Twenty

The first week with the baby is full of rest for Miss Riza, and a certain sense of solemnitude invades the house from the rafters down. Granny stays on to help, bringing meals up to Miss Riza's bed and acting as a balance for the few ginger footsteps Miss Riza manages to the tub room and back. The Muellers return home, and they invite Ed, Al, and Winry along only a day later, to spend a few nights camped out next to the creek that cuts their pasture in half. It's difficult to leave, even with Miss Riza's encouragement, but it's obvious that the solitude will be a boon for her. Ed explains to Al, as they pack up a change of clothes, that they'd done similar when he was born.

"We won't be far if she needs us back," Ed says.

He still thinks about her, and worries, even as he helps string fishing lines and drive tent stakes into the softened ground. But Ed also resolves to learn names—Heida, Agnes, Abelard, and baby Elias—although none seem right to bring back to Miss Riza. The Muellers have a bookshelf in their parlor, and he scans the spines almost absently but again, no promising leads.

When they are taken back to the house, at long last, Miss Riza is feeling well enough to come downstairs, and a little party is arranged out in the front yard. The whole town turns up, and everyone brings food and presents for the baby. Tables are set up in long lines, zig-zagging across the hill—there's not enough chairs, so the kids all have to sit on blankets or stay standing. The baby gets passed around until he starts to fuss.

"I suppose we're a town in favor of family names," Mr. Bohn says. "Abelard five generations back—and we've been Arnaud for twice that."

Miss Riza makes a face, subtly. She looks, as Granny said, resplendent in her new gingham dress and flower-crowned straw hat, and with the baby's white blanket spilling from her arms, she's as beautiful as the museum paintings back in East City.

"I suppose we're the kind to wait," she says. "The name that best fits always comes to us sooner than later. This one might take some time."

"Well, his place is marked in the register and waiting for him," the preacher says, tapping the baby's nose with his fingertip. "Just the date and time of his birth."

"I wonder—"

Miss Riza hesitates.

"I know it's not—the way of things—but I wondered if he could be written in with his father's family name. Instead of just mine."

Part of Ed expects an awkward pause, the rude whispering behind hands, but it doesn't happen. The preacher smiles, and the ladies gathered close around Miss Riza do not look up from doting on the baby.

"Of course, dear girl."

He says it in a way that seems, to Ed, as though Miss Riza's request was somehow silly. Ed sits at her knee and doesn't move to play, even when Winry tugs at his arm twice.

The gifts are brought out in the afternoon, and it's all a big production with everybody pushing up their contribution next as Miss Riza thanks them and cries. There's blankets hand-sewn and so many secondhand clothes, as well as sweet-smelling soaps and jars of strange, oily tinctures. Plenty of food, of course, and jokes about how soon enough the whole house will be too tired to cook.

The black walnut crib is the party's natural peak. All of it Al's work, finished during their brief stay with the Muellers—though he presents it as if Ed had helped even a bit. Miss Riza is rendered speechless, simply settling the baby and his blankets into the crib and then turning to give each Ed and Al a tearful kiss on their foreheads.

The party breaks up not long after that, with the sunset pushing everyone meandering back down the hill to town and leaving only Granny and Winry to help them clean things up. Miss Riza is quickly forced back inside with the baby, who breaks into a screaming fit and won't be calmed by rocking.

Ed brings the washing tub out to stack all the plates and cups in, starting from the opposite end of Al and working in.

"Why'd you tell everyone I helped with the crib?"

"I dunno," Al says with a shrug, sweeping bread crumbs into the grass. "Just felt like the right thing."

The baby is still crying when they drag the tub back inside the house, and he doesn't stop for an hour.

That happens a lot—seemingly for no reason at all, suddenly a piercing wail will echo from the newly prepared nursery. Granny says he's a colicky baby, whatever that means. Sometimes Miss Riza will cry with him, but quieter, with her face puffy and splotched red, and her hair a tangled nest of braids. She sleeps in hourly shifts, waking with the baby to feed him and bathe him and pace him back and forth through the foyer as he sobs and screams without comfort.

Ed doesn't remember Al being so loud or at least not nearly so often—although Ed himself was only a year older and could, by rights, simply have forgotten the struggles of living with a newborn.

For distraction, he makes a project of organizing the library's shelves. His research is still gone, of course—but he thumbs now through tomes he'd overlooked for seeming irrelevant to his work. A lot of it is old and written by men who seem less concerned with science than with simply copying down their philosophical meanderings. Ed recognizes some of the names from Teacher's lessons. The ancient masters, she'd called them, with a dismissive curl of her lip.

Miss Riza joins him sometimes in those lazy April afternoons, usually during one of the baby's brief quiet interludes. She'll have him set in a little wicker apple basket in the corner while she sweeps or scrubs or polishes. Ed can usually rock the basket with his foot when he's set up at the big desk, books spread edge-to-edge in front of him.

"On Alchemy," she reads from over his shoulder, shaking out the freshly-washed curtains. "Bit simple, don't you think?"

Ed shrugs.

"Well, I suppose—when you're the first at something, you don't need to fuss over the title."

"Have you read this?" Ed asks, and Miss Riza does not answer immediately. Done with the curtains, she's arranging wildflowers in an empty preserves jar—a habit she's taken up since the first spring blossoms began to push their way out of the thawing dirt.

"Yes," she says, after a long silence. "I think I've read most of the books in here."

"Why?"

"For research."

She smiles at him, as alarmingly unfamiliar as the first moment they met—when she stepped from Granny's trap, wind-battered and tired from the road, thinner, colder, with a narrow and searching gaze that has suddenly returned. She smiles, but she studies him, too.

"What were you researching?" Ed asks, with the slightest emphasis on the pronoun. They haven't spoken about that fateful moment since the morning of the baby's birth—what he thinks of now only as the Incident.

Miss Riza's hands return to work over the ruffles in the curtains, smoothing seams flat.

"When I was a girl," she says, intently watching the motion of her own fingers, "my father had a library quite like this."

She nods a little, encapsulating not just the books but the charts and the maps and the scattered artifacts. Hohenheim certainly favored a particular look, and Ed wonders what sort of oddities Riza's father might have focused his obsessions on.

"I was never allowed inside, except to bring him his meals, and I was absolutely never allowed to read any of his books. And I was an obedient child. I never looked past their spines, even when he had me burn them all—shortly before he died."

He tries to imagine Miss Riza as a little girl, in pinafore and finger-worked lace, diligently polishing and scrubbing and sweeping just as she does now—but for some reason, all he can picture is Winry's face.

"Is that… how you knew what we were doing?"

"I didn't, actually," Miss Riza says, now pulling each book even with the front of the shelves. "Until I walked into this room and saw that circle on the ground, I didn't… I wouldn't let myself even begin to consider it."

"But then how—?"

"Can I ask you something?"

Ed nods slowly.

"Are you going to try again?"

He can hear Al through the open window, whistling as he works in the garden. They had abandoned it after Mom died, letting the weeds and rot overtake each carefully-maintained row. Even now Al is pleasantly scolding some field mice from nibbling the beanstalks. They've already re-strung the washing line and repaired the well pump, and there's a line of chairs and tables waiting to be stripped and sanded and lacquered over again. They had the chimneys swept last week, and Mr. Bohn has sent out an order for green paint to refresh the shutters and door.

The same as every other spring he's seen, and yet—to go back, to the way things were, so much new and good would be lost.

"No," Ed says, the heaviness sitting high in his chest. "I don't think it would work, anyway."

"No? And why's that?"

"We didn't have anything to trade for her soul."

She is not watching him, but the intensity of her focus itches him nonetheless.

"Everything's equivalent exchange. You have to have something to trade, and we didn't," he concludes with a deep sigh.

"So you have been thinking about it."

He shrugs this away.

"I don't think there is an equivalent. Maybe another soul, but—"

"That's what my father thought."

She has grown, in leaps and bounds, by countless multitudes, in Ed's eyes. Having shared so little of her life before, and Ed being always too preoccupied to dedicate any thought to it—he had no consideration for what she did in the hours that he and Al weren't around to fill. As though, somehow, other people need only exist when he thinks of them.

Ed occupies the room's only real chair, but Miss Riza pulls a box from beneath the work table and sits beside him, careful to make little noise. The basket is still, and the baby shifts but doesn't seem to wake.

"I never told you much about my father, did I?"

Ed shakes his head.

"You know that he was an alchemist."

"Yeah."

"All my life he only seemed to care about one line of research: flame alchemy. He used to be an academic—a kind of free-thinker. He'd give speeches about the unfair way things were and all the injustices of the world, talked about how alchemy was supposed to be used only for the good of all the people, but when it came down to it—he had his particular interest and nothing else mattered as much."

She looks far away again, chin resting on one hand as the other passes back and forth across the desk's newly-polished top.

"When his work was finished, he wanted everything that had gotten him there destroyed. He built a bridge to a tower of knowledge, and then he turned and burned it all behind him. Some hundreds of books and scrolls, and every single scrap of paper he'd ever written a note on, straight into the library hearth."

Ed listens politely, keeping his page with a ribbon.

"I thought that was everything. But after he died, when I was cleaning out his house, I found some correspondence that had been well-hidden. I didn't understand the circles or the formulas, but the letters were from an old colleague of his, and they were responding to a series of questions my father raised on the creation of human life with alchemy. But with my father—well, nothing was ever left at hypothesis."

"So you think he tried?"

She smiles again and meets his gaze. Her eyes look darker now, since the baby, and set more deeply in her face.

"I really don't know," she says, "but somehow I doubt it. The work I saw was incomplete at best, and he had it hidden away as though he were ashamed of it. And grace knows he had plenty to be ashamed of."

"So…"

Ed drums a staccato rhythm on the desk.

"Is that why you went back?"

"No, that was—something else."

She frowns, turning to check the baby. No new movement—just dreams, as his little legs churn the swaddling.

"There was a debt I had to deal with. I told you that. I couldn't afford to pay back a loan, so in exchange, the men I owed money to asked for my father's house and everything in it. They knew he was an alchemist, and they were expecting his research to be inside. And when it wasn't—well, I explained to them the limits of their contract."

"Are they going to leave you alone now?"

"I think so," Miss Riza says. "Matters are plenty clear now, for them."

Naturally, he thinks back to the officer and gun barrel smoking just beside his ear. She hadn't taken the gun with her on the train, but maybe she could've found one there.

"You and I," she says, "are better than we were, right?"

Miss Riza places her hand over Ed's hand, stilling his fingers.

"A family shouldn't lie or keep things from each other. So we're not going to do that anymore."

"Yes, Miss Riza."

"Good."

She kisses his head and stands.

"I'm going to go help Al with the garden. Keep the window open so I can hear if the baby needs me."

"Yes, Miss Riza."

She leaves the curtains draped across the tables and fumbles a moment in untying her apron. Ed turns back to his book, still closed and waiting for him to resume.

"Wait—Miss Riza?"

"Yes?"

He taps his finger on the cover's gold leaf lettering.

"What about this? For his name?"

She reads it, and smiles wide, and then crosses to the basket and lifts the baby up.

"What do you think?" she asks him. "Does it suit you?"

Ed braces for the piercing wail he expects, but instead the baby gurgles, flailing out his chubby little hands for Miss Riza to catch with kisses.

They walk to town the next morning, all four of them in a line across the road, and they stop at the preacher's house on their way back. He uses a quill to write in the registry, each letter a solid flourish of flat black ink: Nicklaus Johann Mustang, born the thirteenth of March in the year nineteen-aught-nine.

Quite suddenly it is June, and Miss Riza's birthday. Granny bakes a lemon cake, and they eat it beneath a blistering sun.

"I suppose I should say that twenty feels different," Miss Riza says, with her fork chasing the last of the cake crumbs into a puff of whipped cream waiting on the edge of her plate. She holds Nicklaus to her shoulder, rubbing little circles in his back as he sleeps. "I'll just have to wait around for twenty-one."

"I'd like to be twenty," Winry sighs dreamily. "A house of my own and a sweet little baby—"

"You've more than plenty time for that," Granny says, snapping a towel on the back of her chair.

They sit around the wireless that night and listen to the evening programs droning on beneath a bright moon, reminding each other with laughter of all the journeys the year has brought them—so when the announcement comes over, they're all still awake.

"Ladies and gentlemen—ladies and gentlemen—please excuse the interruption of your evening's program, but we here at Radio Central have received a late-breaking cable directly from the front. We're reading this now, exactly as it came to us, by the order of Fuhrer King Bradley himself. Ladies and gentlemen, the message as follows: Alert. Last Ishvalan stronghold has fallen. The insurrectionists are defeated. The war is over."

Granny and Miss Riza stare at the wireless in wide-eyed disbelief, as though Mr. Kaube himself might leap from between the vacuum tubes and laugh it away as a joke.

"Ladies and gentlemen—" he says. "I will repeat that again. The war is over."

There are supposed to be celebrations the next day, he explains, but Resembool does not revel with the rest of the country. Instead, everyone in town gathers on a patch of cool blue grass near the train station—where the Sutters' home once stood—and together, they listen to a sober invocation from the preacher. It is a miserable experience, made worse by the lack of food that follows. Ed, Al, and Miss Riza stand with Granny and Winry and the Muellers, and Nicklaus's quiet is bought with a constant shift from hand to hand.

In the weeks that follow, no one speaks of what the war ending might bring to their door—of who could be, can be, should be out there even now, finding his way home. Every single day brings a new train blasting through the station back to East City, and new faces back from their long absences. So many wounded, and so many more lost. At home, no one talks about him—not even to conjure a ghost.

Summer drags on its usual ways. Al and Miss Riza work in the garden, and Nicklaus learns to laugh and to hold up his head, and when they set him belly-down on the parlor rug, his little arms and legs churn in the silly imitation of a crawl.

August arrives with high heat, and midway through brings a shiny black car crawling up the hill. Ed is alone in the front yard, trying to chase the hens back to their shady little house behind the shed. He stops, broom in hand, as the car rolls to a stop and its driver emerges.

He is a gaunt man, with narrow eyes and a narrower mustache above his frowning lip. He wears a buttoned black coat and an officer's cap, and he holds a hand across his brow, sweeping a glance all around him.

"Hello," he says to Ed, wincing at the volume of his own voice. "Is this the Elric house?"

"Why?"

"Wh—"

The man blinks, shaking his head.

"I'm sorry—do you live here?"

"What do you care?"

He drops his hand from his eyes and squints. Ed can tell the man is clenching his jaw.

"Because I'm looking for someone."

"So?"

The man huffs.

"Look, kid, is this the Elric house or not?"

"Ed, who is it?" Miss Riza calls from somewhere deep in the house.

"I dunno," Ed shouts back, "some weirdo!"

"Is it the milkman?"

"No."

"Ed!"
"It's not Mr. Ebner!"

"You said that last time."

"It's not this time, I swear!"

"Ed, just because you don't like milk doesn't mean the rest of us are willing to go without!"

"It's not," Ed insists, looking back at the stranger. "You're not Mr. Ebner. Who are you?"

But he doesn't answer—transfixed, staring into the doorway behind Ed, as though he might divine from that distance the exact layout of foyer to kitchen, where Miss Riza can be heard, banging around with the dishes.

"I am so sorry, sir," she shouts. "I'll be right there."

"Who are you?" Ed asks again, but Miss Riza comes rushing out, hastily wiping her hands dry on her apron, before the man can answer.

"Sir, I apologize! Things have just been—"

She stops so abruptly in the doorway that she has to grab the frame to stay upright.

"Miss Riza?"

She gasps, hands rising to her mouth, ignoring Ed, and then takes a few stuttered steps into the yard. This movement is matched by the man, who sweeps the hat from his head and surges forward, but stops just short of her. His eyes are wide—to Ed, it seems a little like fear.

"Are you really here?" Miss Riza asks, her voice ruined with trembling.

"Yes."

It's not really eavesdropping if they're talking loud enough for Ed to hear. The hens, no longer harassed by the broom, have gathered around his ankles and peck at the dirt too near his toes. He looks between them, and the two at the center of the yard, who act as if they're completely alone in the world.

"How did you…? You found me, and I thought—"

"I went to the house, and someone else was living there," the man says, as Miss Riza closes the distance. Ed feels a little silly for not realizing it sooner—but the picture he saw was small and grainy and such a long time ago. And the reality is much shorter than he'd pictured.

"They sold it," Miss Riza says with a short shake of her head. "I couldn't pay, and—"

"No one would tell me where you were or what happened, so I went back to East City—and I got a telegram from some corporal at the post office with this address? I thought I—"

"I tried to tell you—I wrote you everyday, but none of them made it through, and I didn't think—"

The man—Miss Riza's beau, Nicklaus's father, Roy Mustang—reaches up and gently wipes a tear from her cheek.

"I'm sorry," he whispers. "I'm sorry I took so long."

Miss Riza's hand closes over his.

"I feel like I've been waiting a hundred years for you."

They embrace and then, full of hesitation, they kiss. Mostly on instinct, Ed makes a face and looks away, but glances back to check when they're done with it.

They stop, eventually, but they don't let go of each other. Miss Riza laughs gently, as Mr. Mustang (maybe he'd prefer major?) holds her face between his hands and kisses her again.

"You hate it, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Well, it's all the fashion in Central."

"It's abhorrent," Miss Riza says, grinning wide. "But I think there's still a razor in the vanity."

She kisses his cheek and then buries her face against his chest. He nuzzles the crown of her braided hair, and Ed sees suddenly a flash of his own parents, embracing quietly in the dark foyer, early one cold morning. It's a melancholy image, pressed flat over the warmth of Miss Riza so peacefully happy.

"There's so many things I need to tell you," she says. "A lot's happened while you've been away."

And before Mr. Mustang can reply, that near-omnipresent piercing wail rises through an open window. Miss Riza glances, half sighing and half smiling, and takes a few steps back towards the house.

"Is that…?"

Mr. Mustang looks like all his breath has left him quite suddenly—a kind of unfocused shock that drains the color from his face and then returns it rapidly.

"Is that a baby?"

Miss Riza reaches back to him.

"Come inside," she says. "There's someone you need to meet."

And he moves, almost in a stagger, to meet her. She leads him by hand up the walk and through the open door—though as she passes through, she calls back.

"Ed, come along."

And he nods, mostly for himself, but not without a last look down the hill. Dust is drifting gently out across the yard, hiding the fence and the far swell of the road where it meets the horizon. The hens have found their way back to the roost, and the beating sun has found its rest behind a solid line of western clouds. The milkman will be up to make his deliveries in an hour or two, followed distantly by the new mailman—and then the train, with its long lonesome whistle, will roar past on its rounds without stopping.

Ed breathes deep, letting the swelling song of crickets and cicadas fill his lungs. He knows, unspeakably certain of it, that he will remember this moment, years and years and years hence.