Leviathan Falls

Chapter Nine: Kit

His father looked out from the screen, eyes red from happy tears. Probably, Alex Kamal had wept over Kit the same way once, but Kit had been a baby then. He didn’t remember it, and so seeing it now felt like the revelation of something new.

“I am so proud of what you and Rohi are doing. The life you’ve put together. It’s—it’s—it’s hard to understand what it means to make a family. To bring a new person into the world. But now that you have, I hope you can see that’s the love we had for you. Me and your mother both. It’s overwhelming. This is everything I hoped you could find. And I know—I know—that you’ll be a good father. A better father than I was.”

“Oh, fuck, Dad,” Kit breathed. “Are we doing this again?”

“The bad things that happened were never about you. About how much I loved you. How much I do love you. I am so full. What you’ve done, it just leaves me feeling so full. I’m so happy. I’m so happy for you.”

The message ended. It was five full minutes long, and Kit wasn’t sure he had the stamina right now to listen to it again. It was easy for his father to romanticize Kit’s life. Distance and the political dangers of their contact meant Alex could only see a small part of a very large picture.

He checked the time. There wasn’t much to say, and most of it wasn’t something he’d want to put on Alex’s shoulders anyway. If Aunt Bobbie had still been alive, maybe he’d have turned to her. She’d had a way of seeing to the heart of a thing. Compassion without sentimentality. His father was carrying too much baggage for that, and Kit still couldn’t help protecting him.

He started the recording.

“Hey,” he said into the camera. “I want you to know that I really appreciate you coming close enough to swap these messages close to real time. More often than not, I send you something and I just have to hope you even got it… Shit.”

He stopped the recording, deleted it. He didn’t want this to devolve into another round of Alex whipping himself for not being more present in Kit’s adolescence. The issue carried more guilt for his father than any resentment from Kit. It was just that he had too much right now to add on the burden of one more person’s emotional well-being.

But he had to say something.

The door chime saved him for the moment. He dropped his comms and told the door to unlock. His mother breezed into the apartment the way she always did. She was a stately, strong-jawed woman who wielded the nobility of her features like a club. Kit loved her and he always would, but he liked her more when she was on a screen.

“Where’s my baby?” she said with a grin. She didn’t mean him.

“Rohi’s changing his diaper,” Kit said, gesturing toward the back room with his chin. “She’ll be out in a minute.”

“Rokia!” Giselle said. “Grandma’s come to help.”

Rohi hated it when people not from her birth family used her full name. From the day his mother had found that out, she’d never called her anything else. Kit understood that she meant it as a statement of love and acceptance. He also understood it was a power play. The apparent contradiction of being both things at once made sense to him in a way it didn’t to Rohi, but he’d been raised with it. The dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of childhood became the self-evident norms of adulthood.

He listened to their voices—Giselle’s and Rohi’s and the gabble and fuss that was Bakari. He couldn’t make out the words, but he knew the tones. Mother’s imperiousness compensating for her insecurity. Rohi’s polite kindness that masked her annoyance. And the baby’s vocalizations, still too new to mean anything to Kit but his own joy and exhaustion.

A minute later, the three of them came out together: his mother, his wife, and his son. Giselle already had Bakari on her hip. Rohi’s smile was strained but patient.

“Grandma’s here,” his mother said. “I am in control. You two lovelies go off and enjoy your date night while I play with my perfect baby boy.”

“We’ll be back after dinner,” Kit said.

“Don’t hurry,” Giselle said with an airy wave. Rohi’s eye roll was so small it was almost subliminal. Kit bowed to his mother, kissed his confused son on the top of his head where the bones hadn’t yet fused, and then he and Rohi walked out to the public corridor and closed the door behind them. The last thing he heard was Bakari starting to wail as he realized they were leaving.

“Date night?” Rohi asked as they walked down toward the local hub.

“It was easier than ‘Rohi and I need to have an uninterrupted conversation,’” Kit said. “It would have been half an hour of her telling me why divorce is bad. This way, there was no lecture.”

He had hoped she would laugh, but her nod was sharp, short, and businesslike. She didn’t take his arm, and her gaze stayed locked on the walkway before them. The common corridor was bright, and the plants on the median shifted their broad leaves in the breeze of the recyclers. They’d taken positions at Aterpol on Mars with the understanding that it was both a center of research, second in the Sol system only to Earth, and a more congenial place for pregnancy than any of the deeper stations except maybe Ganymede. Giselle had been delighted, and Rohi had too, at first.

They came to the noodle bar that had been their habitual off-shift hangout. A young man with an untreated acne problem and a dombra sat on a little dais, plucking a gentle melody and being ignored by the people eating at the tables. Kit sat, Rohi sat across from him, and they ignored the music too.

“Do you want to order first?” Kit said, careful to keep his voice neutral.

“Yes,” Rohi said. It didn’t take more than a moment to key their preferences into the table and have the system confirm them. They sat in silence for the three minutes before old Jandol came out with their bowls—lemongrass and egg roll for him, com chiên cá for her. That she’d ordered one of her comfort foods meant something to him. Jandol nodded to them both, missing the tension or else ignoring it, and went back to the kitchen. Rohi leaned in over her bowl.

“Well,” Kit said. “What’s on your mind?”

“Hear me out, all right?”

He nodded her on.

“I think we should look at postponing the contract again.”

“Rohi—”

“No, hear me out.” She waited until she was sure he’d be quiet. “I know Mars is only a third of a g, but it’s a consistent third. Always-on gravity is really important in the first few months of development. His inner ear is still forming. His bone growth is starting. He’ll be going through a lot of fundamental changes in the next year, and even if we’re on one of the fast ships, we’ll still be on the float for months. I don’t want him to grow up with any of the low-gravity syndromes. I don’t want to start his life by changing his body in ways that give him fewer options later on. Not if I don’t have to.”

“I hear what you’re saying.”

“I’ve looked at the schedule. There’s three other parts of the team who could take our berth on the Preiss. We’d still be in the date range if we switched to going out on the Nag Hammadi.”

“Assuming we got on it,” Kit said.

“I’m not saying don’t ever do it,” Rohi said. “I’m not saying cancel the contract. That’s not what I meant.”

A fat, slow tear drifted down her cheek, and she wiped it away like it had betrayed her.

Kit took a deep breath, and let it out. When he spoke, he spoke carefully. “You’re crying.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m scared.”

“What are you scared of?”

She looked at him, incredulous. Like the answer was obvious. It was, but he thought it was important for her to say it out loud anyway.

“I’m suggesting that you compromise your career,” she said. That she’d said your career, not our careers, was everything. Kit thought he’d understood the dynamic between them, and now he knew he was right. The corners of her mouth tugged down, and he could see for a moment what she’d looked like as a child, long before he met her.

“Okay,” he said. “My turn?”

She nodded.

“Here’s the first thing,” he said. “I’m not my father. And I’m not your mothers. I’m not going to make the decisions they made. You and Bakari are my first choice, every time. I’m not going to leave, even if it means cutting off a career path.”

“I just—”

He took her hand. “Hear me out?”

She nodded. The next tear, she ignored.

“I know this isn’t the perfect time,” he said. “But there’s never going to be a perfect time. There will always be something. Bakari’s development or my mother’s health or a conference we won’t be able to come back for or something. There’s always something.”

“Until Laconia decides to start another war to prove a point. Or the aliens kill us all.”

“I can’t control any of that,” Kit said. “All I can do is keep acting like the universe is going to keep existing and planning for a future in it. Nieuwestad is one-point-two g. It’s going to be hard on him, and us too. Jacobin-Black Combined Capital is a good company doing the kind of work we want to do, but that doesn’t mean we have to do it. We can break the contract and find something else. Or we can go and do the best we can. If we go, there are a lot of good programs for helping kids and babies with gravity transitions. And I’ll get up to go to the gym with you every day if you want. If we stay here, there are other jobs. We can do anything. But we’re going to be doing it together.”

Rohi’s eyes were red now, and she wicked the tears away with her napkin. “This is stupid.”

Kit took her hand. “You get scared when we talk about balancing the family and work, and it’s okay that you do. I get it, and I love you, and a good cry is just part of the way we talk about this stuff. And you never judge me when it’s my turn to be the weepy one.”

“I just don’t want to mess things up,” she said. “What if we mess things up for him?”

Kit stroked her knuckles with his thumb the way he did when she couldn’t sleep. “We will, though. No one’s perfect. Everyone’s carrying something that their parents would have done differently if they’d known. Or if they’d been better people. Or if things had just been different. That’s all right. It’s normal. Part of why I am what I am is all the bad choices my mom and dad made, and if they’d done differently, they’d still have made some mistakes somewhere along the line, and those would be part of me instead. They weren’t perfect, and we aren’t perfect.”

“He is, though,” Rohi said. “Bakari is.”

“He is, isn’t he?”

They were quiet for a little while. Jandol came out and offered to take their leftovers away. When Kit shook his head, the old man shrugged and puttered back to the kitchen.

Eventually, Rohi hauled in a breath, and when she sighed, she folded forward. When she spoke, her voice had lost its tightness. “All right. Thank you.”

“Don’t say ‘I’m sorry.’”

“I didn’t.”

“You were about to.”

She smiled, and he could see the storm had passed. “I was about to.”

He sucked up a mouthful of noodles and chewed. The lemongrass tasted real, and the noodles were soft and salty. If they’d gone a little cold, he didn’t care. Rohi sighed and relaxed into her chair.

After dinner, they walked home slowly. She took his hand, and he leaned against her. For a while, it was almost like they were courting again, only deeper. Richer. Fuller. This was the life that both of their parental groups had given up, and Kit didn’t understand any of them at all.

At the rooms, Giselle was sitting on the couch, spooling through entertainment newsfeeds on her handheld. As they came in, she lifted a finger to her lips and pointed toward the nursery.

“He fell asleep ten minutes ago,” she said. “Ate well. Shat out his bodyweight. Giggled, played, cried for fifteen seconds, and out.”

“Thank you, Mama,” Kit said, and Giselle stood up and wrapped him in her arms.

“It’s not for you,” she said, quietly enough that only he could hear. “I’m soaking in all the grandbaby I can while I have him. Storing up for winter.”

After she left, Rohi went to her office, walking softly to keep from waking the baby, and he sat at his own desk and pulled up his message queue.

He started the camera.

“Hey, Dad. I love you too. Thank you for coming close enough to send the message. I know how hard that can be. And I love you for it. Having a kid is the scariest thing I’ve ever done, and I love it. I love having a kid. I love being a dad.

“I know you and Mom didn’t have things go the way you’d have picked. But no matter what happened, I always knew you cared about me. I learned that from you. If that’s the only thing I manage to pass on, it’ll be worth it. It’s a great legacy. Seriously the best.”

He tried to think of something more, but exhaustion was seeping in at the corners of his brain, and he didn’t really know what else there was to say. He reviewed it, sent it, scrubbed his system the way he always did when he’d gotten something from the underground’s network, then showered and got ready for bed.

Rohi wasn’t there. He found her standing over the crib, looking down at the new little life they’d made together. Bakari’s soft, round belly rose and fell as he slept. Kit stood there with her and with him.

“He’s a strong little guy, isn’t he?” Rohi said.

“He is. And his parents love him.”

“Okay, then. Let’s go.”