A sequel to
Time Enough To Heal TOC . Growing up different is never easy. It’s doubly hard when your names are Clark Joseph Kent and Lois Lane Olsen.
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1996 - Smallville, KansasPerry White, editor of the Daily Planet newspaper in Metropolis, watched the older couple worriedly as he handed them the three month old baby, a grandson they hadn’t known existed until Perry’s call to them, two days before.
Martha Kent took the child in her arms and sat down in the rocking chair she kept in the corner of the farmhouse living room. She peered into the baby’s face. Brown almond shaped eyes, longish hair the color of midnight, olive skin that spoke of no particular ethnicity but seemed to partake of all of them. The face of her dead son as he looked the first time she held him in her arms so many years ago. When she and her husband rescued him out of a spaceship in Schuster’s field. The baby smiled at her, made a grab for her glasses.
“How?” she asked her late son’s boss.
Perry sighed and sat down on the worn sofa. “You remember the tissue samples Ching took from Clark’s body last year?”
“During that whole New Krypton mess?” Jonathan Kent elaborated. Of course they remembered. Their boy had been in the ground for less than three days when the super-powered aliens showed up. Two of them made a mess of downtown Smallville before being killed by a pair of military sharp-shooters. The third, Ching, had come to them with Jimmy Olsen, their son’s friend, to exhume his body. “Yeah, we remember.”
“Well, Zara was Kal-El’s birth-wife and she needed to return home to her people pregnant by him so she could solve some political issues,” Perry explained.
“So he’s Clark’s and this Zara woman’s child?” Martha asked.
“Not exactly,” Perry admitted. “The baby is a clone of Clark. His identical twin brother, only thirty years younger.” He let this information sink in before continuing. “Two days ago, I got a message from Ching, from New Krypton, telling me he was sending two survivors to Earth. This little boy and a little girl who couldn’t be much more than a day old. Ching’s final message was that New Krypton had destroyed itself. He asked me to make sure the children would be safe.”
Martha looked over at her husband. “We’re not as young as we used to be,” she commented.
“You’re not much older than I am, and you did a good job raising Clark,” Perry said. Their son had been one of the best investigative reporters the editor had ever had the privilege of knowing, and one of the best men, even without the Superman persona.
“If we’d done a good job, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Jonathan said sadly. “Or maybe we might, but it would have been Clark giving you the message, not some stranger. If we’d done a good job, he wouldn’t have felt so alone . . . he wouldn’t have done what he did to himself and everyone around him.”
“Jonathan, it’s not the baby’s fault Clark’s not here,” Martha said. The baby has starting to fuss. “Has he got a name?”
“His Kryptonian name is Ler-El. His birth certificate says Clark Joseph Kent, son of Clark Jerome Kent and Sarah Ray. The story Jimmy and I gave out at the Planet was that Sarah came to me a few months after Clark’s death, pregnant, looking for him. She had no family. I’d kept in touch with her, helped her out a little. Then she died a few days ago, an accident. Her roommate contacted me and here we are.”
“Hello CJ,” Martha crooned. The baby’s eyes locked onto her face and he smiled.
Metropolis“Do you think they’ll buy it?” James Bartholomew Olsen asked his fiancée, Lucille Jennifer Lane. They were standing outside her uncle’s restaurant in midtown, the American Bistro, waiting a few minutes before going in to see Lucy’s parents.
Lucy shrugged at his question, taking a moment to straighten the lace bonnet that covered dark hair of the tiny baby he held in his arms. “With my parents, it’s anybody’s guess. I just wish your dad hadn’t put your name on the birth certificate as the father.”
“The way my dad explained it, with my name on it, we don’t have to worry about social services trying to lay claim to her, put her in foster care. We certainly couldn’t put your name down as the mother, could we?” Jimmy asked.
“I guess not,” Lucy admitted. She looked inside the restaurant, spotting her parents already seated at a table. From the looks of it, her mother was starting on her second glass of wine. Lucy picked up the baby carrier she’d set on the ground. “We’d better go in.”
They walked over to the corner table where Sam and Ellen Lane were seated. One of the waiters noticed the baby and hurried to bring a high chair to sit the carrier on. Jimmy settled the newborn into the carrier before taking a seat beside Lucy at the table.
“Whose kid?” Sam asked.
“It’s complicated, Dad,” Lucy began.
“It always is,” Ellen put in.
Jimmy and Lucy looked at one another. This was going to be harder than either of them had hoped, although maybe not as bad as Lucy had imagined.
Jimmy cleared his throat. “She’s mine, and before you say anything, it happened before Lucy and I got serious about each other, and I had no idea until two days ago that the woman had even gotten pregnant.”
“So, how do you happen to have her?” Sam asked. He was a just little less hostile than before.
“Two nights ago, I got a call from the mother, telling me to come get her, or else,” Jimmy explained.
“Or else what?” Ellen asked.
“I didn’t ask. She sounded pretty strung out on the phone. When Perry and I got to the hospital where she said was, she’d already left. The description the nurse gave me matched a woman I went out with a couple times nine, ten months ago and the names matched on the paperwork. She’d put me down as the father, so unless somebody can prove otherwise, I’m a daddy.”
“So, when are you getting rid of her?” Ellen demanded, finishing off her glass of wine.
“Mom,” Lucy said quietly. “Jimmy and I have talked about this, and we’ve decided to keep her, to raise her. It’s not her fault her mother couldn’t be bothered to let Jimmy know anything about her, or that she ran off.”
“And if this ‘person’ comes back, demanding the child?” Ellen asked. There was a vicious bite in her tone.
“If that happens, well, she abandoned her baby and walked out of the hospital,” Lucy said. “Mister White told us he’ll be surprised if the woman doesn’t show up on the police blotter sometime soon.”
Lucy sighed silently. She’d always hated it when her mother drank. As a child, she’d had Lois, her older sister, to protect her, to try and make things better. And they had gotten better for a while. Ellen had even stopped drinking for a a couple years. Then Lois, Ellen's first-born, died, accidentally killed by her friend Superman while they tried to foil a kidnapping.
Ellen fell back into the bottle and hadn’t come out since.
No one at the time, except Lucy, had blamed the superhero for Lois’s death, although he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. A year later, within days of completing his sentence, Superman was dead too, murdered by an alien assassin. At least, that’s what everyone said happened. Lucy had her doubts. She doubted even an alien assassin could have killed Superman unless he’d been distracted, unless he’d wanted to lose, to die.
Clark Kent, Lois’s partner, was also dead. So much waste, three lives snuffed out over one miscalculation.
Sam leaned over and peered at the sleeping child. “She looks healthy enough. I assume you’ve had her checked out?”
“Jimmy and I took her in to a clinic this morning. She’s perfectly healthy. No indications of maternal drug abuse, nothing like that,” Lucy told her father.
“And how do you plan to support a family?” Sam asked Jimmy.
“I have a decent job, decent income,” Jimmy explained. “Lucy has a job, too. We’ll make it.”
Ellen looked at them, bleary eyed. “So, what’s her name?”
“We named her Lois,” Jimmy said. “Lois Joanne, after her aunt. After my friend.”
