Your Magic or Mine? (38 page)

And the damned imperative gave him sharp jabs if he saw something that reminded him of her, like a dark-haired woman at the grocery store or a profusely blooming plant.

To top it all off, the little ivy, while thriving with a new leaf, did seem to give him reproachful looks from time to time. No, that last part couldn’t be possible. He certainly wasn’t communing with plants now.

He looked at his watch. Time to get back to work. He was putting down his coffee cup when the doorbell rang.

Who on earth would be here so early? Gloriana? When her name crossed his mind, his hand holding the cup lurched, and the coffee splashed on the table.

No, it couldn’t be. Samson wasn’t going crazy. Standing by the stairs with his ears pricked, the hound was watching the door, but not moving.

Marcus put down the cup, threw the paper on the coffee table, got up from his easy chair, and stalked to the door. Whoever it was, he’d get rid of them quickly. He jerked it open, not bothering to look through the peephole first.

“Oh, my God. What are you doing here?” burst out before he could control himself.

“Don’t stand there gawking, Marcus,” his father said. “Are you going to let us in or not?”

“Thank you, dear, and close your mouth,” his mother said as she breezed past him after he stepped aside.

Marcus closed the door—and his mouth—and followed them into the living room. Stefan leaned down to give Samson a pat before taking one of the easy chairs, and Judith made herself comfortable on the sofa.

“Is something wrong? What’s happened? You’re both all right, aren’t you?” he asked, certain a catastrophe had struck. Why else would they have come here all the way from Europe? They didn’t look like their usual immaculate selves. Instead they were rather rumpled and travel-worn—and something else below the surface. Anger? Sadness? He couldn’t tell.

“We’re fine,” Stefan said. “Sit down. We need to talk.”

“What about your conference, your appointments?”

“What we have to say is much more important,” his father answered.

“Would you like some coffee? Water?”

“No, dear,” Judith said. “We’ll have some later, perhaps. First things first.”

Uh-oh. Those words always preceded a discussion he didn’t want to have. Marcus lowered himself into the chair closest to his mother. He remained stiffly upright.

“I had a long talk with Gloriana on Monday,” Judith said. “We know she’s your soul mate, and we are thrilled and happy that you’ve found your mate at last. She’s perfect for you.”

“Damn fine woman,” Stefan put in. “Lots of talent and intelligence. Pretty, too. You couldn’t do better.”

Marcus didn’t say a word. He could all too readily imagine how that conversation with his soul mate had gone. Reminding himself that he was an adult and had valid reasons for his stance on the matter, he waited for their comments. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked from one to the other.

“She told us you’re rejecting the mating, however,” Stefan continued, “and she’s told us why. I’ll admit, your reasons have caused both of us a great deal of confusion and some heartache. We decided to come to you. We need to discuss the situation face to face and try to stop you from making the biggest mistake of your life.” His father leaned forward and pointed a finger at him. “Marcus, you are excellent at studying facts and making the correct decisions about all manner of problems, but, son, you’re coming to the wrong conclusion here.”

Marcus still said nothing. His father didn’t like interruptions, especially not those contradicting what he was saying. They were very much alike in this—and in many other aspects, like needing proof before changing their minds—a thought that bolstered his confidence in his determinations. How could they refute him? Hadn’t he lived it?

“That is our fault,” Judith said. “We never sat down and talked to you about soul mates, the reasons for our actions, or our feelings.”

“Quite frankly, we never thought we needed to.” Stefan rubbed his hand over his face—a weary gesture. “I guess we took it for granted that you’d understand us the way we understand each other.”

“Also, neither of our families ever talked much about what has become so important here or showed their affection for each other in public,” Judith said, “so I think we perpetuated their practices without considering the consequences, indeed without realizing we were doing so. We’re here to clear the air. Therefore let’s start at the beginning—your beginning. I can’t tell you how overjoyed we were when we found out I was pregnant.”

“Damn right,” Stefan added. “We’d wanted a child as soon as possible after we married. It simply took a little longer than we originally planned.”

He hadn’t been an afterthought or a bloodline issue
. Marcus’s heart beat faster while their words began to sink into his brain. He stopped himself from smiling, however. Better to hear the whole story before rejoicing. He did relax enough to uncross his arms.

Then he noticed his mother’s hands clasping and unclasping in her lap. He’d never seen her make such a nervous movement before. And his father was fidgeting, and Stefan never fidgeted. The discussion seemed to be harder on them than on him. Or was it about to get worse, much worse for him?

“I don’t think we ever told you,” Judith went on, “but your birth was a difficult one for me, and it took some time to recuperate. We brought in nurses for a while, and after I got back on my feet, we continued with a nanny to help with you. You understand the demands of academia. Our careers were taking off, and like many women at that time, I was trying to ‘have it all.’ That left little spare time for either of us. We made it a point to eat breakfast together with you every morning and dinner every evening and tried to work in some playtime. Also, one or both of us tucked you in at night. Do you remember any of that?”

Marcus shook his head, but he wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t remember or because he didn’t believe her. She had to be telling the truth. His mother never, ever lied. Images of his parents laughing and cleaning his ice-cream-smeared face and of them reading a bedtime story flashed through his mind, too quick to grasp and study. Were the pictures real? Or merely wishful thinking?

“Of course, he doesn’t remember. Most of that was before he was five years old,” Stefan said with a shake of his head before he smiled broadly. “By God, how bright you were, Marcus. When we had you tested, you scored higher than either of us had, and we were no slouches. That’s when we brought in a tutor. Remember Toby Feldman?”

Marcus nodded. Oh, yes, he remembered his tutor. Feldman had been in graduate school at the time, and very different and more outgoing than his parents. Much more fun. Marcus had hated it when Feldman graduated and went off to teach—and Marcus found himself in …

“We knew we had to send you to a good school that would challenge you, and Silberkraft Academy seemed perfect. We had no idea that you were miserable there,” his mother said with a catch in her voice. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I don’t …” Marcus started slowly. The tears glistening in Judith’s eyes gave him a moment of panic. He’d never seen her cry, and he prayed she wouldn’t now. He cast around in his mind for the reasons he never told them of his misery. “I guess because … when we were together on vacations after I started boarding school, there never seemed to be time to talk.
Simply talk
. We were always going somewhere, meeting somebody, seeing something. We talked about my grades or what I was studying, but you never asked if I liked it.”

“What was the problem? Why didn’t you like it?” Stefan asked. “We both loved our boarding schools. We thought you would, too.”

“Oh, the classes were all right, and I had some good teachers, and I enjoyed learning,” Marcus answered. “Since I placed three years ahead of my age level, however, I was always in classes with the bigger kids. I wasn’t even in a residential house with boys my age because the school wasn’t organized that way, but by grade level. The older kids … well, let’s simply say, they weren’t always as friendly as they might have been. Those my age called me a freak because I was smarter than they were. I spent most of my time alone studying when I wasn’t with tutors. The only place I was in my age group was in sports, because teams were determined by age, weight, and height.” He wasn’t about to tell them about the hazing he’d also endured there.

“Besides,” he concluded, “what could you have done about it? Sent me someplace else? It might have been worse. Look, don’t worry about that. It’s in the past. Over and done with.”

“That may be,” Judith said, “but it’s all affecting your future. I’m doubly sorry we didn’t, as you say, simply talk. Those years were frantic, both of us chasing professorships or prizes or publication or something, while trying to fit in time to be together with you. You’re correct, there was no time
to simply be.”

She gave him a sheepish look. “I have to confess something also, Marcus. You scared me a little.”

“Me?” He couldn’t stop his voice from rising or his eyebrows lifting toward his forehead. “I scared you? How?”

“By being male. No, both of you hear me out. I never told you, either,” Judith said, pointing at Stefan when he laughed. “I was never totally comfortable around boys, or later, men. Remember, I went to an all-girls school. The few men I saw were stuffy old teachers who didn’t have an ounce of sex appeal among them. The only boys were those in a neighboring school who were rowdy, rude, and, after a certain age, probably rapacious, or so I feared. When I went to undergraduate college, again solely women, I ignored all males. That may have partly been the soul-mate phenomenon at work, but the result was the same. I repeated the pattern when I was in graduate school and again when I started teaching.”

She smiled at his father and suddenly looked much younger. “Then I met Stefan. What a revelation! We were soul mates, with all that term implies. I learned more about men in our first three months together than in my entire life before that. My relationships with other men, however, remained the same—friendly but distant. And here you came along. A boy! What was I going to do with a boy? How do you talk to a boy? You were rowdy and rambunctious, of course, and interested in things that were foreign to me, like trucks and cowboys and space aliens.

“After a while, just as I thought I was making progress with you, it was time to send you to school. The years simply flew by and suddenly you were a teenager and didn’t want to have anything to do with us. On vacation, I felt like we were dragging you around against your will. I counted it a success if we heard a whole sentence from you, much less a paragraph. The only people you wanted to talk to, thank goodness, were the ones to whom we were introducing you and who shared your interests, which didn’t coincide with ours. You grew up, of course, and we could talk about adult subjects, and I was comfortable again.”

“Have I lived up to your expectations, accomplished your goals? Are you proud of me?” Marcus asked and crossed his arms again, bracing himself for the answer.

“Of course, you have,” Judith said. “We both could not be prouder of you. Some of our colleagues are tired of us telling them about your latest achievements. Your equation is stunning, a real contribution to spell-casting. Why do you even have to ask?”

“Because you don’t tell me so. All I hear is how you want me to publish more, to take a position somewhere else, to meet
your
goals. I think you’ve said ‘good job,’ your highest praise, to me eight times in my life, Stefan. What do I have to do, win the Fields Medal?”

“I didn’t think we had to tell you,” Stefan said, looking both puzzled and somewhat defensive. “I thought we were showing you. Otherwise, we certainly wouldn’t have introduced you, especially as a young boy, to all our friends and colleagues, or gone out of our way to put you in contact with the leaders in so many disciplines. Man, I really enjoyed watching their faces when you started asking questions. You knocked their socks off.” He grinned, then frowned.

“As for heaping more praise on you? Frankly, I was apprehensive too much of it would go to your head. Nobody likes a show-off or an overweening ego in a young man, even a brilliant one. The last thing we wanted was for you to end up like that Pritchart fellow.”

“What about my meeting
your
goals?”

“What do you mean?” Judith asked.

“Like publishing more, like teaching at an Ivy League school? What about
my
goals, the ones I set for myself?”

“Oh, Marcus, I thought those
were your
goals.”

“No, those were the ones you set for me, not the ones I set for myself. We’ve never discussed goals from my perspective. Neither of you ever asked what I wanted to do. You always told me.”

“Ah, I see where you’re coming from,” Stefan said, his frown clearing. “All right, what are your goals?”

“To make whatever advances I can in my field and in magic, to teach my students and help them learn as well as I’m able, to continue to write my science-fiction books, and
to live my life as I see fit.”

“Those sound commendable to me,” Stefan stated. “Oh, by the way, I enjoy those novels of yours.”

“You read them? Why didn’t you tell me?” The discussion was becoming one surprise after another. First, they actually wanted him, and second, his father read his books. What next?

“The subject never came up.”

“Of course, it didn’t. I wasn’t about to ask since I thought you disapproved of my writing them because you never said a word. Why go looking for criticism?” The real question was, why did he have to ask? Why hadn’t Stefan said something? He opened his mouth to ask those very questions.

“Hold it, you two,” Judith interjected, holding up both hands before he could say a word. “We’re missing the main point here. Let’s agree that none of us can read the others’ minds and that we need to discuss
everything
from this point forward and to give praise when it’s due. No matter what our parents did, Stefan.” She gave him an emphatic nod.

“Let’s stipulate that as parents we should have talked
with
you more, instead of
at you
, Marcus. I think we both assume the professorial demeanor too quickly—heaven only knows how frustrated I become when your father starts ‘dictating’ to me as if I were one of his students. But I don’t let him get away with it. I never thought you would take his statements like commandments. All right, does everybody agree on these points?”