on the safe side, part 6

January, 2084 - Summer Phoenix is 19, Hayden is 34, Ryanne is 13.
Soundtrack: "Because of You," by Kelly Clarkson.

warnings: a severe lack of pictures, more difficult conversations, renegade third person past tense narration, the Phoenix family's last story on this blog.

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The future was full of plans again. After dinner, after talking, after the tears had all dried, you could have counted the plans in a list. Nessa looked forward to going back to work. Jack looked forward to getting her pregnant again, which her doctors told her there was a decent chance would be successful. Hayden and Piper's baby, would it be a boy or a girl? They didn't care as long as it was healthy, of course. And then the night quieted down, Nessa and Jack and Grandma Sophie went home and it was just the four of them -- five if you counted the baby -- what a strange thing to get used to.


Hayden and Piper took themselves to bed, and Summer and Ryanne went upstairs. They laid out sleeping bags on the floor -- Ryanne too, even though she could have slept in her bed. This was a proper sleepover. They might have set up a tent outside if it wasn't January.

In the dark, Ryanne talked about piercings. "Not 'til you're older," Summer said.

And tattoos. "Not 'til you're older," Summer said again.

And Ryanne wanted to know about boys.

"What do you know about boys?"

"I think Sam Harris likes me," Ryanne said.

"You might be right." Summer smiled. "You're probably right." She remembered Tyler at thirteen -- she didn't have to do much more than look at him and possess what would someday be breasts to get him to like her. "But for now, just try being friends with him."

"I don't have any friends," Ryanne said.

"That's probably not true. I bet Sam would say he's your friend."

"He's not my friend."

"He would be if you let him. And anyway, you have me."

Summer could just make out Ryanne's smile in the thin band of moonlight from the window behind her.

Ryanne didn't have any more to say, and it wasn't long before she settled into the soft, steady breaths of sleep. Summer couldn't sleep. She hated sleeping. She felt like she hadn't slept in years. She stared at the ceiling of her sister's bedroom and realized that she was probably too old for sleeping bags on the floor. Her back would hurt in the morning. But her sister would be too old for this soon too, and Summer didn't want to lose a single moment that she knew she'd never get back again.

She rolled onto her side and picked up a strand of her sister's bright green hair. Wasn't she too young to have green hair? Summer hadn't dyed hers until she was older, she thought. She tried to remember being thirteen herself, having her mom drive her between her friends' houses, all the fun and games, stealing kisses in the moonlight outside the back door of her house. She had so many friends when she was thirteen. When it was so simple. Back when she still had her whole future ahead of her and she had no idea this would be where she ended up.

But Ryanne was okay. More okay than she put on sometimes. She was so tiny and child-like still, despite the fierce attitude and angry grimaces. She slept with her retainer in, her nose all scrunched up against her pillow. She was just a baby, and she had more friends than she knew, and it wasn't too late for her.

Summer whispered, "Maybe we'll just start over from the beginning. We could pretend like nothing ever happened and start over."

If only it were that easy. Pretending was exactly what they'd been doing for exactly four years, one month, and three days now. Pretending wasn't enough.

Summer rolled off her sleeping bag quietly and tip-toed down to the kitchen in search of some hot cocoa and some MTV, but instead found the back door cracked open and a cold draft pouring in.

Hayden was outside sneaking a cigarette. Summer watched him as he flicked it onto the frosty sidewalk, all that cold, the grass was crusted with ice.

The first thing she thought: It’s going to kill him. The cigarettes. Later, probably. Much later. He didn't start smoking until after the accident, so maybe that bought him an extra thirty years — did it work that way? He almost died once, and this too would kill him some day. He would actually die some day, and not just almost. He would die and not be saved. He would die and not come back. People died. Everyone died eventually. And somehow the ones left behind had to carry on living.

Summer stepped outside with him. He looked up at her, startled. "You don't smoke, do you?"

"No," Summer said. "Not usually. I mean, no. I just wanted to... talk."

He looked worried. "About?"

"I'm glad you and Piper are having a baby and everything. It's not that."

She had nothing against Piper, and neither did Ryanne, except that Ryanne was too young to understand it that way. Summer remembered being thirteen, the way anger manifested itself in general rather than in the specific. Specifics couldn't be drawn until later, when she was older and had some distance to see things from. They didn't need to talk to a counselor -- they just needed to talk. To be allowed to talk. Summer needed to talk to her dad about everything that happened, but she couldn't because everyone was always so damned afraid of cracking him up again. Everyone was so damned afraid that Nessa might die, that Tyler might not make it back, afraid of everything, as if this world might explode at any minute. Because the truth was, it actually might.

And it made her angry, because they're all making plans and moving on, and here she was still stuck with it all. She was so young, and she made some really bad mistakes.  It wasn't fair what he did to them all. It wasn't fair, and she never got the chance to say it. Was she allowed to say it?

"We needed you!" She said. "And you just fucking checked out!"

Her voice came out in weak whimpers then, shaky and unsure. "How could you do that to us? I was fifteen! I was just a little girl."

He didn't have to ask what she was talking about. "I wasn't... I don't know," he said. "I'm sorry."

"It's too much -- the store, and school, and everything. It's not my burden to bear."

"I didn't say you had to run it. You seemed to want to."

"I thought it was what mom would have wanted, you said that, she would have wanted us to have it. I thought that's what you wanted."

He approached her then, as if he might take her shoulders in his hands, but he didn't, scared to touch her. "You can do what you want with it, hire it out even."

"I don't want to run it. I don't want to do the hiring, I don't want to manage it, I'm nineteen, I want to be a kid, I want to focus on school and be in a band, and be a kid." She started to cry then, because she wasn't a kid anymore. She was nineteen, a woman. She was a kid once, but not now. "I was just a kid," she said again. "And now it's all so fucked."

"I'm sorry, what can I do?"

She sat down on the porch and he sat down next to her. She shook her head. That was all over now, and there was no going back. All the mistakes, the wrong turns, the suffocation. She fucked up her own life and Tyler's life too. She should have done so many things differently, but now it was what it was, and it couldn't be undone. What was there to do?

She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, watching it turn into a frozen puff in the air. She didn't feel cold. She felt the hot pulse of blood in her fingers, but she felt calm. Now she felt calm. And tired. Like she could sleep for a year. A long, deep, dreamless sleep. Even if on a sleeping bag on the floor.

"I remember when you girls were really little," he said. "I made a lot of mistakes too. I was a grown up and I made mistakes. Big ones. What was I thinking? You know, I have actually thought about this before. And they said I was out of my mind with grief, but I knew what I was thinking. About how I could do it."

He paused to look over at her. She was scared to look him in the eyes, but she did. She swallowed hard. "What was it?"

"You're a woman now," he said. "I told your grandma then, and I told your uncle Jack. I didn't want to tell you about it then because you were both so young, but I can tell you now. When I did it, I was thinking that I knew my mom would take care of you. I knew you girls wouldn't be left alone."

He'd never spoken of it so bluntly before. Summer's eyes felt the strain of gaping at him, wide with the relief of all that silence lifted. So many years. He finally said it.

But instead of anger or surprise or anything else, she felt a laugh rise from her chest. An absurd laugh that filled the cold air. "That's not good enough, you know."

He began to laugh awkwardly too. "No. I know it's not."

The patio door rolled open behind them then. Ryanne snuck out, socked feet padding across the deck. She wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, shivering lightly, her retainer still in.

"What are you guys doing? It's cold out here! Why are you laughing? What's so funny?"

After lecturing them, she sat down with them anyway and they just smiled at her.

"We're starting over," Summer said.

"Yup," Hayden said, putting an arm around each of them.

"Staring over from what?"

"From this morning," Hayden said.

"So I can say I'm sorry?"

"You're sorry? About what?"

"The baby," Ryanne said. She scrunched up her nose a little. "It's okay if you guys wanna have one, I guess. I don't care."

Hayden laughed, and Summer did too. "I'll take that as permission then, " he said.

The future was full of plans again. There was only forward from here, and there was something refreshing about the idea of it. A life full of hope. A fresh start. Summer hadn't felt so safe in years, tucked under her father's arm like she might be a little girl again and not the grown woman she actually was.

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