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.