Sam
But word spreads like wildfire of a philosopher’s death. Every syndicate is on edge. When she and Will return to Angel City, she can sense the potential for violence hanging heavy in the air.
Her mother returns to pounding the meat. “How was Berlin?”
Her mother’s expression doesn’t change. “You were working the entire time?”
This, at least, gets a bit of reaction from her mother, who pauses in her kitchen preparation to look at the envelope. She glances at her daughter. “What is it?”
Sam tears it open for her so that she doesn’t have to remove her food gloves. “Read it,” she says.
Inside is a title, along with a thick stack of other paperwork. Sam looks on as her mother reads through it, the crease between her brow deepening, then disappearing as her eyes widen.
“Mom,” Sam says, “I bought you a house.”
Her mother stops cooking. She looks quickly at her. “A house?”
Sam nods, and breaks into her first genuine smile in a long time.
This was the solution, of course, doing a good thing with her money, spending it on her mother, gifting her everything she deserves and more.
And for a moment, it seems to work—her mother seems to forget everything as she stares down at the paper.
“It’s on a hill,” Sam continues. “Floor-to-ceiling glass panels, so you can see a view of the entire city.” She leans forward eagerly to point at the photos, proud of herself, her voice growing more animated.
“And look at the size of this lot. There’s a swimming pool and hot tub in the backyard, and a vegetable garden, and fruit trees. ”
“You’ve bought it already?” Her mother looks at her again.
“Yes. It’s all done.”
“What’s the mortgage?”
“There is none. I bought it in cash.”
In cash. Her mother looks at the title again.
Tightens her grip on the paper. Sam sees the expression shift on her face, stretching tight her scarred skin, and for a moment, she tries to remember what her mother used to look like before the fire.
It’s hard to see that woman here. She searches for joy on her mother’s face, but all she sees is something unreadable.
Sam’s smile wavers, the feeling of satisfaction she’d expected to get now eluding her.
“Do you like it?” Sam asks.
“I love it.” But there is something else in her mother’s voice that Sam tries to guess.
Her mother doesn’t speak again, and the kitchen lapses into silence. Sam can feel herself tensing up, her muscles turning stiff, her posture curving in the way that she always did when she was a child, making herself smaller, giving herself less room.
“Do you need help?” Sam asks, watching as her mother switches from pounding meat to preparing an egg batter.
“Get me some flour,” her mother says.
Sam obeys, pours a bit of the flour into a bowl, and then heads back to the pantry to fetch a bag of baked breadcrumbs. They fall again into silence.
At last, her mother says, “You didn’t go to Berlin.”
Sam frowns. “I did.”
“I checked your itinerary online,” her mother replies. “It didn’t match what you gave me.”
Sam relaxes a little. Is that all? “The itineraries change all the time. We had a delayed flight.”
“That Berlin flight was canceled the day you left. There were no other flights out to Berlin until twenty-four hours later, and yet you still arrived overseas around the same time.”
Now Sam can feel a slight twinge of annoyance. “I think you just got the dates wrong.”
Her mother doesn’t say anything for a moment. She dips the meat in the egg batter, then into the flour. “I did find a match for one that arrived around the same time that you landed,” she says. “But it wasn’t for a flight to Berlin.”
“Mom.”
“It was to Londinium.”
Sam sighs. “You need to stop tracking my behavior like I’m a teenager.”
At that, her mother stops in the middle of her meal preparation to look up at her daughter. A buzzing has begun in the back of Sam’s mind. She knows.
“Where did you really go?” her mother asks her.
Now Sam is getting annoyed. “I did work in Berlin—we just had to travel around a bit.”
Her mother frowns at her. “Why did you lie about it?”
“About what?”
“About your travel.”
Sam turns it around. “Well, what about you? You once said you called my college about my record because you were filing paperwork. What paperwork? Or did you just lie about that as an excuse to dig into my business?”
“And did you ever follow up with your college about that?”
“Yes. Everything’s fine.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I’m an adult now and I don’t need to report my every move back to you.”
Perhaps there’s too much venom in Sam’s words, because it surprises even her. Her mother quiets a little after this, and the two of them fall back into silence. The oil in the pot is hot now. Her mother puts the chicken in, and the sound of the sizzle fills the kitchen.
“You’re doing very well for yourself,” her mother tells her after a while. An olive branch.
Sam leans against the counter and tries to calm her voice back down.
“I’ve been working hard,” she says, and it’s the truth.
“It’s what you’ve told me my entire life.
If I reach for the stars, I can make things happen.
Isn’t that right? That’s what you’ve done.
Well, here are the stars.” Her voice softens, and she adds, “Do you like the house?” She realizes she’s already asked this.
“I love it,” her mother responds again. The words are hollow and tired.
“You can move in anytime. We can make it easy. Do you want help?”
“I can do it myself.”
“Look, I know if I let you, you’re going to literally do it yourself. I don’t want you and a neighbor lifting couches into a rented truck.”
“You’re so busy these days. I’ll make do.”
The conversation still doesn’t feel quite right. Sam tries to correct it. “How’s your work?”
“Fine.”
When her mother doesn’t elaborate, Sam says, “You know you don’t have to work so hard anymore. You don’t ever have to work again, even. I can take care of everything for you.”
The oil crackles and springs from the pot, and her mother tugs down her sleeves to protect her arms. “I don’t need you to take care of everything for me.”
Sam feels like she’s five years old again, trying to gauge her mother’s mood. As her mother continues frying the chicken in silence, Sam sets the table, pulls out the place mats she’s used since she was a child, the same chopsticks and knives and plates, the napkins under the cabinet.
As her mother puts their food down, Sam says, “You’ve never bought new dishes since you moved here? They’re all chipping.”
“They work just fine.”
“I’ll get you new place mats.”
“Don’t bring anything,” her mother says. “I’ll just throw it away. Everything works fine.”
Sam puts down her chopsticks. “Why do you have to be like this? What do you want from me?”
Her mother takes a sip of egg soup. “Like what?”
“All my life, you’ve wanted me to work hard, to be able to support myself and take care of you.”
“I’ve never asked you to take care of me.”
“It’s what I want to do. And now I’ve worked hard, and I’m trying to take care of you, and you’re rejecting all of it. Like you’re ashamed of me.”
“I don’t need you buying things for me.”
“I want to buy things for you. I want to use the money I’ve made, for you.”
“How do you make your money, Sam?” she asks quietly.
Sam throws her hands up and grabs her chopsticks again, stabbing them into a piece of chicken. “I don’t know how else to explain it to you, Mama,” she snaps. “I have a job.”
“Sam,” her mother says, putting her bowl down to stare at her. “Stop lying to me.”
“Is this still about my flight?”
“About everything, Sam.” Her mother pats her chest. “There’s a weight on you. I have felt it there for a long time. Months? Maybe years. You don’t tell me. But now you show up and you’ve bought me a multimillion-dollar house in cash. Sam, that doesn’t make sense. What are you really doing?”
“Nothing, Mama,” Sam says angrily. “I make money.”
Mother and daughter stare at each other for a long time.
“You think you’re invincible, that you’ll never make a mistake,” her mother says.
“I’m not. But I won’t.”
Her mother scoffs under her breath. “Don’t be a stupid girl.”
She spits the word stupid, and Sam flinches. The last time she’d been called that was the day her mother cut up her Rabbit.
“I’m not stupid,” she says softly.
“Sam, I brought you here so that you can be free. We came here because you can become anything, not so you can trap yourself in something you can’t escape.”
“Why do you think I’m trapped?”
“Because you are keeping a secret from me. Something is wrong.”
Sam’s dark thoughts are crowding her mind. “Nothing’s wrong!”
“You are in the greatest country in the world. You can do anything, if you work hard enough, if you study hard—”
“Then what?” Sam is shouting now. The leak of words becomes a flood.
“What?” She throws her hands up. “We came here for what? Why won’t you believe me?
You work twelve hours a day doing what? What you love?
What pays you? When will your reality match up with your dream, Mama?
What were you looking for? What’s the point? ”
“You don’t know anything at all.” Her mother says it with vehemence and disgust. “You are a child and you have no idea what suffering means.”
“You have never seen my suffering.”
“And you’ve seen mine? You realize all my suffering is for you?”
“I didn’t choose your suffering! I didn’t choose you!” There is a vein of cruelty in Sam’s words now, and she can’t stop it. “I don’t need to be grateful when I never asked for you! I don’t need to bare my soul to you because you’ve—never—been—here!”
Her mother puts her chopsticks down and leans back. Sam has struck her, has drawn blood. “Selfish child,” she hisses between her teeth. “You think I’m never here with you. Never spend time with you. I wasn’t here because I was working for you.”
“Not that. I understood that. You’re never here.” Sam taps her chest. “I’ve never once seen your heart. And you expect me to show you mine? I don’t even know you!”
“Maybe you just don’t know how to see.” Her mother is here to draw blood too. “All these years, and you still have never managed to step out of your selfishness. You think you know everything. You think you understand me.”
“Do you understand me? Do you know why I do things?” Sam can feel the tears building in her throat.
“Tell me, then. Talk to me.”
“You should have asked that years ago. You should have wanted that when you had me.”
“You’re lucky I kept you.”
The words are spat so quickly, with so much harshness, that Sam barely catches them. Her mother looks down at her bowl, brows furrowed, seemingly angry with herself. After a while, she takes a bite of rice and stabs her chopsticks into another slice of chicken.
The world is blurring now and Sam can’t bear the idea of crying here, right in front of her mother. Instead she closes her eyes and swallows hard. Her nails dig into the wood. When she opens her eyes, she sees that underneath her fingers, bits of the wood have turned black, into ash.
Hurriedly, she transmutes the wood back into its original state before her mother can see.
But does it even matter? Their fight tells Sam that her mother likely knows nothing about alchemy or Lumines’s connection to the restaurant explosion.
If she did, she would have guessed Sam’s secret.
She would have known. She would have said something.
Instead, all Sam feels is an insurmountable gulf between them.
They are so far apart that nothing can bring them back together.
She pushes away from the table and stares through her mother to the wall beyond. After a while, she stands and quietly gathers her things. Her mother doesn’t try to stop her, doesn’t even look up from her food. Sam turns around and heads to the door.
Outside, the sound of sirens turns deafening and then fades as quickly as it comes.
That night, she dreams of her mother.
She is tying up Sam’s hair in their old apartment’s bathroom.
Sam must still be a child here, because her hair is still black, but in the nature of dreams, she can’t recall exactly what she looks like in the mirror.
After she wakes up, she will only remember a reflection of her adult self staring back at her.
The sadness in her chest is so heavy that she is struggling to stay upright, lest she sink to the floor and fall right through.
Something terrible has happened, but she can’t remember what.
It is only in the back of her mind, somewhere out of reach.
When her mother finishes tying her hair and she turns around, they stare at each other.
In reality, her mother would have simply left to do whatever else she needed to do.
Maybe she would have told Sam to go sit down for dinner.
But in the dream, she stops to take in her daughter.
She has an expression on her face that mirrors the grief in Sam’s chest.
What’s wrong? her mother asks her. It’s a question she has never asked in real life.
Sam just shakes her head. Nothing. But to her shame, she is crying, tears spilling down her cheeks.
Her mother reaches out and gently touches her daughter’s face. To Sam’s surprise, she is crying too. She searches Sam’s gaze for something to latch onto, a reason, an opening. You can tell me, she says in the dream. It’s going to be okay.
But all Sam can do in the dream is cry and cry and feel embarrassed for every tear.
She wants to run from her mother and hide from the discomfort of being so exposed in front of her, but she also wants to stay because she has never seen her mother’s heart open before, the sight of tears in her eyes.
She wants to tell her mother, Something is wrong with us. Can’t you feel it?
But neither of them say anything. They only look at each other, their hearts breaking, and don’t know why.