Apple Core

Four: Questions

Derek was right. On Friday, my perspective on lemon cheesecakes was completely changed.

The party wasn't very ostentatious; as Derek had said, there were only the three of us, if I don't count his mother and his teenage sister, who got out, complaining about everything, as we entered. Which is, to be honest, what all teenagers do in my opinion. We had pizza and cake, played video games, then, as night came closer, we watched a horror movie.

That night, despite the movie being not very scary, I couldn't sleep. I could hear my grandmother snoring from the room beside mine, and the moonlight coming in through the window prevented me from being thrown in total darkness.

All I had to remember to fall asleep peacefully were the honey colored eyes. It was as if that woman was my mother, that she would come in and tell me not to be afraid. Somehow, when I imagined my real mother's green eyes, it didn't bring the same feeling. Instead I had an image in my head of my green eyed mother yelling at me to go to bed and quit being a baby.

It felt wrong. Shouldn't I feel that my mother was my mother, more than anyone else? Who was this woman, and why were our eyes the same? Did her heart jump in her chest as well when she realized that the person she was looking at had eyes that were so identical, she might as well have been looking at a mirror?

I remembered what she said when I told her Circleton was supposed to be safe. It isn't. Why wasn't it? What did she mean?

Such complex thoughts didn't help my mind shut down, and instead kept it awake. I don't think I slept before two in the morning.

Summer in Circleton was more peaceful than in the city. The sky was clearer, and it wasn't half as hot, because, my mom said, of the lack of air pollution. Birds chirped and the trees were covered in green once more.

After the last of my final examinations, I was free to roam the town as often as I pleased. I was off to meet Derek at the park. Ralph had broken one of his neighbors' windows playing tennis and was grounded for a week, which ended the following day. I felt closer in age to them, now that I was eleven. I wasn't sure the feeling would last after Ralph's thirteenth birthday the following week.

As much as I wanted to go to my friend's houses, my mother wouldn't let me. They too wanted me to visit, but my mother said she didn't want me in anybody's house if she didn't know their parents. Birthday parties were an exception, though. So that's why Ralph was having one.

"I can't wait to show you my room," he had said the previous weekend, "it'll look much cooler with the TV my dad is getting me for my birthday. He's getting it before the party, so we can watch a movie on it."

When I reached the park, Derek sat there, obviously bothered with something. "Hey, man," I said, "what's wrong?"

"You won't believe my parents, dude," he said, "they just told me we're moving, the day after Ralph's birthday."

My heart jumped in my chest. "Moving?" I asked, "Where? Why?"

"One of those big cities with lots of traffic, no parking spaces, and a clear lack of fresh air," he said, "all because my dad found a stupid job."

Will I never see Derek again? "Are.. are you going to come back, at all?"

"Once a year," he said, "next summer, when we don't have any school and my dad gets his yearly vacation. You really should have seen my sister, though. She was devastated. Next year is her last year at school, and she really wanted to graduate with her friends. It's the first time I really felt sorry for her."

I imagined the teenage girl who got out of Derek's house on his birthday, crying. I began to feel sorry for her too.

"But.. but that's not an easy decision," I said, "your parents must have thought it through. I mean, they can't just leave everything and everyone they've ever known behind."

"They have, Clyde," said Derek, "It's a huge job opportunity for him, they kept saying. Would make us rich. We could buy whatever we want, they said. I don't think they understand how much money can't buy happiness."

Silence engulfed us for a minute or two. I wanted to help Derek and just say something, but I didn't know what to say. It came as much of a shock to me as it did to him.

"Ugh!" he suddenly yelled, almost making me jump, "Why did Ralph have to go and get himself grounded?! Now I'll have to say it all over again, and it's bad enough that it's true!"

"I.. I can tell him." I said.

Derek sighed and sat on a swing. I took a seat on the swing next to him. "I just wish they told me sooner." he said.

"Don't worry, Derek," I said "Cities aren't that bad if you make a good first Impression."

"I hope you're right." he mumbled.

We all agreed to make Ralph's birthday party, the twenty-seventh of June, one of the best days of our lives. The next day, after I had told Ralph that Derek was moving, the two of us planned to make it into a goodbye-party as well.

We made huge banners, Ralph and I, banners that said GOODBYE DEREK or WE WILL MISS YOU. We let Derek help with the less obvious stuff, like the juices we were gonna buy or the flavor of cake. Little known to him, the cake wasn't going to be wishing Ralph a happy birthday.

"I should show you my house, so you'd know the way tomorrow," said Ralph, the day before the party.

On the same street as Derek's, but closer to mine, was the house Ralph stopped in front of. It was white, with a slanted brown roof, and flower boxes leaned out of the windows. The wooden door was closed, standing firmly shut behind a front yard of mowed grass. It was the same house the honey-eyed woman had emerged from in December.

But Ralph obviously lived there. And he didn't have any brothers or sisters, so that woman wasn't his sister. And she might have looked a bit younger in the dark, but now that I remembered, she might have been in her thirties. What if she was his mother? Would that make me Ralph's cousin?

"Ralph," I asked, as we headed back to the park where Derek was, "do you have any aunts and uncles?"

But I only imagined myself asking. I didn't have the guts, and I never did. I really wanted to know, but there was really no realistic reason why I would ask that question. What if he asked me why I wanted to know? What if he felt I was intruding on his personal life and didn't want to be my friend anymore?

So that brought me back where I had begun. At the park, Ralph told a joke that was probably funny, as Derek laughed a lot. Even though I was laughing, I wasn't really paying any attention.

Even that night, I couldn't sleep. It wasn't just the eyes. I felt a connection with that honey-eyed woman, a connection I had felt before. But trying to remember it was difficult; it was like I had that memory so long ago, that it felt like it was someone else's, or like I had lost my memory and was trying to remember something that happened before. It felt hopeless. Like I would never fully understand that memory, or why it was there, or where it had come from.

But it wasn't my brain I blamed for the memory being intangible; it was my mother. If she had talked about my father more often, I would have known who this woman was. And she had to be a relative of my father's, because who else would she be? My mother didn't have any siblings, and neither did my grandmother.

And it felt like a puzzle, a puzzle that couldn't be solved because half the pieces were missing. It's like there's something I should know that I didn't. Some little detail that would put all of the pieces together. And the worst part was that I didn't know what it was. And the best part was that I would never stop trying to find out.