Chapter Twenty-Four #2
I try to track the line of his vision to see what he’s looking at, but nothing against the wall seems worth that level of attention. His gaze remains fixed on nothing.
Confusion overtakes me. I just came in from outside. An hour of playing and exploring the grounds of the Whitcomb manor had brought levity and joy to another long day of heat and toil, but the lightness disappears when faced with the weight I feel in this room.
“Father.” It’s part announcement of my entrance and part question as to his current state.
He doesn’t look at me immediately. His eyes stay fixed on the middle distance for several more breaths before he finally seems to register my presence.
“Son,” he says simply, and the heaviness of that single syllable nearly buckles my young knees.
I’ve never heard my father sound like this. He sounds so broken, hollow.
“The rabbits were chasing each other by the brook just now, Father. You should have seen them scamper,” I say, hoping I can erase the tension in the room with a description of something softer than whatever this is.
Hoping my simple observation of the world outside can somehow anchor him back to normalcy.
“T-they were so fast, and the little ones could barely keep up with the pack—”
“She’s gone, son.”
The words don’t make sense. I blink and furrow my brows while trying to understand his cryptic statement.
“Who is, Father? You’re not making any sense.”
“Your mother, boy. Your mother is dead.”
The world stops spinning.
“But I saw her just this morning.” My voice sounds so very far away. “S-she was preparing breakfast. A touch of flour on her cheek and more covering her apron. She was smiling, Father. She was—”
I can see her clearly. The way she hummed while she worked. The smell of bread and butter and cinnamon. The sound of her laugh when I made a joke that really wasn’t particularly funny. But she laughed anyway because she loved me.
“And I hope you remember her that way, my sweet boy.”
Sweet boy. The endearment undoes me.
“No. Don’t say that. There will be more memories. Many more. You can fix her, Dad. You can fix anything.”
My father has always been able to fix things. When my toy horse broke, he fixed it. The door came loose from its hinges; he fixed it. When I scraped my knee, chasing the Whitcombs’ daughter, he cleaned the cut and wrapped it. Surely, there is something he can do.
“Not this, son. There’s no hammer strong enough to bend Fate’s iron. Hers is a metal that cannot be welded.”
“How? How did it happen?”
“She’d been sick for a while, boy. Her time had come.”
“Sick? But you never told me. She never seemed ill to me.”
And she hadn’t. My mother had been vibrant and alive and present every single day. How could she have fallen so ill without me knowing? How could something be so wrong with her when she was right there, smiling and humming and being exactly who she’d always been?
“Aye, she was brave to the end. A fierce fighter your mother was. But she was up against an unbeatable foe.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We wanted to protect you. Figured it’d be for the best.”
The lie is so gentle that it takes me a moment to recognize it as a lie at all. They wanted to protect me. My parents wanted to shield me from the knowledge that my mother was dying. That we were losing her, forever.
His eyes move for the first time since I entered the room.
He turns them slowly in my direction, capturing my soul inside his stare.
I seek comfort in his look. I yearn to see him open his arms to invite me into his embrace.
I long for his protection in this moment when my world is shattering.
I need him to tell me that everything will be all right, that this is some terrible misunderstanding, that my mother will come walking through the door at any moment, complaining about the flour on her apron.
But he offers none of that.
No life returns to his look, no feeling of warmth or safety. His entire being radiates an infinite sadness as he locks eyes with his only child—me—and a single tear wells in his right eye. On his next blink, it falls like the blacksmith’s hammer, with a crash to the floor.
He does not reach for me. Does not comfort me more, nor does he offer any of the protection my father always has.
Instead, he breaks. And I realize, in that moment, that I am alone.
That no one is coming to fix this. That some things, even the strongest man’s hammer cannot mend.
The Catacombs
My perspective on the room shifts violently, and I become an observer once more.
The immediacy of that moment feels distant now, but the pain remains.
Always the pain. That foundational hurt sears itself back into the center of me, branded to my soul from too early an age.
My mother, gone. Without so much as a goodbye.
Without a parting piece of wisdom or a memento of her love for me.
Just an illness she hid from her son and a lifetime of hurt I buried and hid from myself, thrust back into my face in a space I cannot control and cannot escape.
The room begins to fade. The colors desaturate, and the golden light dims.
“I do not want to go back there.” I speak aloud in a soft voice that gets swallowed by the stone all around. “Please, I don’t want to remember this.”
“We do not get to choose our memories, I’m afraid,” Fyre says softly. “They choose us. And some of them are tenacious bastards, clinging to the walls of our consciousness long after we’ve tried to bury them.”
“I seek Maddy. I need to find my Maddy. Why are you showing me this? Why aren’t you helping me get to her?”
“In order to get where you want to go, you must begin wherever you are.”
“No fucking shit,” I bite out.
“It would seem that this is somewhere you needed to visit on your journey. Perhaps more pleasant memories await just around the bend.”
The room of my childhood has entirely disappeared from the surrounding area, and in its place is another choice—a path that branches off in either direction.
“Another direction to choose,” I mutter, my voice hollow.
“Wouldn’t be much of a maze if it was just a straight line.”
“You’re full of useful tidbits then, aren’t you?”
Fyre ignores my jab and continues to assess the situation. “You relived a moment your world broke, and here you are, still standing. That counts for something.”
I don’t bother responding to my annoying guide and instead I pick a direction and walk deeper into the unknown.
With each step, my legs feel even heavier, my burden harder to carry.
But I keep walking. Because Fyre is right; I’m still standing.
And somewhere in this bloody maze, there must be a way forward.
Maddy has to be waiting on the other side of all this pain.
She has to be, and she is worth every ache.