“Go home?” Clark asked. “Why are you asking about that now?”
There were still a couple of months of summer left, plenty of time to make decisions.
“Lisa likes you,” Lois said. “Maybe even more than she likes her father.”
He seemed pleased by the admission.
“Kal El can visit her any time he wants to, in the blink of an eye. That won’t change whether Lisa lives here, in Metropolis, or in Calcutta.”
“Thinking of moving to Calcutta?” Clark asked. “I’ve been there. I’d advise against it.”
“You know what I mean. But you…this is your life. Once all of this is over, she won’t see you again, and that’s going to be hard for her.”
Lois was talking about herself as much as Lisa. Unlike Lisa, she was old enough to realize that fairy tales generally didn’t come true. Wealthy people tended to marry other wealthy people. While Clark hadn’t always been wealthy, he’d slid seamlessly into the role.
“How kind of you to be so concerned,” Clark said flatly. “You aren’t talking about leaving tomorrow, are you?”
Lois shook her head. “We just need to start talking about an exit strategy.”
Clark closed his eyes for a moment. “What if I don’t want to?”
“What? Talk about it? We could wait, I suppose, but it’s going to come up eventually.”
“What if I don’t want her to leave?”
Lois frowned. For some reason, her heart was beginning to pound in her chest.
“There are people who hate Kal El because of what he is, and no matter how well you try to keep the secret, if he comes to visit her, someone will notice.”
Lois had wondered a little about the logistics of the meetings. Unless they drove out of town to meet him on the highway, there was always a chance of discovery.
“You don’t think people are going to wonder why you are buying expensive things for the child of a single mother you have living under your roof?”
“Nobody would ask any questions if I claimed she was my biological child.”
Lois stared at him, flabbergasted. She’d known that Clark Kent had craved a child of his own. Lisa’s stories about the wallpaper in her room was proof of that.
“Lisa already has parents,” she said frostily. “We did just fine without anybody.”
“If I claimed her as my own, she could receive all the things she deserves,” Clark says. “She could get an education at a college of her choice. Kal El could visit her without anybody questioning the relationship.”
“How do you think Kal would feel about this, your taking over his role as a father.”
“We’re quite close,” Clark said. “I don’t think it would bother him at all.”
“And me?” Lois said. “If I agreed to this farce? What happens when my idea of parenting doesn’t match yours?”
She’d heard of too many cases of poor mothers who lost custody of their children to richer spouses. Although there was a streak of altruism in Clark Kent that impressed her, there was also a grim determination to get what he wanted.
“I’d defer to you, of course.” Clark said. “It’d be an arrangement on paper, but Lisa would know who her real father was.”
“She has friends, family in Metropolis.”
“Have you thought about the kind of environment Metropolis is for her right now?” Clark asked. “We’ve solved the problem with her vision, but there is nothing that can be done about her hearing until it settles back into a state of equilibrium.”
Lois frowned.
“She’s hearing everything in a three mile radius.” Clark said. “Constantly.”
Lois felt the blood drain from her face. Even in her neighborhood in the suburbs of Metropolis, there had to be hundreds of families in that radius.
Every fight, every cruel word, every gesture….every time anyone made love. It would be a horrendous cacophony.”
She shook her head. “Not all at once. That’s not possible. She would have said something.”
“She’s been very quiet over these past couple of years, hasn’t she? Always seemed distracted.”
Lois nodded warily.
“I think she’s already developing some abilities to discriminate between noises. Eventually she’ll learn to block out most sounds, other than the sounds she wants to hear.”
“That’s what Kal does,” Lois said. “He blocks out everything except the sounds of people in trouble.”
“He can hear ten times as far as Lisa can,” Clark said. “Sometimes more if the conditions are right.”
“Still….we could move to a small town outside of Metropolis,” Lois said. “Maybe live out in the country.”
“Why?” Clark said. “Why go to all the effort to leave?”
“Lisa loves this place,” Lois said, not adding that she did too. “But she’s going to have to make her own way in life. She can’t go depending on the kindness of strangers.”
“”I’m no stranger,” Clark said.
“Not now,” Lois said. “But what happens when you get married again, and the new wife doesn’t want Lisa?”
His eyes glittered. “That won’t happen.”
“What, you won’t marry again, or you won’t marry anyone who doesn’t like Lisa?”
“Maybe both,” he said.
“Adopting someone else’s child as your own…that’s something huge.”
“I’m not likely to ever have any other children of my own,” Clark said. “Joshua tells me that I’m only biologically compatible with one woman in a million.”
Lois frowned. “He said something like that to me also.”
She hadn’t really understood his convoluted explanation, other than to understand that she had some sort of mutation that made fertility difficult for her with a normal human being.
“We’re compatible,” Clark said, looking suddenly embarrassed.
Lois found herself gaping.
“Biologically. It wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t necessarily work at all. But of all the people in the world, you are one of the vanishingly small percentage with whom I might have a chance at having another child.”
“So that’s why you insisted I come live with you?” Lois felt her vision going red. “Because you hoped I’d be some sort of…brood mare?”
Clark glanced uneasily behind her, at the partition separating them from the front of the vehicle. “Keep your voice down,” he said.
“So all this rigmarole about Lisa was just a thin ploy to get to me. You don’t care about my daughter at all!”
“It’s not like that,” he said uneasily. He shifted in his seat and looked as though he wished he were anywhere but where he was.
“I thought this was all about you looking for a substitute daughter. It seemed a little creepy, but that was ok. This…I can’t believe I fell for…”
“It was about Lisa. It’s always been about Lisa, “ Clark said. “The thing with you…that was entirely secondary.”
This caught Lois up short.
“If I never have another child, I’ll be completely happy.” Clark stared at her, then he looked away. “I never could have believed how I’d feel when I realized…”
Lois frowned. She’d thought Clark was childless. Did he have an illegitimate child somewhere? Was that the real reason Lana had left him?
If so, then why wasn’t the child a part of his life?
“I thought you didn’t have a child?”
“There’s always been a void in my life. I never knew my real parents” Clark said. “And my adoptive parents…well, you know what happened to them.”
Lois didn’t speak. Instead she simply stared at him. Clark seemed oddly reluctant to continue, as though he feared her reaction to discovering that he had another child.
“When I was seventeen, I met someone. She was amazing. Fire and passion, no fear. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. When she kissed me, I thought I was going to die.”
Lois frowned. If Clark and Superman had been friends even back when she’d first met Kal, Clark might have been there the night they’d conceived Lisa. She vaguely remembered that he’d come with a group of other boys.
“I thought I was in love,” Clark said. “But I wasn’t in my right mind; I was intoxicated on something and the next morning I couldn’t remember where I’d left her.”
It sounded like a mirror image of her own story, Lois thought. She’d given up drinking entirely after that night; it had no place in her life as a mother, and given her mother’s history of alcoholism…it was scary.
“So how do you know you have a child?” Lois asked quietly. “You said it was a pretty slim shot even with someone who was compatible.”
“She came to me recently,” Clark said. “She’d tracked me down. She brought her daughter with her…the most wonderful child I’d ever seen.”
“Then why are you still making all this fuss about Lisa?” Lois asked. “You should be reaching out to your own daughter, trying to be part of HER life. And this other, perfect woman? You should be bringing her into your house instead of me.
“I want to acknowledge Lisa as my daughter and make her my heir because….she IS my biological daughter.”
Lois felt the blood drain from her face for the second time in the evening. Staring at Clark, she could see all the similarities between him and Kal El. In her mind, their faces superimposed on each other. They had the same eyes, the same lips, the same mouth. The hair was different, but only in so much as hair gel and a different style was concerned.
There was a reason Clark hadn’t taken his place on the stage tonight, Lois realized. It wasn’t that he was modest, and wanted to avoid the spotlight, although apparently he did. It was that he couldn’t be in two places at once.
That was probably why Clark was so careful about being photographed. He didn’t want anybody making visual comparisons of him and the alien hero.
It was so obvious now that she looked at him. How had he been able to pull it off with a change of hairstyle and an outrageous outfit. True, he’d been careful not to spend much time with her as Kal El, but…
“Lisa knew.” Lois said, her mind racing.
Lisa had been cold and standoffish toward Clark until the incident with the glasses, but afterwards she’d been overly affectionate and sweet.
“I asked her not to tell you,” Clark said, looking embarrassed.
“Why?” she asked, a hint of anger appearing in her voice. “Did you think I was going to run to the tabloids? Lisa has just as much to lose in this as you do.”
“I…I wanted you to get to know me for who I am,” Clark said. “I was afraid that Superman would confuse things.”
“You thought I’d be so blinded by the cape and tights that I’d fall for you right away.” Lois’s voice was flat.
“I haven’t been the nicest person,” Clark said. “Some of that was the red poison, but I can’t blame it all on that. I’d hoped…If you got to know me for who I am and if you still liked me a little that all of this would go a little easier.”
“This? What is this?” Lois asked.
“I want to claim Lisa as my biological child, and I want the two of you to move in with me permanently.”
*********************
Lana felt the blood dripping from her hand. Irritably, she ripped the earpiece from her ear and went in search for a towel. The shattered remains of her wine glass lay on the table in front of her.
Putting the recording device in Clark’s limo had been inspired. It was amazing what modern technology could do. In the past, Clark would have heard anything with moving parts, but these gadgets were entirely digital.
Anyone who knew her would have thought Lana would be in a rage by this point, but she was beyond that.
She felt cold and numb. All that was left was to put her plan in motion. When this was all done, she’d have a child of her own, and Clark would lose everything, including his life.
Sometimes revenge was best served cold.
