Demicore

Chapter 3

A tear fell from his eye, then another. The last hundred and fifty years of keeping himself together waiting and hoping for her flashed before his eyes, then started falling from them. He couldn’t stop saying he was sorry. He saw her in his mind – Andy.

"I couldn’t help it," he muttered through his sobbing, "I needed someone as much as she and I couldn’t help it."

Elizabeth’s tears stopped. "What?"

"I thought you were dead."

"So what? You cheated on me? I have been unconscious for a couple weeks and you couldn’t wait for me? I was injured nearly to the point of death and you had needs?" her heart monitor started beeping along with several other machines in the room monitoring her status.

"It’s not like that," he started, "you were legally dead for a hundred and fifty years."

"Not possible! What else are you not telling me?" she started having trouble breathing.

"Liz, please," he reached out to touch her face and she jerked away, putting stress on her I.V. when she batted at his hand. The monitors’ beeping became more urgent. Erik’s phone started beeping, too, but he ignored it. Nothing was as important as trying to sort this out with her.

"Get out of here! I’m not going to listen to this, I thought I knew you better!"

Sonya walked in the door. "Hello, Elizabeth, I am another of your doctors – Sonya. I am here because your monitors have sent out a distress."

Erik gave her a very dirty I-had-this-handled look. Elizabeth half smiled thinking of her own daughter.

"I understand that you were just having a rather heated debate, but it has put your systems and healing at risk. I am going to need to give you a light sedative to help you calm down." Erik gave Sonya a very dirty look. He did not want her sedated at all. He was afraid she would not remember conversations if she was – or solutions.

"Just please remove my husband from the room and I will be fine. You can still give the drugs if you want," she offered up the hand with her IV in it.

"He has stayed by your side the entire time you have been in this room. We have had to bring in separate food trays so he would eat. I think it will take more than me ordering him to go to get him away from your side." Sonya injected the sedative into Elizabeth’s I.V. but did not leave.

"I have a daughter named Sonya. She is four."

"Liz –"

"Dad, don’t."

"Dad?" Elizabeth looked back and forth between them. This doctor was as old, if not a little older than the two of them, why was she calling Erik dad?

"s**t," Sonya whispered under her breath.

"You were attacked, hurt beyond current medical help, so you were put into a portal through time," Erik said bluntly, Sonya face-palmed. "It is one hundred and fifty years and a couple weeks since your attack," Erik paused while Elizabeth shook her head in disbelief. "And this talented doctor is your daughter."

"I don't know what kind of sick prank this is or why you would choose to pull it, but I've had enough," her eyes welled with tears and her monitors started beeping again.

Sonya took a deep breath. Then another. She was frantically searching her mind for anything that would convince her mom of what had happened. The tension in the room grew. Sonya could come up with nothing that wouldn't sound rehearsed.

Katlin came rushing into the room, "Mom's monitors are lit up like a Christmas tree and making more noise than an angry flock of geese, what's going on?" she said all in one breath as she started checking Elizabeth's vitals. She stopped because no one else was moving, then followed their gaze to her face, "Oh, you're awake."

Sonya just closed her eyes. Erik winced. Elizabeth turned her searching glare to Katlin. "And just who are you?"

Katlin's eyes began to fill with tears. "They told you too soon. I told them if they told you too soon you would never believe it. I told them you would have to see for yourself how things are different than they were. I warned them the mind is too fragile after such a trauma." She sat down and cried.

"You all know how unbelievable this is," she said, "so if you want me to have even a shadow of the benefit of the doubt that it could have happened you're going to have to give me some proof."

Katlin looked up, brown eyes shining with tears, and quietly spoke, "One of my earliest memories is sitting in your lap trying not to fall asleep and rubbing the small scar you have just below your right shoulder."

The feel of the room shifted. Elizabeth's expression changed. Her gaze shifted to each of the other people in the room, carefully studying their eyes and then around the room itself. The ivory and blue wallpaper was yellowed with age and held up with tape and glue. The paint on the other two walls that had once been light blue to match the wallpaper was sun faded where the light came through the window which gave it a streaked appearance. Then it occurred to her: No hospital anywhere would have let her be treated at home, let alone lent the machinery with which to do so or sent doctors. As the realization hit that she would have to consider what they were saying, even the frantic beeping of the monitors began to fade into nothingness.

"Do you think that did it?" Sonya asked the room around her. Erik was silent, staring at the sleeping form that was the reason he had lived so long.

"I don't know, but it would have been a lot easier if you two idiots had waited until she was ready to hear it. Now I don't know what kind of negative effect this mess will have on her recovery! You both know that for the body to heal, the mind has to heal, too," Katlin chided them harshly before she stormed out of the room.

"That went well," Sonya commented sarcastically.

"Do you have any idea how stubborn your mother is?" Erik asked quietly after several minutes. It was the first time he had talked about her personality in years - since the girls had been very young. He kept a photo of her on his person at all times and talked often about the plans for when she returned, but never about her personally. Sonya shook her head and sat down. "She is the type of person who can change the laws of nature just because she believes it should be different."

There was another long pause. These breaks in Erik's conversation were often indicative of important topics, so she waited patiently. "She came by it naturally, though. Her mother was the same way. I swear they could have reset the stars if they had thought it needed to be done." He held Elizabeth's hand, his eyes never leaving her face. "Getting the truth through to her when she doesn't want to see it may prove to be more difficult than getting her back through this portal was."

Sonya knew what he meant. One hundred and fifty years of near constant court cases, studying, research, martial arts, medical breakthroughs, watching family get old and die around them, the witch hunt for the man who actually committed the "murders", and hope. Always hope. They had to believe that at the end of the allotted time frame the portal would be reopened to find that they had advanced far enough to save the two women trapped in the time warp inside it. They had not lost sight of that hope through the trials following the disappearance of the two women, nor through the hunt for Joey, the man who knifed them. They had not even lost the hope for Elizabeth and Carol through Erik falling in love with Andy and it only grew when Andy passed away.

Hope. It was all that kept them going for the past century and a half. Now it would have to keep them all for a while longer through this next trial: Convincing Elizabeth of what had happened in those hundred and fifty years she was caught in a time dimension portal. Sonya quietly slipped out of the room, leaving her father sitting at her mother's side.

For days she would barely speak to any of them when she was awake, which was rare due to the hefty medication she was taking. Erik got especially dirty looks. When she was asleep, she called out their names. Sonya and Katlin took some heart in the fact that she had not shut them out entirely but for Erik, there was no solace. Not until he noticed that she was softer toward Katlin, warming up to her slowly.

When finally she was ready to start getting out of bed for short times, it was not Erik she asked to help her, but Katlin. Then she took a turn they had been holding their breath for: She started asking questions.

"Katlin," she said when she was settled into her chair, "sit and talk with me for a while." She was sitting in the first piece of new furniture she and Erik had ever purchased, a gliding chair. Katlin sat across from her in the Lazy Boy. "Do you remember that chair?" she asked.

"Yes, you bought it for Grandmother to sit in with us."

"Do you know anything about the one I am sitting in?"

"It was bought when you were pregnant with Sonya. Dad said that you were always rocking so you bought the chair. But I doubt these questions are going to prove anything to you. He shared this stuff with me while we were setting up the room for your arrival."

"Was the set up slow or did it run smoothly and on time?"

"Slow. Stuff with Dad is always slow, especially when his heart is attached to what he's doing. He has to stop and consider every little piece until you remind him he is supposed to be getting something done with it. It's amazing he is so skilled at surgery."

"Surgery? Erik?"

"Yes. You should have seen him operate on Andy. He was exact, precise, almost robotic." Katlin knew she was taking a risk mentioning Andy, especially in the same sentence as her father. The wait for Elizabeth to respond was excruciating. Her silence seemed to last forever. Katlin's years of psychology were the only thing that held her together while she waited.

"You look to be about 25 years old."

"I'm not. I'm one hundred and fifty-two with a birthday coming up in a couple months. Not that I celebrate it much anymore."

"What day?" this would be one of the cinchers for them. If she gave the wrong date it would mean this was all a cruel game.

"July 22nd." Katlin paused to let her words sink in. She felt bad about having to play head games with her mom, but that was the only way... "You know Grandma Char and Papa tried as hard as they could those first few birthdays after you and Grandmother were attacked to make birthdays special, but there was just not any happiness to be had when both your parents aren't around."

"Both? How do you mean both?" Elizabeth was curious. She either really believed what she was saying or was a very well trained actress. Was it even possible to have trained an actress in the time it would have taken for her to heal from that attack?

"Yes, both. They accused Dad of your murders and hauled him off to jail." Katlin's eyes began to tear up. Even with a hundred and fifty years between her and the frightened little girl she had been when all of that happened the emotions were almost more than she could control.

"Murders?! But I'm not dead! Tell them to come here, I will give them a sketch of the man who did it. I got a really good look at him. I'll prove your father didn't murder anyone! He doesn't have it in him. I will make them listen-" Elizabeth was talking so fast her words were almost running together. Katlin had to hold up her hand to get her mom to stop talking so she could get a word in edgewise. Her heart leapt when Elizabeth had recognized Erik as her father.

"Mom, you were pronounced legally dead. We had a ceremony for you and everything. The only thing that got Dad off the hook was the fact that there were no bodies and his fingerprints were not on the knife. But the people who prosecuted him died decades ago. To be honest, we're trying to figure out how we are going to prove that you are really alive now..." she was soft, reassuring, and final all at the same time, "Now, let's get you back into bed. I think you have had enough of this horror story for one day."

As she was able to sit up and move about more, she asked more questions and listened more intently to what Katlin had to say. Still she would not see Erik when she was up. They spoke of the trials that they had gone through after the attack and the suits Erik filed afterward. It had funded the girls through college with an abundance left over after Katlin got started playing in the stock market.

"Dad's idea of a birthday present was ten grand in an online investment account for me to manage," she admitted. "I was nine. Naturally, I was thrilled. So I played with it. I tripled it in three weeks..."

"You were a natural," Sonya chimed in with a smile, "just like everything you ever tried. Now, lets see about taking Mom out for a walk today."