From Hate Flourishes Love

Long Lost In-Law

🅚🅐🅘

I'm trapped in my own body, struggling to convince my body to work. I feel fully awake, yet dead— no different than a corpse. I keep waking up, but I'm unable to fend off the paralysis.

It's like waking up in the morning, you're certain that you're awake but completely unable to move or open your eyes. Usually, it only lasts for a minute but for me, it's my everlasting torment.

"Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it;" I hear Zander reading Moby-Dick to me, "and in everything imposingly beautiful ..."

He stops reading.

"Imposingly beautiful?" He asks himself. "Kai? You
didn't tell me you met the author of this book."

Doesn't he know that Herman is talking about a whale? He's comparing me to a freaking whale. If I was awake, I'd . . . I'd . . . I'd tell him that I love him, then hit him upside the head.

"Kai," Zander says softly. "Your strength makes you even more beautiful. I know you're going to come back to me, and in my eyes, you'll be more beautiful than ever."

🅩🅐🅝🅓🅔🅡

Kai's parents look nervously between themselves, not saying anything.

"Will one of you start talking?" I beg them. "Please!"

I rake my hands through my hair, frustrated with them being tight-lipped about something so important. Kai's brother could save him, save my family.

"Where do we start?" Mrs. Summers asks, reaching for her husband's hand.

I wanted to scream at them to tell me everything about their son, but I couldn't bring myself to. I could see it. They're grieving and this time it was for two sons.

"Start with," I soften my expression."What happened to the baby? Did you give him up for adoption?"

"It's complicated," Mrs. Summers whispers. "We had hardly just arrived in America from Martinique. We didn't have a home for ourselves, no money. We were living with Wallace's half-brother at the time... I was six months pregnant, we could've never expected the baby to come so soon. He was so impossibly small, fragile. The doctors said he wouldn't make it through the night, but he did."

She breaks from the story, her shoulder shaking, lips trembling as she gasps silently.

"Our son made it," Mr. Summers smiles weakly. "But he still needed the doctors to help him survive — but his parents were undocumented. We had no health insurance. . . We couldn't be sure the hospital would treat him."

"But they did?" I ask him. "They treated the baby?"

"They did," he says bitterly."They weren't going to, but my brother's mother-in-law convinced them. She was a midwife at the hospital . . . She said had fallen in love with our baby. She was impressed with his fight and swore she wouldn't let it go in vain. So, she called up her daughter and my brother, and begged them to let us register the baby under their names," Mr. Summers tries to hold it together but fails.

"What happened?" I asked them. "Why didn't the baby get to stay with you?"

"So many things," Mrs. Summers wipes her tears. "We couldn't seem to make things work for us in the States at the time. Wallace's father was petitioning to get us green cards since he was a natural-born citizen, but he thought we had a better chance to get them if we weren't staying in the country illegally, so he asked us to go back home to Martinique and not to fret about the baby since our family would take care of him."