by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
As they’d planned, Anno and Drathur kept their first full day on Crossroads Station lowkey. They wandered through the various districts, letting the kits drag them into any shop that had fun toys or treats on display. They spent hours at one of the playgrounds, watching the kits play on the various climbing structures and bounce around inside the anti-grav bubbles. Anno even let herself get talked into playing in a game of tag, chasing the kits as they all somersaulted through the air, scattering and squealing whenever she got close enough to touch them. It was a good day.
And Anno didn’t let the messages from her various siblings piling up on her wrist computer spoil it. She turned off notifications and let herself have a day off. None of her siblings would be surprised by her going incommunicado for a day. After the last eight years, it was kind of her thing, actually — the main thing they knew about her anymore. She needed her space.
When evening came, they gathered up take-out dishes from food stalls to eat in their small quarters again — this time, mostly long, fat noodles that the kits kept wanting to play with while slurping them down.
Once the kits were in bed, at least trying to sleep, Anno and Drathur lay on their own bed in the other room and spoke in whispers, trying to coordinate their plans for the rest of the two weeks. Well, more like a week and half, now that they were two days into their stay on the station and a whole day the following week would be devoted to attending the wedding and related celebrations.
Taking the kits cloud surfing on New Jupiter was a high priority and would take a whole day. Doing a spacewalk all the way around the station accounted for another day of plans — possibly two if the kits enjoyed it enough to want to do it again. And once Anno reluctantly started reading through the messages from her family that had been piling up on her wrist computer all day, she found herself having to juggle her own plans with constraints and hopes and requests from her siblings. It was too much. It was all too much.
Anno shoved her wrist computer deep under her pillow, closed her eyes tight, and flattened her ears, as if she could shut the knowledge of the complex game of Tetris (yes, she’d played Tetris — it was one of the Ancient Earth games that had had some of the most staying power of anything in human culture) she had to play to fit in everything she wanted to do with her kits, show to her kits, and revisit for herself before it would be time to go.
“We don’t have to say ‘yes’ to any of your siblings’ invitations,” Drathur said gently.
“Yes we do,” Anno said. “You saw how the kits were with their cousins. You saw how much fun they were having, and you heard them asking about seeing the cousins again all day today.”
Drathur said nothing. He couldn’t argue with that. He’d been there. And it wouldn’t have been possible to miss how excited Loi, Mei, and Darso were about their newly discovered cousins — both the ones they’d met and the ones they’d only heard about.
“If we leave without the kits getting to see any cousins again at all… we will never hear the end of it.” Anno shoved her pointed muzzle into the downy pillow, letting it muffle her words and refusing to care. “It’ll be a story they tell about how we broke their little hearts that lasts for the rest of our lives.” After a moment, Anno expanded her thinking beyond the kits… to her siblings themselves. “And besides, if I disappear again… after only one short visit, while they know I’m on the station for two weeks, I don’t think any of my siblings would forgive me for that. Forever. That kind of thing… that mistake would be permanent. But I just don’t know how not to make it. I don’t know how to have energy to deal with seeing any of them again.”
Anno started to groan, low and deep in the back of her throat, with her face still shoved into the pillow. She felt trapped, like she had way back when she’d actually lived on Crossroads Station. This was why she’d had to get away.
“Okay,” Drathur said, adjusting his strategy. “Maybe we do see some of them, but we do it on our terms.”
Anno’s ears perked a little, and she mumbled into the pillow, “Like… how?”
“Well, instead of accepting all these dinner and outing invitations…” He paused; sometimes it seemed like his thoughts just moved more slowly than Anno’s, but they were usually worth waiting for. “…we decide what we want to do for ourselves, and then we invite them to join us. Or not. Either way would be fine, because we’d already know what we want to be doing. We get extra company for it? Great. We don’t? Not a problem, and not our fault that it didn’t work out. This is our vacation.” Drathur laid a hand heavily on Anno’s shoulder. “We get to spend it how we want.”
Anno pulled away from the pillow, looked up at her husband, and saw the steady calmness he always seemed to radiate. She nodded. “Okay.”
Maybe she could see her family and not get swept away by them. Maybe. If Drathur anchored her, then maybe, just maybe, it would work.
“It’s hard,” Anno said, “seeing them all and not getting pulled right back into worrying about each of them and what all their needs are… and letting it overwhelm me.” She sat up, pulled her knees against her chest, and hugged them close, effectively wrapping herself up into a tight ball.
Most of Anno’s sibling would probably have found the idea of her being overwhelmed by worrying about all of their needs funny. She had stood up for herself so fiercely — and noisily — against their mother when she’d been back at home. But she’d been fighting for the last vestiges of herself. What they hadn’t seen, what none of them had ever seemed to notice, was how much of herself she’d been sublimating — how much of her had just drifted away under the tides of all of them together.
Anno had been a less picky eater than many of her younger siblings, so she’d learned it was easier for everyone if she just went along with what Lut and Iko settled on wanting to eat. She’d been a more advanced student, being older, so all the group games and family movie nights had been too simple, too easy for her. She’d learned to just push her own needs and preferences aside on so many things. By the time she’d moved out on her own, Anno didn’t even remember what kind of food or entertainment she liked best. She just knew what all her younger siblings liked. She’d had to start thinking about her own preferences for the first time in years in order to actually figure out what they were.
Anno didn’t want to go back to being that person — a person who felt like she was being pushed around like a wispy blade of grass in a windstorm, constantly bending almost to the point of breaking… but who seemed to look to everyone around her like a stubborn tree trunk. Implacable. Unmovable. Uncaring. She hadn’t enjoyed that contradiction in the difference between how she felt on the inside and who the people she loved told her she was. Who they saw when looking at her.
It had taken Anno years to sort out who she was without her family twisting her up and pulling her in every direction. Years to find the core of herself and build a life around it that let her expand out and really exist, rather than feeling like a shadow inside her own body.
She couldn’t go back to being a shadow again.
Continue on to Chapter 14…