readingrat | fic: The Cuckoo -- Chapter 11 (Reply)

Part II
Chapter 11: Manipulative Minors

"I thought I knew Cluedo," Wilson said, staring at the game board.

"It's easy," Rachel said encouragingly. "See, you get a token and half of these cards, and we've got to take one of each out first, but don't look at them! Oh, and when it's your turn you have to turn a wheel first."

"What are those cards?" Wilson asked, pointing to another pile.

"You have to take one of those if you get a Dark Mark. It says what you have to do and if you're unlucky, you have to pay money. And if you have no money, you lose."

"I don't remember any money in Cluedo," Wilson said, pulling the rules book towards him, "or any sort of wheel on the game board. I remember Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick."

Rachel giggled. "There's no Co- Cornell Mustard." What a stupid name!

"So I gather," Wilson said. "But there's still a library, thank God! Okay, so the basics are the same: someone gets killed - no, kidnapped - and we have to figure out how and where and who."

Rachel prepared herself for a longer wait. It had taken Mom ages to figure out 'Harry Potter Cluedo', but neither she nor Wilson liked having her explain games to them. They preferred reading all that stuff in the book.

"Dark Mark," Wilson muttered. "Spells. Jeez, this is complicated!"

"Wilson?"

"Hmmm?" He was turning one of the wheels experimentally, ruining Rachel's careful set-up.

"How long is Pete staying?"

Wilson stopped changing the location of the doorways and looked at her. "I don't know. Why?"

She turned the wheel back to its proper position. Then she twisted one of the game coins to make it spin on the table. Finally she said, "He and Mom keep yelling at each other. It's not nice."

"True," Wilson said.

"So tell him to go away."

"Don't you like Pete?"

Rachel considered this. Sometimes Pete was better than any other grown up - he had the fun-nest ideas, he could pull ridiculous faces, and when he wanted to he could explain the coolest stuff. Other times, he was unbelievably grouchy or he'd stare into space not listening to anything that was going on.

"He's okay," Rachel said grudgingly. "But I want Mom happy again."

"She's fine; they've always been that way. It's her way of dealing with him."

"It's annoying."

Wilson rubbed the back of his neck, like when he was playing chess with her. "I guess I could leave; Pete would go with me."

"No!"

He stared at her.

"It's boring when you aren't here," Rachel explained. Wilson was fun. He played board games with her - even chess, which Mom hated. He cooked cool stuff with tons of meat in it and only token amounts of veggies. He could play songs from all her favourite musicals on Pete's guitar and sing them with her; Mom didn't know most of the songs, and she couldn't play anything on the guitar. Which reminded her …

"Are you going to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show with me?" On evenings when Mom had meetings (which was almost every evening at the moment), Rachel and Wilson had gotten into the habit of watching musicals together.

Wilson's eyes widened. "What gave you that idea?"

"That's what Pete rented," Rachel said, her heart sinking. Pete must have been making fun of her again. "He said you'd told him to bring it to watch with me. He said it was a … a classic." The way Pete had said it, drawing the word out, it had sounded as though a 'classic' was a very special kind of musical. "Isn't it?"

"Yes, but The Rocky Horror Picture Show wasn't quite what I meant when I told him to get a classic," Wilson said. "It's not suitable for children."

"He said he'd watch it with us," Rachel wheedled. Pete mostly mocked them when they watched television together, but every now and then he'd join them, standing in the doorway at first making rude comments about the plot, the songs and the actors, but then slowly inching his way towards the couch until he'd end up sprawled next to Wilson. Those were the best evenings: he and Wilson would throw popcorn at each other, sing along loudly, and quote bits of the dialogue at each other.

Wilson was not to be tempted. "I'll get something else. Have you watched The Jungle Book?"

"Of course! And I don't want any more children's musicals. They're boring." Pete wouldn't want to watch those, and it was more fun with Pete there.

"Okay, I'll think of something. Where did he put my car keys?"

Rachel wheeled herself into the kitchen where Pete was sitting, his chin propped on the back of his hand, copying down a whole pile of numbers from his laptop screen onto a piece of paper. Rachel squinted at the paper.

"Hey, that's the picture I drew for Mom for her birthday! You can't take that!"

"Seems I can," he said without looking up. "The whole place is plastered with your squiggles; you think she'll notice if one is missing?"

"I could tell her," Rachel said. Then, while the statement still hung in the air, she said, "Wanna play with me?"

He looked at her over the top of his glasses, rather like the Wolf when he was dressed up as Grandma in Rachel's old illustrated fairy tale book. "Ni-ice," he drawled. "Such skill in the art of blackmail in one so young."

Rachel was stumped. Was 'blackmail' a card game? But she wasn't about to admit that she didn't know it. "Can we play something else?"

"Busy here."

"And when you've finished whatever you're doing?"

"I doubt it. Can you play anything interesting, like poker?"

Knowing that a 'no' would end the conversation, Rachel offered, "You could teach me."

His mouth twitched slightly, but when he looked back at his column of numbers, his expression grew grim again. "She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named wouldn't approve," he said absently, rolling the salt shaker along the fingers of one hand while he tapped his teeth with the pencil he held in the other.

"You don't care about that," Rachel stated boldly.

He looked at her again, this time with a definite quirk around his mouth. "What makes you think that?"

Rachel huffed. "You've been annoying Mom ever since you and Wilson got back from your trip. She's always yelling at you, and it's driving me crazy. You gotta stop!"

"You, and your mom, have got to stop blaming me for all the crap that's happening in your lives."

"Huh?"

Leaning back, he took off his glasses and folded them. "Didn't your mom teach you to say, 'Excuse me,' or 'I'm sorry, I didn't get that'?" He didn't wait for her answer. "Your mom is yelling at me non-stop because she wants something from me that she isn't getting. In short, she's letting off steam. It's got nothing to do with anything I've done."

"But - you're doing a lot of naughty things."

"I've been told that I used to do much naughtier things without your mom getting her panties all in a twist," he said, his eyebrows wriggling in a very funny manner.

"What does she want from you?" Rachel asked, wondering whether she could bully him into giving it to Mom. When she got whiny, people tended to give her what she wanted.

"She wants me to cure Wilson. I can't. End of story."

Cure Wilson? He smelled funny sometimes, but not so bad that you couldn't sit next to him. Nana also smelled like that; she said it was her medicine, but Mom always rolled her eyes when she said that. Maybe it was what old, sick people smelled like. "What's Wilson got?"

"He's got cancer. You know what that is?"

Cancer was bad; she knew that. But Wilson was fine; he coughed sometimes, but that wasn't bad. When Rachel had a cough, she still had to go to school.

"He isn't sick," she said.

"Not so that you'd notice. It's inside him, where you can't see it, but it's there."

"What'll happen?"

"If I can't cure it? He'll die," Pete said without any inflection.

Grown-ups didn't tell children about other grown-ups dying. Or if they did, they tried to make it sound nice. Grown-ups always tried to make bad things seem like fun.

"You're lying," Rachel said.

Pete shrugged, but he wasn't smiling like he was making a joke. His expression was serious. "Ask your mom."

Rachel wrinkled up her nose. The last time she'd asked a grown-up about something she hadn't been supposed to know, it had ended very badly. That had been when she'd asked Julia about Pete driving a car into their house.

Pete seemed to read her thoughts. "Scared of asking her? Then figure out a way to make her spill the beans. Now scram, scat, lift anchor!" He flapped his hands towards the kitchen door.

"We watched Mamma Mia,' Rachel said to Mom. "They wore sparkly clothes and such high shoes!" She held her hands apart in illustration.

"Mamma Mia?" Mom echoed, looking doubtful. "Did you like it?"

Rachel considered the question. "It was okay, but there was too much kissing. Yuck!"

"Well, I guess it's meant for adults rather than children," Mom said. "Brush your hair, please."

"There was a girl who was going to get married," Rachel said. "And she didn't know who her dad was either. In the end she had three dads."

Mom got this look like she'd eaten something sour. "You've got a dad," she said quietly. "Simon is your dad."

Rachel frowned. Mom had explained to her that her real mother had died after she was born and that Simon had been too young to look after her. But he was old now, well over twenty, and he still practically never came to see her. She'd get birthday cards and presents from him, but now that she could read, she could tell that the handwriting in his cards was the same as the one in the cards his parents - they'd asked her to call them 'Grandma' and 'Grandpa' - sent her, which meant that Simon didn't even remember her birthday or buy her presents.

"Are you going to marry Wilson?" Rachel asked. Wilson was a lot older than Simon, which wasn't cool, but at least he was around.

"No, sweetheart," Mom said, laughing a little. "Wilson and I are just good friends. Did that movie give you romantic ideas?" She twisted her bracelet, like she always did when she was thinking. "Life isn't like a movie, you know. In movies, everything is straightforward and simple and everything works out somehow. That's what makes them fun to watch, but that's not how it works in everyday life."

Actually, the movie had been 'stupendously stupid', as Pete said, but Pete and Wilson had sung along and had even done a funny dance in the living room until Wilson had collapsed onto the couch racked with coughs, upon which Pete had given him a funny look and had stalked out of the living room slamming the door behind him. Wilson had pretended that nothing had happened, but he'd stopped singing after that, probably thinking that Rachel wouldn't notice. But she had noticed, because she was watching him to see whether he was really dying, like Pete said. He wasn't going to die of a stupid cough, was he?

Then again, Pete's expression had been scary - not a I'm mad at you! scary, but a I want to cry, even though I'm a grown-up scary. That was the worst kind of scary.

"Wilson coughed a lot today," Rachel said as casually as she could manage.

Mom, putting out her pyjamas, stilled. Then she turned to face her, leaning back against the chest of drawers and folding her arms over her chest. "What have you overheard?" she asked.

"I …," Rachel began, but couldn't think of anything that would explain her knowledge. "Pete said he's dying," she blurted out.

"Great!" Mom said the way she did when she meant the opposite of what she was saying. She rubbed her forehead tiredly.

With a sickening lurch Rachel realised that this meant Pete had told the truth. The corners of her mouth twitched downwards uncontrollably.

"Oh, honey!" Mom cried out, rushing over and plucking her out of her wheelchair. She sagged down onto the bed, cradling Rachel in her arms.

Rachel burrowed her face into Mom's blouse. "I don't want him to die," she said when she could speak again.

"We won't let him," Mom said.

"You mean you'n Pete?"

"Yes, Pete and I. Pete's a very good doctor. He cured me once when I was sick, and Nana too."

"Then maybe you shouldn't yell at him so much," Rachel said.

"What? I don't …."

"If you keep yelling at him, he'll go. And then who'll cure Wilson? And if you aren't gonna marry Wilson, Wilson might go with him. Wilson said that if he left, Pete would go too, so if Pete leaves, maybe Wilson will go with him. 'Cause they're friends." Rachel hiccupped. "And then there'll be no one left at all!"

Mom stared at her, mouth agape. Rachel wiped her nose on her sleeve, but Mom was too dumbstruck to object.

"Did you understand me, Mom?" Rachel asked after a moment. Mom was still staring the way Keith did in Math class when he had no clue how to do the sums. Keith was dense that way.

Mom jerked out of her thoughts. "Yes, I understood you," she said. "No more yelling. I got that." She stood up, putting Rachel down on the bed, and tossed the pyjamas over to her. "Here, get changed. I'll be back." With that she left the room.