Betrayed (17 page)

I
realized something ten minutes ago. I realized it the moment I stepped foot out the front door of that decrepit Brooklyn brownstone with Heather hanging her arm around my shoulders and the sun glaring so harshly in my eyes that I felt nearly as blind as she was.

I lost track of all of it for a second. I lost track of the swarm of agents surrounding me, and the body bags, and Loki's functionally dead body being wheeled into an Agency van, and even my father, who I hadn't hugged yet in all the insanity of the morning.

I lost track of everything but the sunny urban wasteland surrounding me on all sides. Somewhere in the deepest outskirts of Brooklyn. Completely neglected by mankind probably since at least the late 1970s. Nothing but boarded-up brown-stones, and abandoned rusty Dumpsters, and gigantic Newport cigarette billboards covered over completely with graffiti.

And it looked to me like heaven. Total and complete heaven. The bright, vivid colors of the graffiti, the reflection of the golden sun in the rust of the Dumpsters, the millions of glistening specks of quartz in the old sidewalks…It was my very first sight of freedom.

Because that's what I realized as I stepped foot out into that heavenly wasteland.

I realized that I had been raised in captivity.

Just like any ape in the zoo, just like any cranky parrot in a two-foot-high cage living in some grandmother's dark apartment that looks out on the air shaft.

Needless to say, the irony didn't escape me. Here I'd been under the impression that I was probably the most independent being on the planet—that every choice in my life was entirely up to me. But I was so wrong. I didn't even realize how wrong until ten minutes ago.

All my choices and all my family's choices had really just been coping mechanisms to survive
him.
Whether we could see the actual cage or not, we had always been Loki's captives. Everything we'd done since I was six years old had been dictated by his existence. We'd moved to the Berkshires to run from him. My mother died because of him. My father abandoned me to protect me from him, which is what landed me in the care of George and Ella Niven (need I even say more about them?). I lost Sam because of him, I lost Mary because of him, and I nearly lost Ed for the same reason.

A
slave.
I've been a complete
slave
to his will—to his entire freaking existence. And to think I'd never even known it until this year. That's
ten years
of complete ignorance. Eleven of my most formative years lived in captivity. The better part of this year as more than just his captive but as his goddamned guinea pig—his fearless specimen.

And now
he'll
finally be the captive. If I've ever questioned the notion of karmic justice, I swear I'll never question it again. Because Loki is the captive now. A captive inside his own vegetative body for the rest of his quasi-life. And if enjoying that makes me cruel, then so be it, but I don't think he's lived a life deserving of one drop of respect. So I had to laugh. I had to laugh for at least a second when I realized what the future held for my uncle. My dad said they were probably going to run tests on him, maybe try to find out what had turned him into such a sadistic freak, and that seems just perfect to me. He's going to live out the rest of his nonlife flat on his back and as someone
else's
test subject for a change.

And now I'm actually free. Not my old definition of free. Not free as in escaping the reality of the situation. Not free as in free to beat on whoever I choose. But
actually
free. Free to pursue an actual life. Free to hope for all the things I'd sworn to avoid for all eternity, like friends and boyfriends and a
family.

And while that's all quite undeniably heavenly, the truth is…I have no idea how to do that. I don't know a damn thing about freedom. I don't know a damn thing about hope or optimism or creating my own fate. I don't know how to
act.
I only know how to
react.
For a goddamned genius, I know next to nothing about life outside a cage.

So what
do
I know?

I know that Loki isn't my father, a fact which I will be continuously celebrating for the next twenty or so years. I know that if I'd just had my real father
around
more that I might have learned this fact about Loki much earlier and avoided a whole crock of painful doubts and repulsion. In fact, I know that there's probably a world of things my father could have explained to me if he hadn't lived so much of his life as one of Loki's captives.

But I also know that my father is back now. And he's going to be here for a while. So I'll have time to ask every single question I should have been asking for the last ten years. And he'll have time to answer me.

I know that I need to see Ed Fargo as soon as possible and tell him that I'm planning on taking hours and hours of intensive girlfriend lessons. I need to explain to him that growing up alone in a cage leaves one with the exact same human-to-human skills as any other zoo animal or house pet. Ed must know something about that after those years in the chair. That chair must have been kind of like a cage at times. And the freedom to walk again must have felt a little like stepping onto the moon. But still, I don't think that's the same. Ed just had to relearn this whole freedom thing.

I, on the other hand, will be learning freedom from scratch. At an awfully late age.

Bear with me, Ed.
Please
just bear with me.

“I'D LIKE TO MAKE A TOAST IF
I could….”

Gaia's father stood up from the table and raised his glass. But as he began to speak, his voice faded from Gaia's mind. She strained for the tenth time in the last half hour to accept the sight of her “new family” at this grand dining-room table as a truly untainted, non-dream-related, non-drug-induced reality.

It wasn't as if rationally she couldn't recognize that it was real. It was just that the whole scene was so frustratingly dreamlike, Gaia could barely find her place in it.

Everyone sitting around the dining table in this posh Upper East Side apartment; her father at the head of the table, smiling, with his glass raised; Natasha and Tatiana both unharmed and smiling comfortably; Ed sitting right next to her, quite possibly as in love with her as she was with him…

This moment was only supposed to exist in Gaia's embarrassingly childish fantasies. This was meant to be nothing more than a fictional archetypal image. One of those ridiculous and unattainable dreams that only served as beautiful fiction, keeping Gaia moving forward through the drudgery of her
real
life.

But it was all undeniably real. It had been real from the moment they'd dropped Heather safely back at the hospital and then walked through the door of the apartment. That's when Gaia had seen Natasha, sitting on the living-room couch, most definitely alive, just as Gaia had promised Tatiana she would be. Her arms were glued securely around Tatiana as if she had no intention of letting go for a number of days. And just a few feet from their magnetized embrace was Ed Fargo.

Ed had been sitting on the edge of the couch like a huge welcome-home gift with an intoxicating smile. All three of them had been waiting anxiously for Gaia and her father's safe return. And when Gaia and her father had walked through that door, the three of them smiled with such acute relief, it actually made Gaia want to let out a huge breath of her own, even though she hadn't been the least bit anxious.

Gaia had been trying since then to breathe in the reality here, but this moment at the dining table was still so…

Just listen to your dad,
she told herself.
Listen to his toast and you'll settle in.

She took her own advice and tuned back in to her father. But luckily she hadn't missed anything yet. He and Natasha were having a little domestic squabble over wine. Even their domestic squabble seemed too enchanting to be real. But it was. All of it was unmistakably real.

“Oh, come on, Tom.” Natasha laughed. “You can't toast with a glass of water. Let me pour you a glass of wine.”

“Water will do,” he said with a smile.

“No, no,” Natasha insisted, standing up from the table and stepping into the kitchen as she spoke. “Just a little in your glass for the toast, yes? That's all. I've been holding on to this one bottle for a special occasion, and I doubt very much there will
ever
be a more special occasion than all of us sitting here, together and alive at this table today.”

“Well, I think you may be right about that,” Tom replied. Gaia couldn't have agreed more. With all the secrets out of the way, Natasha was beginning to grow on her more and more by the minute.

Natasha stepped back to the dining table quickly and poured a little wine into one glass for Gaia's dad. She set the bottle aside on the desk and rushed back to her chair.

“Well, then,” Tom went on. “A toast…”

Gaia took a few deep breaths and gazed at her father. Even though she'd known it for at least an hour now, this was the first time she had truly
felt
it, as she let herself focus in on him at the head of the table.

He was back. He was truly back. It was almost as if Gaia had spent these last hellacious months taking the father she'd always known and pulling him apart piece by piece, ripping him up into tiny jagged pieces and examining him from every possible angle before finally putting him all back together. But now that he had been fully reassembled in her heart, Gaia could finally look at him with her own eyes, instead of the eyes of a twelve-year-old. She knew that today was the day she had begun to admire him for the man he was. Not just the father.

“First and foremost,” he said, “to my daughter.” Gaia felt her heart jump into her throat. “Gaia, I am never leaving your side again,” he said, staring comfortably into her eyes. “
Ever.
If it takes us ten years, I will make up for all the time that my brother ripped away from us.” Gaia believed him. She felt herself blushing, though, and lowered her head slightly just to recover. Ed grabbed her hand under the table and squeezed it tightly. This, of course, only served to double the amount of blood rushing to her face. Her dad smiled a knowing smile and moved on.

“To Heather Gannis. She's safe and sound back at the hospital now, and the doctors have already seen some marked improvement in her health. She's shown clear signs that the sickness is reversing itself. Her doctor told me that with some hard work and research put into her eyesight, the prognosis looks good for an eventual full recovery.” He then raised his glass to the table. “And most of all,” he said as he took a moment to take in his audience, “to this family.”

He stopped for a moment. It looked like emotion was getting the better of him. He quickly collected himself and went on. “Because that is what we are now…. We are a family. Loki is gone. And for that…I feel nothing. Because my brother died twenty years ago. And I grieved for him with all my heart. But Loki…Loki's death is a blessing for everyone in this room. And I believe that he's taken with him all the pain and all the sorrow that he's caused us. I believe…no, I
know
that Loki's absence is the one thing that can mark a new beginning for all of us here at this table. Not just all of us as individuals, but all of us as a family. So…to my family…and you too, Ed.”

The entire table laughed as they clinked their glasses. Tom drank down his small glass of wine, and the rest of them threw back their water.

“And now we eat!” Natasha announced, bouncing up from her chair as some real inklings of normalcy began to kick in.

Listening to the toast had helped. Gaia was finally starting to believe it now. She was finally finding the ability to breathe freely and actually
be
in this insanely storybook moment. This time as she looked around the table, she wasn't just seeing some lonely child's naive fantasy of togetherness projected like a hologram into the room. This time she could see a truly admirable father, a kind and caring woman who loved him, the beginnings of a real sister, and…an unbelievably cute boy. A rather stunning boy, actually, who was still gripping her hand under the table.

Once Gaia turned to him, she found that the rest of the table seemed to float away like an unmanned sailboat, leaving only her and Ed swimming alone in the water. And while the new beginning for this family was something of a miracle, one look at Ed and Gaia knew that there was a much more essential new beginning to tend to. A new beginning that needed to begin immediately.

Gaia shot up from the table, grabbed onto Ed's wrist, and tugged him down the hallway.

GAIA PULLED ED INTO THE BATHROOM
and slammed the door behind him, leaning her hands against the door on either side of his face. She was bubbling with determination at this point. She was overflowing with it. Because the clouds of Gaia's life had finally parted for two seconds, and the heavens had opened wide, and the sun shone down, casting a golden haze over all that was usually decrepit and gray and hopeless…so she had to move fast. Because it could only be a matter of time (Hours? Maybe even minutes?) before the next train wreck hit. It was a clear-cut pattern. A curse that seemed to work like clockwork. So the goal was simple.

Extend that time in the sun for as long as possible. Ignore the repression, depression, regression, and digression—also known as big, fat, lard-assed intimacy issues—that always got in the way. Hold them at bay while the sun was still out. Before the timer started its countdown again.

“Whoa, there, Tiger—,” Ed laughed, pressing his back against the bathroom door.

“Shhh.” Gaia placed her finger to her lips. “You talk too much, Ed,” she whispered.

“Gaia, your dad's right in the—”

“
Shhh.
Don't talk. Listen, okay? Have you seen a lot of time travel movies?”

“What?” Ed looked positively dumbfounded.

“
Time-travel movies,
Ed,” she pressed. “Am I speaking Spanish? You know, the movies where there's this one particular point in time when some kind of cosmic temporal screw up happens and then the whole universe just veers off in the wrong direction into some horrible alternate universe where everything sucks, until our trusty hero goes back to that point in time when everything got completely screwy and sets the universe back on course?”

“Um…” Ed was searching Gaia's eyes for possible signs of insanity. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, I've seen some of those—”

“Okay,” Gaia rushed, “and would you say you have a good imagination?”

Ed was still having a little trouble keeping up. “I…uh…”

“Pretend,”
Gaia pushed him. “Are you good at pretending?”

“Yeah, I guess I—”

“Good. Perfect. Great,” Gaia said. “Okay, here's the deal, Ed. New beginning, okay? New beginning. We had a cosmic temporal screw up that morning. We skipped over to this horrible alternate universe the morning after our night together. The morning you got shot at.”

“Okay…?”

“Okay, so let's
fix
it. Let's go back to that morning
right now
and set things back on the right course, okay?”

“I—I, uh…,”Ed stammered.

“Ed,”
she snapped. “Work with me here. You've got to work with me. You know how my life goes. You know we've got to make the most of our time here in the bathroom.”

“Okay,
yes,
” Ed agreed. “Okay, it's that morning again. We're back in that morning. I'm coming back home with Bisquick and Aunt Jemima.”

“Good,” Gaia encouraged him. “I'm watching you from out your bedroom window, waiting for you to get back here.”

“Okay. I
don't
get shot at.”

“Correct. You
do not
get shot at,” Gaia agreed. “And I just watch you walk into the building, and then I wait for you to walk back through your bedroom door.”

Ed reached down to the knob of the bathroom door, opened it slightly, and slammed it shut. “Honey, I'm
home,
” he called quietly to Gaia's face. “I brought everything we need for the panc—”

Gaia grabbed onto Ed's shoulders and kissed him, pouring all the combined passion of that morning and this evening, and all the mornings and evenings in between, into one kiss. That's where she would have been. That's where she should have been. Waiting at the door to pull him back into that bed.

She probed every part of his mouth with her own, pressing him back against the door as he reached his arms around her waist and lifted her off the floor.

“What took you so long?” she whispered.

“I had to get the breakfast rose
,
” he whispered back, tickling the inside of her ear with his lips. “You can't have breakfast in bed without the breakfast rose.”

And just like that, Gaia knew they weren't pretending anymore. They were there. They were in Ed's bedroom all those days ago, living out what should have been the rest of that morning. It was so easy to go back. Because in so many ways, she had never really left. The real Gaia had stayed in that room, while ignorant monkey Gaia raised in captivity just babbled and screamed a bunch of destructive nonsense in the miserable alternate universe. But they were back now. Back where they were supposed to be. And this time Gaia was going to talk. Repression was off-limits. Lying was off-limits. Just truth. As much of it as she could stuff into this one moment.

“I want to go back to bed,” she told him.

“Yes,”Ed agreed. “Pancakes later. Let's go back to bed.”

“And then I want to go to the street fair down the street.”

“Yes.”
Ed laughed, pulling Gaia tighter to his body. “So do
I.
I want to go through boxes of two-dollar tube socks with you.”

“I want to look at sushi refrigerator magnets with you, and bad mix tapes.”

“I want a sausage sandwich and a chocolate crepe,” Ed said. “And I want to stay there till they shut the damn thing down.”

“Once I've eaten ten pounds of fried dough, we can leave,” Gaia said. “And then back—”

“To bed, absolutely,” Ed agreed.

Gaia brought her head back slowly, brushing her cheek against the stubble on Ed's chin, gently kissing the corner of his mouth and the area just above his lips. And then finally his lips, breathing him in and out and in again, feeling his fingertips running long trails along the skin of her stomach and her back.

“Ed,” she whispered. “I want to look at tiny, crappy apartments with you, and get a giant dog with you, and read the paper with you, and any other boring bourgeois nonsense you can think of…with you.”

“Is that a proposal?” Ed grinned. “Should I go ask your father for your hand?”

“What, do you think I'm a lunatic?” Gaia squawked. “I'm seventeen years old.”

“Kidding,” Ed said as he smacked his back up against the wall and grabbed Gaia by the shoulders. “Are you fully awake?” he asked, examining her eyes carefully.

Gaia stepped closer and leaned against him. And for the first time in her life, being fearless finally served a
truly
useful purpose. “I'm fully awake, Ed,” she said, looking straight into his dark brown eyes. “And I'm in love with you.”

And with those words, Gaia swore she could actually hear life falling back into alignment like a loud, creaky drawbridge.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the only thing she heard. Ed and Gaia both snapped their heads toward the door as a loud scream rang out from back down the hall.

Tell me it's a joke,
Gaia said to herself as she whipped open the bathroom door and ran for the living room, Ed following close behind.
Tell me it was a laugh or the
sound of someone being tickled. Just don't tell me the clouds are closing already
….

Gaia leapt out into the living room. It was definitely not a joke. It was just a sight that she couldn't begin to understand.

Her father's face was turning a horrid shade of purple. His hands were clutching at his neck as his entire torso fell forward on the table, writhing in some kind of inexplicable pain.

“Somebody call an ambulance!” Natasha screamed.

“I just did!” Tatiana replied. “They're coming! They're coming now.”

Gaia leapt to her father's side and tried to prop him up. “Are you choking?” she asked urgently.

He shook his head no and looked over at Natasha.

“Don't worry, Tom,” Natasha cried. “The ambulance is on its way.”

“I don't
understand,
” Gaia shouted, looking into her father's desperate eyes. “I don't understand what happened!”

“Try to stay calm, Gaia,” Natasha pleaded. “I'm sure the ambulance will—”

There was a loud pounding at the door. “EMS!” they barked through the door. “EMS. We got an emergency call—open up!”

The ambulance had already arrived. It was the fastest Gaia had ever seen an ambulance arrive on the scene.