Peripeteia by Mirage
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Chapter or StoryAuthor's Chapter Notes:
I apologize for my tardiness. I also apologize for this chapter.
"You're having second thoughts," Jarod said.
"You should be, too," Parker cautioned. "You're risking a hell of a lot more than I am, and, unlike you, I've already done this dozens of times, or," she added tentatively, "it feels like I have."
"Then you are still having premonitions," Jarod said, returning his gaze to the road. He considered infinite choices, actions, reactions, infinite permutations of actions and reactions, paths taken and not.
He couldn't stop himself from pondering the other versions of himself Parker might have encountered turning left or right, or keeping straight at the intersection of four battered roads, and the influence they'd evidently had on her.
Questions lingered on Jarod's tongue; he swallowed them all, and glanced at her. "Ethan," he explained succinctly, answering the questions in Parker's eyes.
"Isn't with your family, is he?" She asked.
"No, I'm sorry, he isn't. We'll find him. We'll find our brother, and your baby brother. I'll never give up."
"Neither will I."
"Is there anything else you want to tell me?"
"You want to know if I'm still Haley Joel-ing like I was in Carthis, and communicating with dead people?"
"Uh-- I don't know what a Haley Joel-ing is, but, yes, in Scotland, you were being guided by a child who died more than a century earlier. Prior to that trip, Ethan said you were having premonitions, and Broots said you were having visions, and now, it's obvious that your inner sense is no longer dormant."
"It began before Carthis," Parker said with a mirthless smile. "I saw Tommy. He was with me, warning me, and-- just waiting. He," she added somberly, "he told me to trust you. Insisted. And I must have listened to him, because I took your advice, and I finally told him that I love him. And then he was gone. Go ahead and say it, Jarod. Tell me I'm crazy."
"If you are then we both must be, after all, you and I both saw Faith. Insanity isn't a foregone conclusion simply because there isn't another rational explanation."
"You can tell Sydney that the next time you two have a little sit down. He theorizes that it's my unfinished business, that I'm seeking closure, trying to resolve trauma, and possibly disassociating. He prescribed me anti-psychotics, and rest."
"That doesn't sound like Sydney. He wouldn't react that aggressively to a couple of instances of-"
"Dozens," Parker confessed. "Yeah, I know that look well," she said in response to Jarod's suddenly grave expression. "You know," she confided in a tight, flat voice, "I specifically asked Sydney not to tell you about any of this, asked him not to betray me. Only insanity, Jarod," Parker said, shaking her head slowly, "would explain why I'm here-- betraying myself."
"I think you're under an enormous amount of stress, and now you're afraid for your baby brother, too, and with good reason. Tell me, how have you been coping with all of this?"
"Better than I was when I was drinking scotch like it was a competitive sport."
Jarod widened his eyes, and remarked blandly, "A competitive sport. That bad, hmm?"
"Yeah," Parker said, surveying the empty, fallow fields beyond the window, "but I can finally empathize with Ebeneezer now."
"You knew how to reach me," Jarod said. "You didn't have to go through this alone. Or didn't you check your voicemail?"
"I appreciated the sentiment, Jarod, but you and I both know how complicated this is."
"Then," Jarod pleaded, "let's uncomplicate it."
"I don't know how to do that."
"You could try," Jarod said. "That's all I ask. We're not that different, you and me," he added after a moment. "We never have been. We have a lot more in common now. I help people, too."
"The people you help are alive, Jarod, and no one's accusing you of being insane or experiencing symptoms of trauma."
"No one recently. Look, maybe Sydney's wrong, and the ghosts are real. Or maybe Sydney is only partially wrong. Maybe helping these ghosts, these--hallucinations if it's what they are, is how you help you, maybe this is how you are supposed to heal your trauma."
"Is that what you've been doing since escaping the Centre, Jarod? Healing yourself by helping others?"
"Not exactly. What you're feeling and doing right now isn't sustainable. The constant worry, the churning in your gut, the pressure in your chest, the choking feeling in your throat, the desperation, the way your body rejects food and sleep.
I've been exactly where you are, and if you're going to to survive you can't live there. It gnaws at sanity until there's nothing left. I would have become an entirely different person had I remained in an uninterrupted state of heightened stress, pain, anxiety, and constant, fruitless searching."
"He's a toddler, Jarod," Parker exclaimed in a tremulous voice thick with grief. "I don't know who has him or what they're doing to him, or if he's eating or- or---" Parker drew a sharp breath, held it, summoned composure. "I have to find him."
"You will. My family's going to help you."
"Why? Why in the hell would your family help me after everything I've done to them?"
"Why don't you ask them yourself," Jarod said, slipping the gear into park. "Let's go."
The pair were barely out of the car when Ian bounded down the steps. "Uh-oh," Jarod announced, "Incoming."
"He," Parker said with a gasp, and immediately fell silent.
"Mhm, he still looks like me."
"No kidding," Parker murmured.
"You don't have to pretend that it doesn't freak you out. He'll know."
"Because he is exactly like you."
"Yes," Jarod agreed, confessing, lightly, "and it still freaks me out."
"I knew I'd see you again," Ian said with a sheepish grin, and confessed guilelessly, "I'm really nervous. But that's expected. You are too, probably," he said suddenly. "This has to be even more weird for you."
Parker smiled, and confessed with a nod, "A little bit, yeah."
"You'll adjust," Ian confidently asserted. "You only just now arrived. By the way, welcome home," he said, opening his arms to her, and, when Parker did the same, embracing her. "I hope you'll stay for a while," he said when he released her.
"Ian," Parker said, shaking her head, "I don't know-"
"Of course she'll stay for a while," Major Charles interjected, and observed Parker meet his gaze. "I just spoke to your Mr. Broots. He was worried when you didn't answer your phone. I don't know how the hell he was able to get this number, but I suppose that's neither here nor there. Come on up," he said, indicating a rocker with an extended hand. "Please."
"I gotta get back to work," Ian said, walking backward and then turning and jogging up the steps.
"Work?" Parker said quietly.
"He's coordinating with Mr. Broots to assist in the search for your baby brother," Major Charles said. "I've made some calls, Emily's reached out to her contacts. You're going to see him again soon, Miss Parker."
Parker nodded appreciatively, and accepted tea, all the while silently thinking, not soon enough. She never once suspected that Major Charles' words, intended to comfort her, would prove prophetic.
Nor did Parker suspect that Catherine had been appeased by something other than her willingness to cooperate with Jarod.
She forced herself to continue cooperating, drank tea, and allowed Jarod's father to convince her to join the family in the dining room.
Parker had never understood the evident obsession people have with feeding the worried, the anguished, the heartbroken, the lost, the seekers, the separated, the grieving.
The knot of fear in her throat made it impossible to swallow anything except liquids, and even that required an enormous effort. Rather than demand she eat, Jarod pushed a milkshake into her hand, quickly explained the health benefits of its contents, and returned to his chair.
Parker watched Jarod scoop up a veggie wrap with his left hand and quietly tap out messages on the laptop with the right. Emily, similarly, devoured a slice of pizza and occasionally shouted demands into her mobile while pacing the floor of the library.
Ian and Major Charles were somewhere, too, Parker guessed, no doubt multitasking.
This was their life, and had been for decades, and it broke Parker's heart.
Blinking back tears, Parker returned her gaze to her own laptop, and tried to force her hands to stop trembling. She lifted the straw to her mouth, forced herself to swallow, felt her stomach lurch.
It's not so bad now. And at least Mom's quiet. That has to mean something.
The silence gave Parker hope that she was, at last, on the correct path, and that the present detour was only a brief stop on the journey to a new life in Landsmeer with her baby brother.
But hope could be cruel, and the impact devastating after the plummet back to reality.
Parker had tried to temper her expectations while plotting the rescue, purchasing a home in Europe, depositing money into a fund for her baby brother. Her mother's memory served as stern reminder of the fate awaiting those who defy the Centre.
Nevertheless, Parker couldn't stop herself from loving the child, and, like her mother, she wanted, more than anything, to give her baby brother a real childhood and watch him grow up.
Staring at the laptop's dim screen, she realized with a pang of sorrow that he never would.
Her baby brother wasn't going to be found in any of the police reports she'd accessed, by any of Emily's contacts, or in any of the places that the international search party assembled by Major Charles intended to look.
Baby Parker was in the screen's reflection, standing at Parker's side. He circled the table slowly, and climbed into the chair recently vacated by Jarod.
The Pretender had excused himself after being summoned by his father via text, and Emily was two rooms away, eating her way through a deep dish pizza, and giving some poor soul absolute hell through clenched teeth.
Emily had observed Jarod leave, and was becoming agitated by his continued absence. She didn't trust the Parkers, through no fault of her own, of course; being tossed out of a window by one of them had tainted the entire lot.
It wasn't a question of one bad apple either, or a spoiled bunch. Based on her extensive research, she worried that the entire family tree was rotten and hollow, and should be felled.
Emily, understandably, didn't think it was wise to leave Parker alone. Neither did Jarod, although for enitrely different reasons.
"A 911 text, Dad?" Jarod said, dropping to a low crouch beside his father. "What's the emergency?"
"I'm afraid that what I have to say is going to come as a shock. It's about that Brigitte woman."
"What could Brigitte possibly have to do with us finding Miss Parker's brother."
"That's just it. He isn't Miss Parker's brother, Jarod," Major Charles whispered. "He's her son. And not just hers, Jarod," Major Charles continued gravely, " he's-"
"No," Jarod interrupted fiercely with a resolute head shake.
"Brigitte was a surrogate. To prove her loyalty to Mr. Parker she carried your-"
"Dad," Jarod stammered tearfully.
"Your and Miss Parker's child," concluded Major Charles.
Jarod lowered his head, and groaned a ragged, "God," through clenched teeth.
"I know, Son," Major Charles said, parking a consoling hand on Jarod's shoulder. "I know. One of us is going to have to tell her the truth."
Jarod rose, and pushed a hand over his face. Major Charles found his son's swift transition from shocked disbelief and tears of anguish to murderous rage and clenched fists rather alarming.
The bastards. They create my child without my permission and then deny me the opportunity to care for him, and now they've lost him.
"Jarod? Son? Did you hear me?"
"Yes," Jarod answered, adding in a tone of forlorn resignation, "I'll tell her."
Jarod absolutely would have told Parker, too, but when he returned to the dining room she was kneeling on the floor and pleading with his chair.
He felt physically unwell suddenly, and implausibly even more enraged. He was ashamed of himself for questioning Sydney's competence.
Clearly, the psychiatrist hadn't acted too aggressively. Jarod feared that perhaps Sydney had been much too conservative.
Jaord had personally treated patients who were more stable than Parker and they'd been involuntarily hospitalized at the time.
As if she'd overheard Jarod's thoughts, Parker fell silent, and swung her tearful gaze at him.
"It's okay," Parker assured Jarod, and Jarod wanted to scream a sternly worded rebuttal.
He believed she had a right to know she was a mother; he also believed that she was entirely too disconnected from reality to comprehend his words.
"Join us," Parker said, returning her gaze to the chair. "He wants to say goodbye."
Jarod shook his head slowly, forced himself to smile, and entered the room. "Look," he said softly, "I think you need to lie down now, and try to get some rest. Please."
"Soon," Parker insisted quietly, adding carefully, "He wants me to tell you that he liked the bunny."
"All right," Jarod said with a placating smile, deliberately choosing to remain neutral and neither feed nor outright starve the delusions, and, as a result, agitate her.
He believed she was suffering from a legitimate mental health crisis, and intended to telephone Sydney the second she fell asleep.
"No, it isn't all right, Jarod," Parker argued softly, pushing tears away with trembling fingers, and nodding slowly at an empty chair. "He feels your anger and pain just like he did when---- when you visited him in the infirmary, and left him the pink bunny."
Jarod inhaled a sharp breath and shook his head in negation. Parker's words, he believed, rang agonizingly true, and she seemed mentally sound. Devastated, yes, but lucid.
He had, in fact, visited the infirmary, on numerous occasions over the years, to see various people, including Sydney and Parker.
He'd only left one pink bunny in all of those years, just months after meeting a sexually abusive priest referred to as Shifty G by several people Jarod had questioned.
He recalled the Veritas project, and Raines masquerading—as millions of people do—as a Christian.
Jarod found Parker's words too difficult to comprehend and process. In fact, a small part of Jarod wanted Parker to be unstable, because it was considerably less painful than what she was suggesting.
A mental illness could be treated; their child's death could not.
Jarod briefly considered sedating Parker, and resuming his search for their son in peace. Jarod shuddered at the thought, widened his eyes.
The mental health crisis, he realized, was all his.
Or, Jarod argued— with himself, I failed to successfully bypass Centre surveillance, and she was watching when I left the pink bunny with her baby br-- our child.
Or maybe I accidentally confided in Sydney, and he told her.
Or--
Parker refused to let Jarod slip any further, or fall; salvation, however, was as brutal as it was compassionate.
"You whispered in his ear that his big sister," Parker said slowly, and forcefully, determined to say the truth plainly and clearly. She couldn't afford to lose a single syllable in incoherent sobs; she didn't have the strength to repeat herself. She drew a sharp breath, and looking up into Jarod's face, concluded tearfully, "loves bunnies, too."
Jarod followed Parker's gaze to the chair, attempted again to see what, or who, Parker saw there, and discovered, with a start, that the pink bunny, the one he'd given their child, inexplicably occupied it.
Jarod was only distantly aware of the grief siphoning oxygen from his lungs, the room undulating and briefly darkening, the strangled cry in his throat. And Parker's sobs.
The Pretender pursued every logical explanation, reached for one after another, and grasped only emptiness. Arriving at inevitable dead-ends, he backtracked, determined to disprove the proven, unveil the deception and misdirection Parker had employed to create such an elaborate and cruel illusion.
He was no longer pursuing truth, he realized; he was running from it, and his hypocrisy wasn't lost on him.
Jarod felt hope completely wither, and tears on his face, and his knees buckle.
He couldn't stop himself from sinking to the floor, and into a dark and unfamiliar corridor of hell--- at Parker's side.
Instinctively, he drew her into his arms, and wept while she sobbed into his chest.
Chapter End Notes:
Sorry, Fam.
