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.
Every night on the space freighter, it was a struggle to get the kits to go to bed. Well, no, it was a struggle to get them to quiet down and go to sleep. Not only did the idea of dividing the day up into separate portions of ‘day’ and ‘night’ feel very artificial to the suddenly savvy little children, but the thin walls meant they could hear other passengers moving through the hallways and talking in neighboring rooms, all very much awake.
Mei argued that without a sun anywhere near the ship, clearly she didn’t need sleep anymore. Obviously, the sun setting was the cause of the Heffen need to sleep, and without a sun to set, she would never need to sleep again. Loi and Darso weren’t sure that sounded right, but they liked the idea of never sleeping again.
Worse, back at home, each kit had their own small room, and on the freighter, the three of them were sharing one room and one big bed. Well, medium-sized bed, but the kits were small enough that it seemed big to them. This made every night a sleepover, and it’s much harder to get three kits to settle down when they’re together than when Anno and Drathur could separate them. Divide and conquer is a big part of raising a litter.
Fortunately, to make the nights easier, Anno had thought ahead — she’d used the 3D printer before they’d left to generate a series of tiny figurines as nightly gifts for the kits. She’d found a file with schematics for figurines representing most of the alien species common in this branch of the galaxy’s spiral arm. Just cute little plastic toys, nothing much. They’d be easy to melt back down and reuse their materials after the trip was over or whenever the kits tired of them. But for now, they were the trip’s saving grace.
Anno and Drathur had carefully wrapped the tiny figurines the night before they’d left, and each night of the flight, the kits got to pick one tiny present to unwrap. But they had to promise to settle down for their bedtime story after unwrapping it and go right to sleep after that.
A lot of different species live on Crossroads Station, but Anno had focused on the species of her younger siblings and mother for the flight there. So, each of the nights on the way to the station, the kits opened a tiny present with either one or two figurines, and then Anno told them stories about her younger siblings who were the same species as the figurines they’d chosen until they fell asleep.
It was a good way to quiet the children for the night, but it was also a good way to prepare them for meeting any relatives who they might be introduced to soon. Anno wasn’t sure which of her siblings she’d be meeting with during her visit home. She knew she should send her mother and siblings all a message preparing them for her arrival… but she hadn’t been able to do it. Not before they’d left. Not the first night of the trip… And then each successive day, it just seemed harder, and somehow, she found herself on the last night of the freighter ride, looking down at her kits, each clutching a little koala-like figurine in their sleep, and feeling like an absolute fool.
Anno stepped gingerly through the dim room, trying not to step her paws on any of the other figurines from previous nights, which had — of course — been left strewn around the floor of the kits’ room. She closed the door adjoining her and Drathur’s room to theirs, and sighed in deep relief.
“They’re asleep?” Drathur whispered. He was laying on the bed with his portable computer on his lap, trying to squeeze some work in while Anno told the kits their bedtime stories.
“Loi says the Woaoo figurine is her favorite, and she can’t wait to meet Grandma Clori,” Anno whispered back, crawling onto the bed beside Drathur.
The fur between his eyes creased with concern. “That sounds hard for you. Are you okay?”
Anno shrugged one shoulder; the other was leaned against the bed. “I’m the one who decided to teach them about my family. I’m the one who chose cute stories from my childhood to share.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not hard.”
“Yeah.” Anno leaned back and closed her eyes. That didn’t shut out the visions of her imagination which was absolutely cluttered with all the possible ways her mother, Clori, might greet her after all these years of silence. They ranged from hugs and praise to… nothing. A cold shoulder, a sharp glare, and no words at all.
“Would you like me to write a message for you to send?” Drathur asked. “I could compose something simple, and then you could send it. Would that make it easier?”
Anno shook her head without opening her eyes. “No, I can write it.” Of course, she hadn’t been writing it. As long as she didn’t send her family a message, they couldn’t fail to respond.
“Would it help if I sent it?” Drathur asked. “Just, you know, something like, ‘Hey, you don’t know me, but I’m the father of your grandkids — or nieces and nephew, as the case may be — and we’ll be visiting the station and wanted to know if you’d like to get together?’”
Anno quirked a smile. She couldn’t help it. She liked the idea of Drathur running interference for her. But it wouldn’t solve the real problem — just like she’d been afraid that Am-lei hadn’t really wanted her to come to the wedding, she was terrified that the answer from her mother and siblings would simply be, “No.” No, they didn’t want to see her. And that wouldn’t be any easier to hear relayed from him.
However, it might be easier to read it on a screen in a message than to see it happen on her mother’s face in real time, in person.
It really would be better to send a message ahead of them, even if it could only beat them to Crossroads Station by half a day at this point. There would be a lot to do when they arrived, with disembarking and settling into the quarters they’d rented for their stay. So, maybe there’d be a full day once that was all added together.
“It’ll be better to read a message that says, ‘no,’ than see my mother’s face shut down and close me out, expressing her rejection with her eyes and the flattening of her big round fluffy ears…” Anno was talking to herself more than Drathur, trying to hype herself up into doing what she needed to do.
Drathur didn’t say anything. He wasn’t the kind of person to offer reassurance when he didn’t know if it was well-grounded, and he didn’t know what Clori and Anno’s siblings would think about her waltzing back onto Crossroads Station for two weeks, with absolutely no warning, after disappearing for eight years.
Anno appreciated that Drathur didn’t fill her pointed ears with empty promises about how everything would be okay. But his silence was hard to hear; it reflected her own worries far too well.
Drathur grabbed Anno’s paw and squeezed it, in lieu of empty words. He squeezed it until she opened her eyes again and looked at him.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll write it, and all you have to do is agree to letting me send it.”
“From my account, though,” Anno amended. “Like it was written by and comes from me.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “Whatever you want.”
Drathur turned his computer to where she could see the screen and began composing the first words Anno would say to her family in most of a decade. There were no words that could be good enough. But she’d already put this off as long as she could. Letting Drathur help her was better than risking setting paw on Crossroads Station without warning her family, better than risking running into them while their faces were unguarded and might show their true feelings about her.
This was better. Even if it was too little, it was better.
Continue on to Chapter 7…