Author's webpage: http://internettrash.com/users/livia/brighid/brighid.htm

Author's disclaimer: This is not for profit, but for love. They're not mine, they belong to Dreamtime. = )

Author's notes: Hmm. Naomi spoke to me. Guess us New Age hippy chicks need to stick together. For Beth, and JiM and Dawn and my Guardian Angel.

Pilgrim

by Brighid

It's New Year's Eve, the edge of the new millennium. I had shown up tonight, a bottle of champagne in hand, planning to whisk my son and his roommate out to dinner on the town if they didn't already have parties to go to. It's been awhile since I was in Cascade, and I wanted to make a gesture. I have learned, in the last couple of years, that gestures are important.

The boys didn't have parties to go to, and they didn't plan to go out. The champagne is chilling, but I'll probably be the only one drinking it. They're on call tonight, as are pretty much all city police. As Jim put it, some of the "apocalyptic whackos" know the new math, and know that 2001 is as much the big year as last year, Y2K bug notwithstanding.

So, instead of dining out, or tagging along to some gala bash, I'm listening to Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo while Jim chops apples up for mulled apple juice, and my son strips and cleans his gun. Blair's very methodical about it, everything laid out just so on the oilcloth, everything in its place. A year or two ago, I would have thought he was making some sort of statement, some gesture of defiance, but I'd like to think that I've learned a bit of wisdom in the intervening time. He's not making a statement; he's just cleaning his gun. He's on call tonight, and on duty tomorrow, and his safety and his partner's safety could depend on his gun being in good order.

I'm sitting here, chatting about the Goddess Tour through Greece I went on, and he's nodding and asking questions. Jim's got some, too, which surprises me a little. The man knows his mythology. All the while we're talking, Blair's hands are busy with his gun. They move surely, confidently, almost meditatively over it. Each step is precise, perfect, fluid. There is a part of me that would like to pin this, this meticulousness on Jim, but that's untrue, unfair. I can remember Blair like this as a child, when he played Lego. He'd plan out in his head what he wanted to build, visualize it, then lay out the little plastic blocks with serious intent, sorting by colour and size and function. He approached it with the same sort of meditative calm. Eventually, a spaceship or a racecar or a desert island would emerge. Never a gun, though.

My son never made guns.

I startle a bit as Jim asks me a question, realizing I've let the conversation slide. "So, what'd you think of Crete?" he repeats, his rough voice surprisingly gentle. I look up to find him watching me watching Blair, and there is a strange sort of sympathy in his gaze. He holds out a cored, peeled apple chunk to me, gestures to the juicer. "And would you mind doing this part? I hate standing too close to the whine of this thing. Sounds like Sandburg when it's his turn to clean the bathroom." There is a break in my son's cleaning as his left hand comes up, finger waving.

"Blair!" comes naturally to my lips, but I'm laughing, losing that strange, dark shadow that had gripped me the moment before. I smile at Jim, join him in the kitchen, leaving the table and the sharp smell of gun oil behind. "It was lovely. One of those... oh, truly resonant places. And Sheila certainly new her way about the sacred sites!" Jim nods encouragingly as he moves on to assembling our dinner -- salads and buns and cheeses and cold turkey from Christmas. This is certainly not what I had planned; instead of a party, we'll be eating a cold supper on the couch and drinking mulled juice and watching movies and listening to the rain, and oddly enough, it seems as good as anything else I could think of. Better, even.

I watch Jim out of the corner of my eye as I drop chunks of Granny Smith and Gala and Rose into the juicer. Jim's hands are long and elegant as he cuts the buns open, shaves the cheese into paper-thin slices. I remember noticing those hands the first time we met, how they held the wine glass, how they moved against the bed spread when he invited me to sit beside him, show him pictures of my travels. It occurs to me, though, that those first impressions have been subsumed in other memories: how those fingers touched my son's arm, his side, his head. How they lingered over pictures of a five-year old Blair, tracing the nose, the curve of his cheek. I had thought, when we first met, that he might be fun to bed. He's the sort of man who'd swallow you whole, who'd leave you tired and breathless and sated and who'd smile at you in the morning. And he kept touching me -- but he touched Blair more.

He still touches Blair more.

Now I understand it, at least a little. My son is his touchstone. Blair explained it, once, in the aftermath. He's like the reset for Jim, the focus that the Sentinel grounds himself in. The boot disk, as it were. And he provides the lateral thinking that is sometimes needed to deal with the vagaries Jim's abilities throw at him. They are yin and yang to one another. That makes sense, in a way. I had to meditate a hell of a lot to resolve that in my own mind, but in the end, before I left, I could say, "I hear that," and mean it.

What troubled me most was Blair's need to be that touchstone, to be needed by Jim. I've always thought that need was a chain, a tether to a freed soul, an enlightened being. I've come to understand, that for Blair at least, it's a foundation. It's his firmament. All those years, all those travels, the career as an anthropologist, I had thought that he was like me -- a free spirit, wandering, not seeking so much as experiencing. I've come to understand that my son was never really a voyager, a traveler -- he was a pilgrim.

I saw signs of it, sometimes, but never really understood them. When he was seven, the first time we found our way to England, we visited Canterbury Cathedral. He sat down on the great stone steps, fitted his small foot into the depression worn there by thousands of feet, and he looked up at me, his eyes huge and full of questions that he didn't know how to ask yet, and I was too young to have answers for.

When he was eleven, we traveled through Israel, the trip bought by my father, a gift to show Blair something of the heritage I'd chosen not to follow. I remember seeing those same questions in his eyes at the Wailing Wall. He knelt there for hours, listening to the keening prayers, soaking it all up, and then, finally, he returned to me, took my hand, walked away in silence.

When we got home, he went to his grandfather, asked to go to Hebrew school, asked for a bar mitzvah. Father was ecstatic, calling Rabbi Green and setting things in motion right away. He spent a lot of time with my father over the next two and a half years, and I'm glad that Blair could give him something I never could, that they could share something that I'd never wanted.

Blair was a good student, and he did well. Dad wept at his Bar Mitzvah, and showered him with presents. I remember asking Blair, on the ride home, if it was what he had thought it would be. He smiled up at me, a little sleepy from the wine he'd drunk, and shook his head. "Close, though," he said, was all he would say. In the months after, he still studied and went to synagogue with his grandfather. Dad died a little less than a year later, a happy, happy man. Blair still keeps the Swiss Army knife his grandfather gave him, even if his visits to synagogue are few and far between.

The summer after his grandfather died, we went to India with some friends of mine. He watched the Ganges with the same intensity he had studied the Wailing Wall, and he asked me questions; when I didn't have the answers he wanted, he asked them of everyone else. Questions about life, and death, and destiny and karma. At the time, in the years that followed, I thought I saw the anthropologist being born. I know, now, that it was merely the pilgrim soul in my son, trying to find the path it was meant to walk, the right road to faith.

It seems almost incomprehensible to me that it would end up being a badge, a gun and a fortyish cop with a quiet sense of humour and absolutely gorgeous hands. A damned fine ass, too.

I'm almost fifty, not almost dead.

But I don't wonder about taking Jim to bed anymore. I figured out, that first visit, to look but not touch. Now I know why. Jim belongs to my son, and my son to Jim. I am allowed to observe, to participate from the periphery, but that's all. Anything else risks losing everything, and I've already come too close to that. Blair forgave me then; I'm not sure if he'd be able to forgive again.

The gun is cleaned, reassembled and locked up. Blair's hands are washed, he's lit incense to clear the scent of the cleaning away, and he's helping Jim carry the trays out to the living room coffee table. I have the juice watered, have dropped the cinnamon and cloves in, the slices of orange, and it is just beginning to simmer on the stove. He stops on his way past, leans over my shoulder, sniffs deeply from the pot I'm stirring. His arm goes around my waist and he hugs me. It feels the same as when he was five, when he was fifteen. It makes my heart just... god, ache, but in a good, good way. "Smells good, Mom. We can let it simmer awhile, then serve it up later." He shoos me over to the couch. I choose the longer one, curling up in the corner, with a plate of sourdough roll, Gouda cheese and apples. Jim sits down next to me, closer than I would have expected, but when Blair sits next to him, crowding us comfortably together, it all makes sense. Jim hits the remote, and the DVD player hums to life."2001: A Space Odyssey" begins playing. I squint accusingly across Jim at my son, but he just shrugs and grins and points at his partner.

Jim laughs, a soft exhalation that sounds suspiciously like 'heh-heh', and leans back to enjoy the movie. I would like to blame this on my son, but the white socks tipped me off, years ago: Jim is a closet geek. The Shakespeare on the shelves, and the Asimov, and god help me, the Jane Austen, are all his.

I've seen the movie, a few times. Straight, even, though I liked it better with acid. Instead of focusing on the plot, I let my attention wander. The loft has undergone a number of changes over the years. The first time I'd visited, I'd gotten a distinct impression of, well, empty. Divorced guy special, you know? Books and a sound system, some utilitarian furniture, with a few nice things left over from the marriage, probably gifts she didn't want to take. By the second visit, there was more colour. More variety. A greater mix of my son's things on the shelves, in the music collection, John Varley commingling with Asimov and Heinlein. The hemp tea towels, the pottery toothpaste holder. Little touches.

Now, they both live here. Hell, they bought the new couches together, though neither, for the life of them, can explain why they chose white. Though I now understand why Blair started giggling, a little crazily, when I told him that a white couch would show all the dirt...

Blair is stealing chunks of cheese from Jim's plate. He's catcalling to "Dave" on the screen, warning him about Hal. Jim has thumped his twice, and is now threatening him with a batik pillow. "I swear to god, Chief, one more peep out of you and you're breathing foam." Three or four years ago, this would have upset me, this almost stereotypical play of male aggression. I don't think I could have seen it for what it is, the roughness merely a veneer over this mind-blowing... affection? Love? Like a big cat, cuffing a kitten, holding it down and cleaning its ears. And my son... my son loves it. He's chuckling, squirming, chucking cheese at Jim, threatening the upholstery.

"Boys!" Both stop, turn to me, looking flushed and amused and a little chagrined. "Watch the movie." Both smother grins, settle in, get back to the movie. A minute or two later, I see Blair's hand return to Jim's plate, and Jim just looks at me, shakes his head, and then goes back to watching the movie. The smell of apples and cinnamon infuses the loft, and the rain on the window is like music. Jim's arms stretch out along the back of the sofa, including us both.

When the movie's over, both are up and clearing away dishes. A minute or so later, Blair's carrying in a plate of date and oatmeal cookies, and Jim's hands are overfull with three steaming mugs. "Dick Clarke or local talent?" he asks, going for the remote once everything is settled to his satisfaction.

"Dick Clarke is creepy," Blair offers. "Annie Hayashi, on the other hand, is hot," he continues. Jim shoots me another of those looks.

"Dick Clarke it is," Jim says drily, flipping around the dial until he finds what he's looking for, despite Blair's protests. It's some band or other playing. Blair knows them, Jim pretends not to, and I haven't a clue. But they're nice enough, they go with the evening. Then Dick Clarke appears, and Blair launches into some mock-lecture on the history behind the Fountain of Youth in myth and legend. Jim gets this glazed look, until Blair whacks him hard on the shoulder.

"Hey, you chose Dick, no fair zoning on purpose to escape the consequences," he complains. Jim shushes him, keeps staring at the screen, until he sits back with a snort. "Tuck scars," he says finally, definitively.

"Really?" Blair's leaning forward now, interested. "Where? How many? Shit. I knew it!"

"Who didn't?" Jim replies, a little smugly. "Though I think the hair is his own. Dyed, but real." He's squinting again at the television.

"Heh," Blair leans back, pats the thin spot on top of Jim's head. "Follicle envy there, partner?" Jim doesn't answer, just glances at Blair, reaches into his ponytail and tugs. "Ouch, hey! What are you doing?"

Jim dangles a long, coarse grey hair between his fingers. "Well, I keep hearing you plucking these suckers out, thought you might appreciate some help." He turns to me. "Want some more juice?" I nod, and he gets up, taking his mug, too, but leaving Blair's mug behind. Blair rolls his eyes, mouths the word "sensitive" at me.

"I heard that," Jim says mildly from the kitchen. "I am not sensitive. The fact that I don't waste testosterone on hair isn't something to get sensitive about."

"He has a point, dear," I agree, looking over at Jim, smiling slightly. He grins at me from the kitchen island, salutes me with his mug. Blair looks between the two of us, flushes up a bit, claps his hands over his ears like he's five all over again.

"God, I so do not need to hear crap like that from you two," he moans. "Get back in here, now, and I'm turning to Annie and we're gonna do the count down and No. More. Testosterone." Jim chuckles, brings me back my mug, then grabs Blair's and refills it before settling down between us again. Mostly we stop talking, just listen to the band playing, and watch the local coverage. It seems quiet enough; certainly there are no international hit men making things interesting. The boys sometimes comment on things, mentioning tidbits from the last year when some sight on the television triggers a memory. I suspect I am getting highly edited versions. I suspect I will always get highly edited versions. I think, perhaps, I am happiest with that.

About a minute to midnight Jim shuts the television off. I turn to ask why, but his eyes are closed, his head cocked, and Blair is watching him with this small half-smile. He motions me to be quiet. It's like watching a spiritual channeller, when they've gone beyond their body. A moment later, Jim's counting softly. Ten, nine, eight... and I suddenly understand that they're showing me something, sharing something with me that I had never really expected. I have to swallow hard, almost miss it as he reaches "one". Then his eyes are open, and he's looking at Blair, and they're both smiling small, quiet smiles.

"Happy New Year, Chief," he says, as Blair says "Happy New Year, Jim." In that moment, I do not exist. They do not touch, nothing passes between them but this, this look, these soft words, but I feel like a voyeur all the same. Then they both turn to me, and it's "Happy New Year, Naomi," and "Happy New Year, Mom," and I'm being kissed and hugged and the television comes back on while they clean up the dishes and mugs and wait to make sure Simon won't be calling in the next little while. I wander to the bathroom, get cleaned up, ready for bed. I come out to find the loft mostly dark, and Jim helping Blair make up the couch. I say goodnight, kiss them both, and disappear into my son's room to sleep.

No dinner out, no champagne, but a good evening, all the same. After awhile, I realize the apartment is silent, but I haven't heard Jim move upstairs, so I peer out the slats of the room's blinds, to see them standing in the dark, by the couch, pale in the light from the streetlamps outside. Jim's arm is around Blair's shoulders, Blair's arm around his waist, and Jim's face is pressed into the top of my son's head. They are utterly still, utterly quiet. The thin, silver shimmer of my son, the darker gleam of Jim Ellison merge into one light, a sliver of brightness around them both. There is a peace in the lines of Blair's face, a stillness that I saw a hint of on the ride home from his Bar Mitzvah. I remember his questions, after the Ganges, and I think, perhaps, that this is the answer to them. I am a wanderer, and my son is a pilgrim and I finally, finally understand that.

I watch a moment longer, until Jim's long-fingered hand drifts up, tangles in Blair's ponytail, tugs so that... and then I let the slat fall back into place, because I have learned that there are places I just don't belong, that there are parts of my son's life that are his and his alone.

Two sets of feet move softly up the stairs. In the morning, I may just have to pretend not to notice that the couch has not been slept in. And that's just fine. I hear that.

But I think, perhaps, that I should tune into a meditation tape to help me sleep. I don't need to hear everything, after all.

An End.