Pathways - Jeri Taylor [109]
Moira was an elegantly beautiful woman, in Tom’s opinion. She had classically delicate features, wide blue eyes set in an oval face, straight thin nose, lips a bit generous but not out of proportion. She pulled her dark hair back off her face in a severe fashion which seemed, on Moira, altogether fetching. She was straightforward and completely without guile, and Tom adored her.
“Didn’t you race today?” she asked immediately, in her frank way. “How’d it go?”
Tom felt his eyes flicker to his father, who sat at the head of the table, eyes on a padd he was studying. Tom wasn’t sure he had even heard the question.
“Not so well. I took a tumble in the middle of my run and lost my chance to compete.”
“I’m sorry. It’s a wonder to me everybody doesn’t fall every time they go scooting down one of those mountains. I don’t know how you do it, sliding around on those funny-looking slats. How can you control which way you go, anyway?”
“Practice” was Tom’s laconic reply. He had no desire to get involved in a discussion of the techniques of skiing.
“Tom was actually doing well at the time,” his mother added unhelpfully. His mother was a martial-arts instructor, in magnificent physical shape, and a paleontological scholar in her own right. She was also the most loving, warm, generous woman Tom had ever encountered. He had often wondered how she’d been attracted to his father.
Tom’s eyes moved again to Admiral Paris, whose eyes had lifted from the padd, looking at his wife and children with the dispassionate look of someone who was running multiplication tables in his head. But, as Tom had suspected, he had registered every word that had been uttered.
“Hope you didn’t hurt yourself,” he said, his voice neutral, with no shading or inference of any kind. What kind of game was he playing? He had seen the fall, had seen people surrounding Tom, testing him, transporting him right from the slope to the medical facility. Why would Admiral Paris ask this curious question?
“I got pretty banged up,” Tom replied, searching his father’s face for reaction. “Broke some bones, tore some muscles and ligaments. But everything’s been pretty well regenerated. I’m just a little sore.”
“Glad it wasn’t serious,” his father intoned, then turned his eyes once more to the padd.
“Owen, Moira hasn’t been home for three months. Don’t you think you could put that padd away at the dinner table?”
Admiral Paris smiled good-naturedly and turned the padd off. “Sorry,” he said. “The Ktarians have proposed an expedition into the Beta Quadrant. Just wanted to stay on top of it.” He looked at Moira and smiled fondly. “What’s new in South Carolina?”
Tom half listened as Moira launched into a rambling account of the miseries of medical school, a subject that seemed to absorb his father’s attention completely. He was completely baffled by the admiral’s behavior. Was his father so embarrassed by Tom’s performance that he didn’t even want to admit he’d seen it? Was he trying to spare Tom’s feelings by pretending he hadn’t been there?
Or was it—and this thought hit Tom like a fist in the stomach—that he hadn’t been there?
Tom felt color rise unbidden in his face, shame greater than that he’d felt this morning in Switzerland undulating through him. His thoughts tumbled over each other, as though in homage to his spectacular plunge down the mountainside. Could he have imagined he’d seen his father? Or had he seen someone who bore him a vague resemblance and turned that person, in his mind’s eye, into the admiral?
And if he’d done that—why? He didn’t expect to see his father at a racing event, he didn’t anticipate it; in fact, it was the furthest thing from his mind. That surprise was what had taken him out of the moment and caused him