She was hunched over, focused on where the light was shining on the table.
They hadn’t closed the laptop before they’d left, had they?
Did she see the camera windows? Would she know what they were?
Sean sighed. He’d been dodging his mother the last couple of days and being very short and snippy, or simply not being available.
It wasn’t her fault he was screwing up. Again.
He circled the island to go to the far side of the kitchen table. “Good morning,” he said quietly.
“Ohaiyo,” she said in a soft voice. She was dressed in a crisp white shirt with a pair of khaki slacks and wore a hair band, the strands shoved away from her face.
A towel lay flat in front of her over the table. On top were pieces of the bowl they had broken. She had a vial of gold flakes, a mixing bowl, and a small jar of lacquer.
She mixed clear lacquer with the tiny flakes of gold until they blended. The result was a very small dollop of gold. With a thin cotton swab, she picked up a piece of the bowl and used the swab like a paintbrush, tracing the edge of one of the broken bowl pieces.
Sean sat down in a chair across from her. The smell of lacquer was stronger here, and it stung his nose. “What are you doing?”
“Kintsugi,” she said quietly.
He wasn’t familiar with the word and tried to piece it out. “Gold?”
“Golden joinery.” She picked up a second piece of the bowl and pressed it to the first, making a golden seam between them. The effect was creating a golden vein, accentuating the crack.
“We can just get another bowl,” he said. “We don’t have to repair them.”
She spoke without raising her gaze from her work. “I’ve never known you to give up just because something was broken.”
He snorted, shaking his head. He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “And you do it with gold? Not just with glue?”
“Kintsugi isn’t just about repairing,” she said. She picked up the cotton swab and started to paint another edge, layering the gold liquid. “It is about the beauty in the flaws, and acknowledging a harsh history in the past.”
He was familiar with the cultural thought that tragedy was looked upon to be revered instead of avoiding thinking about it. He had nothing to say to this, but was drawn to watching her continue to fix the bowl.
After a few minutes, he wasn’t really watching her, just staring into space. His fingers absently traced the direction of the grain on the wooden table.
Sang was breaking. He was, too. He was a split second away from carrying her out of there. The group would thank him for it later.
It would be worth the lost favors. She’d be out. She’d be with them.
With him...
After a few moments of silence, she spoke. “If you’re tired from being out most of the night, you should call Owen and let him know.”
At the sound of his name, he groaned. “I don’t need his permission to be tired. He can’t help right now.”
“Did you ask him?”
“He isn’t as perfect as you think.”
“No, he isn’t,” she said quietly.
He paused, confused by the comment. “You’re always telling me to talk to him. To be like him. You just told me to call him.”
She placed another piece of the bowl against a golden seam, holding it together until it stuck in place. “Do you remember when you first met him? Every day you would come home and complain this boy thought he knew everything and nothing you said mattered.”
“He’s still like that.”
“While you were in your room one day, he came to the door.” She put down the bowl and used a swab to mix more gold and lacquer. “You two had a particularly bad fight, and you had told him not to contact you.”
Sean blinked. There was a time after they had been paired up within the Academy that they were trying to work out ways to earn more favors, yet they’d argued about how.
He couldn’t remember his argument at the time, but anything Sean would suggest was essentially too risky for two ten-year-olds to do. Owen wouldn’t come up with a solution on his own. They’d butted heads a lot back then about this. “I didn’t know he talked to you.”
“I never told you. Apparently, he didn’t either. Usually when you two fight, you’re not even listening to each other.”
“Mom...he’s not...”
“Are you fighting with him?”
She might have heard them the last couple of days. He sighed. “A little.”
“Then you aren’t understanding each other.”
“Yeah. He’s not listening to me. He’s wrong this time.”
She nodded and then picked up another piece of the bowl. The bowl was now looking more like it used to, just with golden veins. “But you haven’t found a solution you are both completely happy with. Otherwise he would have agreed to it.”
True. “It’s complicated. Too many variables. Too many questions.”
“Maybe you should stop asking so many questions and focus on something else.”
His lips twitched. He tapped a forefinger on the table’s surface. “Is that what you told him? Years ago?”
The corner of her mouth unwrinkled, and there formed the slightest of smiles. “He asked many questions. He wanted to understand how to convince you to listen to a complicated answer.”
“And you told him to stop asking?”
“I told him how, years ago, I found you at the hospital, abandoned.”
Sean tilted his head. “How was that important?”
She put the bowl down, attaching more gold and the last few pieces around the rim. “I wanted to keep you, but it wasn’t so simple. Your father and I disagreed then on how to handle the situation: find someone to adopt you or let the state system take you into their care.”
Sean sat up, eyebrows raised. “You told me you wanted to keep me when you saw me.”
“What I wanted wasn’t really possible for us at the time, or so we thought,” she said. “We were young, with a limited income, and we were here on work visas. We were very sure the system wouldn’t allow foreigners to adopt American children. We didn’t think it was possible...until we changed how we were thinking.”
“How?”
“We found a small church willing to prepare a baptismal record for you, claiming we were the parents. Back then, it was a little easier to convince a judge you were mine, rather than convince one to let us adopt you.”
The information sank in, and he stared at the table. “You didn’t tell me about that. You told him before you told me about it?”
“Does it change anything now? Does it change how I raised you? No. You are who you are now. We are where we are.”
When he did ask about when he was adopted, it was usually about clues as to how he had been found: abandoned in a hospital. He had asked about his real birth mother. He had given up years ago trying to figure it out, as he didn’t want her to be sad thinking that he wanted to replace her.
However, it made sense why Owen had suddenly changed. He’d come up with a solution because he’d stopped asking the same questions. Instead, he’d changed the results he wanted in the first place.
When Owen changed the goal, it changed how they approached it.
Sean stared at the table, and then at the bowl with the golden lines.
There were too many questions around Sang.
Let go of the questions...or maybe change the result they wanted.
Sean tapped at the table, letting the idea sink in. He wasn’t sure he had an answer.
But he knew someone would. Owen. He’d just have to convince him to give up his stubbornness, thinking his way was the only way.
Sean stood up, heading for the door. “I’ll be back later, Mom.”
“I know,” she said.
The Youngest Graduates
Summerville had streaks of purple and pink clouds across the eastern sky. The temperature had dropped. A hard frost covered part of the
road and crusted blades of grass. It made walking across Bob’s Diner’s parking lot hazardous.
A semi had pulled into the lot and parked in the grass near the tree line next to the ambulance.
There were few other cars. The neon lights from the diner’s sign cast various glowing colors across windshields.
Sean parked closer to the semi and turned off the car. He stared out the windshield, waiting to see if anyone would notice him. When it seemed the coast was clear, he got out of his car and headed toward the security trailer.
The trailer blended in with the diner. It was easy to picture it as an add-on annex for storage or security and not think twice.
The door was unlocked. He went inside.
The carpet was dull, utilitarian. The walls were wood panels. He’d barely noticed it all last night, but it certainly looked like a security trailer.
The desks had been pushed up against the walls better to create more space. A couple of cots were against the far side of the room.
Gabriel slept in one of them, with an arm over his eyes in the dim light. His hair was wild, strands all over the place. He had a thick blanket over his body. His chest rose and fell steadily.
Three floor heaters were turned on, making the room almost warm enough to take off a coat.
Owen stood near a folding table. He wore the same clothes as last night, with the sleeves rolled up. He was bent over another laptop, focused on a video feed of Sang’s bedroom.
On the feed, Sang was curled up with her cheek against the pillow.
A smaller window showed Carol, awake and sweeping the floor in the laundry room.
Sean stood by the door, waiting for Owen to look up and acknowledged him. When he didn’t, Sean edged closer to look closer at the feed.
Sang turned in the bed, flopping over.
Restless.
She stared at the ceiling, frowning. It was easy to think she was asleep until she moved.
Had she gotten much sleep at all last night? She’d seemed so tired, but the news of being held at the house and getting pulled out of school probably wouldn’t allow her brain to rest.
Like them. They were running on fumes trying to work around this.
Suddenly Owen’s shoulders rose and fell rapidly. He swiped violently at the laptop, causing it and several other devices to fall to the floor in a heap.
Gabriel bolted upright, scrubbing his face. “What happened?”
Owen said nothing, leaning over the tables with his palms flat on the surface. His face was all hard planes, his lips tight.
Sean grimaced for Gabriel’s sake. He rarely saw Owen lose control, and it wasn’t great for the others to see him like this. Not right now.
“Gabriel,” Sean said quietly. “Run over to Nathan’s. Wake the others up. Bring them here.”
Gabriel cocked his head, but only hesitated for a moment. “On it,” he said and jumped up. He yanked on a coat on a rack, shoved his feet into boots and was out the door.
Owen waited until Gabriel was gone to speak slowly, his tone low. “I can’t get her out,” he said. “And we can’t let her stay.”
Sean had told him she couldn’t stay, and at least now, he knew it. Still, this wasn’t him. He was behaving more like...Sean. Irrational. Feeling.
At first, Sean wasn’t sure what to say. What could he tell him? He didn’t know what the solution was, but he knew Owen would if he got him on the right path.
“When we were ten,” Sean said slowly, “we argued like this. We argued about how to win favors and money to graduate from the Academy.”
“That has nothing to do with her,” he said.
Sean continued anyway. “I had some stupid plan to develop another Academy neighborhood, bigger than the others. Clean it up ourselves and make it suitable for people to live in. You kept telling we couldn’t do that alone.”
Silence filled the trailer. Sean glanced at the equipment, the cots, particularly the untouched one that was most likely meant for Owen.
Owen slowly picked himself up until he was standing straight, shoulders back, but still looking at the wall. “We had ideas where we would do the work. Doing it ourselves gave us the advantage of getting more favors. Only we didn’t know plumbing. We didn’t know how to run electricity. We could barely hammer nails.”
“We couldn’t do the things we wanted because we were ten,” Sean said. He approached Owen slowly. When he didn’t speak, Sean kept going. “You came to me later. I don’t remember what you said exactly...”
Owen nodded, turning his head just enough that he peered at Sean over his shoulder. “Why do we need to do it? What if we simply got other people to do what we wanted?”
“No limits,” Sean said with a grin. “We let go of the idea of what ten-year-olds could do and instead thought of what we could get others to do.”
“Suddenly we could do anything,” Owen said.
“We decided to work in secret. Make other people do what we couldn’t. We wrote letters. We put the right people in contact with who we wanted and fed them ideas and where to get the money. We told no one what we were up to.”
Owen nodded. “An abandoned building in the middle of Charleston. No one wanted to tackle the maintenance to get it up and running, but the city had funds set aside for repurposing that area.”
“We found the right people,” Sean said. “People willing to put in the hours and experience.”
“And got additional funding. Millions filtered into a project they thought was coordinated by various nonprofits.”
“Before that time, the Academy worked in small offices and facilities broken up around the city,” Sean said, coming closer to the table. He scooped up one of the tablets that had fallen, holding it in his hands. “They thought it was better to work in secret that way. We found something better for them.”
“A hospital,” Owen said. He finally turned around to face him. His expression calm. “Privately owned.”
Sean nodded, showing him the tablet with the darkened screen. “We became the two ten-year-old boys who coordinated the team to create a central Academy hospital. We were only discovered when we told them what we’d done.”
Owen’s lips twitched. “When everything was in place, they sought out the benefactors and found us. Wouldn’t even believe us at first.”
Sean held the tablet tighter. “When they did, they had to give us the favors. We gave them all what they didn’t even know they needed.”
Owen blinked rapidly, his eyes passing from the table, to Sean, to the door and then back to Sean. “I don’t understand. You want to use those favors?”
“I’m saying we were the youngest to graduate in the history of the Academy. Us. You and me. We did it together.” He used the tablet to point to Owen’s face. “Tell me we can’t get Sang out. Now. When we want her. When she wants it. And still keep her ghost bird status. We can do anything, Owen. We’ve done it before.”
Owen frowned but took the tablet from Sean’s hands. “We can’t convince Carol to send her to a school.”
Sean smiled and shook his head. “Change the result we want.”
Owen raised an eyebrow. “Why...try to convince her to send her to a school?”
“Why even ask her permission?” Sean said.
Owen paused, holding the tablet.
Slowly, he drew it closer, those eyes staring at the dark surface. The air seemed to still in the trailer.
His fingers glided over the glass.
He touched the power button.
The glow illuminated his eyes, reflecting on his glasses.
“We won’t ask,” Owen said, the edge of his mouth curling into the tiniest smile. “They’ll have no choice.”
Behind the Door
SANG
I woke up off and on throughout the night. There was no desire inside me to get up, even while the sun was starting to rise.
Sitting up meant facing Jimmy. Or Carol. I was so angry at my situation that I feared I’d cry or break down in front of
them.
Sean’s phone was against my chest, under the blanket. The bedroom was silent.
I stared at the flowers on the wallpaper. Light from the window had dimmed when Jimmy got up and shut the blinds. He left to go downstairs.
I could have sent phone messages then, but I didn’t know what to say.
I dozed off and on, but my mind was going over and over fleeting thoughts.
The guys.
The Academy.
People who cared about me.
They were out there, and I was in here.
If it takes a month, will you keep fighting?
Mr. Blackbourne had asked me the question, but it was under different circumstances. If I could just get out of the house every once in a while and get to them... if the guys could sneak in at night... I thought I could be strong enough for this.
How could I tell him no? Even now, I would never dare do so.
Walking out...it would bring them trouble. It would cost favors. Who knew how many? Most of them had none left. They’d spent them on me. I didn’t know how much the Academy would forgive, but it all depended on me becoming the ghost bird they wanted.
So I had to follow through. I had to wait for them.
I breathed in slowly, letting air fill my lungs. Ammonia scents were filling the air around me. Carol was awake and mopping or washing who knew what downstairs.
I stared off aimlessly, waiting for someone to tell me what to do next.
The phone I held wasn’t buzzing. No messages at all. They were letting me sleep.
I was too restless to sleep.
I needed to do something. To give myself some hope that getting out was at all possible.
I had to give them some hope.
Dr. Green...his face...those eyes...he knew. He knew what I was feeling. I saw the doubt, the desire. If I didn’t find some sort of hope for us, they’ll do something drastic. Or I would.
Jimmy returned and crawled back into his cot. Either he’d just gone to the bathroom, or he was avoiding his mother so he wouldn’t have to clean. It was still early.
Eventually, he fell back asleep.
I rose slowly and eased myself off the bed. I didn’t want to wake Jimmy. He was on his back on the cot, the blanket wrapped over his entire body. The air was a little cold. The thermostat had been turned down.