As far as world records went, being pregnant for thirteen years was going to be tough to beat. I’m embarrassed that my first thought was to wonder how the hell mom could have gotten pregnant in L2. Rational thought kicked in a second later and I realized that she’s already been pregnant when she’s been stuck in there. Dad had never mentioned anything about a baby and I wondered if he’d been quietly grieving for both his wife and his unborn child this whole time.

Thinking about the size of the baby in my scan, mom had only been three or four weeks along when she’d been frozen in my own personal version of carbonite. Had dad even known about the pregnancy? Had mom known? She wasn’t showing yet and that was definitely a possibility. Was I going to have to wake her up into a different world and tell her she was pregnant?

I walked back to my truck in a daze. There was so much to process. Too much really and my brain took a short break. Well, another short break. The first was when I’d realized that the body in the road was mom and I’d cried for who knows how long. Now I found myself driving back to pick her up and not remembering the last twenty minutes. I needed to get a hold of myself. It was hard though. My thoughts kept jumping around. Mom’s alive. I could have grown up with a brother or a sister. I’d always wanted someone to play with. How do I explain all this to dad? How can mom pick up the pieces of her life when she looks more like my older sister than my mother? Will mom be mad at me when we wake her up? Will dad hate me when he realizes that it’s all my fault?

That last though stopped me cold. It was my fault. Mom didn’t have a field around her that protected her. The only way she could have gotten into L2 is by me bringing her there. Four-year-old me had been scared and I’d shifted just like I had in the bus incident. Only mom had been holding onto me when I’d shifted and I’d taken her with me. When I ran out of strength to stay in L2, I’d snapped back to reality and she hadn’t. I wondered if that’s why Lenny had crashed the car. Had he seen us suddenly disappear from the backseat of the car? Is that why he hadn’t ever spoken of the accident with anyone? Was he questioning his sanity?

I stopped the car beside mom and went around to lift her inside. Looking at her, posed in the middle of her never-ending kidnapping, I couldn’t take it anymore. She couldn’t care, but I did. I shifted us and the truck to R2 and carefully re-positioned her so that it seemed she had only fallen asleep while we were driving. Without the stasis, her facial muscles unfroze as well and I was able to close her eyelids and smooth out her features into a semblance of relaxation.

Watching her, I was surprised at how beautiful she was. My own memories of her had dimmed over the years, replaced with stories and photographs of her. Either the pictures hadn’t done her justice or I’d become so accustomed to them over the years that I stopped truly seeing her. In my mind, she had turned into an image of a person called ‘mom’.

Although I’d always been told how much I looked like her, I’d never been able to see the resemblance. Now I examined her features and could see where I’d gotten mine from. The difference was that on her, the combination of those features was striking. On me, not so much. Maybe I’d grow into those features one day, but I doubted it. I was almost eighteen already. Besides, I didn’t mind not being beautiful. It seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth. It might even be why those guys had decided to kidnap us.

I spend the two-hour drive back home trying to figure out how were we going to be able to bring mom back into our lives. Things would have been so much simpler if she’d aged in L2. Although with her being pregnant, I’m not even sure how that would have worked. Regardless, she hadn’t aged and there was no rational explanation for that. Good genes could only carry you so far. This went way beyond that. Then there was the fact that she couldn’t explain to anyone what she’d been doing for the past thirteen years. For her, those thirteen years hadn’t existed.

She missed out on watching me grow up and on growing older with dad. I think that would be the hardest part for her to come to grips with. Dad always told me that family was the most important thing to her. That reminded me of her parents and I had yet another reason to be thankful that my grandparents were still with us. For her to finally come back to us but miss out on seeing them would have been tragic. She’d be in for enough of a shock when she reunited with Uncle Magnum and found that he was completely bald now.

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I started making a mental list of all the other issues that she’d have trying to fit back into her life. She had no clothes except for what she was wearing. We’d moved to a new city and into a new house that she’d never seen. Her old job was gone. All her friends think she’s dead. All her friends and family had aged thirteen years. She didn’t know what an iPhone was. She’d missed over a decade of movies. Not much of a loss there. She didn’t even know who the current president was. She had a lot of catching up to do and through it all, she would have to raise an infant that would be eighteen years younger than his or her sister.

The situation reminded me of the therapy sessions that I’d sat in on for the women rescued from Serpentine last year. They’d been through a life changing experience and everyone had expected them to be happy to be back and pick up their lives right where they’d left off. However, the experience had changed them and they couldn’t go back to the way things were before. They needed to make a new life for themselves. Mom situation was a bit different, in that she had stayed the same while the world changed, but the results were the same. She was going to have to make a new life for herself. Barely anything remained from her old life. She’d effectively have to become a whole new person.

That thought jarred me. Could she become a new person? If she had a new identity, that would solve the not-aging problem nicely. Given her strong resemblance to a younger version of mom, she’d still have to part of the Metzstein family. Only she’d have to be someone that even mom’s extended family didn’t know about, since we wouldn’t want to have to involve mom’s whole side of the family in the lie.

I got stuck on this problem for awhile. Besides Uncle Magnum and his parents, I’d never met anyone else from mom’s side of the family. I knew there were great aunts and uncles and loads of cousins, but I’d never met any of them. Mom’s clan mostly hailed from New York and Israel. One day I’d have to ask her how she’d ended up in North Carolina. With no other choice left to me, my thoughts settled on Uncle Magnum. I did some math and realized that if he had had a daughter at eighteen, she’d be twenty-five today, just a bit younger than mom’s twenty-nine years when time stopped for her. That was close enough that most people wouldn’t notice the difference between.

With that settled, I just needed to figure out who mom’s new mother would be. Uncle Magnum was not in the habit of telling his teenage niece about his past relationships. I knew about a few of his girlfriends from before Maggie, but none of those had lasted very long. A memory drifted up from my mind of Uncle Magnum and I watching ‘When Harry Met Sally’ a few years ago. I smiled as I fondly remembered the restaurant scene. Meg Ryan was giving a hell of a performance faking an orgasm and I turned to Uncle Magnum, gave him my most confused look and whispered to Uncle Magnum, “What’s she doing? What’s an orgasm?” Uncle Magnum turned all shades of red and started stammering something. I tried to keep a curious look on my face throughout it all, but I ended up failing miserably and burst into laughter. It took him a few seconds to realize that I was teasing him and then the pillow fight began. He added extra minutes of plank to my warmups for weeks after than, but it was so worth it. To this day, I still bring it up occasionally, when he’s least expecting it. The last time I’d done it, about a month ago, we’d been in the middle of sparring and I’d just casually said, “You still never explained what an orgasm is.” Needless to say, that was enough of a distraction for me to get in two solid hits and win the round. The icing on the cake was that Sifu Zhang had been watching, but didn’t hear what I’d said. When he asked Uncle Magnum what had distracted him so much, Uncle Magnum had turned beat red and I couldn’t stop laughing for a long time.

Although I loved that memory, it wasn’t the reason that I’d thought of the movie. After the pillow fight and after the movie ended, I’d asked Uncle Magnum if he thought it was true that men and woman couldn’t just be friends and would always want to be in a relationship. He’d gotten a wistful expression on his face and answered, “No. It’s not true. At least it isn’t always true. Growing up, my best friend was a girl named Vanessa. We were very close, but never intimate. We just weren’t interested in each other in that way. Whatever it is that causes two people to be attracted to each other, we didn’t have it. We were just great friends.”

“How come you’ve never mentioned her before? Is she still in Raleigh?”

“No. She took a year off after high school and backpacked through Europe. When she got back, she enlisted in the Navy. Her dream had always been to become a marine. She was killed during a training exercise just off the east coast.”

If Uncle Magnum agreed, I was going to suggest that mom’s new identity would be as his and Vanessa’s daughter.