The English Descendants

27

Eddie is still an emotionally fragile girl when she reaches high school. She spent a few years learning at home and, when she returns to school, it is to a neighbouring district. She is bookish and quiet, her free time spent alone in the library where she studies designs for steam powered things. Her favourite projects are those she can build and she always chooses the elective courses that allow her to create something. Daisy has built her a workshop in the lower level of the barn where she has a boiler and a drive shaft and all manner of steam driven tools, many of which she has built under Thomas' careful, but distant supervision. She has dragged his tools and his watchmaker's cabinet into her own space. Enola's trunk is always open and she studies his designs in earnest. They are elegant, functional, and fascinating.

She is seventeen when she determines for certain that she wants nothing to do with her peers. She attends the cast party for the high school play. As the set designer, she is someone they rarely saw, invited, but not really welcomed. After she is greeted by the hosts, she settles into a tacky green vinyl chair in one corner. The gathering is everything she imagined- loud, mindless, and accompanied by terrible music. She stays only because she has a slight crush on one of the understudies. The later the night gets, the more uncomfortable she becomes. Someone brings bottles of wine from the kitchen. Then another someone starts passing a joint around. And yet another someone opens a mint tin to share pills that have no label. The boy she is watching comes to talk to her for a little while, then brings her a drink. She trusts him. She should not. She is getting groggy as she watches other boys push themselves onto girls who look to be as woozy as she is. She passes out in the chair.

When she wakes at dawn, she is the only person not sleeping. There are half naked teenagers all over the room. She struggles to sit up, panic rising in her chest as she checks her own clothes. They are all where they should be.

A familiar voice comes from beside her, "You're safe. But I do think you should call for the authorities."

She turns and sees Thomas perched on the arm of her chair, "Have you been there all night?"

"Yes. And the young man you were watching- I believe he is called Ben?" She nods, "He had best not come near you again. He tried and I made myself as visible as I could. I believe whatever he took earlier in the night made my presence quite clear. His expression was amusing."

"Wait, are you telling me my crush tried to...?"

"I do not know. But I was unwilling to discover his intent."

She gathers her things, "Let's get out of here." She drives home as fast as the law allows, sometimes a little faster. As soon as she is in her front door, she calls the police and makes an anonymous report.

She hears rumours at school that the police found more drugs in the house than she ever saw. She determines there is no reason to socialize with her peers if they are just going to do stupid things. She returns all her attention to her tinkering. Her quiet, consistent life is what she wants, and the only excitement she wishes for is the excitement of discovery. She shares what she learns with Thomas. She sits at her workbench and he hovers over her shoulder, watching intently, asking questions as she works with wires and microcircuits, technology that makes her world run in the same way that steam did his. But the modern electric everything, wires so tiny they are printed, not hand run, cannot enchant her in the same way and Eddie always returns to Thomas' steam engines. There is something incredible and elemental about powering machines by belts and heat and water. She cuts wood for the pile when it dwindles, determined that there should always be the means to bring the boiler to a full head of steam.

The household does change, though, when May Ellen dies. One less voice at the table, and one more trip to Elmwood Cemetery. Eddie and Rose pay little attention to the funeral, their minds elsewhere, the cemetery a reminder of something they don't want to think of as a part of their future. May's brother, Richard, his son, Alan, and Alan's partner, Theodore, are faces they have only rarely seen and they feel awkward trying to converse with them. Instead, they huddle together at the cafe they stop in after her burial and pretend that there aren't other people around them.