Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

A' is for Alacrity, Astronauts and Grief

This story was previously published in the anthology TEMPORALLY OUT OF ORDER, released by the small press Zombies Need Brains LLC.

Becca hadn’t even meant to show Sam the typewriter. It had sat in the crate in the attic with the other things she and Julie had played with as children that their mother, Candice, hadn’t gotten rid of yet. Becca had flown in to Heathrow, thrown her bag on the lower bunk of her childhood room and driven to the hospital to collect her nephew from Candice’s arms.

She’d had to turn her face away from Julie’s battered face on the bed, unable to look at the tubes and bruises and swelling. The doctor’s prognosis had stuttered through static.

You know she’s not in there anymore. Becca hadn’t dared say the words. There’s a reason they offered to up the morphine, they just can’t say it. She might wake up, but she’s not coming back.

Work had given her two weeks’ bereavement leave. A luxury, with the project already overdue. She’d used up two days just getting here, walked out on salvaging six years with Rick with four words that had burned into her mouth like acid. My sister is dying.

Now she couldn’t even look at her.

Candice had sat haggard in the only chair next to the bed, Sam hunched and silent in her lap. When Becca lifted him from Candice’s strong grasp, neither of them stirred. She’d driven Sam back to the house in silence and trawled through the attic for something for him to do while she worked out how in the hell you explained to a seven-year-old about comas and car accidents and orphans.

It would be different if Sam’s father were alive. If Candice had had anyone else to call but the daughter who’d crossed oceans to get away from her. Candice had barely said a word since that phone call, not even when Becca had hired a car against her instructions after twenty-six hours on a plane.

It would be okay. It would all be okay. Becca hugged her elbows like they could fill the hole in her stomach. Julie’s not going to wake up, how can that be okay?

Because she’s not going to wake up. You won’t have to stay here. You can just say goodbye and go home, like you planned. She sank her teeth into her cheek and forced the admission from her mind. She had more important things to deal with.

Sam was solemn, and for once not full of questions. A dozen platitudes rose in her throat and withered. Julie’s weekly Skype calls aside, the last time he’d seen her, he’d been a toddler at his father’s funeral. She was the aunt who appeared when parents died.

Becca flinched. She hasn’t.

You can’t tell him differently. It wouldn’t be fair.

He sat at the crate, hunched in on himself, and poked the old typewriter buttons. He hadn’t even lifted it out. Armed with a cup of earl grey and a chocolate biscuit, Becca sat next to him and waited.

“I’m writing a letter to Mum,” he said flatly. “But the letters don’t come out right.”

Becca leaned over; the typewriter produced the same gibberish she remembered from her childhood.

It had driven her father to distraction. His last unsolvable riddle: a perfectly normal, working, ordinary typewriter that wrote alien hieroglyphics. He’d kept it in pride of place in the lounge to puzzle out with his two girls, and taken it apart three times, even the electronic pieces and the 80’s-era solar-cells. What is it we do when we don’t know something? She smiled at his voice in her head.

But I can’t puzzle this one out, Dad. I can’t fix it. I just want her to go, to be peaceful and I hate myself for that. She squeezed the biscuit so hard it shattered, gazing down at the typewriter and its printed nonsense like it was a talisman.

Candice had packed it away after he died, along with all of his things, like he’d never lived here at all.

Sam stroked the yellowed paper standing stiff from the rollers.

“How many letters can it make?” he asked.

“How many do you think? Can you work it out?” Becca brushed biscuit crumbs from his hair while he screwed up his face.

“Twenty-six?”

“Come on, that’s a guess. You can work it out.”

This was met with silence. He peered at the paper, at the keys, fingers opening and closing individually.

“Forty…Fifty…eight.”

“Including the numbers and all the commas and things?”

More silence while his finger hovered over each of the number and punctuation keys.

“Eighty…six?”

“There you go.”

Sam shook his head, blonde curls shivering like Julie’s pixie-cut did. Used to. “But it makes more than eighty-six different letters.”

Becca pressed her lips, her mother’s “that’s impossible” dismissal pent up behind them. Julie had said he was bright. Even if you doubled the keys, there seemed to be far more printed letters than the typewriter could physically type, none of them familiar. She released her breath with a smile.

“Your mother and I used to pretend it was a message from someone far away,” she said. “It’s what made me become a programmer, trying to figure out puzzles like that. We kept everything it printed in that binder, there. Maybe you can figure it out.”

Sam lifted the almost-full three-ring binder, flipped it open. Becca’s eyes stung at the sight of Julie’s margin notes, the backwards ‘a’s she used to write as a child, and she ruffled Sam’s hair.

The hospital ward echoed with clicks and hums and machine-driven breaths. Julie lay, too bruised and too still, with Candice curled over her.

“Mum! Guess what I found!” Sam burst in, a hurricane of enthusiasm.

Candice glared, barely shifting from over her daughter. “Hush, sweetling. Your mummy is sleeping, she needs to get better.”

“But I want to tell her about the codes! It’ll make her feel better, it’s really interesting!” He shook Julie’s shoulder gently. “Mum, I have to show you something.”

“No!” Candice slapped his hands away and fussed over the tubes Sam had minutely disturbed. “You mustn’t touch, Mummy is very fragile,” she snapped. “Nurse!”

“But”—Sam’s voice squeaked—“Mum always feels better when I hug her. She said so.”

Becca wrapped her arm around Sam’s shoulder, squeezing him while she tried to swallow the cannonball in her throat. “You can give her lots of hugs when she wakes up, okay?” She rubbed the crown of his head like her father used to do. “We just need to be careful of the tubes and things, mate. They’re very important.”

Sam snivelled. “They look uncomfortable.”

“It’s okay, she’s asleep, she can’t feel them. Why don’t you tell her what you found?”

“You said she’s sleeping, she won’t hear me.”

“She’ll hear you in her dreams, love.” Becca shot a look at Candice, who still crouched over Julie like she was shielding her, and hardened her voice. “The doctors said it’s good for her to hear things.” She lifted Sam onto the foot of the bed and pulled the typewriter pages from her bag. Candice snatched the papers and waved them under Becca’s nose.

“Not your father’s nonsense again! Nothing but broken junk.”

“It’s a code!” Sam grabbed at the paper. “Someone is sending coded messages and we have to work them out!”

Candice sucked in her breath, and arranged a honeyed smile. “I know you want your Mummy to get better, because you love her very much,” she said softly. “You want to help look after her, don’t you?” She curled one arm around his shoulders, easing him off the bed. “She needs you to be a big boy so you can help her. Can you do that for her?”

Sam nodded mutely, clearly confused about where code investigation fell in the spectrum of “being a big boy.”

Becca stepped forward. “Mum—”

Candice’s head whipped up, and the sweetness vanished from her face. “I don’t want to hear any more of it. You’re under my roof. You’ll put that thing away when you get home. Or better yet, throw it out.”

Becca clenched her jaw, but couldn’t find a retort. Candice had always hated Dad’s obsessions. It didn’t matter what it was: if she didn’t understand it, it wasn’t allowed.

Candice lowered her voice theatrically. “Julie needs him right now while she gets better, not silly distractions.”

“I thought it was interesting,” Sam mumbled.

“It’s just broken, my sweetling. There are more important things right now.”

Sam barely said two words the whole drive home. He hunched in the back seat, hugging his knees and smearing ink-stained tears across his cheeks.

“Careful with those,” Becca joked, nodding to the pile of crumpled typewriter paper she’d retrieved from Candice before they left. “You don’t know what they say, yet. It could be important.”

He didn’t reply. To him, she was still just a face from a laptop. What did Dad do when I was this upset? He loved his puzzles, his what-ifs. Sometimes he’d be so engrossed he’d forget to eat, chewing pen lids into scraps until Candice dragged him down to dinner. Becca smiled to herself, then clenched her cheek muscles in place.

What if Julie does wake up? Even just some of her, she might still be Julie.

I can’t live with Candice again.

Nine days left. Then she had to be on a plane home. Or not. She shook her head. Focus on Sam. His smile made Julie’s fate—and her own—less terrifying. Besides, Julie had named her godmother. He was Becca’s responsibility, now.

“You know what you need to do?” she asked in her best detective voice as they pulled up at the Earl’s Court Road traffic light. “We need more data. For instance, there are more letters than keys. So does each key match a certain set of letters? Is there a pattern?”

Sam frowned. “I don’t know,” he said huskily.

“You don’t know?” Becca turned and gaped at him, mock-aghast. “Well, what is it we do, when we don’t know something?” Sam shook his head mutely. Becca mimicked her father’s exuberance: “We find out!”

The slightest of smiles tweaked Sam’s cheek. Becca leaned between the front seats and whispered. “I won’t tell her if you won’t.”

Becca blurred through the morning and afternoon cleaning walls and light switches and other things that didn’t need cleaning, to the plunks of Sam on the typewriter in the living room. Until—

“Auntie! I figured it out! And it’s talking to me!”“

Becca raced in, half-expecting he’d taken it apart.

Sam sat in the living room surrounded by open books of dense text, studiously writing in his Buzz Lightyear notebook.

“What do you mean, kiddo?” Becca peered over his shoulder.

“You said I should work out whether the same keys make the same symbols—they don’t,” he announced, in a tone like he was receiving the Nobel Prize. “So I thought it might be random, but it’s not. I counted one hundred and twenty-seven different letters, and there are patterns. Lots of patterns.”

Becca remembered to close her mouth. She and Julie had played with this for months as kids. How had they never noticed that? And Sam had, all by himself?

“So I looked through Dad’s old books Mum kept, they tell you how to crack codes, by looking for patterns and how many letters and whether the patterns are big or small, and—” he ran out of breath and gulped air. “There was one where it’s not based on letters but on sounds. Fo-somethings.”

“Phonemes,” Becca murmured, half-entranced. She flipped through the books next to Sam—cryptography books. His father had been Military Intelligence. Julie had never said doing what, only that he’d had a knack for languages and numbers.

“That’s why there are so many letters. It’s writing out exactly what he said, how it sounded. And then it started talking to me.”

“Now Sam,” Becca heard her mother’s tone in her voice and winced.

“I’m not lying! Look!” He pushed his notebook under her face. Becca frowned at the jumble of English words.

“It’s backwards,” Sam said helpfully. “The words, I mean. They started at the end of the message.”

“Why is it backwards?”

“Why is it writing in an alien language?”

“Point made.” She took the notebook. “Uncle Sam,” she murmured, reading backwards. “I guess Uncle Sam came through after all, I can see the shuttles flying.” A grin spread over her face at the beautifully impossible—her father’s grin. “That’s not you, Sam. That’s what people sometimes call America, like it’s a big brother. I think he’s a soldier or something.”

“Like Dad, in Afghanistan?”

Becca caught her breath. Careful.

“I don’t think this is your father, sweetheart.”

How do you know? It could be.

“Is he in trouble?”

The phone rang.

Digging her mobile out of her jeans, Becca silently thanked the universe for the reprieve. “Could be, but it sounds like reinforcements have arrived. Hello?”

“Ms. Willoway? This is Cromwell Intensive Care.”

The world paused. Becca sank onto a plate on the coffee table, legs quivering.

“Your sister is awake.”

“She’s going to be fine,” Candice’s insistence shrilled across Julie’s vacant stare.

“It’s brain damage, Mum,” Becca whispered. “You can’t make it better. It doesn’t just heal like a broken bone. You don’t know if she’s still in there.”

Candice rounded on Becca. “Of course she is! She just needs rest. We’ll take her home this afternoon, we’ll get her better.”

Becca frowned. “Straight from the ICU? Don’t they want to keep her for observation or rehab?”

“I insisted. She needs her family, not faceless caretakers. They’ll send a physio-nurse to check on her twice a day. They gave me a list of things…I can manage, just like with your father, when he went.”

Candice really does love her. And you. And Sam.

Becca stared at the vacant woman who looked like her sister. Julie’s eyes followed people when they spoke, and she moved her lips as spittle slowly slipped out the corner of her mouth. Gone, though, was the laugh, the flash-in-the-pan grin, the need to be into everything, understanding everything, the intensity when she listened like she was reading off the back of your skull. Gone was the banter which wound up offending people as often as not, the wit that invented codenames for Candice’s tactics in their Skype calls. Gone, even, was the bitter resignation at returning to Candice’s clutches a widow, Sam in tow, and that steel-eyed determination to climb free again. Nothing in this stranger’s face was Julie.

Becca crumpled against the bed, but the tears wouldn’t come.

Candice wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pressing her into her perfumed jacket, and soothed the nape of her neck. “She’s going to be fine. You’ll see,” she murmured in her soft voice, the motherly voice from Becca’s childhood fevers. She pulled a tissue from her purse and gently blotted at Becca’s dry cheeks.

“Sam shouldn’t see her like this.” Becca glanced out the window where Sam quietly wrote a letter to the lost soldier who might be his father.

“She’s his mother. He’ll love her whatever she looks like.”

“Except she doesn’t really look like she loves him, now. He won’t understand—”

“He should know she does,” Candice said sharply. “She needs him. She won’t get better without him to come back to. So no more of that nonsense. I know you gave into him. Head full of fluff just like your father. Soon as we get home, you’re putting that thing back in the attic where it belongs.”

Back in control. Becca opened her mouth to protest, to explain the new wonder. She just lost her daughter, whatever she says. She needs this. Instead, she said, “Yes, Mum.”

Why do I keep excusing her?

Candice nodded. “We may as well get it over with, then.” She opened the ICU door and beckoned Sam inside. “You can say hello, now, sweetling. She’s coming home with us this afternoon.”

Sam bounded in, pulled up short.

“Mum?” The lost tone in his voice sank like a knife in Becca’s ribs.

“It’s okay, mate,” Becca murmured. “Her brain is bruised, so it’s hard for her to move. But you can still tell her all about the soldier.” Becca shot a hard look at Candice. “She’d like that.”

Candice raised her eyebrow, but said nothing.

The typewriter disappeared into the attic to make way in the living room for Julie, her equipment, and pills. Sam sat beside her on the fold-out bed with his notebook, filling the otherwise silent room with his theories until Candice snapped.

“No more nonsense, that’s enough!” She snatched his notebook up. “Your mother needs rest and care, not silliness and running about.”

“Mum,” Becca said, clearing plates from dinner.

Candice spun on her heel. “And you, as bad as your father, nothing but a waste of time and energy, leaving the work to everyone else.”

Sam started to cry. Becca opened her mouth, but Candice cut her off with words from twenty years ago: “Don’t start with me, young madam.”

“He needs this. He’s seven years old!”

“Old enough to grow up. You both are. Other people are more important than nonsense!”

“Oh, like ‘she’s going to be fine,’ that kind of nonsense?” The words shot out of Becca’s mouth before she could stop them. She stepped forward, hand stretched out as if she could snatch them back.

Candice’s face paled, her mouth an ‘o’ of shock, two pink spots of fury in her cheeks. “How dare you talk back to me.” Her voice dropped to a growl. Becca flinched. Candice snatched up the gravy boat, marching into the kitchen with notebook and gravy.

“Mum,” Becca began, but Candice didn’t pause. “Mum, I didn’t mean it, I—”

Candice threw the notebook in the bin, dumped the gravy on top of it, and slammed the boat in after so hard it shattered. She turned to Becca, hand half-raised for a slap. Clenching the plates to stop them rattling in her hands, Becca fought not to flinch again. Sam hugged his knees, heels slipping off the edge of the seat, and Candice seemed to suddenly remember him. The hand dropped to rub his shoulders.

“It’s time for bed, sweetling,” she said. “In the morning, you’ll see this was for the best, for your mother.”

Sam slunk off to Becca’s old room. Becca glared in the silence.

“You shouldn’t have taken it out on him,” Becca said softly.

Candice stiffened and whipped the tea towel off the rack. “You know not to answer back.”

Sam didn’t appear for breakfast. Becca checked every cupboard she’d hidden in as a toddler, the ivy behind the house that Julie had always made her cubby, under every piece of furniture she could lift or wriggle into, even up the apricot tree in the rain. No Sam.

“Why would he do this?” Candice fumed. “Doesn’t he know how hard things are already?” She all but wrenched the cupboard door off its hinges. “This is what I’m talking about, running away instead of learning to cope!”

“He was coping, in his own way. Not everybody has to cope your way!” Becca shot back.

Candice sucked in a breath in shock. Becca plunged ahead, using anger as courage.

“Why did you have to destroy his notebook?” she shouted. “Why do you always have to win?”

The slap came out of nowhere. Becca reeled against the wall, her cheek on fire.

“I raised you better than that,” Candice spat.

“Dad raised me. You just controlled me. There’s a difference.”

Candice raised her hand for another slap, but Becca swatted it down and shoved past her into the cluttered hallway. “Check the street!” she shouted before Candice could follow. She barged into her room and snatched her bag from under the bed. I can do it. I’ll just leave. It’s my life. I’ll fix things with Rick, go to work, drinks with the guys, live my life. I love Julie, but I’m not helping her here. Becca shoved her clothes in the bag with numb hands. She’d find Sam, and then she’d…

What? Leave him here? She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting against the nausea that clawed up her throat.

She couldn’t leave him here.

Years stretched out in front of her like a prison sentence. Starting over again, no job, no friends. Facing Candice alone, without backup. Without Julie.

Dragging at air, she squeezed her fingers around her wrists, ran for the bathroom to be sick—

And tripped over a bucket, landing on a fire poker.

The hell are a bucket and fire poker doing in the hallway? Massaging her jarred ankle, Becca rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, where the attic ladder pull-cord swung slowly.

A shifting thump came from the ceiling. Becca smiled despite herself. She’d discounted the attic ladder as out of his reach. But standing on a bucket to twirl the ladder cord around a fire poker and pull the ladder down—that sounded like her father’s grandson. Becca eased the stairs down and crept into the attic.

Sam stared at a box, almost ravenous, scribbling on the backs of envelopes. As she approached, the typewriter clicks came, muffled—he’d wrapped her dad’s old shirts around the machine to quiet it. Becca couldn’t stifle the grin. He frantically pressed a key over and over, scribbling as he went.

Becca sat, but he didn’t look up.

“Grandma’s mad at me,” he whispered.

“Grandma’s worried about your Mum.”

“Are you mad at me?”

Becca hugged him close. “What’ve you got there?” She pointed at the envelopes.

Sam bit his lip. “She took my notebook, but…I’d already gotten pretty good at remembering the codes. I was working on remembering the rest.” He cringed slightly, breath held.

Becca looked over his scrawl. The patterns held steady, three symbols to a phoneme. “Do you remember how you figured them out?” She sifted in the attic piles for some pieces of card and a pen. “Let me show you how to make a decoder ring.”

Sam grinned.

“So how’s our soldier doing?”

“Someone’s chasing him. He almost got caught near Yoorannis but that’s when the shuttles showed up.”

“Near where?” Becca peered at the envelopes in the dim light of the attic window. Sam pointed, and she squinted harder. “Yoor…Uranus. It’s a planet.”

“Like in space?” Sam’s eyes widened. “He’s a space soldier?”

“Maybe an astronaut. He must be clever, sending the message out.”

“He did what you said, asked what he didn’t know,” Sam pointed to another section, then frowned. “If he’s in space, then…it’s not my Dad.”

Becca sighed and squeezed Sam close.

Feet slammed on the attic stairs. Candice’s head rose from the floor, her face like ice. She glanced at them, and Becca was nine years old again with her new dress covered in mud. She clutched Sam, leaning between him and her mother.

Candice loomed down. “I don’t understand what you’re doing, when you know how much Julie needs you. But if you can’t do it yourself…” She hefted up the typewriter, crate and all, and carried it over to the attic window. Becca watched, her legs refusing to move, as Candice opened the window and dumped the crate through it into the rain. Sam shuddered at every thump and ping of metal as the crate and its contents burst apart on their front lawn.

“I put your bag away.” Her consonants could have cut steel. “When you have realised there are more important things, I’ll be in the living room, looking after my daughter.” She stalked down the stairs. Becca’s face burned.

Sam shivered. “Does Mum think I don’t love her?”

“No, mate,” Becca rubbed his arms as if to warm him, or perhaps herself. “Your Mum knows how much you love her.” Her voice sounded hollow, even to her.

Becca lay awake on her childhood bed, studying the scrawl on the bottom of Julie’s bunk. Sam slept, the rise and fall of his breath like a tiny piston, but sleep eluded Becca.

The pre-dawn birdsong niggled. They were the wrong birds. She missed the magpie warble, the cackle of Kookaburras as they hunted worms for their young.

Who would raise Sam? Her? Her mother? No, Becca had made too many hard choices to break that cycle, she had to spare him that. But how could she take him away from Julie? Rick would never sign on for a kid, he didn’t even want a dog. And Candice couldn’t care for Julie on her own, not even with a physio-nurse visiting.

Was this her life, now? Walled in with Candice by guilt? Caring for the body of a sister she’d never see again? Becca bit down on her cheek until she tasted blood.

What would Dad do?

Figure it out. Find what you’re missing. Build your decoder.

Typewriter pieces sprang forward in her mind. Where had that astronaut come from? How did he contact her?

You’re just distracting yourself from the problem. She winced at her mother’s voice in her head. If she stayed here, she’d turn into Candice.

She had to leave. They both did. Julie would want what was best for her son, even if that didn’t include her. Becca’d find a school nearby, ask work for flexible hours. Her friends would visit, and Rick…She’d work something out with Rick. He’d come around, he’d like Sam. She’d make it work.

Becca swung her legs out from the covers and felt for a torch. The only dressing gown she could find in the dark was Sam’s blue Thomas the Tank Engine one that barely covered her hips, but it would have to do. She eased open the dresser that held Sam’s clothes and quietly bundled them into his backpack. Candice had hidden hers somewhere. She’d buy a new laptop when she got home. If she didn’t go now, she might lose her nerve. She’d put his backpack in the car, then come back for him.

Becca crept down the hallway, past her sister’s laboured breathing. In her head, Candice’s voice cursed her: selfish child. Becca held her breath and slipped the latch on the front door.

The rain had lifted, leaving a pre-dawn sogginess that clogged the air. Becca tip-toed out to the car, the mud squelching through her toes. Shoes. She should get some shoes when she got Sam. She eased the car door shut, and turned back to the house.

The typewriter still lay in pieces on the grass near the bins. Sam would need it. As if it could somehow fill the void of what she was taking him from.

He’s already lost her.

Not the point.

She picked over the remains, laying out letter-levers and keys in a sad little row. She couldn’t put it back together again; most of it was a twisted mess. She held the ‘A’ in her hand, its long arm bent from impact and twisted in the ribbon. Broken, like her sister, never to be whole. Her ink-purple fingers blurred as hot tears wet her cheeks and neck, and sobs pulled up from her gut. She curled over her chest, squeezing the broken pieces in her hand until her palm cramped, sobbing so hard her stomach ached.

Her mother had been right. She’d just been hiding behind the puzzle. Becca stared down at the ink marks in her hand, drained.

A clear symbol sat on her palm where the A had rested. It wasn’t an ‘A’. Slowly, hand shaking, Becca pressed the A key through the ribbon into her palm.

Another symbol.

Electricity surged through her blood stream. She sifted through the rubble. The decoder had disintegrated in the rain, but—but Sam’s notebook might be salvageable. Trying not to breathe, she flipped the lid off the garbage bin and rummaged inside, dug out the gravy-sodden notebook and wiped the worst of the mess off with the mountain of used tissues.

The gravy had eaten half of Sam’s notes, but with her laptop, she could re-translate it with ocular character recognition. Give it a dictionary and the translations from the notebook, it could take educated guesses at the rest. She could figure it out, finish it for him.

One problem: Candice had her laptop.

Conviction wavered under Candice’s imaginary glare.

You could just leave it. You’re taking him away from everything, he’s probably not going to care. You could just slink away, like always. Because she scares you. Your own mother scares you.

Fist closed around the ‘A’ key, Becca marched inside.

She found her carry-on bag stuffed in Candice’s wardrobe and lugged it halfway to the hall before the lights flicked on. Candice stood in her vermillion dressing gown, one raised hand gripping a leather belt.

“I thought you were…” she began, expression foggy. She glanced at Becca, then the bag, hardened her gaze and drew herself up, setting her face into battle-mode. She let the silence play out, the seconds battering at Becca’s walls like artillery.

“I deserve better than this. So does your sister.”

Becca flinched as the words shot through to her gut. “It’s not about you.” Her voice whined like a child’s.

Candice strode towards her, the belt swinging ominously. “She needs you. You can’t run away because you don’t feel like dealing with it. You don’t get to pretend anymore while someone else cleans up the mess.”

The bag slipped down Becca’s arm like a weight fixing her in place and her mind narrowed to the words, to Candice’s voice, struggling to gain an edge.

Candice loomed within striking distance. “Your sister understood that,” she said. “We had our differences, but she worked hard for her family, for her son. She buried her husband while you ran off to your koalas. And now she needs you, and you’re leaving it to everyone else, like you always do. Leaving us behind.”

Shaking her head mutely, Becca tried to drum up words, thoughts, anything.

Candice leaned close. “You selfish child. Always, no matter what I did. She’s not the one who deserved this.”

Sickening heat flooded up from Becca’s belly, swallowing her.

Candice’s eyes glinted in triumph. “Were you even going to say goodbye to Sam? Or are you leaving that to me as well, to explain why you’re abandoning him.”

Sam.

Becca found an edge. Protect Sam. She clutched it like a spear, lifted her chin, locked eyes with Candice. “I’m taking him with me,” she snarled.

Candice reared back, mouth open.

Drawing her anger from her voice, Becca pulled herself straight. “I gave up every friend I had to move away. My sister. My job. My possessions. I didn’t run away, I made a calculated choice. I paid a price.” She took a deep breath, chin thrust out like she could push the words out and not hear them. “It was worth leaving everything behind to be free of you.”

Silence again, but this time it couldn’t touch her. Her blood surged like ice through her chest.

“How dare you,” Candice breathed. “You ungrateful—”

“I’m just being honest with you,” Becca shot back. “Without the nonsense, just like you wanted. Without pretending this is okay.” I can do this. I can stand up to her. I can protect him. “Because it’s not. You are toxic, and if you want to get anywhere near Sam, things are going to have to change.”

Candice brandished the belt. “You can’t take him away from me. From Julie.”

Becca snatched it out of her hands. “I’m his legal guardian. Anyone can see she’s not fit for motherhood.” She took a deep breath and leaned close enough to smell the laundry soap on her mother’s gown. “I will miss her until my heart stops, but it would have been kinder to everyone, especially her, if you had just let her go.”

Becca re-shouldered the bag. “I’ll bring Sam to you to say goodbye.”

Sam had mumbled groggy goodbyes. Becca had tried to wake him, but the boy just wanted to sleep, so she’d tucked him in the car with her carry-on and the remains of the typewriter and driven to the airport to wait for their standby flight. He slept the whole way, and barely woke when she piloted him to an empty gate lounge. Becca sat in the row next to him and rifled through her bag for her jeans and jumper to drag on.

He should be with his mother.

I can’t leave him with Candice.

She scrabbled faster through socks, underwear and camisoles. No jeans.

Candice wouldn’t hurt him.

he’d control him.

Deciding this for him isn’t control? You can’t be a parent. This isn’t your life.

Hands shaking, she dragged the jumper out of its tangle with a t-shirt and her headphones. She must have left the jeans at Candice’s. She tied the jumper around her hips.

I’d be better than she would. Julie would want this.

Would she? Would Sam? Or is this just what you want?

This was ridiculous. She’d made the decision. She wasn’t going to unmake it. She shoved the escaping underwear back in, hauled the laptop out and set it up on the table with the typewriter pieces and the gravy-sodden notebook. Her fingers jittered on the keys. Sometimes distractions were necessary.

The program took less time than she’d expected. Components just fit, like something guided her code, pulling it into a prototype effortlessly. She could almost smell her father’s aftershave on the keyboard.

Gripped with a frenzy, she snatched some napkins from the table, hammered the broken key through the ribbon onto them as fast as she could and held them up to the webcam, tapping the keyboard impotently while the program churned up the translation. Next to her, Sam rolled on his bag in his sleep, curling around it.

There it was: the astronaut’s team had been colonising Titan when unfriendly ships arrived from outside the system. He stole one and escaped, largely by jabbing everything to see what it did, and broadcast his distress call until the American shuttles turned up.

Sam was right, this guy had her father’s attitude. Poke it with a stick. Never let ignorance or fear stand in the way of trying.

Don’t let her beat that out of you again.

Dawn crept over the horizon of the runway. Becca’s hands ached. The program struggled with words not in the dictionary, and she paused to decipher them by hand.

“Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

I don’t know how this’ll reach you, I think their tech latches onto whatever it can. I set the ship to do a data dump at the end of this transmission; hopefully there’s something Uncle Sam can use. I’m taking a lot on faith, you know, with your stories. Tell Mum I love her, and say hi to Uncle Sam.”

Becca frowned. Was Uncle Sam actually a person?

There was an address before the message, like a letter: Rebecca Willoway and Michael Oaks, 275 Tempus Terrace.

Her name. Candice’s address.

Becca hugged the laptop to herself and pressed the ‘A’ key a few more times against the last napkin. It wrote ‘A’. She wasn’t surprised.

But it couldn’t be her, if it was “Uncle” Sam. Sam would be a cousin to any grandchild of hers. And she wasn’t staying here.

Except Sam was her son, now. If she had any other children, he’d be more brother to them than anything else.

The dawn sun soaked through the window into her spine with the realisation, sickeningly warm. Becca slumped as her life collapsed back inside the walls of Candice’s rule.

Even if you believe in magic typewriters from the future, it doesn’t mean that future’s going to happen.

No, but it’s possible. I hadn’t thought of that. I hadn’t thought something good might come of it.

The warmth roiled in her chest.

It’s not possible, because you’re taking Sam away from that. For his own good.

Maybe I just don’t want to give up my life. My friends, Rick.

You’re doing the right thing for Sam.

Am I, though? Or am I just doing the easy thing for me?

The thought slammed down like stone. Becca shut the lid of the laptop, fighting the urge to curl up around her knees.

Forget the stupid typewriter a minute. What’s best for him? That’s my job, now. That’s what Julie wanted.

The plastic seat squeaked softly—Becca stopped herself from rocking.

I stood up to her once. I can stand up to her again. Maybe I could make some happiness here.

She unfolded herself from the seat and stoked Sam’s hair from his face.

He deserves to have his mother—his real mother—in his life.

You’ll have to keep fighting for it. Keep fighting her, every moment.

In the carport of Candice’s house, Becca gathered the last of the scrawled-on napkins from the back seat. Sam, finally awake, had scampered off to tell the whole thing to Julie as soon as the engine had stopped. Hands full, Becca flicked the door closed with her knee as another car pulled up in the drive.

A young man in blue scrubs and coiffed black hair stepped out, hospital-branded duffel bag slung across one muscular shoulder. He gave her a wave, smile gracing perfect cheekbones, and Becca was suddenly acutely aware that she stood in the front garden wearing a tied-on jumper and a child’s dressing gown, hands clutching stained napkins and sticky with gravy, face still swollen with tears.

“How’re you doing?” he called out with a rich burr from one of the southern states of America. He held out his hand. “Oakes, Michael Oakes. I’m your sister’s physio-nurse.”

“Oh, yes. They—they said.” Becca stammered, trying to wind the robe more tightly against herself. “I’m sorry, it’s been a bit of a night. Michael, was it?” Belatedly, she offered her hand to shake, still full of napkins. His warm fingers wrapped over hers securely. A small scar bisected his left eyebrow, giving him a permanent inquisitive expression. He didn’t even flinch at the gravy.

“Oakes, yes. It’s okay. It’s like that.” He stepped closer, professional manner softening for a moment. “It gets easier, I promise.”

Becca looked back down at the address on the napkins. “Are you sure?” she said, not entirely to him.

He smiled again, and extended his arm to lead her toward the house. “Trust me,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”