Connie
The kind of money that will change your life.
The deep, frightening gouges in the wood, scored with black ash.
Something like a door with a transformed knob that can’t open. Like screams muffled into silence by an invisible field of air.
She’s trembling now, sick with fear, as if she has been transported back to the factory and to that sealed room. And here is her daughter, doing the impossible, just as Maclan once had.
Alchemy. Maclan had called it that.
She can’t know for sure if that’s what happened here—but once, when Sam was small, Connie caught her searching up the term. And then it faded away, and Connie hoped that Sam had forgotten about it. Until now.
The kind of money that will change your life.
No one makes Sam’s kind of money at her age, not without some sort of big reason attached to it.
So what is Sam’s reason? Connie thinks back to the day when Sam came over, rail thin, eyes dark and haunted.
Or the time when her hands were so dry and cracked that they were bleeding.
She thinks of Sam’s supposed college, telling her on the phone that they had no record of Sam ever attending.
Then she thinks back to years earlier, when Sam first claimed she’d gotten a part-time job.
Should Connie have believed her, even back then? Had that been when all this started?
Sam is in trouble. She has entangled herself in something very bad. And deep in her belly, Connie knows what it is.
Who does Sam answer to? Does she work for Lumines or Grand Central?
They were the only two names Connie knew of when she worked at the factory, and she could always sense that their influence runs as deeply through this city as groundwater.
She thinks of the Lumines men who would occasionally show up in the restaurant, how even being in their vicinity would shake her to her core.
Or does Sam work for someone else entirely?
Are there others? What danger is Sam in? Who has her daughter in their grasp?
She leans against her bed and stares into the darkness. She doesn’t know what to do. What did she even say to Sam tonight? Her words are a blur to her now, spat out in a storm of desperation and anger.
Sam hurt her, so she had reached out and broken her daughter’s heart.
Connie sinks her head into her hands, then pounds her fists against her temples until she has a headache. She squeezes her eyes shut and hisses through her teeth, lets tears streak down her face.
It is her fault, of course. She brought Sam to this city, imagined the riches her daughter could get here, hoped that this soil could feed her all the good things and none of the bad. But how can you choose one and not the other?
She doesn’t know what to do to make it better because she has never been shown an example of how to make anything better.
What if tonight was the last time Sam ever set foot in her apartment?
What if Sam cuts her off? What if Sam decides to move without telling her?
What if she tries to call Sam now and gets a stranger’s voice instead? What if she never hears from Sam again?
Connie showers for so long that the water turns ice-cold.
She wakes up at strange hours of the night and is unable to go back to sleep.
She walks down the grid of sidewalks in her neighborhood until she hits the major cross streets and then doubles back, over and over, until she knows the real solution.
Whatever Sam has gotten herself entangled in, they can’t stay here.
They have to leave. That much is obvious.
So long as they live in Angel City, Sam will be in danger, and there is nothing her mother can do to protect her.
Connie remembers Maclan again and feels a sickness deep in her stomach.
He didn’t hunt her down after she quit her job, but somehow, Connie knows that had she taken the job offered to her, had she become an alchemist and then walked away, he would have killed her with his own hands.
But if she flees with Sam, where would they go?
They could go back.
Once Connie thinks about it, she can’t believe how simple it is.
There is no guarantee that life won’t be harsh there too but at least it will be a new chance.
They could start from scratch. She straightens as if the idea has propped her up, and immediately she turns back in the middle of her walk to head home.
Once in her apartment, she paces and paces until she’s exhausted, and then she sits down on the couch and starts to plan.
You’re mad, she can imagine Sam telling her.
And maybe she is. Maybe she has blown everything out of proportion.
But what if she hasn’t? What if she’s right?
They can’t fly, as Connie doesn’t have a passport, but maybe she can find passage on board a cargo ship for them both.
It was how they’d come here, after all. The trip will be weeks long, but it will get them there safely.
One of her coworkers at the grocery store recently came over to the States by ship and has connections to a runner who can get her passage back.
She’s not sure how much it will cost. She has almost fifteen thousand dollars in the savings account that is to her own name rather than her daughter’s, but she can’t pull all of it out without the bank flagging the transaction.
Connie would rather not leave a trail like that for someone to find.
Still, she will need all the money she can get, and she doesn’t have much time.
She has to get them out as soon as possible.
So, as much as the idea makes her wince, Connie decides that she’ll need to withdraw the money all at once.
She pulls out her phone and opens the calendar and decides on this coming Friday.
A Friday, so that when she leaves from work, she can find Sam immediately and they can make their way down to the pier.
They’ll have to take the buses; it will be the safest and most discreet way to travel, in case someone is tracking their license plate.
Friday, when they can board the ship at midnight and then be far out to sea by morning.
Maybe they will search the city for them, then perhaps the country, and when they can’t, perhaps they will cut their losses and find someone else who can do whatever it is that Sam does.
Connie thinks about what they can take with them.
She heads into the bedroom and pulls out the single tote bag she has, then reaches into her dresser and pulls out all her clothes: two soft black turtlenecks; a chunky blue knit vest; two pairs of trousers, both gray; a week’s worth of socks and underwear.
She packs the bag until it is nearly overflowing, and only then does she take a moment to sit on the bed, breathing rapidly, staring at the mess of clothes she has left on the floor.
The room never looks like this. Connie has always kept a tidy home, even when they had almost nothing.
To her, it had always meant the possibility of better things, that even if they lived in a tiny, old apartment, she could control the beauty of it, could make it theirs.
But perhaps it was always an illusion, something trapping them here. Somehow, when she looks at the mess on the floor, she feels a sense of relief. It is a sign that things are happening. It helps her feel like leaving is possible.
But will Sam go? Is this it for them here?
Connie came because of a whisper of a dream, and now she’ll go back because of fear.
Is that the right reason, after all she’s been through?
She sits and stares and wonders whether she’s ready to give this all up, and in the middle of thinking that, she realizes with a start that you can’t give up something you never had.
She looks out her window to see the power lines arching across the night sky, the black silhouettes of skinny palm trees, and is surprised by the sharpness of the ache in her chest. She closes her eyes.
How badly she had wanted to make it work here.
How much she’ll miss this city, in spite of everything.
But now that the possibility of returning home—can she still call it that?
Home?—has become very real, she finds herself looking forward to the sight of an old land on the other side of the ocean.
They’ll go to the countryside, the towns by the rivers.
Does it still look like how she remembers it?
Do the streets still swarm with bicycles?
Do willows still hang over the water? In the darkness, she dreams of silk gourds hanging heavily from tangles of ivy, sunflowers turning their giant heads toward the sun, rich black dirt beneath her slippers, markets in narrow streets, paths along the stream.
It’s summer, the cicadas are roaring, the water in the air sticks to her skin.
There is hardly the sight of a city in the distance at all, only open blue skies.
She lets herself dream of a land she doesn’t yet know is long gone.
What if she had just stayed? What if that had been the dream? But that’s the problem, isn’t it—you can’t know what the future would have been. All you can do is make your best guess.
She pictures Sam, little again, holding her hand as they make their way down a river path in an alternate reality.
Look at the cicada shells, how they cling to the bark.
She pictures Sam looking up at her with that smile she once had, all beauty and love and wonder, that said Mama, I trust you, you are the most perfect person in the world.
How little she had appreciated her then. How much she aches for her now. She has a lifetime of regrets for how she has failed her daughter. But sometimes, you get an opportunity to right past wrongs.
Maybe, maybe this is her chance to try again.