He stares at the rain, sightless, lost to his own grief. It’s cracking him open, this moment. A shell being cleaved in two. I’ll take whatever I can, but I’m not sure how much will be left.
Not sure much of him will survive.
24
Poseidon
There’s nothing left for me in France.
Hades and Zeus left early yesterday morning, before Ashley and I came back up. Things are probably over between us, after the animal I became on the shore. My quest is over. My mother is dead.
So I give orders for the men to prepare the ship. We’ve got more of the crew back, but I feel like a shell of a man. Empty. Hollow. Useless. I love Ashley, but it’s not fair to her to be the only thing I have in the world. I haven’t found a way to tell her that.
There’s one last thing to do before we leave.
Ashley walks next to me, following the turns to the church. Buddy comes along with us. We stop at a cart and buy a bouquet of flowers, which feel inadequate in my palm. But I can’t go without leaving her something. After I buy them, Ashley puts her hand in mine.
It’s another perfect, sunny day, and I have never felt so hopeless. So despairing. I don’t know where to go from here. Without the direction of the quest—without the brothers I just found—I have no purpose. I’m aimless. Ashley will know that soon, and she’ll leave. She should leave. It would be the right thing, even if it killed me.
We go around the side of the big stone church and through the rows of headstones to where my mother rests beneath a tree. At least she would like it here. This is where she wanted to be buried.
I lay the flowers at the base of the stone and rest my hand on the smooth curve of the top. “I’m sorry,” I whisper to her. Ashley leans her head against my arm, still holding my other hand. “I don’t know if I should leave her rosary here.”
Ashley takes a deep breath. “I think—”
“Excuse me.” The voice that interrupts her is soft and unassuming. It’s not surprising she got so close without us hearing her. Ashley straightens up, but doesn’t let go of my hand. The nun is petite and extremely old. She squints at me, taking another step closer, and I get the sense that she’s been watching us for a while. Pretty fucking intrusive, if you ask me. She is speaking French to me. The nun hesitates. “Excuse me, but...” She trails off again, and I’m losing patience. I wanted to leave the flowers. I wanted to say a prayer, if one came to me. And then I wanted to leave.
“Can I help you, sister?”
“How do you know Magdalene?”
I swallow a new lump in my throat. “She was my mother.”
The nun’s eyes go wide. “You are her son?”
My pulse races at the look in her eyes, at the bizarre excitement there. “Yes.”
“She’s been looking for you.” Her hands flutter in front of her. “She—” I’m giving this woman a heart attack, and I don’t understand. She has not been looking for me. She’s dead. “Many years ago, I helped a woman escape her husband. A powerful man in Spain. A cruel man. She had a small child.”
It sinks in, what she’s saying, and I point at the headstone to make sure we’re not running up against some kind of language barrier. “It was her?”
“Yes. But we thought you had died.”
“What?” I didn’t die. I was taken. From the apartment where we lived, by a man who named an agency and wouldn’t look at me. The memory has been splintered by the terror I felt in that moment. I screamed until I threw up. They took me anyway. I fought just as hard when the plane landed. It didn’t work.
She gestures to the headstone. “Magdalene feared you had died when she couldn’t find you. She’s been searching all these years. She stayed close in case you came home.”
Ashley’s squeezing my hand so hard it hurts. “What’s she saying? Poseidon. Tell me.”
“She’s alive.” I say it, and my life opens up ahead of me. “My mother is alive.”
The village is ten miles outside the city, but it might as well be a hundred. It’s a tiny place. A nothing place. The perfect place to hide. There’s very little here, other than a small stone church, a few small shops, and one dirt road.
I have the slip of paper with the address in my pocket along with the rosary. In this kind of place, there aren’t many street signs, so I duck into the first shop and ask for directions. The woman there points me farther down the dirt road. “The house with the blue door,” she says.
Ashley walks by my side down the street in the sunshine, the breeze toying with her hair, her cheeks pink. She’s holding it together for me, but her excitement comes off her in waves. For me. For the man who kidnapped her. She’s so excited for me that she keeps blinking away tears. I stop her in the middle of the road and take her face in my hands. Look into those blue eyes one more time. Because before I find my mother, I need to do this.
“I love you,” I tell her, and Ashley’s breath catches. “I heard you. Every time you told me. And I love you. You are…” Words fail me. “You are more than the sea.”
“I love you,” she manages, and then she goes up on tiptoe and gives me the sweetest kiss. Then Ashley clears her throat, takes my hand, and squares her shoulders. We look down the street together. “Do you think there’s more than one house with a blue door?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t even call them houses.”
They’re cottages, really. Tiny things. Simple. About the size of the apartment we shared. I’ve been all over the world, but my mother has been in this little life.
Ashley tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear. “Is that one blue, or—”
As she speaks, someone steps out of the next house. An older woman in a cotton dress the color of a robin’s egg. She moves through the modest garden at the front of her house, a watering can in her hand.
And something about the way she holds it.
Something about the way she stands.
She glances up from the flowers waving beneath her watering and—
It’s her. It’s her. I didn’t recognize her, I didn’t know her with gray hair. She had dark hair like mine when we were together, but now it’s gray. But her eyes are exactly the same.
I take another step toward her, and it hits me. She looks different.
I look different.
I’m a tall, tattooed man who’s spent most of his life at sea. I don’t know how to introduce myself to my mother. I don’t want to scare her. I open my mouth to speak, to explain, but only one word comes out: “Mama.”
The smile that breaks across her face transforms her into a young woman again, and she’s not as old as I first thought, she’s my mother. She’s still alive. I still have time. The watering can falls from her hands and she holds her arms out to me. “Poseidon.”
My name is like laughter when she says it. Like an adventure. Like a great ship with white sails. I go to her, the world blurred from the tears in my eyes. It’s all shocks of color and the soaring sensation of walking toward my mother after a lifetime apart. My heart tugs toward her, every beat matching the new truth. My mother. My mother. My mother. I have a mother. She’s alive.