Author's note: Thanks for the love, guys, sorry for the delay. I've been working on my other story, and hopefully should have an update for that one too! Enjoy!
8. Calling
Thanksgiving 2003- Two years after The Departure
All in all, the surprise visit had been a resounding success.
The madcap rush to get through finals, the frenzied packing and then enduring two airports and two flights, complete with a handsy seatmate and lost luggage…it had all been worth it. Amy DeLuca-Valenti’s beaming smile, and her excited babble upon seeing her daughter on the porch had banished any discomforts. Sheriff Valenti’s hug had been no less fierce, and to make up for the fact that she would be the only kid they had to spoil this break, for Kyle had a game he absolutely had to stay in Texas for, Maria regaled them with the juiciest of her stories from NYU, cleansed for parental ears of course.
There really was no need for them to know how during one of Liz’s rare visits to the Big Apple, they had almost managed to burn one of the dorms down when her best friend’s glitchy alien powers decided to snap-crackle-and-pop the microwave into oblivion. There was also no need to add that Maria’s attempts to smother the flames with a throw blanket had backfired when the damned thing had burst into flames. She would of course, discreetly mention the incident to the Sheriff, because he got mad when they forgot to update him on things not of this earth, but he didn’t really need all the gory details. Those, she would reserve for Kyle’s ears.
Mind wandering back to her best friend, Maria felt a pang of disappointment that Liz, too, wasn’t home for break. Roswell seemed to aggravate her spells, so she came home even less often than before, and with the Parker’s worry for their daughter’s health, they had made the trek to spend Thanksgiving in Chicago instead. Privately, Maria thought this was insanity. There was nothing more miserable than Chicago in October, unless you considered Chicago in February. That was truly the stuff nightmares were made of, a polar opposite to her current situation.
She was cozily swaddled in her bed, stuffed full of Thanksgiving dinner, her room still smelling sweet from her favorite incense sticks, the quiet of the New Mexico desert seeping into her room through her open window. No blaring horns, no police sirens, just peaceful tranquility- all of which should have knocked her out the minute she’d gotten into bed.
So why couldn’t she sleep?
Maria huffed, and turned to her side, hoping the shift would let help in her efforts, but all it did was point out the reason she was still awake.
It was innocent enough, a simple picture frame, trapping the image of two teenagers in one of those god-awful prom poses beneath the clear glass. She remembered it so clearly, the way she had had to cajole, plead and threaten him before he had rolled his eyes and dragged her to the photo station, as if it had been his idea all along. The picture was far away, but Maria could see it clearly in her mind, her soft smile, the flower garland in her hair, in contrast to Michael’s blank expression and the carefully ordered hair that was the anti-thesis of its natural state.
Thoughts of sleep were chased away as thoughts of an entirely different nature, ones that involved lost lovers and friends and musings on survival, occupied her mind instead. When she next glanced at the clock and she saw that a whole hour and half had passed, and she was still no closer to answering the questions she, Liz and Kyle didn’t dare discuss out loud, at least, not while they were sober. Frustrated now, she sat up, grabbing the robe carelessly tossed over the end of her bed and shrugging it on. Tea was the solution, she decided, recalling her mother wax poetic about this new blend she had acquired. And if that didn’t work, she knew where Kyle’s stash of sleeping pills where.
Making her way through the darkened rooms, Maria smiled at the little changes she could see, things that marked the house as the DeLuca-Valenti home. Purchased in the middle of their senior year at WRH, the three-bedroom ranch style home was at the edge of town, close to the desert. Amy’s eccentric tastes, in the form of interesting Native American pieces and abstract modern art were mixed in with the Sheriff’s collection of old school rock and roll records and antique weapons. Kyle’s various sports trophies and newspaper clippings were proudly displayed, along with photographs of Maria and the Whits at various shows.
There were other pictures too, childhood photos of Kyle, pictures of Maria and Liz from age six onwards, and then the girls with a skinny, dark haired boy who was all elbows and knees once they were a little older. Maria touched Alex’s face lightly, breathing through the pain that never seemed to go away. The photos with Alex stopped in their junior year of high school, and photos of Kyle, Maria and Liz took up more room. The last picture on the wall before the kitchen was from their high school graduation, and though they were all smiling, Maria noticed that their grins were mere shadows of the ones their younger versions sported. And there was something else wrong with it too, she decided.
The picture frame was far too empty.
There should be a tall, lanky boy with a mile wide smile standing behind her and Liz, with a beautiful blonde girl by his side. It was also missing a serious, dark haired boy with a shy smile, looking at Liz Parker like she was the only one on earth that mattered. And it was missing Michael, who should be by her side, scowling as always, but secretly pleased to be surrounded by everyone else, finally part of a family. Heart heavy, she turned away from the photo and made for the kitchen, even though somehow, she didn’t think tea would help anymore.
***********
“ I have officially gone insane,”
The words were uttered in a mournful tone, and when no one refuted her statement, Maria snorted softly. She wasn’t sure what she expected; it wasn’t as if anyone else was in the car with her after all. In fact, the headlights of her faithful Jetta, left behind with her mother while she went to school, were the only bright points in the darkness of the desert, highlighting the fact that she was completely alone.
It was her fourth sleepless night in a row, complete with tossing and turning in bed, tormented by memories and endless questions. While insomnia had hardly been a rarity in New York, Roswell didn’t have constant car horns and city noises to distract her. Unlike New York, Roswell had the capacity to drive her mad, for she had underestimated the power that being back home, alone, without Kyle and Liz to silently commiserate and bear the burden of the past with her, would have. Maria hadn’t even known she was driving into the desert until she was on the road that would take her out there. She wasn’t sure where exactly she was going, but whatever bizarre compulsion had taken over her seemed perfectly content that she remain on this road. She noted the Vasquez rocks jutting out into the sky, and with a sinking feeling, realized that if she continued on her present route, she would come to the place where they had buried everything that their friends had left behind.
She drove on.
The next hour was a blur. She had hiked out to where the alien artifacts had been buried with hardly a thought for dangerous animals, people or aliens alike, with nothing but her snow shovel in tow. Recognizing the rock formation they assigned as a marker, she didn’t stop to question herself as she started to dig, didn’t stop to take a rest when the plastic shovel broke, when she resorted to using her hands, when her fingernails tore off and bled. She didn’t stop until she was holding the burlap sack in her hands, and the strange metallic book Alex had died to translate was in her lap. It was with a sort of quiet detachment that she flipped the pages, her filthy hands leaving marks on the silvery material. When she got to the page that held the etchings of the Royal Four, she traced Michael’s face, as tenderly as he had hers the night before he left.
There was no way to tell how long she stared at his face, no way to gauge how much time had passed as she wished in vain that the metal under her fingertips would become warm flesh. The first tear that splashed onto the strange metal seemed innocent enough, but then they didn’t stop. Suddenly, she was bawling, great, heaving, sobs of the likes she hadn’t allowed herself to succumb to in years wracking her body, until she was spent, leaning against the boulder behind her with nothing to show for her efforts except a headache, and torn and ragged fingers.
With a sniffle, and shaking her head at the dramatic breakdown, her sensible side, the one that sounded a lot like Liz, piped up and suggested that staying out in the desert all night, surrounded by alien artifacts no less, was not a very wise thing to do. Slowly, and wincing at the injury she’d done to herself, Maria wiped off the book and placed it back in the sack first. The small, rough-hewn rocks they had used to heal Michael went in next, and then lastly, only the orb was left. What happened next was over so quickly, that hours later, when she had cleaned herself up and was laying in bed once more, she was still debating over whether it had actually occurred.
There had been blood on her hand, a souvenir from her frantic effort to unearth the buried items, and it had made contact with the grooved cuts that made up the design on the orb. It could have been a trick of the light, a flash from a shooting star as it burnt its way through space, but she could have sworn that the design on the thing flashed, and that she could see it glow through her hand. She had dropped it into the sack a moment later, and when she fished it out again, it looked perfectly normal. Her hand, apart from her bloodied fingernails, was the same. Still, she stared at it for hours, wondering if she was going insane, and thinking that perhaps it was her turn to take an extended absence from Roswell. The town was making her hallucinate, clearly, and the memories around every corner were stifling.
Maria fell into fitful sleep shortly after deciding she would be moving up her return date. The hand she’d been so carefully scrutinizing hung off the edge of her bed, perfectly intact and whole, normal, save for the symbol from the orb pulsing steadily from her palm.
That night, she dreamed Alex Whitman was alive.
FIN.