I carved it on the wall and left it behind, Bat Masterson had said. His mother had left behind more than her name.
“You became a medic,” Elliot said slowly. “You don’t become a medic if you don’t—care about people.”
She shot him an annoyed look. Elliot almost found it comforting, the sign of the cranky medic he’d liked, rather than the distant stranger he’d been speaking to here at the edge of the world.
Then she sighed, and the crease between her eyebrows smoothed as if the sigh had unfolded the skin.
“Do you want me to talk about why I became a medic?” she asked eventually. “I will. Do you want me to talk about why I left your father, whether I considered taking you with me? Ask me what you want to know, and I’ll tell you. Like I said . . . I suppose I owe you.”
Elliot had thought out different reasons she might have had for leaving. He would not hate her, even if she said that she had not considered taking him with her. She hadn’t had a job then, or any money: she might have thought leaving him would comfort his father. She might have been depressed after having him, confused at her lack of maternal feeling. The way his father had loved her was not the way people should be loved. Usually women didn’t have a whole other world to run to, but she had.
He had thought out so many reasons.
“Do you have anything,” Elliot said, very slowly, “to ask me?”
“What, ask for your forgiveness?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest. “No.”
“I am not the one who brought up owing, or forgiveness,” said Elliot, his voice very smooth. “Is it on your mind?”
She looked like she wanted to slap him. He wished she would.
“I meant,” Elliot said, after a moment. “Do you want to know how I am? Or how my father is? Do you want to know what I like? What I want to do when I grow up? Do you want to know who I am or who I love?”
“I know who your friends are, remember?” the medic retorted. “Everybody knows that. The elf girl and the gay Sunborn kid.”
Elliot’s eyes narrowed. “There is a lot more to Serene than just being an elf. And there’s a hell of a lot more to Luke than being gay, like that’s what makes him remarkable among the Sunborns. He happens to be their champion. Though,” he added quickly, “value systems based on physical strength and martial prowess are meaningless!”
Elka Pathwind looked at him, her head tilted but her eyes still wide, her expression neutral. “The commander sometimes talks about you. She said you were crazy.”
Elliot hesitated. “Well . . . do you want to know if I am?”
His mother shook her head. “Why are you so eager for me to ask you questions?”
Because in every scenario he’d ever thought through, every time he had waited on the stairs of his house in the terrible silence, she had come back. She had taken steps toward him, every step from wherever she’d been to where he was. He hadn’t stumbled painfully over her. He had known, in his imagination, whatever she did or whatever she said to him, whatever her reasons for going, that she had come back.
This was different. She had not come to him. He had no reason to think she had any interest in him. She had to give him a reason.
“Because I want to know . . . if you care to know anything about me.”
“Not really,” said the medic at last, with a shrug. “You’re no concern of mine.”
It was almost evening, the sun drowning in the clouds. It was later than he had thought.
“Okay,” said Elliot, after a pause. It was a longer pause than he would have liked. He wished he’d been able to speak sooner. “Then I think we’re done here. I just—I wanted to be sure of where we both stood. Now I am.”
She gave him one last look, assessing and coming to a decision. There was a certain easing of her expression that Elliot thought might be relief. She nodded.
“I guess this could have gone worse,” she told him, and walked away.
Elliot supposed she was right. It could have gone worse. He could have tried to have a relationship with her, ignored all the signs and blundered stupidly and hopefully on. He could have forced her to spell out her indifference even more clearly.
Elliot stood leaning against the fence for some time: the first place he had learned about magic, met Serene and Luke, chosen to stay. He had believed in a lot of stories, back then, including the ones he told himself.
He was sure his mother had a story: that there was more to why she had left, why she had come back here, why she had chosen the job she had, why she thought the way she did about the world. He was not going to hear it, though. They were not going to have the bond of shared stories and joined lives. She did not care to listen.
“Hey,” said Luke after some dark indeterminate length of time, wandering up to him.
“I can’t do this right now,” Elliot snarled at him.
Luke stared. “Well, nice to see you too.”
Elliot didn’t want to be cruel, he thought suddenly. This was the moment to tell everything, if there had ever been such a moment, when all his defences were burned down. He had to say it: I just found my mother, and it turns out that what I always feared is absolutely true. Neither of them ever wanted me at all. I have been unwanted for my whole life. By the way, I like guys as well as girls, and I’d appreciate it if you’d quit implying I hit on everyone. You are one of only two people I love, and I have to know if I have any real value to you.
It would be a miracle if he could get all that out, but after that he thought he could manage to say: Take me to Serene, and maybe: I think I’m going to cry.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he said, and tried to work out how to say everything else.
“It’s hard sometimes, with my family,” said Luke into the silence.
“Oh,” Elliot said, his voice brittle. “Is it?”
“Being just ordinary, I mean, when they’re all . . . you know.”
That was literally the most ridiculous thing Elliot had ever heard. He did not know what had possessed Luke to come over and start talking random absurdities at one of the most horrible times of Elliot’s life, but apparently Elliot had to cope with this. He felt like a burn victim, having someone come at him with a grater.
Elliot badly wanted to snap at Luke, but he did not dare. If he let himself lose his temper, it was going to be ugly: he was going to do or say something terrible. He did not even know what poison he might spill, but he knew that Luke did not know anything. Luke did not deserve it.
“You’re ordinary? I seem to recall some sort of championship,” said Elliot, his voice astonishingly calm in his own ears. “That is what not being hit in the head multiple times does for me. I have this astonishing recall of past events.”
“Yeah, but that was a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding of what? By whom?”
“Doesn’t matter. Look, my mother is being tiresome and she wanted me to ask you if you wanted to have din—”