Excerpt: Lament

Another submenu appeared, with filenames and categories. All of them had the category 'Long Term.' It was starting to look like Chesire was intentionally digging up older memories of her and storing them in this chip. She looked over the list, wondering what all these memories were, when one caught her full attention.

“Mirror Speech for Bastet – Long Term”

She sat up straight, and hit the file. The memory that followed was unarguably the same memory that she had been seeing in Chesire's mirror, but faded, somehow, like a copy of a copy.

[memory start]
*Chesire stood in front of her mirror, gathering her nerves. She could do this. She took a couple of deep breaths and started.

“Bastet?” she said, and then realized she wasn't really sure what to say next. She fidgeted about for a moment, trying to think, focusing hard on her reflection in front of her.

Inspiration came, and she said, “I can't live like this anymore.”

Oh, man, that sounded awful, she realized. She shook from head to toe, not knowing what to do. She could do this. She could. She was the world's number one pop star. She regularly sang to audiences of more than a hundred thousand screaming fans. She could do anything. Surely, she could talk to her sister, right?

She looked at the face in the mirror and let out a sob.

“Chesire?” Johnathan called from the bedroom. “You okay, Honey?”

“I can't do it,” she told him in a shaking voice. “I... don't know what to say. I don't know how to...”

“Hey, hey hey, he cooed, stepping into the room and putting his arms around her. She melted into those arms, leaning against him, just a little and letting herself sob. “It's your sister, right? If I know anything about sibling behavior, I know that no matter how mad they get, they still love you. No matter how bad it gets, she'll forgive you.”

She reached up and petted his cheek. “Okay,” she told him, waving him off. “Go on, get ready.”

“Right,” he said, kissing the top of her head and stepping off out of the scene.

Chesire looked back up at her face in the mirror and spoke again. “Bastet? I want to ask for your forgiveness. I still am not sure what I did to earn so much ire from you that you won't talk to me for six long years, but whatever it was, baby, I'm sorry. Please, you're the only family I have left and you won't talk to me. I... I can't do this. I can't live like this anymore. Please, at least tell me what I did, so that I can remedy this, somehow. I love you and I want my family back...*
[memory end]

The scene faded, and Bastet came back to reality, her hands over her mouth, and tears in her eyes.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Oh, God. No, please no.” she sobbed, fighting back tears.

“What's up?” Bob asked, a concerned tone in his voice.

“Bast?” Vanessa asked.

“I just found out what the images in the mirror were,” she told Bob, sobbing.

“Okay,” he chimed.

“She was rehearsing a speech to me,” she said, and explained all about the scene she had just watched in the mirror.

“So, she was wanting to get back together with you?”

“Yeah,” Bastet told him, “she was saying that she couldn't live like this and she meant that she couldn't live with us so apart, anymore. She wanted to have her family back and I was all she had left. I had no idea.”

“Didn't you?” Vanessa asked, looking at Bastet with a very serious face.

“No,” Bastet told her with a question in her voice. “Why? Should I have? I mean, this memory was from the older chip, so that makes it at least a year old. I don't remember her trying to contact me...”

She stopped short as Vanessa reached back, pulling her own HMR chip out of its socket and handing it to her. Slowly, with great hesitation, Bastet took it from her, pulling Chesire's chip out and pushing Vanessa's in.

When the line of icons appeared, she looked up at Vanessa, who told her, “Search by Title, you're looking for Chesire Crying June12”

It took a moment, but she found the file and with a look of real trepidation, she opened it.

[memory start]
*Vanessa was sitting on Chesire's long couch, and Chesire was curled up against her, crying like a baby. She held her close, hugging her tight and letting her cry.

“I don't understand why she hates me so much!” Chesire sobbed into her breast.

“I don't know, baby,” was all she could think to say. “Did she give you some specific reason?”

“That's just it,” Chesire told her, sitting up to look her in the eyes. “I've sent her half a dozen letters, all with HMR chips with my little speech in front of the mirror and a bunch of other happy memories from childhood and life before the feud, hoping she'd see that I love her and all, but she never even opened them.”

“None of them?”

“None of them! Every one of them has come back unopened with a stamp on it that said, 'Return to Sender.' She never even looked at it.” Her body was wracked with sobs and she squeaked, “I think that hurts even more!”

She lay back down in Vanessa's arms and started to cry with renewed vigor. All Vanessa could do was hold her mentor close and let her go.*
[memory end]

She came back to the present looking right into Vanessa's eyes, feeling kind of stupid. She swallowed hard and said, “Oh, yeah.”

Vanessa looked into her eyes for a long moment, and told her, “Your sister loved you with every fiber of her being, Bastet Keller. She started out patient, fully believing that her sister would turn around and forgive and forget and that everything would be all right in the end. She started to lose faith in the end. To the day she died, she never understood why you were so angry that you wouldn't even open a simple letter.”

Vanessa continued to stare her down, obviously looking for some kind of answer, but Bastet didn't have any. “I can't tell you,” she finally said.