Home Before Home

Their Third Winter

When he was a little boy on Vulcan, his mother had always loved the rain. It did not seem logical to him, and he had told her so. But she had smiled and said, "Well, Spock, you're right. It's not logical." That was not a satisfactory answer; Vulcans argue only for reasons, and if one's mother would not give one a reason to argue, it followed that one could not argue. One could, however, ask her why, provided that one did not expect an answer one could understand.

"It makes me feel happy," she had answered. "It makes me feel at home."

The infrequent torrential rains on his home planet did not make him feel at home. They made him feel sticky, as though he wanted to shake the unfamiliar humidity off his hands and feet and lick himself to wash off the wet, which was not logical either. But his mother, whose distant ancestors were not feline, insisted that rain made her feel happy. "It's so soothing," she would say, standing at the window to watch the grayness that obscured the red sun and set everything awash. "Just listen...."

He stood at the window now, secure in the knowledge that the frames he had replaced one point two five years ago would not leak as the original frames had done, and watched Sarah and Jill "going for a splash" in the brightly colored ponchos that Sarah had made for them. ("It's yellow!" she had exclaimed in delight that first summer when they found the lightweight tarpaulin that the Earthbounders had left rolled up in the kennel, its intended use a mystery at the time. "We can cut it up for mackinaws." Why she would want to do that had been difficult for him to understand until this winter, when Jill was old enough to go for a splash. But he understood now.) Watching them from the window, he listened to the soft, monotonous drumming of the rain on the roof of the bungalow, found it pleasant to be inside where it was dry, and also to be watching the two outside. Wet hair tangled on their shoulders, they ran barefoot and laughing, hand in hand, two bright spots of sunshine in silver-gray. If the rain had reminded Amanda of home in those long-gone days of his childhood, Sarah and Jill reminded him of home now--here in the only home any of them would probably ever have.

He suppressed a sigh, controlled his recurring melancholy, and turned from the window to lay a fire for their return. Feline-descended they were not, but it had been a long winter, and he knew from experience how much they would both enjoy the fire when they came in from their splash.

Maintaining a supply of dry wood was difficult, but difficult tasks passed the time, and so he sought them out and (if truth were told) spent more time than was justified in their accomplishment. Belatedly, he suspected that the tarp had been used to cover the woodpile in winter; what remained of it was still used for that purpose, and he had also found a number of nooks and crannies in each of the buildings where wood could be piled, in neat stacks to conserve space, each time there were enough sunny days in tandem to dry it out. The cutting and stacking were time-consuming enough to give him an additional reason to look forward to the appearance of the sun. And Sarah's restlessness and Jill's incessant energy ensured that there would be enough excursions into the winter rain to justify what Sarah called "squirreling away" the wood for the fireplace. However, the necessity of arranging the stacks in layers, each one fitted together like a puzzle, was debatable. Occasionally he would wonder if this behavior were obsessive--until he considered the minimal alternatives available during the rainy season. Put succinctly, much of the time he had nothing else to do.

And so he took his time laying the fire, arranging the kindling and larger pieces to please his sense of order, only marginally aware of how much he was anticipating Sarah's pleasure at seeing the fire when she came in. When he realized the extent of his anticipation of that event, he took pains to subdue it. It was not logical to take inordinate pleasure in such inconsequential events, especially in light of the fact that this one took place nearly every day.

Curious phenomenon, that. Never having lived in close proximity to another being, he had been unaware of the dynamics of the resultant personal interaction. Down the long tunnel of memory, he heard her saying, "Give a damn, Spock. Just give a damn." Could this, perhaps, be what she meant--this quiet delight that rose in him when she came through the door and saw the fire already burning? Such a small thing to mean so much to a human.

Giving her pleasure pleases me said a heavily muffled voice deep inside him. But he chose to disregard it as irrelevant.

As he went on meticulously laying the fire, he remembered how much she had changed in the three years since they had come to Tara. Grown up, he supposed one could call it, although that would be over-simplification in the extreme. She was complex enough to defy categorization, and to attempt to do so was to invite catastrophe. Even now, it baffled him that one person's inconsistencies could exasperate and even infuriate him to the edge of control, only to fling him to the opposite extreme (respect? affection?) within hours or even within moments. Of late, however, the extremes were less perceptible as such, and for that he was grateful. There had been danger to Jill in her mother's emotional excesses, and danger to the Image in Sarah's once-evident preoccupation with physical gratification. He knew that he would not have given in to her, would never have betrayed the Image. Even now, with the Time approaching in one point three years, he felt secure in the fact that the problem was solved before it became a problem. Sarah was now well able to survive and protect Jill alone; he would simply take the 'craft far enough away to prevent him from returning on foot before he died, land it, and irreparably damage the mechanism while he was still sane enough to do it. The logical simplicity of the plan pleased him; for the first time in months he thought of the Father, and how much this solution would have pleased him as well.

Satisfied, he lit the fire, sat back on his heels, and stared into the flames as Sarah often did. No Vulcan would enjoy this atavistic preoccupation. And yet he indulged for a moment, perhaps because there was no one there to see him do it. And his thoughts wandered on.

In any case, the proximate problem of Sarah's unfulfilled appetites now appeared to have been solved as well--by her rather than by him, and without his being forced into an arbitrary position of outright rejection. If only he could be as sure that she would--

Despair, sudden and overwhelming, engulfed him, and he bowed his head against the onslaught.

I know he's coming back for me. Why doesn't he do it?

Control. Gain control. Jim could not be dead. He would know it if Jim were dead.

But why doesn't he come back?

He forced the fear and the confusion and, yes, the anger under control. Anger against what? Fate? What would be, would be. Control. Slowly he raised his head and took a deep breath as the soothing flames rose higher. Jim would come back. It might not be soon enough for him. But surely--surely it would be soon enough for Jill.

It was only when he thought of Jill never knowing her father that his logically simple plan for his own demise faltered and threatened to collapse. Who, then, would tell her again and again that her father was the captain of a starship? He knew that she did not understand the words, but he knew also that she somehow understood how important those words were. For how long? Who would keep the memory alive for her? It was not logical to expect Sarah to do that. She had known Jim for only a few days, had been involved in a transient relationship that he still could not begin to understand. What then would become of the promise he himself had made on the night of Jill's birth--to see to it that she never forgot the father she had never met? Only a halfling would have made such an illogical vow. The Father.... But he was not the Father. He was not anyone's father, least of all Jill's....

For a moment he was filled with a bittersweet longing that he had not permitted himself to feel since he received Sarah's child into his hands and lost for a moment the precious emotional distance that Sarah had tried so hard to help him preserve. The muffled voice inside him, which he could never quite silence, had whispered, I wish it were mine.

Not this baby.

My baby.

And...hers?

At that moment, Sarah and Jill burst into the room, laughing and scattering raindrops. Seeing the fire, Sarah paused and drew in her breath--hair molded to her head, face streaked with rain, eyes alight with pleasure. And he thought, You are beautiful, and cut down the thought and buried it.

So much danger here....

Even as he controlled, he saw Sarah mute her pleasure rather than embarrass him. "That's wonderful," she said quietly. "Look, Jill. Spock made us a fire."

"He a'ways does," Jill informed her happily, and the two of them discarded their dripping yellow mackinaws in a pile on the floor. Spock concentrated on wondering why Sarah found it necessary to do that, thereby successfully banishing the most disquieting thoughts he had had in months.

That evening, he worked again on the cradle he was making for Jill's doll. She had long since given up "bathing" everything Sarah made for her that remotely resembled a baby, and was now inordinately fond of a diaper-doll that Sarah has stuffed with grass and drawn a face for. The doll's name was Dolly. To Jill, there were only three given names on the world, and Sarah's suggestions of names had no meaning for her. Both Sarah and Spock were disturbed by this; Jill's unfamiliarity with basic human conventions continually reminded them that without memories of another life, she was much more isolated than they were. Attempting to counteract this, Sarah had formed the habit of telling what she called "family stories" while they sat by the fire in the evenings. This evening, the story involved Sarah and her cousin Chris, and a certain escapade that appeared to amuse and sadden her at the same time. Memories should not sadden us, Spock thought. Memories should kept in a safe place to be enjoyed and savored. In fantasy, he saw himself playing chess with Jim of an evening, with McCoy lounging nearby, glass in hand. He could not savor that memory, but only yearn for it. So much for Vulcan advice to humans. Had it not always been so? And why had he not learned that elementary fact until it was too late?

As usual, Jill was full of questions. "What's Christmas?" "What's a stocking?" "What's cookie dough?" Sarah explained, brushing her hair in the firelight. Spock worked on the cradle, firmly refusing to notice how the light played on her hair as she brushed. "What's a cuzzin?" Jill asked finally.

"A cousin is...someone whose mother is your father's sister, or whose father is your mother's brother, or--"

"What's a sister?"

"A little girl," Sarah explained, obviously aware that she was far out of her depth in what should have been very shallow water, "who has the same mother and--"

"Can I have one?" Jill asked eagerly.

Sarah's mouth opened, but no sound came.

"Look, Jill." Rising without haste, Spock took the small, unfinished cradle in his hands and sat on the floor next to the child. He showed her how Dolly would fit into the cradle, and explained how he would sand it down until it was so smooth that Dolly would not snag on it as she did now. Jill looked at the cradle and then at his hands, appearing to be equally fascinated with both. Sarah, he had noticed, often watched his hands too, and he wondered why both of them appeared to enjoy doing that. A hand, as T'Pau would say, is a hand. In any case, Jill was successfully diverted from her former conversational path, and when he looked up at Sarah, she mouthed a silent Thank you.

After the child was in bed, they sat before the fire in companionable silence for a long time--Sarah on the floor, arms around her knees, staring into the flames, and Spock sanding the cradle, which was already taking on a pleasing sheen.

"How can we explain things to her," Sarah asked finally, "when she has no referents?" There was frustration in her voice, and something like despair.

"We shall continue to tell her 'family stories.'"

"We?"

Spock raised an eyebrow. "I was not left on a doorstep." But in his mind, he saw Jim. And McCoy. And all the others....

Sarah smiled briefly. "No. But I was. Almost."

"You?"

She told him then, for the first time. About the parents who were killed when she was a child. About the aunt and uncle on her mother's side who took her in and raised her among their children as one of their own. "Except I wasn't," she said wistfully. "Not really." And about her paternal grandfather, who was "the only person who was really mine." Sitting before the fire, staring into it as Spock had done earlier, she became for him, for the first time, a person with a life--a life that had existed before Tara, before James Kirk. It was damp outside the fire's circle, and she had thrown a blanket around her shoulders in lieu of a shawl. The blanket slipped off one shoulder, but she want on talking, unaware. He listened, fascinated, drinking in the newness of her. "He told me about my father, his son. About my mother too, but he didn't know her very well. And about my grandmother." And she told him then about her alien grandmother who had stowed away on a spaceship because her planet was not a safe place to be. "She used to say that her parents chose their kinsmen unwisely." It was a quotation. He could surmise that from the way she said it. And everything fell into place at last.

Zarabeth.

At least she had had a child of her own. Before. And that child had been Sarah's grandmother.

It had been several years since he had seen in retrospect Sarah's face as she bent over the Tiffany lamp, marveling at its beauty--the same face he had seen when Zarabeth bent over the fire in her icebound cave. But now he knew that it was not the same face at all. Astonished, he realized that it had been a very long time indeed since he had seen Zarabeth when he looked at Sarah.

"What are you think--" she began, and stopped. "I'm sorry. That's not something you ask a Vulcan."

"Why did you wish to ask it?" Something inside said Danger. But he ignored it. This was a friend. They could not survive together, even for another one point three years, unless they were friends.

"You looked so...I don't know. Puzzled. Relieved." She smiled, and her hair shone gold in the firelight. "Spock, you really have no idea how transparent you are."

Stop.

He laid the cradle aside and rose, breaking the intimacy of the moment with what seemed to him to be remarkable tact and delicacy. "You were fortunate to have your grandfather nearby during that time." Leaning over, he pulled the blanket up around her shoulder again. A gesture of friendship, so that she would not feel rejected. "The rain has stopped. I shall check on the animals in the kennel." She nodded--calm, undisturbed, and he went out into the night gratified that they two were better friends than they had been before.

Alone before the fire, Sarah hid her face against her drawn-up knees. Such a beautiful evening, and now it was all falling apart--because she wanted to make love with him so badly that she could hardly stand it.

"Be satisfied with what you have," she whispered, clenching her hands to fists. "It doesn't get any better than this." Tears slipped down her cheeks, and she rubbed them away with the heels of her hands, still whispering. "I can do this. I can do this."

By the time he returned, she was dry-eyed and apparently calm. But although she had been feeling sleepily content while they talked, she remained wide awake, staring into the fire, for a long time after he went to his room.