The Dead-Tossed Waves (9 page)

I stop pacing. I stare at her. “My name?” I ask, dazed. I have nothing from my life before, not even something as basic as my name? I take a deep breath but I feel as though my lungs can’t hold the air.

“This … Gabrielle … it’s not my name?”

The moon is barely crouching over the horizon but even so I can see the pale echoes of it against her face. She looks both old and young at once and I wonder how I could have ever thought I was her natural child. My hair is blond, bleached almost white by the summer sun and hers is black, now streaked gray with age. Her skin is pale and mine is tan, her eyes dark where mine are light.

But who grows up challenging their own mother’s claim on them as a child? Why would I have ever thought I’m not who my mother told me I was?

She pushes herself up and comes to stand in front of me. “You kept saying something when I asked you but I couldn’t understand,” she whispers. “You wouldn’t tell me anything. I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Why Gabrielle?” I ask. It’s the only thing I can focus on as I try to reorder every memory of my life. As I probe the truth of everything my mother has told me.

My mother steps back, her mouth slightly twisted, as if she’s surprised at my question. “She was a girl I knew when I was your age,” she says slowly and quietly as if she can rebuild this bridge between us. “She was from the Forest like you, but no one knew where. And I was the only one who knew she’d come from the Forest.” Tears drip from her eyes. “She is the reason I escaped from my village. She is the reason I found the ocean.

“Listen, Gabrielle, I’m sorry.” She reaches for me but I step out of her grasp. “Please,” she says.

“No!” I shake my head. Too much is crumbling around me. Everything is too fast: Catcher’s bite, Cira’s sentence with the Recruiters and now this. Everything I’ve ever known has shifted underneath me and I don’t know how to stand straight anymore. “You should have told me!” I shout at her. “I had a right to know!”

“I thought it was best. I thought …” She swallows. “I thought that I’d lost everything else in the world and that somehow God was giving me something to hold on to. I thought … I thought He was giving me another chance to love.”

“You were being selfish!” I yell, the words raw against my sob-seared throat. “I didn’t belong to you. I was someone else’s daughter.”

“You would have died,” she pleads, holding her hand toward me. “I saved you.”

I push my fists against my head, wanting to yell and scream and shout. I know she’s right. I know that if I’d been left on that path something terrible would have happened. I
could have been bitten and infected; I could have starved. But that doesn’t matter to me now. What matters is that she never told me any of this before this moment. That she probably wouldn’t have told me.

What matters is that she’s been lying to me my entire life. Everything I’ve ever known and thought about myself is wrong—fake. And I don’t know what I can trust right now, which makes me feel like I’ve been cast adrift. Shoved away from shore to battle the waves on my own.

I don’t know how to make her understand. “How can you tell me to let it all go? As if the past doesn’t matter?” I point at her, my finger shaking. “You want to just forget about what came before, but it doesn’t work that way. I can’t forget the people I loved and who loved me. Maybe you’re fine with taking what you need and forgetting about the rest. With leaving the people you love out in the Forest to die. But that’s not me. That’s not what life is about.” I’m left panting.

My mother’s cheeks are crimson against the white of her face, as if I’ve slapped her.

I swallow. I’ve pushed too hard. Gone too far. Lost control and let myself fall into my emotions.

I shove my fingers through my hair, pulling against my scalp. I don’t know how to make her realize how fundamentally this information changes everything about me and the way I’ve always known myself. I’ve always been Mary’s daughter. And I can’t stop thinking about who I am around Catcher—how he made me feel like I’m somehow important.

She’s taken this away from me. The hope that I can be more like her. The idea that something of her is in me.

The fact that I belong to her.

I step back with my hands up, as if I can push the air and she’ll be gone. “I’m not sure I can ever forgive you,” I tell her.

“Gabrielle,” she says, her voice low and even, her eyes narrowing slightly.

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s not who I am. I’m not even sure that’s who I want to be anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I love you.”

She waits for me to tell her I love her as well. She waits for me to forgive her. But all I can do is turn and run away down the beach. I’ve never hated my mother before and the feeling is like a pit of black nothingness collapsing me from the inside.

I keep going until I see the hulk of the Barrier looming in front of me. Lights bob along in the dark, the Militiamen on guard. My shoulders rise and fall as I stare at the wall and catch my breath. This is what it comes down to.

This is where it all began. If I hadn’t crossed it I’d never have kissed Catcher. I wouldn’t have known that he felt about me the same way I did about him. He never would have gotten bitten. I never would have talked to my mother about love and she’d have never told me the truth.

I wonder if she would have ever told me if not by accident.

I don’t want to face this. I don’t want to handle this. It’s too much and I need for it all to stop. I need to catch my breath and figure out what to do.

But the earth keeps spinning, the waves keep crashing, the lamp in the lighthouse keeps turning. Nothing stops just because I feel as though it should. Just because I’m lost.

Frustration bubbles through me. If only I could just curl up here in the sand. Bury in like a clam and forget. Not have to worry about these responsibilities.

I think about my mother and how she said life was so much easier after forgetting. But even as I try to push him from my mind I think about Catcher. I think about the
roughness of his chin against my neck. I think about my promise to Cira to find him.

I hear footsteps approaching and I look up. Daniel and two other Militiamen walk toward me, lanterns held high in front of them, casting shadows against their cheeks and eyes. I see the moment when Daniel recognizes me, the way his eyebrows rise and his steps falter. He reaches out a hand to me as the other Militiamen fade back.

“Gabry,” he says, his tone concerned. But my name on his lips is a lie—my name is nothing anymore. It doesn’t belong to me, and I push against the Barrier and run away down the beach.

“Gabry, wait!” Daniel calls after me, but I don’t stop and his voice fades behind me. My name with it.

I push through the thick dry sand, my legs screaming with the effort, until I reach the base of the lighthouse. My lungs burn and muscles twitch but still my mind whirs. I look up. Light cuts across the sky, casting my mother’s shadow against the glass. I watch as she stands and stares at the ocean.

This place has always been my home. And yet now I don’t know what it is anymore. I don’t know who I am.

Everything seems too far away, too hopeless, the weight of what I have to overcome too much. In the darkness I see the remnants of my mother’s sailboat and remember days with her out on the water. Suddenly everything becomes clear: I have to find Catcher. And going out into the ocean is the only way.

I
watch my mother from the beach as she paces around the gallery, staring into the darkness. I tap my fingers against my thighs, dig my toes into the sand with impatience, waiting for her to walk away so I can drag the boat to the water without her noticing.

I think about the universal law of gravitation—knowledge that’s always seemed so useless. It was a short winter day when the Protectorate sent a new teacher to our town, a young man who arrived with a light in his eyes that slowly dulled as weeks went on, the cold pressing in tight and the snow falling deep and thick.

All the kids in town from six to sixteen were in one classroom together. The teacher tried to find a way to make the lessons interesting for everyone, and he had the younger children scouring for rocks to represent planets while he tried to walk the older ones through complicated math calculations.

No one believed him when he explained mass, when he
tried to teach us what held our feet to the ground. Some of the parents even pulled their kids out of the school—an extra pair of hands at home was more important than learning science that we’d never use.

But Cira stayed because she was an orphan and preferred lessons to chores and I stayed because my mother always thought education was important, especially science, which she’d never had a chance to learn growing up. I remember the desperation on the teacher’s face as he tried to explain it all to us, to prove to us that the earth we knew was a giant mass spinning in space.

He had a small collection of books from before the Return which he shared with us, showing us pictures that looked like drawings, faded photos on yellowed paper of worlds within worlds within worlds.

Cira thought it was all a joke and preferred to look at the pictures rather than try to understand what it all meant. She held out her superhero necklace one day and asked him how superheroes were able to fly if gravity worked all the time. The teacher almost cried at her question, unable to determine if she was serious or playing a prank.

Midwinter he left without saying a word and the Protectorate didn’t send another teacher until after the harvest the next year. Even after all this time I haven’t made up my mind about gravity, about mass and rotation and force.

Until now. Until this moment standing by the ocean when I realize that my body is like the planets, the center holding every other part spinning around it. Remove the center and everything else collides and falls away.

My mother continues to stare toward the Forest and I continue to feel as though every part of me is expanding beyond my bounds. It will serve her right to worry about me,
I think. To understand what it must have been like for my other mother.

When she finally disappears from the gallery, I sneak to the side of the house and pull the boat from its rack. It scrapes against the sand as I tug and I cringe, hoping that my mother can’t hear the noise over the crash of the waves. Every time the light cuts across the sky I tense, afraid of it giving me away.

It takes me five tries before I’m able to remember how to run the rotting lines through the mast and boom. The bow of the little boat rests against the edge of the surf and I stand staring at it, my hands on my hips and chest heaving with the effort of having dragged it across the beach.

I nudge the hull with my toe, noticing a few cracks where the wood is warped, but there don’t seem to be any obvious breaches. The sail’s almost useless, though, a giant tear down the middle and a few of the old patches practically threadbare.

I could go back. I could climb the stairs and slip into my bed. I could hold my breath, hoping that my mother will come and trail her fingers through my hair as if nothing’s different. I could forget everything my mother told me earlier. I could try to forget everything that happened last night—bury it all down deep. I could forgive my mother for not telling me the truth.

But she’s not my mother, I remember. I squeeze my eyes closed. She’s everything I’ve ever known, a mother to me in every way. Except that somewhere, some other time, I had a different mother. I had another family I know nothing about.

What happened to her? Why was I left alone in the Forest? Why did she leave me? Why did she let me go? Could she have done it on purpose?

Light and dark swirl around me. Overhead the sky seems limitless, as if nothing’s holding me to the ground. Too many
questions. Too many possibilities. I grab a sickle and shove the boat into the water, wanting to escape them all. The hull scrapes across the sand and slaps against a wave, spraying me with water. I toss the weapon into the boat, where it rattles, its blade barely reflecting the moon overhead. And then I push until I’m thigh-deep before leaping into the boat and grabbing the sheet, hoping the old rope isn’t too rotted to tug against the boom. I stare at the reflection of the moon striping across the water almost like a path and wonder what I’m doing. Wonder if I’m really able to do this. Break the rules again. Face the world outside the Barrier.

Heaving a deep breath, I tug on the rope until the sail snaps full of wind and the current against the rudder pulls me diagonal from the beach. I try to pretend that I’m just taking the boat out for fun. That I’m not running away and not about to cross out of Vista.

Drops of surf pelt my face as I gain speed, everything dark. Waves looming, crashing against the boat, making it wobble. Already water’s seeping through the hull, collecting at my feet.

The last lights of Vista wink past, then the dark hulking rocks of the jetty as the boat skips over the water’s surface. It was a mistake to try sailing around the Barrier, I realize. I can’t do this. I can’t break the rules again. I yank the tiller sharply, ducking as the boom snaps across the boat, and turn toward home. But then I see my mother standing on the gallery. Every time the light swings past it illuminates her shadow against the Forest. Where we’re both from.