The Apparent Junction of Earth and Sky

The Apparent Junction of Earth and Sky, Part VIII

She could remember his face. Every line. Every pore. Every imperfection. She didn't know what they were talking about when they said that she would forget. How could she forget him? He was the entirety of her world when they found her. When his hair grew long, she knew, the bangs would fan up in a cowlick over his forehead. The constellation of his freckles was still in her mind. From the moment he was born, the moment she named him, to the moment he watched from his sleeping bag as she was dragged through the leaves, she was aware of him. His movements, his expressions, his every breath.

His voice, though, sometimes left her. She would close her eyes and strain and wait. Eventually, it would come back. It would come back to her just as surely as he never would. She would never see her son again, she knew that. The first few years were rough. Her cries would sometimes wake the older children and they would knock lightly on her door, checking in on her. They would not crawl into her bed the way he sometimes did when he had a bad dream. In fact, they weren't allowed inside the room at all. They would stand in the hallway, the flickering light of her candles passing over their frightened faces with the endless stretch of dark behind them, looking up at her with big eyes.

What's wrong, they would ask. She would never speak his name, though. She would only tell them that she had a life before them, before the orphanage, and that life sometimes decided to come back for her late at night. And when they asked if that life would ever come back for real, if it would ever make her want to leave, she would smile her kind smile and bend down and tell them no, it never would. What she never told them was that she could see his face behind theirs. Their smiles were his smiles and they cried his tears. She would put them back to bed and remember to stifle her sobs next time.

For the last three years, though, those nights no longer came. Ciaran was still planted firmly in her memory.

They never did get the lights back on in New Orleans. Bedtime at the orphanage was sundown so that she would have time to light the candles before it all went black. She did this every night after sending the others home for the day. They always offered to help. She always told them that cleaning up after supper was plenty of help. Besides, these were her kids. They relied on her. She was responsible for them.

Despite the fact that her son's face was so readily available to her, the memory of how exactly she got to New Orleans was still a jumbled, confused mess. She remembered the cold morning when she was dragged away. The men who took her were evil. There were a lot of evil men in the world now. They took her out to the nearest highway, an overpass somewhere, and threw her into a bus that was full of other women. They were taken into Texas. They fought back. It was an unexpected revolt. She didn't know where exactly they were going, but some of the others did. Or had heard stories, at least. It wasn't any place she wanted to be.

People died that night. She couldn't remember if she killed anyone or not. The bus tipped and rolled into the ditch. They were all bleeding, the men and the women. Some didn't survive the roll. There was screaming and scratching and the swish of knife blades. Six of them walked away. Another dozen did not. Their faces she did not remember. By the time it was over, by the time she was standing on a wet, cold highway in abrupt and brutal silence, she was covered in blood. Some of it was hers.

They walked east, the six of them together. There were what seemed like a hundred small towns, some abandoned, some not. One by one, the others dropped off. They stayed in those towns, appealed by the working lights, running water, and rattling jukeboxes in the dingy bars. She spoke only of Ciaran, thought only of her son. Getting back to that place, the spot where she had been taken, was all that mattered.

It was all that mattered until they got to New Orleans.

There were only two of them still together. The other woman was strong but far from silent. She spoke incessantly. She was a college student when it all happened. Now she was muscular and compulsively observant. She left the past where it belonged. She encouraged her quiet travel companion to do the same. With time, she did. She pushed everything away except for her memories of Ciaran.

They avoided cities. Everyone avoided cities, if they could help it. But food ran low and New Orleans was close. So they chanced it. They were caught, of course. Caught by the right people. Within a year of losing Ciaran, she found a new life and a new home.

She wanted to leave at first, of course. She wanted to find her son. But they took her to that building, the one that sat on the most famous street in the city, and she saw the children there. They were all thin, some of them starving. Those were the newest ones, the children who were only just saved from homelessness or violence. And in their faces, as she always would, she saw his face. It was projected to her from every angle. To their own mothers, they had been precious and perfect and everything Ciaran was to her.

No one else had time for them. They were dirty. At night, they were alone in the dark. They needed somebody. Ciaran had Brendan. These children had nobody. So she made the decision. It was the right decision, she knew. At first, she hoped that some form of good karma would come back to her. That Ciaran would come stumbling down the street one early morning. After time, she gave up on that dream. She fell in love with these young lives, watching them grow, watching some turn into adults and leave that corner hotel. Watching them do all the things she once dreamed about watching her son do.

She woke with the sun every day. Volunteers from the neighborhood would cart water to her from the river. They would warm it up over fires. They would cook with it and bathe in it and then dump it back into the river again. She oversaw every part of it. She kept the kids in line and she kept them happy.

In the afternoons, they would section off a few blocks and let the children run. She would stand on the corner balcony of the building and watch them, sometimes while sipping tea from a plain white mug. They felt safe. Some of them told stories about her. They imagined that she was once a very powerful person, a trusted woman who made important decisions. In many ways, she thought she was. All mothers are. If they hit one another, she would stop them with a word. If they cursed too loudly, she would correct them. None of them felt embarrassed or unloved because she let them feel like children. It was perhaps the only place in the world now where that was allowed.

One evening, while the kids were gathering their things to come inside for bed, she stood out on the balcony a little longer. She looked away for a second to set down her plain white mug. And when she stood up again, she saw them.

She thought at first it was a trick of the mind. It had to be. His face was always there, hiding right underneath the fabric of reality, hovering in her subconscious. Yet this was real. Tangible.

Still, the face was hiding. It was hiding on the shoulders of a tall, thin young man. Behind the protruding cheekbones of an adult. Under the shaggy, sun-bleached hair of a stranger. In fact, she would not have believed that it was Ciaran at all if Brendan wasn't standing next to him. Brendan who had changed so little. Brendan whose face she had, indeed, forgotten until that moment.

They were flanked by men and women in off-white shirts who wore baggy, green pants and red bandanas and carried rifles. She said nothing, though. She only ran through the common room, where some of the children watched her. They never saw her so imperfect, so raw in emotion. The hallway was full and she pressed through them, able to see the staircase over their short skulls. She thought she would trip on the bottom step because the open door was right there and just outside was Ciaran and that was all that mattered, not the damn steps, not her damn feet.

When she stepped out onto the street, she froze. Froze far away from him. Traces of blue and orange marked the sky behind him and there wasn't a sound. Many of the children bunched up just inside the doors; they knew the rules, no leaving after playtime. Still, they were silent. She barely felt the dozens of eyes upon her. There was only one set that she could really see anyway.

He was grown now. A man with shadows across his face. He did not move toward her.

Her footsteps echoing across the sidewalk in the utter silence, she went to him. She pressed her palms against his cheeks and felt the stubble there. The constellation of freckles was gone now. Brendan did not watch her. He only watched the boy, neither of them moving. Neither of them, it seemed, even breathing.

"Ciaran," she said in a whimpering breeze.

The boy began to cry.