Hades clears his throat. “Do you want to go in alone?”
I get enough air to answer him. “No.”
I never allowed myself to spend much time imagining this moment, but when I did, I was alone in my imagination. Until very recently, having my brothers here too wasn’t an option. I wouldn’t let it become an option.
Without them, I might not have come here at all. I might have died on Haven Island.
He nods, and is the first one to climb the steps, along with his dog. Hades pulls the door open with both hands on the polished handle, then beckons us in.
Sweat gathers under my collar. Ashley squeezes my hand. Zeus walks on her other side, and Hades joins us as we go in through the porch. The door closes out the sunlight and in the shadowy narthex it takes a second for my eyes to adjust.
It verges on being too much, standing here with the three of them. There are the old, cared-for pews. There is the confessional. There is the altar.
Here, all around us, is the hushed silence of a day waiting to begin. Incense from the last service scents the air, mixed in with furniture polish and fresh flowers. I was here so many times with my mother. The ghost of my six-year-old self swings his legs from the back pew, just tall enough for his head to be visible over the back. Our Lady of the Long Wait. That’s what I thought they should call this place. My skin goes cold, then hot. Ite in pace. I did not go in peace. I went in pain, and I returned in grief, and please, please, let her be here.
“It’s beautiful,” Ashley murmurs, and it occurs to me that the rest of them—my brothers, and this woman who wants me for reasons I can’t begin to understand—are going to stand here for as long as it takes.
I shake myself out of it. “This way.”
What we need is the priest’s office, which is down a hall at the end of the left aisle. The aisle itself is decorated with alcoves. Each one holds a stained glass window and a statue. The interior stonework is cool to the touch at this hour of the morning, and it will stay that way all day.
The priest comes out before we can reach the door leading to the back. If he’s surprised to see anyone here so early, he doesn’t show it.
“Good morning,” he says, in French. He’s not the same priest who was here before. That man would be old by now. Very old, if not buried in the churchyard. “How can I help you?”
Ashley’s hand is tight on mine. I can feel her wondering what the hell happens now if none of us speak French.
One of us does. “Good morning, Father.” Out of the corner of her eye, I can see Ashley’s eyes widen. It’s impossible to be a good pirate, or even decent at shipping, if you don’t have the words you need. So I’ve made a point of getting them all. They come to me like the sea. I wish the sea were here now, but that’s impossible. Ashley is here now. My brothers are here. I can ask this question. This unbearable question. I can say it. “I’m looking for my mother.”
He smiles, eyes kind, and my heart is a mess of adrenaline and hope and fear. “Is she a member of the parish?”
“She was. Many years ago. Maybe she still is.”
Fear of what lies at the end of this conversation suffocates me like filthy lake water. If the priest doesn’t recognize her name, if no one recognizes it, then I can’t trust my own memory. I’ll have nowhere else to search. If he knows her now, if she was here all this time and never came for me, never looked for me—
Ashley squeezes my hand with both of hers.
“What is her name, my child?”
He uses the word for son. It guts me like a fish, but I let it pass over me, I don’t let the pain land.
I open my mouth, and for the first time in decades, I say my mother’s name.
Ashley
Magdalene de Leon sounds like a prayer in Poseidon’s mouth, and in the air of the church. A Spanish prayer, not a French one. There’s no time now to ask about it. Maybe I won’t have to.
I hold my breath.
Poseidon’s hand is steady in mine. I thought he was shaking, but he’s not. It’s me. I want this for him. Please let his mother be alive. Please let her be here somehow.
The priest nods, and says something else to him in French.
“He says he’ll take me to her,” Poseidon says, and something in his voice makes my heart sink. But those words are good words. Those are what he was hoping for.
We follow the priest down the hall and past the offices, which are just where Poseidon said they’d be. The priest takes a left. At the end of a short hallway, he opens a door to the outside. The garden. He must be taking us to the garden.
Poseidon steps out into the fresh sun and pulls me with him.
We’re not in a garden.
We’re in the graveyard.
The priest is making his way through the neat rows of headstones, the grass around them tended. Some of the headstones have flowers at the base. All of them are new and bright. Someone spends time making this place beautiful.
“Oh, fuck,” Zeus says softly.
The breeze rustles in the leaves of a tree casting a shadow on the ground. That’s where the priest has stopped.
Poseidon takes a few steps toward the priest, and then his body rebels. He turns abruptly toward me, like he’s going to go the other way, like he can’t bear to see this, and I put a hand on his waist. There’s no covering his hesitation. Zeus and Hades are only a step behind. Hades is close enough to put a hand on Poseidon’s shoulder.
His brother doesn’t look at him. He doesn’t look at anything. Poseidon stares over my head, silent words on his lips. A question, maybe. I don’t know. After several heartbeats he forces himself to keep going. He keeps his hand in mine.
It’s a too-short walk over to where the priest waits patiently. He gestures to the headstone, and I don’t have to know French to know it means she is here. He asks another question.
“No,” Poseidon says.
The priest bows his head and goes back through the churchyard.
It’s the most gorgeous morning. The sun’s coming up to warm the breeze. Birds call in the tree overhead, their voices bright as the sky cools from pink to blue.
It’s the most gorgeous light. It shines gentle on Poseidon’s face as he looks down at his mother’s gravestone.
At the letters written there.
Magdalene de Leon.
Her date of birth.
And her date of death.
22
Poseidon
My ribs snap one by one. My lungs fold in and collapse. My stomach flattens. I can’t breathe. I don’t want to breathe.
I’m caving in.
“No,” someone says. It’s me. “No.”
But there’s no denying what the headstone says. Her name. The last name I’ve never used, because it didn’t come with me when they sent me to Cronos. It will never appear on any official paperwork unless I put it there, and I can’t do that, because I can never write it down, because she is dead, she is dead, my mother is dead.
If I ever thought it would be better for her to be dead, for her to have left me all those years with Cronos, then I was a fool. This is infinitely worse. I read the headstone again and again, willing the letters to change. Willing them to become something else. Please. Become something else. Let this be someone else’s mother. Let this be an empty grave, a trick.