The Lake Isle Of Innisfree
***
Laura sits on the park bench and hates all the people who aren't dead. She finds it callous of them to eat ice cream in front of her, to buy balloons from the vendor at the corner. To breathe. She is ashamed of this element of self-pity, but one can only suffer so much. Her family's graves are still raw wounds in the dirt. It is strange to be the last of a species.
There, look, the fountain where she'd come undone, surrounded by little children tossing coins in. She wants to shake them, to shake their mothers for telling them lies about wishing for things. For dreaming, because it is so frakking cruel to let them plant these little seeds of hope when life - with its early, killing frosts - will freeze it all to nothing.
And yet she tortures herself with it, presses the vivid tableau of these everyday lives against her brain like a finger to a bruise. Makes sure it still hurts. And it does.
A redheaded woman walks by with a plump baby on her hip and a toddler trailing close behind, the girl's serious little face scrunched in concentration as she spoons green ice from a cup into her rosebud mouth. Laura resents them - the baby's pink-cheeked health, the girl's bubble world full of sweet treats and sunshine. Their mother beaming at the pair of them.
Then, suddenly, the child is down. She wails on the pavement, blood running down her chin, the ice spattered and melting. The baby begins to cry. The mother, looking frantic, holds the squalling infant out to Laura as she watches her frightened daughter. "Do you mind taking him for a minute?"
Laura reaches for him. "Of course not," she says.
***
She walks down the hall to her into her office, the flat clinical smell of the exam room still cool in her nose. She imagines it spreading like anesthetic through her body, chilling her to this numbed state she's in where some other woman has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Not her, not the woman in the mirror who has a prestigious career and a rosewood desk and a respectable collection of Virgon wine. Not the woman who has to swing by her plush office to pick up a plaque and a letter detailing President Adar's great personal esteem for the people of Galactica who do as they're told and fade quietly into the background.
Not that she's bitter.
Should have had a checkup, whispers a silky voice from beyond the veil that's enshrouded her brain. Should have done your monthly self-exam.
Frak you too, she thinks.
There's a sharp stab of pain at her breast and she flinches, picturing the cancer sending out sharp spikes into her tissue, hooking healthy flesh with tiny, deadly thorns. But it's only her bra, the underwire pinching a little, and she readjusts before entering her suite.
"Madame Secretary," says her assistant, getting up. "The Pr-"
She waves her hand and sails past him. If she's out of here within ten minutes she'll make the decommissioning with no trouble. When she opens the door to her office, Richard is in there, waiting like a boy sent to the principal. He stands when she comes in, his hands smoothing his impeccable trousers.
"Laura," he says, a little breathless. "We need to talk."
She eyes him up, knowing what he'll demand of her again. "I'm sorry, Richard," she says, walking past him to the credenza. "This isn't a good time. I've just got to pick up a couple of things for the ceremony. I was out this morning, you know." Good girl, Laura. Even tone. You sound nice and calm and vaguely dismissive. Not at all like you're dying. Not like Mother, there at the end.
Her stomach churns.
Richard startles a bit, looks taken aback, and then rubs his hands over his face. "Gods," he says. "I'm sorry. The doctor's appointment, Laura. How did it go? Did they find anything?" His fingers tap against his thigh.
In that instant, she sees the weakness in him. Sees that he needs her to be fine because he is personally incapable of dealing with her not being fine.
She gives him a half smile and zips the plaque and the letter into her briefcase. "No," she says, the lie floating down easy as a feather. "Not a thing."
***
Cottle's looking at her as though she's an otherwise reliable dog that just peed on the good rug and chewed the sofa to bits. They sit together in the semi-dark, the cries of the grieving parents nothing but distant echoes. A smoky haze hangs around them, the smell perversely making her think of cancer treatments.
"Laura," says the doctor, rolling his heavy glass between his hands as he gazes down into it. "What we did - it's unforgivable." His voice is gruff around the edges, ragged like a gnawed fingernail.
His admonishing tone makes the back of her neck prickle in annoyance. "Forgiveness is for the gods," she says. A little prim, that, but what the hell is he expecting from her?
Cottle's head snaps up. "I don't give a frak about the gods. I have to sleep at night, woman. And do you know what Bill's gonna do if he finds out about this? We'll both be damned lucky if we don't get to experience your little airlock treatment from the other side of the glass."
Laura clucks her tongue a little in the back of her throat; a soft, impatient sound. "The Admiral has no more desire to see that baby in Cylon hands than I do." She fixes Cottle with a level stare. "And if he does uncover the truth, he may very well be grateful that I took the initiative without involving him."
Sharp bark of laughter at her words, the cigarette jumping a little in his fingers. "What a consummate politician you are, President Roslin." Cottle shakes his head slowly. "Are you really all right with this, Laura? With these choices you're making?"
She knows the right answer is to say she won't be okay. That she'll struggle with this decision for ages, and that it'll keep her up at night, wracked with guilt. But the truth is that she's fine with it. The mother doesn't count. The mother is a thing, a vessel, the can that holds the peaches, and someone was hungry. Maya deserves a child. Laura's sorry for Helo, she is, but he's a soldier and therefore a tool for the greater good.
When did she become so godsdamned heartless?
The pinpricks of distant stars when the airlock opens…
"I asked if you were all right," he says crossly, smoke curling around his fingers as he points at her. "It's a yes or no question."
He can't know how easy she finds it. The whiskey lines her stomach with artificial heat, masking the icy thing at her core.
"No," she says, setting her drink on the table. She curves her hand atop his, squeezing it ever so slightly as she speaks. Her hair falls into a tunnel about her face as she stares down at the floor. "No, I'm not."
***
The baby died last night, and they'd buried him this morning beneath a rare appearance from the temperamental New Caprican sun. Laura has one arm around the child's mother - scarcely more than a girl herself - and uses the other to poke at the fire with a metal rod.
"I wanted to go to law school," her companion says, eyes bruised-looking, her face swollen from crying. "I didn't want this. To be a frakking breeder. And for what? For nothing." Her voice is dull, her dark brown hair lank and tangled.
"I'm so sorry, Vivian," Laura says again. She rubs circles on Vivian's thin back, wishing age and experience had provided her with indelible wisdom to offer this suffering scrap of humanity.
"I wish I had died back on Caprica," Vivian mumbles. "They had it easy."
"Oh, honey…" Laura trails off, afraid the pain will break through and betray her. Vivian slumps against her shoulder, crying again in a tired, defeated way. Laura kisses her tumbled hair.
All of those lives blinked out by a searing wind, billions of voices silenced in a heartbeat. No scrounging for water, no cramped quarters and disease. No hunger, no despair…
She remembers Bill's speech after the battle at Ragnar Anchorage. Maybe it would have been better for us to have died quickly back on the colonies with our families instead of dying out here slowly in the emptiness of dark space, he'd said, though his intent had, ultimately, been to inspire. He'd promised them Earth, and they'd wanted so badly to believe.
After her mother had died, after her father and her sisters and the baby sleeping in Caroline's womb had been snatched away, she spent hours orchestrating elaborate scenarios in which she had wound up in the car with them. If only she had been there too, they'd all be tucked in together under a lush blanket of grass.
It's a game she still plays sometimes.
Vivian sits up after the silence has gone on too long and wipes a ragged sleeve across her eyes. "You think so too," she says, a note of accusation in her voice. "You think they were better off."
Laura smiles at her, her heart so close to breaking she can feel it squeezing in her chest. "No," she says. "Life is always better. Where there's life, there's hope."
***
Elosha sits with her, the air sweet with lilac and honeysuckle. Bees, drunk on nectar, blunder by, and a soft breeze picks up to stir the grass. "Where are we?" she asks, her eyes following a dappled fawn down to a stream. It bends its elegant neck and takes a drink from the water.
"We're anywhere you want, Laura."
"I don't understand."
Elosha smiles.
The scene shifts, and Laura's in dark water with her sisters. They're only girls, white and innocent as a trio of nymphs as they splash and giggle. She remembers this night, sneaking out to the lake behind the summer house to go skinny-dipping, having hinted to the Murphy boys down the road that they might be doing so. Elizabeth's got hips now - and the beginning of breasts - but Caroline is still flat-chested and skinny. The moon beams down at them with a friendly face, and Laura laughs and ducks under the surface.
When she comes up, she sees herself reflected in a mirror. She's wrapped in a crisp white sheet, kneeling on a bed, with her hair - her one vanity - tumbling down her back in chestnut ringlets. She glances at the blankets and there's Bill, sleeping soundly, his arm flung out across her side of the bed. She reaches forward to touch his hand, her fingers grasping at his. He smiles in his sleep. Laura lets go and crawls forward to lay down on his arm, her body curved against his, his breathing slowing down her heart as her eyes slide closed.
She awakens on a hillside, the sky a watercolor of crimson and violet, gold and shocking pink. Towards the horizon is a small log cabin, smoke curling from the chimney and spicing the air with the tantalizing scent of peat. Laura draws her knees up and rests her chin on them, watching as the sun slowly burns itself down to the cool embers of night.
"It's getting late," Elosha says from beside her. "You must be tired."
Laura nods. She is tired.
Elosha stands and holds her hand out. "It's all right, Laura. Are you afraid?" Her voice is soothing as warm milk and honey.
Laura looks up into the kind face and gets to her feet. She shakes her head, and follows her friend into the west.
***
Laura sits on the park bench and hates all the people who aren't dead. She finds it callous of them to eat ice cream in front of her, to buy balloons from the vendor at the corner. To breathe. She is ashamed of this element of self-pity, but one can only suffer so much. Her family's graves are still raw wounds in the dirt. It is strange to be the last of a species.
There, look, the fountain where she'd come undone, surrounded by little children tossing coins in. She wants to shake them, to shake their mothers for telling them lies about wishing for things. For dreaming, because it is so frakking cruel to let them plant these little seeds of hope when life - with its early, killing frosts - will freeze it all to nothing.
And yet she tortures herself with it, presses the vivid tableau of these everyday lives against her brain like a finger to a bruise. Makes sure it still hurts. And it does.
A redheaded woman walks by with a plump baby on her hip and a toddler trailing close behind, the girl's serious little face scrunched in concentration as she spoons green ice from a cup into her rosebud mouth. Laura resents them - the baby's pink-cheeked health, the girl's bubble world full of sweet treats and sunshine. Their mother beaming at the pair of them.
Then, suddenly, the child is down. She wails on the pavement, blood running down her chin, the ice spattered and melting. The baby begins to cry. The mother, looking frantic, holds the squalling infant out to Laura as she watches her frightened daughter. "Do you mind taking him for a minute?"
Laura reaches for him. "Of course not," she says.
***
She walks down the hall to her into her office, the flat clinical smell of the exam room still cool in her nose. She imagines it spreading like anesthetic through her body, chilling her to this numbed state she's in where some other woman has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Not her, not the woman in the mirror who has a prestigious career and a rosewood desk and a respectable collection of Virgon wine. Not the woman who has to swing by her plush office to pick up a plaque and a letter detailing President Adar's great personal esteem for the people of Galactica who do as they're told and fade quietly into the background.
Not that she's bitter.
Should have had a checkup, whispers a silky voice from beyond the veil that's enshrouded her brain. Should have done your monthly self-exam.
Frak you too, she thinks.
There's a sharp stab of pain at her breast and she flinches, picturing the cancer sending out sharp spikes into her tissue, hooking healthy flesh with tiny, deadly thorns. But it's only her bra, the underwire pinching a little, and she readjusts before entering her suite.
"Madame Secretary," says her assistant, getting up. "The Pr-"
She waves her hand and sails past him. If she's out of here within ten minutes she'll make the decommissioning with no trouble. When she opens the door to her office, Richard is in there, waiting like a boy sent to the principal. He stands when she comes in, his hands smoothing his impeccable trousers.
"Laura," he says, a little breathless. "We need to talk."
She eyes him up, knowing what he'll demand of her again. "I'm sorry, Richard," she says, walking past him to the credenza. "This isn't a good time. I've just got to pick up a couple of things for the ceremony. I was out this morning, you know." Good girl, Laura. Even tone. You sound nice and calm and vaguely dismissive. Not at all like you're dying. Not like Mother, there at the end.
Her stomach churns.
Richard startles a bit, looks taken aback, and then rubs his hands over his face. "Gods," he says. "I'm sorry. The doctor's appointment, Laura. How did it go? Did they find anything?" His fingers tap against his thigh.
In that instant, she sees the weakness in him. Sees that he needs her to be fine because he is personally incapable of dealing with her not being fine.
She gives him a half smile and zips the plaque and the letter into her briefcase. "No," she says, the lie floating down easy as a feather. "Not a thing."
***
Cottle's looking at her as though she's an otherwise reliable dog that just peed on the good rug and chewed the sofa to bits. They sit together in the semi-dark, the cries of the grieving parents nothing but distant echoes. A smoky haze hangs around them, the smell perversely making her think of cancer treatments.
"Laura," says the doctor, rolling his heavy glass between his hands as he gazes down into it. "What we did - it's unforgivable." His voice is gruff around the edges, ragged like a gnawed fingernail.
His admonishing tone makes the back of her neck prickle in annoyance. "Forgiveness is for the gods," she says. A little prim, that, but what the hell is he expecting from her?
Cottle's head snaps up. "I don't give a frak about the gods. I have to sleep at night, woman. And do you know what Bill's gonna do if he finds out about this? We'll both be damned lucky if we don't get to experience your little airlock treatment from the other side of the glass."
Laura clucks her tongue a little in the back of her throat; a soft, impatient sound. "The Admiral has no more desire to see that baby in Cylon hands than I do." She fixes Cottle with a level stare. "And if he does uncover the truth, he may very well be grateful that I took the initiative without involving him."
Sharp bark of laughter at her words, the cigarette jumping a little in his fingers. "What a consummate politician you are, President Roslin." Cottle shakes his head slowly. "Are you really all right with this, Laura? With these choices you're making?"
She knows the right answer is to say she won't be okay. That she'll struggle with this decision for ages, and that it'll keep her up at night, wracked with guilt. But the truth is that she's fine with it. The mother doesn't count. The mother is a thing, a vessel, the can that holds the peaches, and someone was hungry. Maya deserves a child. Laura's sorry for Helo, she is, but he's a soldier and therefore a tool for the greater good.
When did she become so godsdamned heartless?
The pinpricks of distant stars when the airlock opens…
"I asked if you were all right," he says crossly, smoke curling around his fingers as he points at her. "It's a yes or no question."
He can't know how easy she finds it. The whiskey lines her stomach with artificial heat, masking the icy thing at her core.
"No," she says, setting her drink on the table. She curves her hand atop his, squeezing it ever so slightly as she speaks. Her hair falls into a tunnel about her face as she stares down at the floor. "No, I'm not."
***
The baby died last night, and they'd buried him this morning beneath a rare appearance from the temperamental New Caprican sun. Laura has one arm around the child's mother - scarcely more than a girl herself - and uses the other to poke at the fire with a metal rod.
"I wanted to go to law school," her companion says, eyes bruised-looking, her face swollen from crying. "I didn't want this. To be a frakking breeder. And for what? For nothing." Her voice is dull, her dark brown hair lank and tangled.
"I'm so sorry, Vivian," Laura says again. She rubs circles on Vivian's thin back, wishing age and experience had provided her with indelible wisdom to offer this suffering scrap of humanity.
"I wish I had died back on Caprica," Vivian mumbles. "They had it easy."
"Oh, honey…" Laura trails off, afraid the pain will break through and betray her. Vivian slumps against her shoulder, crying again in a tired, defeated way. Laura kisses her tumbled hair.
All of those lives blinked out by a searing wind, billions of voices silenced in a heartbeat. No scrounging for water, no cramped quarters and disease. No hunger, no despair…
She remembers Bill's speech after the battle at Ragnar Anchorage. Maybe it would have been better for us to have died quickly back on the colonies with our families instead of dying out here slowly in the emptiness of dark space, he'd said, though his intent had, ultimately, been to inspire. He'd promised them Earth, and they'd wanted so badly to believe.
After her mother had died, after her father and her sisters and the baby sleeping in Caroline's womb had been snatched away, she spent hours orchestrating elaborate scenarios in which she had wound up in the car with them. If only she had been there too, they'd all be tucked in together under a lush blanket of grass.
It's a game she still plays sometimes.
Vivian sits up after the silence has gone on too long and wipes a ragged sleeve across her eyes. "You think so too," she says, a note of accusation in her voice. "You think they were better off."
Laura smiles at her, her heart so close to breaking she can feel it squeezing in her chest. "No," she says. "Life is always better. Where there's life, there's hope."
***
Elosha sits with her, the air sweet with lilac and honeysuckle. Bees, drunk on nectar, blunder by, and a soft breeze picks up to stir the grass. "Where are we?" she asks, her eyes following a dappled fawn down to a stream. It bends its elegant neck and takes a drink from the water.
"We're anywhere you want, Laura."
"I don't understand."
Elosha smiles.
The scene shifts, and Laura's in dark water with her sisters. They're only girls, white and innocent as a trio of nymphs as they splash and giggle. She remembers this night, sneaking out to the lake behind the summer house to go skinny-dipping, having hinted to the Murphy boys down the road that they might be doing so. Elizabeth's got hips now - and the beginning of breasts - but Caroline is still flat-chested and skinny. The moon beams down at them with a friendly face, and Laura laughs and ducks under the surface.
When she comes up, she sees herself reflected in a mirror. She's wrapped in a crisp white sheet, kneeling on a bed, with her hair - her one vanity - tumbling down her back in chestnut ringlets. She glances at the blankets and there's Bill, sleeping soundly, his arm flung out across her side of the bed. She reaches forward to touch his hand, her fingers grasping at his. He smiles in his sleep. Laura lets go and crawls forward to lay down on his arm, her body curved against his, his breathing slowing down her heart as her eyes slide closed.
She awakens on a hillside, the sky a watercolor of crimson and violet, gold and shocking pink. Towards the horizon is a small log cabin, smoke curling from the chimney and spicing the air with the tantalizing scent of peat. Laura draws her knees up and rests her chin on them, watching as the sun slowly burns itself down to the cool embers of night.
"It's getting late," Elosha says from beside her. "You must be tired."
Laura nods. She is tired.
Elosha stands and holds her hand out. "It's all right, Laura. Are you afraid?" Her voice is soothing as warm milk and honey.
Laura looks up into the kind face and gets to her feet. She shakes her head, and follows her friend into the west.
***