His face was so sad, Baba’s chest contracted with sympathetic pain.
“It destroyed my marriage. Just about destroyed me, to be honest. The pity was the worst. Everyone knows, and everyone is sorry, so sorry. For a while, around then, I thought about leaving.” He shrugged. “But the job was the one thing that kept me sane, and people needed me, which gave me a reason to get up in the morning. So I stayed.”
Baba realized that at some point during his agonizing recitation, she’d taken his hands, or he’d taken hers. The plates and forks were nowhere to be seen, although she didn’t remember removing them.
“That’s awful,” she said. “I can’t imagine losing a child. No wonder it bothers you so much that other people are losing theirs.” He grimaced, and she squeezed his hands a little tighter. They felt good under her fingers; strong and capable, large without being clumsy. She could envision them mending a fence or cradling a rescued kitten. Or doing other things, preferably to her.
“Time passes. You adjust,” he said, straightening up and pulling his hands back so that he could run them through his too-long hair, moving it off his face in what was clearly becoming a habitual movement. She tucked hers under her arms, suddenly cold, moving away from him to curl her legs up underneath her.
“Still, I could see why you would want to get away, to someplace where there were no memories. Start over again.” She stared at the wall across the room, as if a pattern on the wallpaper there had somehow become more fascinating than usual, its subtle cream silk moiré holding all the secrets of the universe if only you looked long enough in the right light. “You could come with us, you know. Travel the country with me and Chudo-Yudo for a bit.”
Liam made a slight choking sound; surprise or pleasure or alarm, she couldn’t tell.
“Like you said that first day, almost every piece of furniture in the Airstream folds out to be a sleeping space.” She waved a hand around with an airiness she didn’t quite feel. “If you were going to be around long enough, I could even have it create an extra room for you. I’m sure Chudo-Yudo would like to have someone else to talk to besides me.” She shrugged. “It might be fun.”
Liam brushed one large hand gently across her cheek again, smoothing back her cloud of raven hair with a gesture that was surprisingly erotic in its simplicity. For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her.
“It does sound like fun,” he said, with something that sounded like regret. But maybe that was only what she wanted to hear. “Very tempting. But I can’t go anywhere until those children are back home where they belong, whether or not I’m dealing with the case in an official capacity or not. And as much as the town sometimes drives me crazy, I suppose this is where I belong.”
Baba mustered up a smile. “I guess I knew that. It was just a silly notion. I’ve lived alone for such a long time, I doubt I could stand to have anyone else around on a day-to-day basis anyway.”
“Anyone who didn’t shed white fur or breathe fire, you mean.” Liam smiled back.
“Right.”
He gazed into her eyes for a minute, and then asked hesitantly, “Do Babas ever settle down in one place? Stop traveling and set down roots?”
She snorted. “Not exactly. Back in the Old Country, when there were more of us in a smaller area, each Baba tended to have her own territory she watched over. Her hut would travel around within a certain boundary, but never strayed all that far, so people could find her if they wanted to badly enough.”
“Here, though,” she circled her arm to indicate the whole country, and not just the trailer they sat in, “there are so few of us, we tend to travel wherever we are needed.”
“Doesn’t that make it difficult to teach your classes?” Liam asked. “Or are they just part of the illusion?”
“Ha. They’re mostly a cover, although I do teach a class every once in a while when I get a chance. I actually like doing it. But I’m almost always officially off on sabbatical; traveling, researching, collecting samples.” She gestured at the many jars and bottles and leafy green things tucked into corners and in some cases hanging off cast iron hooks on the walls.
“There are only three of us Babas in the entire United States, so we just go where we are called. That’s how I ended up here.”
“Good grief,” Liam said, taken aback. “Wouldn’t it be more efficient to divide the country up into thirds, with one of you taking the eastern part of the country, one the middle, and one the west?”