The hum of the wheels against the road was hypnotizing; the soft sounds of soft rock playing on the radio reminded Lois of long trips she’d taken with her own parents when she was a child, before everything had gone sour between them.
Usually the hum of the road had been enough to let her drift off to sleep to the sound of the music, after she’d shoved Lucy as far as she could on her own side of the seat.
Lisa had never had that kind of sibling rivalry; she never would. She’d had her child too young, and further, there had been some genetic abnormalities that had made the pregnancy especially difficult on her body. She’d almost died, and the damage done to her had been more than she liked to think about still.
So Lisa was always going to be alone. She was never going to have to fight over clothes or dolls or boys. She wasn’t going to know what it was like to stand up for a little sister, to huddle together and comfort each other when their parents were fighting.
She’d never have that special relationship and part of Lois regretted it. It had been hard enough raising one child alone; even with all the help Uncle Mike’d had to offer, it had sometimes been all she could do to get up in the mornings.
Yet Lois would never regret having her, despite the dreams she still sometimes had of a glamorous life as a big reporter.
She glanced over at her daughter and wondered just how much she hadn’t told Lois.
This Superman could do so many things. He was strong; he could set fires with his eyes. He could hear cries for help from miles away.
Lisa had admitted to hearing things that first day. It explained a lot. It explained her sudden coolness toward her grandmother after she turned ten. Ellen had always been careful to keep her vitriol away from impressionable ears, but when those ears could hear telephone conversations from all the way across the house, it meant that Lisa had been exposed to things Lois would have rather protected her from.
Lois was just glad that there had never been any serious men in her life. That would have resulted in the kind of psychological scarring she didn’t want to deal with.
It hurt to think that she’d been suffering all this time, thinking she was crazy and that if she told she’d be sent away. Lois’s job was to protect her little girl, and she’d failed.
It was an old familiar guilt. There were so many things she wanted for her daughter, things she’d never been able to accomplish for herself. This was the last in a long line of failures.
She’d never been able to provide the kind of material things she’d wanted to provide. Living with her Uncle Mike had helped, but it was only in the last few years that she’d been solvent enough to even consider moving out on her own.
Glancing over at her daughter, who was staring straight ahead, Lois wondered what other things were going on with her that she hadn’t bothered to tell her.
“Are you ok?” she asked.
Sometimes it felt as though she didn’t know her daughter anymore. Things had changed between them for the past two years, and it was only now that she was beginning to get an inkling of the reason why.
Lisa nodded, and then returned to staring out the window. She’d been silent for most of the trip, enough that Lois had begun to worry.
Since that first day, Superman had been on television, in magazines, on the radio. He’d saved hundreds of people from earthquakes and floods and car accidents. He’d made it clear that there was no place on earth that he didn’t consider under his protection, with the exception of Metropolis, which he’d avoided.
It wasn’t something that anyone but Lois would have noticed, but there were hundreds of cities in the world, and not all of them had required his services as of yet. Reporters barely had time to shout a few questions at him before he was off to perform yet another few rescues.
The world was desperate for any piece of news about him. In some ways he was bigger than the Beatles, and there were pictures of crowds of admirers trying to swarm him, to touch him, to share in some way a piece of what he had.
None of that made him easier to find; to the contrary, he made rescues and didn’t spend long at any one place. Lois could sympathize. Having a needy world always wanting something from you…she couldn’t imagine.
Lois had begun to lose hope, after three weeks. It didn’t seem as though there was any way to contact this Superman. He didn’t have any known place of residence, and he didn’t even seem to play favorites in terms of where he worked.
It wasn’t until she’d seen an article on the news that Lois had realized her chance. An obscure millionaire, some sort of mining magnate in Colorado had set up a Superman foundation. It was a charitable organization, and according to follow up articles in the paper, Superman had agreed to appear at a celebrity auction.
“Do you really think he’ll be there?” Lisa asked, finally breaking the silence.
Lois nodded. “He’s been pretty good about keeping his promises so far.”
“Not with me.” Lisa said, her voice sounding strained.
“If he’d known about you…if we’d known…it would have been different.”
How different Lois couldn’t know. She knew nothing about the man other than that he claimed to be from another planet, and that he spent great portions of his day devoted to helping people.
“He pretends that he just showed up recently,” Lisa said. “Isn’t that a lie?”
“Well,” Lois said. “We’re not sure that he might not have been just visiting…or it might not be him at all. He might just be an uncle or a cousin or something.”
There was the chance that he could be just one member of a family, or that he was part of an invasionary force. Lois hoped not. It was going to be hard enough to face the man with a child who was almost a teenager. It would only be worse if she had to beg for their lives at the same time.
The only thing she knew was that he would have some answers. He’d be able to answer some of the questions that Lisa and Lois both shared.
Were there ways for Lisa to control her abilities? Would she be able to fly? What else was she likely going to be able to do?
Just how human was she, really?
In the long run, it didn’t matter to Lois. Lisa was her daughter, even if she was really some sort of green bug eyed thing from another star. Lois had a sense, however that it mattered a great deal to Lisa.
Lisa had been alone for far too long.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.” Lois said, after another long period of silence.
Lisa had claimed that people were saying things about her, things she couldn’t possibly have heard. She’d never had a good explanation for it.
Lisa shrugged. “I wouldn’t have believed me.” She didn’t look at Lois, simply staring off into the darkness.
***************
Everything went as planned with the auction. The charity earned more money than anyone would have expected. Superman got more publicity, and the Superman Foundation was one more step toward becoming a self sustaining force of good in the world.
There were so many things he had to answer for, and this wouldn’t begin to make up for them, but it was a start.
Stepping out onto the red carpet, Clark avoided the instinct to blink as flashes of light from dozens of photographers hit him all at once. There were celebrities in front of him and behind him, but he was the one the media was interested in today.
It still felt wrong, all this celebrity. He’d spent his life in hiding, concealing what he could do, fearing the response of the unthinking mob. People hated what they didn’t understand; everything he’d seen had convinced him of that.
What he hadn’t understood was that people had an insatiable need to find something to believe in. Pete had told him this, but he hadn’t believed it.
As he stepped onto the red carpet and prepared to fly away, he found the world seeming to slow down around him. Everything seemed to freeze around him as his vision seemed to constrict.
In the crowd…she was there, staring at him.
The woman he’d wanted to forget…and had never been able to.
She was the woman who had changed the course of his entire life, and he didn’t even know her name.
