Normally, when he found himself thinking or remembering too much, John would find comfort by sitting or standing by the window and looking out at the lake. The view of the water was one of the reasons why he loved that room so much. And now, that avenue of coping was closed to him. How could he push away memories of growing up with Bobby while looking out at the lake where Bobby swam?
A seal. Bobby was a seal. And he himself was not a human. John closed his eyes against the pain those thoughts brought him. Oh, a part of him was glad that Bobby wasn't dead after all. But he was a seal, an animal. And as far away from John as if he really were dead.
And John felt anger toward his parents over the fact that they had let him grieve for Bobby all those years, keeping the truth from him. How many times has he stood over Bobby's grave, his heart crying out the words that John could never bring himself to say out loud - the condemning of Bobby for leaving him behind, asking God why he'd taken Bobby from him - so many wasted hours. So much time lost. Time when John could have been with Bobby, even if it was as one of those selkie creatures.
God, but John didn't want to think about being one of those things. Not human. He'd never been human. Nausea swept over John as he remembered all of the hopes he had - to get married, to have children, to be a nice and normal family. But none of that could ever happen now. The feelings he had been developing for Abby were wrong on so many levels aside from the fact that she was Luka's girlfriend. What could he, a...a thing, offer her, a human? Nothing. He'd never do to her what his mother had done to his father...no, to Jack. His father was dead and not human.
"Oh, God..." with his hand clamped over his mouth, John dashed for the bathroom, barely making it there in time. He emptied his stomach, but the heaving wouldn't stop until he was wrung dry. As he slumped against the tub, John closed his eyes, wishing for all of this to be nothing more than a dream, a bad and horrible dream, but at least a dream. Yet when he opened his eyes, John saw that he was still sitting on the floor of his bathroom, and he was living a nightmare.
Shaking his head as if that small act of denial could cancel everything he'd been told, John got to his feet. Standing at the sink, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the mirror as he reached for his toothbrush. Strange how the man in the mirror seemed to look the same as he had for years. Strange how the man in the mirror looked like a man and not like an animal. The image of Bobby and his uncles out in the lake flashed in John's mind, and he tried to imagine himself as a selkie, looking like a seal. But yet not a seal. Not a human, either, but something mythical that was in-between the two. No matter how hard he tried to imagine himself looking that way, John couldn't quite get the image right. Disgusted once more with himself, John ignored the mirror as he brushed his teeth and washed his face, and then went into his bedroom to sit at the small table where his medical journals normally rested. He picked one up and opened it, determined to spend his afternoon reading.
As the hours passed, John found himself concentrating more on the sounds of the house than on the articles he was trying to read. He could hear a door opening and then his uncle's voices, their Scottish accents crisp as they joked with one another as they passed John's room and then faded as they went downstairs. And then the soft footsteps that stopped at John's door. He held his breath as he waited for his mother to knock on the solid wood, letting it out slowly as those soft footsteps headed on down the hallway as well. It was another hour before he heard the heavier footsteps of his father - of Jack Carter - in the hallway, and when they stopped at his door, the man did knock.
"John? It's dinner time."
"That's okay," John said, cutting off the word 'Dad'. Would he ever be able to think of him as his Dad again? "I'm not very hungry."
"John, you should..." Jack's voice trailed off, and then John heard a slight thump against the wood. He was about to get up to open the door to find out what was wrong when he heard Jack speak again. "We'll be in the dining room if you should change your mind."
"Thank you," John replied, and then he listened as Jack's footsteps disappeared down the stairs. Looking up from the journal, John's eyes fell on the curtains and his mind was drawn to what he would see if he opened them - the lake. The water, calm and serene, calling him, calming him. But he couldn't go there - he wasn't ready to face Bobby as a seal. He wasn't ready to accept that everything he'd been told and had seen was real.
Eleanor looked up from the dinner table as Jack walked into the dining room. "He's not coming down, is he?" she asked, hoping that no one else could pick up on the tremor in her voice.
Jack shook his head as he took his seat. "He said he wasn't hungry."
Ian nodded. "He'll come out when the hunger hits him. John's always had a hearty appetite."
"John also tends to lose his appetite when he feels stressed," Eleanor said, her own appetite now gone. She knew years ago that it was time to tell John the truth, but her fears had kept her from pressing the issue. She had been so wrong, not only about telling him the truth, but about so many other things.
Eleanor put her napkin down and got to her feet, causing all of the men at the table to also rise to their feet. "Excuse me, but I can't eat until I talk with him."
Jack nodded. "Do you want me to come with you?" He set his napkin aside.
"No," Eleanor replied with a shake of her head. "I think we need to talk alone. Please, don't hold dinner for me."
She left the dining room and slowly headed up the stairs, wondering just what more she could say to John. Her hand slipped into the pocket of her skirt and she fingered the skin - John's skin - she had put there. Her own skin was in the other pocket, just in case John should suddenly decide he wanted lessons in how to do things. It only just then occurred to her that John might not be too at ease seeing her naked as she pulled her own skin back on. It would definitely be best to leave his training in the hands of Ian and Colin.
She paused outside of the door of John's room, pressing her ear against the wood and straining to hear any sound within. At first, all she heard was silence, but then she could make out the soft sound of John's breath as it entered and left his body. It wasn't the slow and even sound of someone asleep, so Eleanor raised her hand to the wood and knocked.
"John, I need to speak to you. Please let me in."
Eleanor waited for a reply of some kind, thinking she'd have to coax John into letting her into the room. So she was somewhat pleasantly surprised when she heard footsteps from within and then the sound of the lock tumbling as John unbarred the door to her. Then the footsteps retreated and his voice called out, "Come on in, the door's not locked."
Eleanor slowly opened the door, still unsure of just what she'd say. The image that greeted her as she walked into the room though, told Eleanor that there was only one thing she could say and do. John was seated by his table, a magazine of some kind in his hand, a normal enough sight, Eleanor thought. What wasn't normal, although it was a sight she'd seen all too much over the years - was the amount of sadness she saw in her son's eyes. She'd been responsible for putting that sadness in his eyes, and it broke her heart to know that she'd done that to him.
John looked up at his mother as she walked into his room, noticing how she paused as she first walked in. He knew she was going to lecture him, tell him that it wasn't right for him to sulk in his room, hurting her and his fath...Jack. She was good at short, yet effective, lectures. So John was quite surprised when Eleanor walked up to him, bent over and gave him a long and tight hug, her voice sounding as if she was close to tears as she said "I love you, John. I always have and I always will. Don't ever forget that or doubt it. I know I haven't shown it to you as much as I should have, but I do love you."
John found himself clinging to his mother while on the verge of crying. How many times had he found himself longing to hear her say those words? Oh, he knew she loved him. He had always known that his parents cared. The problem was that he had wanted to hear them say it a lot more than they did. Just as he had wanted them to be around more than they ever were. A thought suddenly occurred to him and he gently grasped his mother's arms, moving her away so he could look into her face and eyes.
"After Bobby died and you and Da...Dad, left, you were with Bobby, weren't you?" He and his sister had always been told that Jack had decided to take Eleanor abroad so she could recover from Bobby's death. And from there, it had seemed that business began to consume the two of them until they rarely had time to come back to Chicago. John had often felt it was because he simply wasn't good enough to make them want to come back - that nothing he did or could ever do was the same as what Bobby might have been capable of, and that his parents just weren't interested. As he grew older, he began to add a new reason to the list of why his parents stayed away - his mother and grandmother didn't get along at all, and, since Bobby had died at the mansion, Eleanor had no desire to be anywhere near there. She and Jack kept their own house, but as John and Barbara were at boarding school and then later at college, there was no need to keep a full staff. So they went from having a cook, a butler, a groundskeeper and a maid to just a cook, groundskeeper and butler and then to just a cook and the groundskeeper, since they were man and wife. And then John's parents had sold the house, giving many reasons for their decision - they weren't there enough to really use it, Theresa and Harold were retiring and Eleanor and Jack had no desire or time to train others to replace them - the truth was that they didn't want another tie to Chicago, or so John had thought. He'd obviously been wrong about a lot of their motives over the years, he could see that now. Bobby wasn't dead, but he still wasn't there, either.
Once more, anger surged through John - anger that the fact his brother was alive had been hidden from him for all those years. Hidden from all of the family. Of course, there was no way that it could be advertised all over Chicago that Eleanor was a Selkie and that Bobby had escaped death by choosing to be a seal - but the family had kept secrets just fine over the years and could have kept that one, too.
"Never mind," John said before Eleanor could reply to his question. Of course she had been with Bobby. Who else would she have been with? Him? His sister?
"I'm really not in the mood for company right now, Mom," John said as he made his way out of the chair, putting his magazine down as he passed the table and put space between the two of them.
Eleanor sighed loudly, then wiped at her eyes. "I know that this is a shock to you, John, and I'm sorry. We should have told you sooner and I can only blame myself for the pain you're feeling right now. But, please, please don't take this out on your father. Jack loves you very much and you are his son, no matter what you might think."
"Is he proud of Bobby?" John abruptly asked. "Does he tell Bobby how proud he is of him, of his life and his family? Oh, that's right, Dad can't communicate with Bobby, can he? Just as well, since he can't seem to communicate with me, either. I've never done anything to make him proud, Mom, and now I know why. So, please, save your speeches for some other time, because I'm not really interested in hearing them." John turned away from her and found himself facing the window and the curtains that had closed off his view of the lake. He wanted nothing more than to open those curtains and look out onto the water, to lose himself in contemplating what it would be like to be out there on it...in it. But that wasn't something he wanted his mother to know about because he knew that Eleanor would find a way to use his desires to manipulate him into doing what she wanted. She always found ways to do that to him.
"I can't answer for Jack, but I'm proud of you, John. You're a fine doctor and your colleagues all care about you very much. They wouldn't care if you weren't a good person." Eleanor reached into her pocket and pulled out the selkie skin from John's birthing, placing it gently on the table. "You are a selkie and there are things you must learn. How to put on the skin, how to take it off, how to survive in the water. It's already calling you to it, John; you found that out when you dove into the Chicago River. Colin and Ian can help you, and so can Bobby. No matter how or what you feel about me and Jack, you need to let them teach you what you need to know."
"You say that as if you think I would ever willingly choose to put that skin on and become a...one of those things," John bitterly said as he turned around to glare at his mother. "Then again," he added after a moment of silence, "Why shouldn't I? I'm not human, so there's no need for me to remain here, is there? Except for maybe the fact that there are people here who care about me. Do they know? Gamma and grandfather? Do they know what I am? Do they know that I'm not Dad's son?"
Eleanor slowly shook her head. "No. No one in the Carter family, except for Bobby, knows that about you. Barbara thinks that the two of you are human and that Bobby's truly dead. I've never seen a reason to tell her otherwise, not when you didn't know the truth yourself."
John nodded, then gestured toward the door. "I'm sure your dinner is getting cold." And once more he turned away from her, not wanting to let the sadness of her eyes sway him to ask her to stay. Damn his mother for being able to do that to him. There he was, thirty-one years old, and still gullible to the sadness he saw there, a sadness he had promised Bobby that he would do his best to chase away. It had been a promise that John had never been able to keep and that had bothered him - that the one promise he had made to Bobby before he died would never be fulfilled. And now...well, now he had found out that Bobby was alive. The sadness, so deep and painful, hadn't been for the total loss of a child. Bobby was alive, not dead.
All of John's thoughts kept coming back to that one inescapable fact - Bobby was alive. So why had his Mom let him suffer all those years, missing Bobby, grieving for him? Why had she pretended to be the grieving mother when she could slip on that damn selkie skin of hers and join Bobby in the water? Damn her for her secrets, John inwardly raged. Damn them all.
He startled slightly as he heard the soft click of his door closing, but it was still a few more moments before he turned around to make sure that Eleanor had gone.
She had. But she had left something behind - that damn skin. John pointedly ignored it as he walked past the table and toward his bathroom, needing to do something to keep himself from giving in and looking out toward the lake - and to keep at bay the urge to hold his own skin and wonder what it would be like to wear it, to be totally free in the water.
The evening hours dragged on, and as full darkness neared, John could hear a barking sound from the direction of the lake, followed by more 'voices' - his mother and uncles, John presumed. And Bobby.
John stared up at the ceiling, memories of his brother once more flooding his head. They had been happy as boys, tormenting each other as brothers often do. But they also loved each other, protected each other. John couldn't blame Bobby for taking the chance of life over certain death. What John did blame Bobby for was not insisting that they let John know what was happening. They wouldn't have even had to tell him the whole truth, John mused. Just the basics. Just enough so he knew that Bobby wasn't really dead. So much in his life could have been different with that knowledge. Oh, he still would have pursued medicine. The urge to be a doctor and help people, in much the same way that the doctors tried to help Bobby, was too strong for John to have ignored it. But other things would have been different. There would have been no guilt over being alive. There wouldn't have been hours spent at the cemetery pouring out his heart to a grave that held no body. There never would have been the pressure to be a 'good little Carter' like Bobby.
John turned his head and looked at the skin on the table. He had given in earlier and touched it. He had held it tightly, feeling the soft fur against his skin...his human skin. A skin that wasn't real. The selkie skin was real, supposedly. He had smelled it, the result being an immediate hit of 'mother' in his brain. It was the skin of a baby, of - what had his Mom called him? A pup. It was the skin of a pup. There was nothing human at all about it, and with that thought, John had dropped the skin to the table and went on with his self-imposed exile in his bedroom.
Looking at it now, with the sounds of his family barking in the distance, John had to fight against the urge to grab it up and run outside and to the lake. There would be none of that, he thought as he rose up on one elbow to lean over and turn out the light. John wasn't going to give his mother what she wanted this time. He'd come to terms with his truth, with his heritage, but it would be in his own time, in his own way, and not hers. Never again would he do anything by her design.
Eventually, being tired overcame the distraction of his family talking down at the lake and John fell asleep. It wasn't as deep and satisfying, as he would have liked as it was riddled with dreams of the ocean and Bobby and swimming and feeling free and at peace.
When John's eyes suddenly jerked open in the dim light of the pre-dawn hour, the first thing John noticed was the lone voice barking out at the lake...calling to him. Calling for him.
Sitting up, John flung the covers aside, his eyes searching through the dim lighting of his room for the skin, for the one thing that could reunite him with Bobby. John had been selfish the day before, thinking of how much he had grieved for Bobby and how much he had missed him. Never once had John thought about how Bobby might have missed him. But now, hearing that plaintive cry from the lake, John knew it was true.
John got to his feet and walked to the window, drawing open the curtains fully. He looked out toward the lake, barely making out it's gray surface through the pre-light. And then he spun around, grabbed the skin from the table and walked out of his bedroom, taking the back stairs down to the kitchen. From there he went outside and straight to the lake, his need to see his brother - in any form - nearly overwhelming.
At the lakeshore, John stopped, his eyes searching over the water for a sign of Bobby, and then he saw him, the dark head bobbing up and down just a short distance out from the shore. They had a saying in the medical profession about 'see one, do one, teach one'. It was trite and simplistic, but pretty much true about the way one learned medicine. And it had paid off for John. He had watched his uncles walk out of the lake, noted how they peeled off their skins. He could put his on if he reversed the process.
John quickly stripped, his eyes still on his brother, and then he picked the skin up and stepped into the water, not really noticing how cold it was against his skin. While he was still in shallow water, John reached down and pulled the skin on over his right foot, somehow knowing that the skin would stretch and not at all surprised when his instinct proved right. Then the left foot went in, and the skin was pulled slowly upward as John walked into deeper water. Bobby's barking had ceased, but he had moved in closer, those dark brown eyes watching patiently.
John continued with the slow process of turning back into what he once had been. He had somehow thought that it would feel odd to be in the skin, but as it covered more of his body, all John felt was how correct it felt. This WAS meant to be. This was his truth, his body, and his form.
When he was finally in water up to his shoulders, John smiled, stretching the skin a bit more as he looked across the few inches that separated him from Bobby. And then the skin was up and over his face, covering his mouth, his nose, his eyes, his ears, and his hair.
And as the rays of the rising sun hit the lake that anchored the Carter property, two seals, one clearly an adult with dark fur and one seemingly still a pup with white fur, cavorted in the water, their barking quick and loud as they entwined their bodies around each other while making up for all of the years lost to them both.