Love is a battlefield

"Are you really going to graduate college this year?" Jodie's blue eyes are half-narrowed. At twelve she already knows to question the seemingly obvious, and Addison is somewhere between proud and ashamed of that.

"I think so," she says carefully. Time moves forward and so did they, still in the same apartment but turns out medical billing is pretty useful and IBM selectric skills weren't as necessary as she thought. They're in the black and they're both in school. Jodie thinks it's great and likes to paw through her mother's books. "I'm going to go to college too," she'll announce and Addison will retort: "You'd better."

They joke about medical school, but Addison's started to think it could be real. Jodie's going to girl scout camp this summer, three weeks away, and Addison will have an empty house to study for the MCATs at night. It's real enough to be scary, to seem like it could actually happen. She'll go wherever she gets in, that's what she says and Jodie agrees. Addison thinks it would be nice to live by the beach. Jodie says she wants to go to Seattle - she's a year or two behind, all those coffee houses and music and grunge - but Addison says there's not enough sun there. Jodie's growing up fast, has her own life now, one Addison doesn't always want to examine too closely. And anyway, they'll have to see where she gets in. The decision's out of their hands this time.

They haven't heard from Derek in a while - except for the checks - but Addison thinks that's probably okay. He comes home faithfully for Christmas at least, with Nora, and Addison can admit she's an okay choice, nice enough to Jodie but not too pushy. She's a doctor too, skinny and rather anemic-looking, nothing like Addison, says she wants to wait to have her own children. Last time he was home Derek told Addison he was proud, about college, and she rolled her eyes.

It's my fault, he said. You had a real future, if we hadn't - but neither of them wants to finish that thought. She accepts his words because they're closer to an apology than she thought she'd get, even if they're for the wrong part of it all. Sometimes people ask her do you miss him? And she'll say yeah but to herself she'll admit that's not the him she's talking about.

Four years.

"Today would be Amy's twenty-first birthday." She's not sure why she says it aloud. Jodie's no partner in her nostalgia and she's not usually the sort of mother who says that kind of thing aloud - at least, she doesn't think she is.

Jodie cocks her head slightly.

"Aunt Amy," Addison prompts. "You remember her," she says and it comes out more as a command than a question.

"I think so."

Addison only has to close her eyes to see her - seventeen and dead - and hear the way the twigs snapped under her feet when she ran. Derek wasn't there. Derek was never there.

Why can't you get over it?

Why can you?

Because it didn't have to happen, she thought then. Thought it but didn't say it.

Aloud Derek said: We have to let them go. Just - let them go in peace.

Four years now. Amy would be twenty-one. Mark twenty-nine in July, like Derek and Addison. Three peas in a pod. Three coins in a fountain. Propose to me in Paris, she said when she was seventeen and stupid.

Seventeen. It's a big year, a turning point. You could become a mother at seventeen. Or you could become part of the woods, bits of you beneath an ancient oak, scattered like poinsettia. Tiny and red. Toxic to the touch. Amy, stop, she said then, but she didn't.

She feels a hundred years old.

Derek's still in California. A country between them seems more manageable than the size of what came before.

And yet the cycle isn't that strange anymore: of grief, of life. Definitions, though - they still surprise her. That she could be a teenaged mother, unwed, trust fund revoked, future stolen - and yet something else could turn out to be the defining moment of her life. It's not Jodie's conception or her birth that defines her, her miserable infancy or her unremarkable childhood. It's that moment on the Shepherds' lawn, gravel from the driveway poking through cheap flip flops, watching Mark pull open the door of the old station wagon. Once, twice, three times. Amy, stop. And Mark, don't. It's his hands at the hem of her shirt, hers on the rope of his shoulders. It's her feet in stirrups, Derek's sister between her legs, nothing at all inside of her. It's that night. It's always that night, pebbly gravel on the drive, twigs breaking under her feet when she ran. Amy, stop. And Mark, don't. She used to dream it happened differently - that he stopped her, or she stopped them both.

Then after a while she stopped having that dream. One day, she thinks, she'll stop dreaming at all. Until then, she's part of the cycle, so she picks up her textbook and waits until she hears the TV click on in the other room, knowing Jodie's occupied. Page two-hundred-twenty six. Chem 30, a pre-med requirement. They're studying the Krebs cycle now.

She thinks just one more time of Mark, the way he pulled the door handle open to hurl himself into the passenger seat next to Amy, ignored her calling after him.

Amy, stop. And Mark, don't.

He went anyway. And then they were two and they went together, and Amy wasn't alone. She thinks if she could see him one more time she might say I'm ready to forgive you. Maybe not for everything but for some things. And I'm sorry too. She would think of him pulling open the door and the station wagon peeling down the drive and they way they looked in the tangle of metal, unclear where one began and the other ended, her own scream like a siren cutting the midnight air, and she would say: Actually, you wouldn't be a terrible father, Mark. You wouldn't be a terrible father at all.

All chapter headers from Pat Benatar's Love is a Battlefield. Alternate universe stories are so much fun to write because it's fascinating to see what changes - and what doesn't - for the same characters in a new setting. Thoughts? Share them!