Transformers: Starscream Ascendant

Chapter 12

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Summary: A woman seeks to discover the reasons behind recent events, while a mother/grandmother tries to understand her own motives. And all the while, something else is listening.

Authors Note: I know that as a Transformers fic, the title characters should get the bulk of the story. However, this first story has a lot of human elements tied up in it, and they have to be addressed. But they will all be tied up at the end.

10:20 AM, Saturday June 21, 2008

Louisville, Kentucky

A 2004 Ford Focus Sedan settled to a stop in front of a house. It wasn't too much unlike the other houses in Deer Park: it had one-and-a-half stories, a wide porch, was covered in wood siding and shingles painted red and with trim painted white.

The driver of the Ford was surprised. Martha Schlotter had expected news vehicles, reporters and various other paparazzi to be swarming the place, based on what CNN coverage she had seen. But the only vehicles she would actually think of as out of place were two black, unmarked SUV's at either end of the block. At the very least, she would be able to talk to... whomever was home, in peace.

She gave a short, contemplative look at her purse in the passenger before grasping it, hefting the strops onto her shoulder and exiting her car. Walking up the concrete path to the house, she wondered what she would say, how she could possibly convey her concerns or ask what she wanted to know.

As it turned out, her first meeting didn't necessitate much talking at all.

She reached the door and just as she was about to knock, the door cracked open and a young woman with curly brown hair and slightly swarthy skin poked her face out. Not knowing quite what to say, Martha ventured a wild guess. "Mrs... McPherson?"

In response, the girl handed her a card with large, block letters written in black marker.

NO PRESS

"Oh.. well, I'm not with the press, I'm just here to see..." Martha was just beginning again when another woman came to the door. This woman had long, dark brown hair starting to go grey and whose face was beginning to display the first signs of visible ageing: wrinkles, a slight sharpening of features and the like. The face... also reminded her of someone else. "Mrs. McPherson?" Martha ventured again.

"Yes, I am Emer McPherson. Who are you and what do you want?" The older woman sounded testy, which was understandable given the initial rush of reporters that must have converged at first. That probably also explained the young woman with the large card and small vocabulary.

"My name is Martha Schlotter. My husband and I..." She looked around to make sure that no one else was listening before continuing. "Ted and I were the ones who adopted Alvin."

Mrs. McPherson regarded her appraisingly for a moment before acting. "You better come inside." She opened the door wider and began leading Martha inside. Once they were in the hallway, the girl shut the door and sat in a chair across from an old hat stand.

"Your daughter?" Asked Mrs. Schlotter, quite confused about the girl.

"One of my daughters friends. And if you're wondering why she didn't talk, Sarah's always been a bit embarrassed about her accent... that and she doesn't want to give the the reporters any sound-bytes to latch onto." They walked down the hall and into the kitchen. "I'm sorry my husband isn't here: those microphone-toting vultures drove him to accept some half-pay overtime at work today." Having reached the kitchen at the rear of the house, Emer invited Martha to sit and asked the first important question. "So.. what do you want anyway?"

Martha, for her part, had been thinking long and hard about what she was going to say. She didn't want to hide the reason for her visit, but she did not want to assume to much. "Mrs. McPherson... I don't want to pry, but I just wanted to ask about your daughter: what she's like, about... well, about the circumstances."

"Why?" Reporters had been rumoured to employ some extremely dirty tactics to get a scoop, and Emer could not help but be cautious around anyone she did not know personally.

"Mrs. McPherson, you deserve to know something right now: when Ted and I entered into this adoption, we had been promised that any child brought to our attention had to be one that really needed a good home. Our parameters were if the mother were extremely young or if there was some form of substance issue or if there were no parents at all." She stopped for a minute to consider if that had seemed a bit... she didn't know what to call it, but it wasn't good. She contimued on. "I have reason to believe that the Agency may have lied to us, and possibly to you and your daughter as well."

Emer McPherson scrunched her features and brought a clenched fist to her mouth. Several beats passed before she seemed to relax a bit. Lowering her hand, Emer felt compelled ask a question that had been haunting her for days. "What... what did Edith say to you when she took Alvin?"

"She stated who she was, she said she was eighteen and she said she wanted her son back. She..." Martha had to approach this conversation carefully, lest she reveal too much. "She knew things about us that we thought were confined to our closest friends. About our son... about..." Well, that was the biggest point... but the contents of her purse possibly connected to everything afterwards.

An awkward silence lapsed over them before Mrs. McPherson just gave up all pretence, bowed her head, covered her face with her hands and muttered "I should have let her find him."

"Pardon?" Martha hadn't quite heard all of it, but she was fairly certain that she had identified the words "her" and "him", the latter potentially indicating the source of the Y chromosome.

Emer lifted her face out of her hands and looked at Martha with a look of sad defeat. "I said I should have let Edith try and find him." Now came a more complete explanation in a more formal tone. "Near the end of her sophomore year, our daughter practically begged us to let her take part in her schools interstate exchange program. The destination that year was Southern California, specifically a little town close to Los Angeles, and Edith made all sorts of reasons why it would be a good idea for her to go. She talked about exploring the desert and its wildlife, she said it would be an opportunity to brush up on her Spanish, she even made an argument about connecting culturally with a more socially liberal population near the coast." Emer began to smile weakly at this point. "But underneath all that, I still think she mostly wanted what any other girl her age would: fun, adventure, a winter with no snow, afternoon trips to LA or to the beach and little or no parental supervision."

Then she began getting serious again. "So she went, stayed with a family affiliated with both the program and a local Presbyterian church and, about a month in, we get a letter from her. It's all great, she says: great weather, nice people, interesting food, learning lots about California culture... and then she says that she met a boy. Says he's a nice, middle-class guy with a great sense of humour and a dorky friend. That's the last I hear about it until the day before the Mission City attack."

Emer closed her eyes in remembered exasperation. "The family she was boarding with caught her trying to sneak back into the house before sunrise. She said that she'd just been studying for the exam with a friend and hadn't checked the time... but the family told us that she had been wearing a jacket they didn't recall her buying." Her eyes opened again. "That incident was mostly eclipsed by what happened in Mission city: the first thing we did was make sure Edith was alright. She said she was fine, told us that Miles... that's the boy... was also fine too, but was worried about that dorky friend of his. Two weeks after that, she came back."

"And that's when..." Martha could guess the event, but this tale had to continue.

"That's when Edith's "time of the month" never came. It was two weeks late before Edith began worrying and actually bought a home-pregnancy test... and even then, she double-checked by going to her pediatrician." Emer sighed and began looking around the room absently. "Do you know how difficult it is to raise an infant, Mrs. Schlotter?"

Thinking back on everything in the last four months, the struggles, the hardships, the shocks... and the cold, hard realities, Martha had her answer almost by base instinct. "I do, Mrs. McPherson."

Emer focused her sight back on her partner in conversation. "Then you can only imagine how much more difficult it would be for a woman below the age of majority, still struggling with finishing her last year of high school and with the social isolation that could result, not to mention of where the money to raise this child would come from." She stood up and wandered toward the back door before turning back. "We couldn't reach the boy, this "Miles". But even if we could... even if I had allowed Edith to continue trying, I didn't want to burden her. Both me and my husband have seen our shares of teenage pregnancy in our time: even with the boy doing what he can for his new family, they'd need lots of help, especially from their families."

Martha did not fully understand the problem. "Then why didn't you just help Edith with the baby?"

"That's the part I can't figure out! I should have just let Edith find him and then judged for myself when he came here to sit in judgement before our extended family." Seemingly upset with herself now, Emer came back to her chair and sit down. "But the reason I gave myself was that i didn't know if he had any family. Without them, we had only two options. There were my husbands kin: a widowed mother in Salyersville, his sister and her family in Cincinnati and distant relatives in the mountains who considered my in-laws a blight in the eyes of God. On the other hand there was my family... and let's just say I wasn't going to let them get their claws into my daughter and leave it at that."

"You don't... get on with your family?" Martha asked, a little astonished at the subtle venom that had seeped into the last sentence.

"The only one who I get along with is my niece Miranda. She and my aunt are the only sane people the Parrs seem to have produced... besides me, of course. I just didn't want them trying to shape Edith into something she obviously did not want to be. They'd help... but it would have been on their terms."

Martha had her eyes closed in reflection by now. "Thank you for your time, Mrs. McPherson. I have to be going now." She got up and began waking back to the door before Emer could get up and follow. Sarah opened the door for her and she went out to her car, all the while trying to disguise the unusual movements of her purse..

Emer McPherson stood back inside the doorway, Sarah beside her. As ere eyes followed the car driving away, she wished... wished with everything she had... that she had made a different decision.

But she hadn't. Almost every morning during Edith's pregnancy, she had woken up with the conviction that this was the way it had to happen.

Not 'how it had to be', mind you, but 'how it had to happen'.