And yet he did not know he was not normal, and he did not have all his questions answered whether that was even a possibility after all he learned or not. Seeing Amelia smiling at him and knowing that someone who was like him thought this was a laugh a minute was almost comforting because when he looked at his mysterious half sister, he got the sense that this life was so much more complicated. Olivia has her own complications he mused to himself. Very human ones, but not so on the other hand if she was anything like him, he reflected because he had yet to come to terms with how special he was, and yet here Amelia and Olivia lived in a town that had forced them to comfort them from early on. “You don’t seem confused by any of this?” he asked as Amelia could only smile back at him.
“As I have said before. It’s been my life since I was old enough to know,” Amelia admitted. “Although I can see how it would feel like an ambush for someone new to come into this life, and to learn everything you have learned, and even then, you don’t know everything…”
“Do you?” Zack asked.
“Enough,” Amelia smirked. “Sure, there is a lot of it that I don’t know, and I am not crying out for that knowledge either because I am sure most of it doesn’t matter to me, but it does to Olivia, and I guess to you too, because I can’t imagine coming into the life, with a blank slate.”
“It’s like a blast of the past, and yet I feel it matters so much more than I can imagine?” Zack muttered.
“Yeah,” Amelia nodded. “I am sorry for that because I can’t imagine knowing you were adopted, and coming for a simple look for your biological parents, and finding all this…”
“It doesn’t help knowing my biological father is in prison?” Zack acknowledged.
“For something he didn’t do,” Amelia allowed.
“So, they say” Zack muttered. “The media though is very persuasive in the other direction” he allowed. “It’s hard to think they got it so wrong?”
“They were fed the government’s version of things because there is only so much Max could say of the situation. Aunt Liz said it herself. A sane person would not believe their version of things even if they could have told it. So, they took the government’s spin of the situation because it did look bad for Olivia’s father, and plus, Max did confess to that other thing, and that is on him, but he did it for the purest of reasons.”
“And that was?” Zack asked. “How can someone confess to an army base explosion when they had nothing to do with it?”
“Because they didn’t want my father, or your aunt to get swept up in it, and same with Olivia’s mother” Amelia allowed as she could see that the mere concept was still rattling Zack. “He had people to protect and took the blame, when it was someone else, because you could not really blame your biological mother because she was dead.”
“It’s actually pretty easy to blame a dead woman?” Zack muttered as he though of that was what was being down now. “All of you think it was my biological mother who did it, so you’re doing it yourself. Blaming a dead woman?”
“A dead woman who had a track record in our group” Amelia acknowledged. “Even then I don’t know exactly what happened back then. Olivia is more up to date than I am, but the collective we knew enough to blame Tess, but the government didn’t want to blame a dead woman so they grabbed onto a confession that your father gave them because they were coming after our parents, and if they had caught up to them, then who knows what havoc and mayhem would have ensued.”
“She killed your mother’s friend, or so they say?” Zack asked.
“They do say,” Amelia muttered.
“I checked you know. Alex Whitman death went down as an accident” Zack asked. “My biological mother wasn’t implicated officially…”
“Could you put someone like us behind bars?” Amelia asked.
“They put my biological father behind bars, and he hasn’t done anything to cause problems all these years?”
True Amelia was forced to muse to herself. But something tells me Max would not also cause a rampage from behind bars. Tess Harding was a different story. “Your biological father has enough sense to stay on the right side of the prison bars,” she allowed. “From what I hear, Tess Harding wouldn’t have the same compulsion and she could have caused a lot of pain and suffering if they had locked her up for Alex’s death.”
“You’re blaming a dead woman?”
“A dead woman who has a track record,” Amelia sighed because she knew how it had to be hard for Zack to reconcile the image of his biological parents. They were not June and Ward Cleaver who gave him up to have a better life because they were too young to be parents, and they went on to have rewarding lives. No, it was the opposite for Zack to reconcile with, and she did not want to be on his side of things because he liked the family, she and Alex had been able to have all these years. “Of course, on the other side of things, if they had locked your mother up for Alex’s death than she wouldn’t have been able to do half of the other things she did?”
“And I wouldn’t be here?” Zack asked.
“I am sorry, but yeah” Amelia said struck at the knowledge that yeah that Zack would not have been born if only they had locked Tess Harding up for Alex Whitman’s death. Max and Liz might have had a better time it, and yeah, Max would not have slept with Tess and created Zack. “It’s a sucky situation for all involved?”
“Yeah,” Zack admitted as he hated to know this was his life story. Biological parents who didn’t love each other, or whose father didn’t love his mother, and had a biological mother who had been made out to be a calculating murderer and a biological father who had confessed to a bombing to save lives so they say, but was also convicted of attacking his wife before she became his wife, but they tell him that he was actually possessed by a dead man, and he hadn’t really done it of his own volition, but had sacrificed his life for the love of his life, who was the one to bring him back, but who wasn’t his mother. Some life I have he muttered to himself.
As the door opened, and they both saw Liz and Olivia walk in, and they noticed Amelia and Zack and continued into the back room, because they had come to have dinner with Jeff and Nancy.
“Yeah, I don’t know why I stay?” Zack sighed. “No one wants me here…”
I do Amelia wanted to say but did not because she knew she should be concentrating on the relationship she did have because despite the distance. Greg was a good guy, and she did not need the difficulty to getting mixed up with someone like Zack who did not know his history and did not know even half of what it took to live in their circle each day. Greg was blissfully unaware, and Amelia enjoyed the freedom that came with being with someone who did not know. There might come a time, where that changed. But right now, she took it in because it does cause trouble to know.
“Are you okay honey?” Nancy asked her daughter a few hours later, after dinner they had shared in the upstairs apartment that the Parkers had lived in since they moved into the diner when Liz was a child, and they took over the business, and it had been Liz’s home and she had loved it and worked in the restaurant once she became of age to be able to work. It was where she met the love of her life. Max, she mused to herself. Downstairs, when she should have died, but he brought her back.
Olivia had announced to her grandparents that she was pregnant. Jeff and Nancy were both supportive of their granddaughter and did not react as negatively to the concept of their teenage granddaughter being pregnant as Olivia feared, and now Olivia was downstairs with her grandfather monitoring the dying hours of the restaurant for the night, and Liz had stayed up stairs to talk to her mother. “I am fine Mom seriously…”
“Are you, I can’t imagine what you’re going through” Nancy asked. “I talked to Diane you know. I know Olivia saw her father?”
“Oh god,” Liz muttered. “Mom…”
“It’s your life, and your marriage,” Nancy smiled. “Your father and I have always been supportive of you…”
“You have,” Liz muttered as she knew her mother had been a saint all these years with how she accepted and went with the flow of everything that had happened. While her father had not been as silent in his views, “But Dad hasn’t been…”
“He loves you and loves his granddaughter” Nancy smiled.
“I have never doubted his love for me, or his love for Olivia, but I know he wanted me to leave Max, and to divorce him” Liz muttered. “He has never accepted that I wanted to stay married to my husband?”
“Most wouldn’t honey,” Nancy allowed. “I mean, staying married to man who will never be able to come home to you or his daughter,” she muttered because she did not think her daughter to be someone who would be in love with someone who was in prison, and behind bars and was never coming home. “There is that bit about what happened to you in Vermont?”
“Mom, I told you what happened there,” Liz sighed because while the town did not know what defined herself or her daughter, and their friends and their abilities. But when she first left town, and before she was forced to come back, she had sent her diary to her father, and therefore he was able to read, and to know what happened in those months and years before she was forced to flee town.
Jeff mostly accepted the diary, and while he was grateful that his daughter did not die when she was fifteen. Still, once Max was arrested on charges related to the treatment of his own daughter, Jeff could not grasp that, and a part of him could not, even though Liz had told him the version of things that was not in her diary about what really had happened in Vermont. That Max had not been Max, the man she married that night. He had been someone else. Someone quite different. Still, it was a movie plot, and hard to believe and so a part of Jeff could not cope with that, and so once Max was convicted. Jeff began advocating for his daughter to divorce Max, but Liz always refused to do so, but fortunately it had not messed up their relationship as they always tried to rise above it for Olivia’s sake, and for their family.
“Anyone would have trouble accepting it?” Nancy allowed.
“I know,” Liz acknowledged. “I love Max Mom, and I know chances are that he won’t be coming home to me, but it should be obvious by now to you and Dad and to anyone who passes judgement on my decision to stay that I do not want to leave him or wish to divorce him. When I married him, I took my vows seriously, and I still do”
“It is still a lot to deal with, and to know he won’t be coming home?” Nancy asked.
“We’re trying to change that…” Liz muttered.
“Honey,” Nancy asked.
“You may think I have limited myself these years, maybe I have, maybe I haven’t but I don’t regret anything that has happened except that if only certain things had gone differently, then I might have had my husband with me all these years, and Olivia would have had her father to love and raise her…”
“How is Max dealing, with finding out about Olivia” Nancy asked changing the subject because she had long known that her daughter loyalty would always be too her husband, and nothing would change that, nor her father’s opinion on the matter would change that for their daughter and still her daughter has been able to achieve some remarkable achievements despite her circumstances and her marriage. Nancy just wished that she could be happy at the end of the day.
“It’s adjustment,” Liz allowed. “But he doesn’t blame me for not telling me.”
“He shouldn’t,” Nancy muttered. “He’s very lucky you have stayed with him, and given him a chance to know his daughter at all”
“Mom,” Liz said in annoyance.
“Fine, I’ll stop,” Nancy murmured. “Olivia is holding up a good front, but how is she really dealing with this honey” she wondered. “With everything…”
“Barely,” Liz admitted.
“I hope you don’t hate me,” Olivia asked as she was helping her father clean up in the kitchen. Something she had done countless times over the years, and that summer she had always thought she might work for him, but now given her circumstances chances of that happening was dimming as she decided to proceed with her pregnancy. She did not know what she would end up doing, but still she was moving on to each day.
“I can never hate you,” Jeff remarked every day that his granddaughter and daughter for that matter could put their foot in front of them and walk through the world with the burden Max had given them. As Nancy knew. Max would always have his thanks for saving his daughter, but anything else he felt for his imprisoned son-in-law was decidedly mixed despite both his daughter and his granddaughter believing differently. “I just wish you didn’t have to go through this, at your age?”
“Me either,” Olivia muttered. “I hope you don’t hate Alex.”
Now him I can have an opinion on Jeff muttered to himself but did not dare say it because he knew his granddaughter still had feelings of love for the boy, and despite their breakup. “Where is he?”
“He supports me,” Olivia muttered as she sensed her grandfather’s disapproval. She knew she and Alex barely had it in the first place because the one thing all her grandparents, on all sides could agree was that she had been too young to be with Alex. That their parents should have stopped it when they could have before it got to the state it has now progressed. But the parents knew from experience. If you say, no you cannot be with him or her than Olivia and Alex would have rebelled and gone there months and years before they finally did, and of course none of them wanted what happened to happen but they knew if they had tried to stop, then that would not have helped anyone. Liz knew it more than anyone. Because her own parents had done that to her and Max. Of course, trusting your kids had its downside, as it was evident that the circumstances had escalated. Still Liz would not have done anything differently because she knew how it could have gone… All they could do was support their kids. And she planned to do such. “Grandpa, I am the one who wanted this break. He still wanted us to be together. I didn’t, or at least now right now”
“You shouldn’t be dealing with this, all by yourself.”
“I am not,” Olivia muttered. “I have all of you, and Mom. Mom has been great. And I am sure my other grandparents will be the same when they know…”
“Your mother loves you,” Jeff muttered as the one thing he was proud of how incredible a mother his daughter was.
“Mom says that Dad loves me too,” Olivia smiled but saw the frown on her grandfather’s face. “Grandpa”
Max Jeff muttered.
“You shouldn’t be hard on him,” Olivia muttered because she knew that was rich because of how hard she had been on her father, but that was before she knew her father had sacrificed everything for her mother. She did not know how to handle the other piece of the puzzle that her mother could have died because of him, but she believed everyone when they said that her father had been possessed.
“Honey, you don’t know everything?” Jeff sighed.
“I know more than you think I do,” Olivia allowed. “I know it’s ugly, and I shouldn’t believe in him, but Mom has been filling me in on some of what happened, and it’s only her side true, but I believe in Mom, and I know when she saw I can trust Dad than I can. I might not understand it completely, and I might in the end have my own view of it, and I might decide I cannot trust him, but I do not know the man he is, as I only have stories. Still, he is the reason I am here, so I might as well get to know him?”
“You shouldn’t have to?” Jeff muttered.
“It’s my life,” Olivia sighed as she heard a text come in on her phone, from her aunt, setting up their visit to Max, and asking if she was available the next day. She responded with, tell me the time, I will be ready
“What was that?” Jeff asked.
“Aunt Isabel,” Olivia asked. “She’s taking me to visit my Dad tomorrow” she smiled as she saw the frown on her grandfather’s face. “Grandpa, I need to see him. You can’t prevent me from seeing the bad side of life, all my life,” she smiled. “I need to form my own opinion of the man he is today, now that I know a bit of what happened years ago.”
“I still don’t like it,” Jeff muttered although he supposed knowing Isabel would be there would lessen the blow for his granddaughter.
“You don’t have to,” Olivia smiled. “He’s Mom’s husband, and most of all, he is my father…” she sighed. “I need to visit him and get some of the insight of his own side, and plus, he has dealt with some of what I have to deal with these days, and so I will be good to get his side since his son, my half brother is back in town.”
“What?” Jeff asked shocked.
“You didn’t know, yeah, Dad’s son, the one he gave up for adoption is back in town. So, I figured, there is a lot to know of my father’s side of the story” she smiled.
“Does your mother know?” Jeff asked blown away.
“Of course,” Olivia nodded. “There is very little you can keep from Mom” she sighed as she wished her mother did not have to deal with the revelation her father’s illegitimate son was back in town.
“You can just accept him into Olivia’s life?” Nancy asked as upstairs, she was also blown away to find out that Max’s son was back in town. One more thing to sour on Max Evans was to know he had cheated on their daughter and had a son with Tess Harding. Liz explained that they had not together at the time, but it was another strike on Max’s image with his in-laws.
Hearing her daughter described the boy Nancy had come to realize she had seen the boy around Amelia Guerin in recent days. She had not known his identity. Now she did, and it amazed that her daughter could just accept it.
“It’s a fact of life Mom,” Liz muttered. “I have always known he was out there. Sure, I did not expect that he would come back, especially with Max where he currently is, but I suppose it was going to happen because the boy was going to have questions one of these days. The same ones that Oliva has in her own way. So, he would want to seek them out, and come to this town. Now he has, and I need to make peace with it, and I have, and he and Olivia are in the process of trying to figure it all out.”
“How can you look at him and know” Nancy asked.
“Know what?” Liz asked if she did not already know what her mother was talking about, but she pleaded ignorance.
“He cheated on you?” Nancy asked aghast that her daughter could be so accepting.
“We weren’t together Mom,” Liz muttered. “Do I hate it, yes, do I wish he didn’t exist, probably, and I definitely don’t like the reminder that I did not give Max his first-born child or the fact he was with someone else. But we were not together, and therefore he could be with anyone he wanted. He chose Tess. It happened, and I cannot change it. As much I wish I could flick my wrist and erase the past, I cannot because my actions played a part in it. He wanted me, and I walked away, and pushed him away, and when I wanted him back, I had to make peace with parts of his past that existed because of the fact he moved on, away from me, for a time” she sighed as she knew her parents knew a lot but still there were parts of the story that hadn’t been in her diary, or very brief
“Honey” Nancy sighed.
“Mom, to love Max I had to accept that there were parts to his past that I did not like, just as he had to make accept the same with me. We made decisions, but we loved each other, and I wanted to marry him, and I do not regret it. It is not easy and has not been easy. But I love Max, and that has not changed. He saved my life otherwise I would have been dead at fifteen. I can accept that he has flaws. Because I do have them too, but seriously Mom, for my sake, and especially for your granddaughter’s sake, You and Dad need to make peace with my husband because I am planning on doing everything in my power to bring him home again.”
“What are you planning to do?” Nancy asked.
“Anything, and everything” Liz muttered. “He made mistakes, but he doesn’t deserve to be in prison, and therefore I am planning on finding a way to bring him home to Olivia and myself.”
“You’re only setting yourself up to be hurt honey,” Nancy asked. “The government won’t allow that to happen.”
“Well too bad,” Liz muttered.
“He confessed honey,” Nancy muttered.
“To protect me, Isabel and Michael” Liz muttered as she had long come to know just what her husband was protecting when he confessed. If the government had gotten their hands-on Michael and Isabel or even herself, who knows what mayhem would have been unleashed “I wish you and Dad would give him some credit for doing whatever he could to save me…” she sighed as she shook her head as she knew that her parents only saw what the world saw, the video tape of Max nearly killing her. No matter the assurances that the truth was something different. Or Max was a different person all together. Jeff and Nancy could not see it. Which is why she had not told them that she had powers, and Oliva had kept that part of herself to herself too. Only the Evans knew the whole story. Because she had not written about it in her dairy because she knew by then, that there were parts of the story that could not be in the diary. Since her return to Roswell, behind the brick of her wall had been a hiding place, but one could not trust that the diary would remain there, but she knew, it still was there, to this day…