Lois stood frozen for a moment. She’d come to accept that she’d been on a fool’s journey, and now that it appeared that she wasn’t, she wasn’t sure what to do.
“Would you like me to bring her in?” Superman asked.
She nodded slowly, hoping he could see her in the darkness. Waking Lisa right now didn’t seem right. She didn’t want the first expression she saw on her father’s face to be one of disbelief.
The door to the station wagon opened, and Lisa stirred a little as the overhead light came on. Lois caught a flash of red as he bent inside to lift her out of her seat, and a moment later he stood again, the light reflecting off the red of his trunks and the blue of his leggings.
He nudged the door shut gently with his hips, and then he was moving across the lawn easily, as though Lisa’s hundred or so pounds didn’t weigh anything.
To a man who could lift airplanes, Lois supposed that it didn’t.
Realizing that he was waiting on her, and suddenly conscious of the empty windows of the houses surrounding them, Lois fumbled with her keys for a moment as she hurried forward.
Her hands were unexpectedly shaky, and she had trouble fitting the key in the lock. Glancing back at the silhouette of the man behind her didn’t make things any easier. She wished she’d thought to replace the bulb on the entrance light.
As the key finally slipped into the lock, Lois felt a moment of shame at the thought of the interior of her home. It was shabby and run down, obviously not what this man was used to if he was spending time around the likes of Clark Kent.
No marble floors or long elegant staircases here.
He slipped inside behind her, and a moment later he’d headed down the hall in the direction of Lisa’s bedroom.
For a moment, Lois wondered how he knew where to go; then she remembered that it was one of his abilities, seeing through things.
She switched on the light and grimaced. In her haste to move she’d left more of a clutter than she’d intended.
It was ironic that in her life before Lisa she’d been a meticulously neat person. As a mother, however, she’d discovered that children create chaos, and that oftentimes a clean house was simply one where the child hasn’t yet come home.
He was out of the bedroom, and there was a blur. Lois stumbled back as she realized that all of her luggage was now sitting by the door. He’d unloaded it all in the space of an instant.
Lois felt a moment of tired gratitude before realizing that all this did was hurry the moment of reckoning.
He stood in the hallway, with the light behind his head like a halo, and Lois wondered what she was going to say.
He spoke first. “You wanted to speak with me?”
Lois nodded and gestured toward her chair. The couch was still gone, of course, leaving the living room looking open and bare. The carpet seemed threadbare and worn, and she felt embarrassed again.
He shook his head slightly and chose instead to stand by the wall. There was something about his body language…it was tense and distant.
Was he worried about what she had to say?
Sitting with him looming over her didn’t seem like a good idea, so Lois gestured toward her kitchen, which at least had barstools around a breakfast nook.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I had something in Shanghai.”
It was subtle, the message that he was a world traveler and that his time was important. Lois forced herself to turn and head for the refrigerator for some orange juice. As tired as she was, she needed a little sugar in her bloodstream, and there wasn’t time to make coffee.
She could feel his eyes on her back as she deliberately poured herself a glass and took a quick sip before returning the carton to the refrigerator.
Turning back to him, she said “Do I call you Superman? Kal El?”
“Kal will be fine,” he said.
Lois moved back to the breakfast nook, where she pressed her stomach against the counter.
“Are there any other beings with your abilities out there?” she asked.
It would be embarrassing to bring up the paternity issue if it turned out that he had cousins and uncles out there with the same abilities.
“To the best of my knowledge.” He shrugged. “I’ve been looking for a long time and haven’t found anyone else like me.”
Lois relaxed. That made this all a little easier.
“Is this going to be an interview, then?” he sounded a little disappointed, and Lois wondered just what he thought had motivated her to bring him here.”
Lois shook her head. “This is personal. Twelve years ago we met each other for the first time at a bar called the Blue Monday in Metropolis.”
He stared at her without speaking.
“I…wasn’t myself. My parents were getting a divorce and I…I’d been drinking.”
He stiffened a little, and his face went blank. Lois wondered if he was only now recognizing her.
She wondered how many other women he’d met on nights like that in bars all around the world. Had there been so many that he didn’t really remember her?
“You were wearing a Midwestern University jacket, but I remember you saying you didn’t actually go there.”
“Let’s say this was all true.” He said finally. “Why have you chosen to contact me now?”
“If it was just about me, I’d have left you alone, but I’m not the only one involved in all this.”
He looked confused.
“Nine months after the night we met, I gave birth to Lisa.”
***************
Clark frowned. He’d expected an ugly accusation of rape, followed by a demand for even more money than he’d offered her in the first place. Without Superman, there would be no Superman Foundation, and so she’d reason that he’d have access to the money.
For once, she’d even have a point. She’d been clearly intoxicated and not in her right mind. Under normal circumstances, he never would have done anything with her, no matter how tempting he’d found her to be.
He couldn’t even afford to tell her the truth. He’d been just as impaired as she’d been; his judgment had been shattered, and what they’d done together had been a mistake. It had been a mistake even if it had been one of the brighter memories of his life.
Instead, she made this ridiculous claim.
She’d been a virgin the night they’d met, and so unless she’d done something soon afterward…
“That’s impossible,” he said flatly.
Lois shook her head. “There was nobody else, and…I have other reasons to think so.”
“My physiology is very similar to that of a human being, but I am not human. I can’t have children.”
It had been a devastating blow the first time he’d heard it, but it was something he’d come to terms with.
Children just weren’t in the cards for him.
“She threw a couch through my wall.” Lois said. She gestured toward the living room, and by leaning back Clark could see where newer bricks had been placed among the old.
It looked like a slipshod job to him, as though someone had rushed through without trying to match the bricks to the wall.
“She can hear things from a mile away,” Lois said. “And then there are the fires.”
Reaching behind her, she pulled a large basket of candy away from its place on the countertop. There was a huge scorch mark with a distinctive pattern radiating out from the center.
It was a pattern he’d seen before. When he’d first been learning to control his heat vision, there had been more fires than he’d wanted to think about.
He’d been thrown out of more than one foster home with a reputation for pyromania because of it, and he could remember with excruciating detail just how terrifying it had been.
His mind flashed back to his first meeting with Lois Lane.
The girl had seemed to be staring at him right through the wall.
For a moment the world seemed to go white around him. He’d spent his life thinking that he was going to be alone. This changed everything.
It felt as though he’d been punched in the chest; he couldn’t catch his breath. He felt as though his hands were shaking, and he could hear his pulse pounding in his ears.
His mind raced, and all he could think was that his life was never going to be the same.
If there had been a mistake in this, did that mean he could have had other children? Could he have moved on from Lana, found someone, lived the sort of life he’d dreamed of instead of the life he’d been living?
He glanced back through the walls to where the girl was sleeping. Her complexion was like his, and so was the shape of her eyes. She had her mother’s hair, but she looked so much like him that it took his breath away.
************
Lois sat, waiting for him to respond. In the dim light of the kitchen she thought she saw him pale a little and sway slightly.
He was silent for a long, interminable moment. She couldn’t read the expression on his face, which suddenly seemed older than it had a moment before.
Lois had a sinking feeling this wasn’t going to go as well as either she or Lisa had hoped.
“I’m…I’m going to…”
His face changed, and his head turned. He looked almost grateful as he said, “There’s an emergency. I…I’ve got to go.”
He stepped around the counter and said, “We need to talk more about this later, but not tonight.”
Lois nodded. She was exhausted, and it was probably going to take him a little time to process the whole thing.
He reached up to her shoulder and brushed a few strands of hair off her shirt. Lois thought she saw him palm a couple of strands awkwardly.
A moment later he was gone.
Lois sighed and prepared to unpack. In the end, the ball was in his court. He’d said he thought he was sterile. Nature had proven him wrong.
Creating a child was easy, being a parent was not.
The next few days were going to give Lisa’s father a chance to show what sort of man he was. For Lisa’s sake, Lois hoped that he was a good one.
Otherwise Lois would be the one who had to pick up all the pieces.
