To Atone

Content warning: allusions to rape

"Try this," Judah said, handing Jane a glass.

She took a sip. "It tastes like…bacon?"

Judah grinned. "Yep."

"Wow." Jane took a swig. "I didn't know bacon whiskey existed."

"I made it."

"It's good." Jane's smile made her whole face glow. "But you should be careful. You'll be driving tomorrow."

"Indeed I will, which is why I had my share earlier."

"Your share?"

"The rest here is for you. As a farewell present before I hit the road again. I already can't wait to get back, but I'll be going somewhere I've never been before on this trip."



Text messages from Jane:

1 week ago:

~ I’m pregnant

~ JT?

~ Please answer me

~ PLEASE

6 days ago:

~ I am getting an abortion

5 days ago:

~ JT, I do not want to see you again. This is for the best, for both of us. May God bless you and keep you.

Judah had slammed his hands against the steering wheel of his truck cab. The blurry memory of that last night they spent together washed over him.

He hurt his thumbs punching in his reply to Jane.

~ Fine. I never want to see you again either

Then he had deleted Jane’s number and cried. He had always dreamed of being a father.

•• Twenty-two years later ••

A woman had been poking the vending machine’s buttons in a forceful, agitated way as Judah walked by, so he stopped. “Is everything okay?”

She spun to face him. “It ate my money. I paid, but it’s not spitting out what I pressed the button for.”

Nearly hidden by the bangs she wore, he glimpsed the tattooed outline of a four-pointed diamond-shaped star. “Jane?”

Her eyes widened. “JT?”

“Yeah.” He stared at her, at her new bangs, at her eyes, at the lines on her face. “Jane.” It had suddenly seemed like both a little and a lot of time had passed since he’d seen his one and only girlfriend. 

“JT—”

I’m so sorry, Jane.” He had reached out to take her hands, then flinched back before he made contact. “I’m so, so sorry for everything I did to you.” He had looked her in the face, waiting for her expression to harden with anger, but it hadn’t. 

“I forgive you,” Jane had said. “I forgave you a long time ago.”

“I don’t forgive me. I got you drunk and pregnant and then I wasn’t there for you and the baby, and then I was so angry at you that I didn’t come back and try to fix what I did wrong even though it was my fault you got an abortion! I’ve done everything wrong!” 

“It was twins, and I didn’t get an abortion,” Jane had said. Her voice was quiet, but in Judah’s ears it was a shout that awakened heart-pounding joy.

“Peter and Wendy Deloria,” Judah says to himself, repeating the names Jane gave him. Twins. A boy and a girl. Both off-world. Jane always did like J.M. Barrie's book Peter and Wendy.

The seat vibrates under Judah as the passenger shuttle fights the gravity of Earth, shooting for the moon. Unlike in a passenger plane meant to stay well within atmosphere, there are no windows in the shuttle’s passenger compartment. Judah would have liked to see the Earth shrinking under him, proving he is actually making progress, not just sitting here doing nothing. 

In the second seat over from him, a little boy in the arms of a woman starts crying and screaming. Like in a passenger plane, there are three seats on each side of a center aisle. The man in between Judah and the woman reaches out and takes the little boy and starts bouncing him. The child laughs. Judah meets the eyes of the father, who immediately speaks to him. “You got any kids?”

“I wasn’t upset about the noise,” Judah blurts. 

“Oh, I’m just asking,” the father says, offering a smile. “No kids, then?” 

“Uh…I have kids.”

“How old are they?” The father leans closer eagerly. 

Judah wonder whether this is what all parents are supposed to do: talk about their kids with each other. “I think…” He tries to remember just how long ago his relationship with Jane ended. “Twenties. Don’t know exactly.”

The child pulls at the father’s shoulder-length brown hair, and he unclenches the little fingers. “So you have lots? This is our second. I’ve heard that around kid number three, you start losing track of birthdays and ages.” 

“Yeah. I lost track.” It’s the unfortunate truth. He completely lost track of Jane. “Going to meet them now, actually.” Stupid idiot! Why did he say that?

“They live on the moon?” 

“Mars.” That’s how far, he thinks, his children have run to escape the hurt he caused their mother. 

“Your kids working out there?”

“Yup.” Judah frowns. How many more questions can this father ask about another dad’s kids? 

The father’s smile falters. “Something wrong?” 

“Yes. A lot.” Judah sighs. “But I’m trying to fix it.” 

The father renews his smile. “That’s great! Not that you have a problem, but that you’re trying to fix it.” 

“I don’t know if I can,” Judah mutters. 

“I’m sure you can,” the father says, resting a hand on Judah’s shoulder. “You’re their dad!” 

“Hmph.”

“Besides being their dad, you just said you’re trying to fix it. Some people don’t try to fix anything. They just keep doing what they’re doing. You’re going all the way to Mars, so you’re off to a great start.”

Judah lifts his head and turns to look at the father, and gets a small fist in his nose as the child writhes. 

“Sorry,” the father says as he captures his son’s flailing wrist. “Usually I’m the one he gets like that.”

Judah’s can’t figure out whether his mouth is grimacing or smirking as he rubs his watering eyes and throbbing nose. Is this what he missed by not raising his children? Suffering bodily assault? 

The child finally calms and goes to sleep, and Judah watches the little boy breathe and groan softly as he shifts in his father’s arms. He wishes he could have held his own children in their sleep and known they trusted him completely. 

When the shuttle reaches the moon, Judah parts ways with the father and mother and their son and heads to the boarding lounge for the Mars transport. As the room buzzes with conversation and jostling people and moving luggage, that family sitting together happily stays in his mind. If only that had also been him and Jane and the twins she bore.

All the way to the red planet, Judah alternates between thinking about what that father said to him and thinking about what he’ll say to the son and daughter he’s never met.

Yet when he finally sees the girl with hair as red and curly as Jane’s and eyes as brown as his own and a face that looks like a blend of his and Jane's, he’s not sure what to say or do.

She’s sitting at a table eating food in the strange little mall where Jane told him she likes to eat. The mall appears strange because the stores and the things sold in them are rather different from what’s found in an Earthly mall. Here the things for sale are more practical, less frivolous, but it still looks similar enough to be called a mall.

Judah walks up to the young woman’s table. “Wendy?”

She looks up at the man she can never have seen before and fear flashes on her face, in her wide eyes and lips pulling back from her teeth. “Yes? Who are you?”

”Is your brother here?” He doesn’t want to unsettle her, but he would like to tell both of them at once rather than one at a time.

“No. Who are you?”

Now, then. “I’m your…” Judah hesitated. Which word to use? “Father.” More distant than Papa or Dad. He isn’t going to try to force her to feel for the man she probably thought abandoned her, her brother, and her mother.

”You’re my dad? JT?”

Jane told their daughter his name. Huh. “Can I sit down with you? I can explain. Maybe not everything, but a lot.”

“Okay.” She keeps her eyes on Judah as he sits down across from her.

He asks how much she knows about him and what happened between him and her mother. She knows as much as Jane told him: That he ignored her texts, and then angrily agreed to never see her again.

He tells her what he explained to Jane, about not having service and not seeing the texts until days after, and being angry when he thought Jane had aborted their baby, and having no idea that Wendy and Peter were alive all these years.

And he thinks back to what Jane explained to him, about hearing the ultrasound technician say she had twins, and thinking that she couldn’t abort twins. She thought Judah didn’t want her at all now that she was pregnant, and it would be better if he didn’t come back and tell her so in person, so she tried to make sure that wouldn’t happen.

And he explains to Wendy about running into her mother again, and how Jane told him about their children and where to find them, and now he’s here.

”I’m sorry,” Judah says. “I’m sorry I did that to your mother, and I’m sorry you’ve all had to struggle without me. I already said that to your mother, and now I’ve said it to you, and I just need to say it to your brother and then I can leave, if you want.”

“It has been hard,” Wendy says, fiddling with her half-full plate. “and it still hurts. But your sorry really does mean something to me. If you’re willing, and if Peter’s willing, I do want to get to know you better."

When he has to look down to see his son's face because Peter is in a wheelchair, Judah feels numb inside. He can only think this must somehow be his fault. If he had done any one of so many things differently, this might not have happened.

"Peter, this is our dad," Wendy says, and they're the sweetest words Judah has ever heard, though they're mixed with pain as he sees the look in Peter's eyes. He revels in both feelings. If this is what it takes to start being a father to them, he can take it, the bitter and the sweet.