Rhiannon Lee (rhiannon_lee) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2021-10-26 16:58:00 |
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Entry tags: | npc, rhiannon lee |
Serch Bythol
Who: Rhiannon, NPC Mitchell Lee
What: A Trip Home
When: Flashback; Late May 2021
Where: Detroit, Michigan
Late May 2021
The house was caught in time.
It was a 1920s bungalow with blue-gray paint and chipped, white trim on the porch posts. A pair of brick steps led onto the little porch. Her dad kept a swing on the right side. The rusted chains could be heard up and down the block whenever a strong wind blew or he took a beer outside to relax, a creeaak-whoo in the evenings or early on weekend mornings. Between the northern exposure and a bur oak that loomed over the yard, the front of the house didn’t get much sunlight.
Rhiannon pulled her rental car through a tight driveway between the Lee property and the next. The engine was loud for the enclosed space, but if she parked on the street, Mitchell would make a deal about how she wasn’t a stranger and that was a stranger thing to do. Even so, she left her overnight bag on the front seat. She hadn’t spent the night in her childhood bed in years.
Mitch was sweating in the big shed out back. He was doing a carpentry project in his free time and the box fan blowing what remained of his hair back from his forehead wasn’t cutting it. Summer had yet to begin, but an early heat wave made the air thick and hot, in part because there wasn’t a good cross-breeze in these old, tight neighborhoods, or that’s what he said when he was self-conscious about the sweltering temperature in their house.
“Hey,” he said, slapping his hands on his dirty jeans as Rhiannon got out of the car. She looked different to him, and it wasn’t just the Corrigan freckles she couldn’t help getting in Nevada. She looked taller. Straighter. Mitch approached her cautiously and was relieved when his daughter came in for a half-hug. By the end of the weekend, maybe they could work their way up to a full one. “How was the plane?”
“Crowded,” Rhiannon answered, attempting a surreptitious look at her dad through her shades and hoping he didn’t notice her counting the new wrinkles and gray hairs. “The woman in the aisle seat took off her shoes, then she pitched a fit when the drink cart ran over her foot.” She checked out his work. “What is this?”
“Uh, it’s a pergola, for the house across the street,” he answered. Mitch drank some cold water, aware that the brunette was watching his Adam’s Apple bob when he drank it. She used to say it freaked her out.
“You mean Mrs. Martin’s house?” Rhiannon aimed her thumb at a brick home with window boxes, similar in shape and size to theirs.
“Ms. Martin’s,” he corrected. His ears were pink.
“Ohhhh.” Rhiannon went into the mini-fridge and stole a can of Faygo. The chht-pop sounded noisy even to her, and she wasn’t the one who looked like they wanted the earth to swallow them. “Well, tell her I said hi.” Rhiannon sipped and stared at him.
Mitch turned off the fan. “Don’t be a twerp.”
“I didn’t say anything!” Rhiannon protested, raising her shoulders.
“Come on in the house before your mascara goes for a run.” He stole the bag out of her car, then led the way across the yard and through a storm door. In his fifties, Mitch wasn’t old but one of his knees was bothering him lately and he favored it. Too much time on a concrete floor, he supposed, but he wasn’t about to give up a new job at the Detroit Assembly Complex, where Mack had opened the first new auto assembly plant in thirty years.
Rhiannon came into the kitchen and petted an unfamiliar dog’s head. According to the tag on his collar, his name was Slim. She could tell he was a shelter mutt, just like the last dog to grace the house, and the one before it. An ancient cat, nearly seventeen, napped on the windowsill. When Rhiannon raised her fingers to the cat’s nose, Maggie sniffed and nuzzled the human hand in recognition. “Sweet girl,” she said, spending some time stroking her before she turned to look at her dad.
“You want to talk now or get settled in?” Mitch took a clean rag from a drawer and ran it under the sink tap. The cool rag felt good on the side of his neck after all that heat.
Her stomach imitated a pretzel, twisting at the mere thought of talking to her dad about anything deep. It was alien territory. Rhiannon grabbed the handles of her bag. “I think I’m gonna jump in the shower first,” she said. “I smell like an airport.”
Mitch nodded, agreeing that it was a good idea. It would give them both time to adjust. “I’m gonna clean up and get dinner started.” He closed the back door and locked it. The dog settled on a mat and gnawed happily at a bone, oblivious as the two humans retreated to their corners of the house and tried to get their heads on straight..
Later, after they made small talk in the kitchen and ate a couple of steaks with bagged salad and baked potatoes, they downed two beers for good measure. Rhiannon watched for her dad’s napkin to hit the table. That meant he was done. She looked at the brownish-pink juice collecting on one side of her plate. Their conversation had drifted from his job to hers, to how her car was performing, and skated briefly over her dodgy relationship with her uncle. But the one thing Rhiannon kept trying and failing to bring up was Ciara, her mother, and the lingering questions she had about the hunter.
“We can stare at each other for the next hour, or you can spit it out,” her dad said. Mitch wasn’t the type to be forward with Rhiannon, or insist on talking about anything, but he knew this was what Rhiannon came for. For whatever reason, she wasn’t satisfied with the usual fumbling phone call.
Rhiannon’s breath left her lungs in a soft huff. “Okay.” She set down her fork and focused on the knotholes in the small, round table they shared. It had two chairs, for almost as long as she could remember. She didn’t know where the third and fourth ones had gone. She decided to dive into the deep end. “When my mom found out she was pregnant, I know you were already married, but… why’d she have me?”
That was it? Mitch flinched. “What kind of question is that? We wanted you.”
“No,” Rhiannon said quickly, before he could blow a fuse and stand up. “I know that. I meant, why was she excited about it?” She alternated between staring at the empty salad bowl and meeting her dad’s eyes. “Was it because she wanted to have a baby, or because I was a hunter?”
Mitch took a second to process that. He leaned back in his chair and tried to get past the knee-jerk reaction of thinking his daughter wanted to know why they bothered to have her. He cast his mind back thirty years to when Ciara zombie-walked out of the bathroom with the three sticks she peed on, ‘just to make sure’, while he was sweating bullets in the bedroom. “Both,” he said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing.” Rhiannon’s eyebrow arched. Her beer can was almost empty, but she went through the motions of taking one last sip. “Was she worried I’d get in the way?”
“No,” he said. “She was worried she didn’t give you enough attention. Show me a mom who doesn’t worry about that.” Mitch had agreed to the conversation, even advanced it, but as soon as it began he started stiffening like always. He made himself loosen up when Rhiannon gently offered him a cigarette and a lighter. “I haven’t smoked in six years,” he grumbled, but he lit up anyway, giving the lighter a long look before passing it back to his daughter. The first puff of smoke made him cough. “Don’t listen to anything your uncle Sean says. He’s a professional bull shitter. Your mom was going toe-to-toe with him to run that family. As for looking after you, that’s what I was for. I just wasn’t any good at it after she was gone.”
Mitch watched Rhiannon retrieve a cigarette for herself. “Why’s this coming up now? You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No,” the hunter said, shaking her head. “I’m trying to figure out what I want. I’m not even sure I want to be a mother. But if I am one day… I think I’d want them to have that choice. To be a hunter.” Rhiannon wet her lips and curled a foot underneath herself. “Everyone said she was good at it. Mom, I mean. I remember her hugging me and reading to me, but I never got to see what she was like as a hunter.”
Mitch’s fingertips rested on the table. It was a thinking position. “She wrote to me when she was off with her family,” he said. He looked around. He didn’t even own ashtrays. Finally he followed Rhiannon’s example and ashed right in the salad bowl. “She sent some tapes, too. Dictating cassettes, I think they're called. I’ve got them upstairs.”
Rhiannon gaped at him. “Why didn't you tell me before?” She imagined herself getting to listen to them as a ten-year-old girl, learning for the first time that she came from a line of hunters on her mother’s side. How would it have felt to hear Ciara’s voice again, not on some weird VHS tape of vacation, but talking right to her about the most incredible, miraculous thing in her life?
“I didn’t want you to emulate your mom, Rhi. I wanted you to figure it out yourself.” Mitch took another drag of the cigarette. “She was sharp as a tack. Funny. She liked to have a good time and she worked hard, but she was unapologetic about hunting. Everything else came second. Even you and me. The way she saw it, there was good in the world, but there was also a lot of bad, and she was going to hold the line. She knew where she stood, and she was gonna plow through anything that got in her way.”
The brunette blinked and rubbed her thumb around the filter of the cigarette in a slowly traced circle, calming her as she tried to understand Mitch’s perspective.
“They’re in a box in my closet, top shelf on the left,” he said. Mitch put out the cigarette. He’d lost the taste for them. “Go up and take a listen. I got the table.” He stood up and reached for her plate.
Rhiannon was sitting cross-legged on her old bed when he came upstairs an hour later. A file box was open before her. She had been through the thick stack of envelopes with handwritten letters and listened to two of the tapes on a handheld playback device. A long, thin jewelry box sat beside her with the lid taped shut. When she looked up, she exhaled. Her face was wet. “I think I get it now,” she said, wiping her cheek on her shoulder. “You weren’t kidding. She wasn’t like me,” the hunter said. “At all. At least not when it came to hunting. I bend rules all the time. I don’t see things in black and white, and I can’t detach from things like her. I mean, I get it, she was trying to survive, but it just... “ She took a breath and forced herself to let it out normally. “I came home because I thought if I knew more about her, it might help me figure out why I’m the way I am. Why I’m so fucking conflicted all the time. But it’s not helping.”
Mitch sat in what he’d come to know as the laundry chair when Rhiannon was a teenager. “Because you don’t take after your mom. You take after me. You just haven’t had the snot kicked out of you.”
Rhiannon looked up, confused.
“I can tell you don’t like the sound of that. You got the hunting from her, your soft side from me, and the rest is your own person. Which is how it should be. Don’t look at anybody else for the answers. You don’t know how long you have. Open that box,” Mitch said. He pointed at the white rectangle.
“This?” Rhiannon slipped her fingernail under the taped sides and pulled off the top. Nestled on the strip of thick, white cotton, there was a silver disc on a chain. The engraving was rubbing away, but she could make out the design. It was a Serch Bythol, a symbol of everlasting love between a couple.
“I gave that to your mom when we got married.” Mitch leaned forward and fastened his wife’s necklace around his daughter’s neck. “Love knocks people like you and me on our asses. When it hits, we don’t care about anything else. I was a blue collar kid, nineteen years old, and I married a monster hunter. You should have seen my face when she told me. Hit someone? Get hit back? Her brother took me on a ride-along to scare me off, but it didn't work. I did think I was going to have longer with her.”
He reached over and picked up a piece of Ciara’s mail just to see the handwriting. Mitch gave it back to Rhiannon. When he stood up, he said, “You don’t act like her, but you do look like her.” Having said his piece, he left the bedroom.
Rhiannon listened to his feet descending the stairs. When she was alone again, she changed out the miniature cassette, leaned back against a pillow, and hit play.