’m guessing that’s what she meant when she talked to you about us.”
Why was Mom mad? Dezzy wondered, then asked.
A multitude of expressions passed over Rilee’s face. She started to speak, then stopped. Then finally said, “She wanted money.”
“And you wouldn’t give her any?”
“We’d already given her a lot. Everyone in the family had given her money. Lots of friends too. And it all went to… to…”
“Buy drugs?” Dez asked.
Rilee nodded convulsively.
“Yeah, you probably shouldn’t have given her any money. How old was I?”
“You weren’t born. We didn’t know you existed until, until…”
“Last night?”
Rilee nodded again, seemingly unable to speak.
Tentatively, Dez asked, “When you say, ‘we,’ who do you mean?”
“Our parents, er, your grandparents. My brother, who’d be your uncle. Your cousins. Lots of other family.”
With hope in her voice, Dez asked tremulously, “Is there someone who’d let me stay with them for a while?”
“Me…” her aunt Rilee croaked out. “I’d love it if you came to live with me.”
Dezzy threw her arms around her aunt’s neck. Though she was still grieving her mom, she was somehow happier than she ever remembered.
It was years before Dezzy understood that her mother’s mood swings had been due to her meth addiction. That her “secret job” had been as a sex worker. And that Dezzy’s orphaned father, supposedly overseas on a secret assignment, was actually unknown.
But, living with her aunt Rilee, Dezzy thrived. Clean—new, not secondhand—clothes, a nice haircut, shampoo, and steady, warm love made all the difference in the world.
***
Saturday morning, Brad Medness went in to check on the micro plasma experiment he was running in the lab at the University of Maryland’s ISEAP (Institute for the Study of Electronics and Applied Physics). He’d been working for a couple of years to develop his system for heating tiny plasma systems to extreme temperatures. Some of the new high energy chirped-pulse lasers could generate extreme heating within the small volumes he worked in. Unfortunately, that heat dissipated so rapidly that he had to take his measurements of the plasmas’ properties on a picosecond or femtosecond basis.
Though his grants were written with the more prosaic goal of understanding plasma physics, his dream was to induce small scale fusion.
Unfortunately, today’s experiment didn’t bring him any closer to that goal.
~~~
When he got home his wife looked up from her screen and said, “My news feed this morning had an article you’d be interested in.”
He expected the article would be about one of his obscure hobbies—so esoteric that the news was usually far behind his own knowledge—but he tried to appear interested. “What was that?”
“Someone apparently gave a talk about a new material that’s a hundred percent reflective, can’t be melted and is thousands of times stronger than steel. They think it should be useful for inducing fusion.”
Brad snorted, “Did you read another article in the Express? I told you not to believe—"
She rolled her eyes and interrupted. “USA Today.”
He frowned, “How’d they fall for something like that?
