“I’m sorry,” she says, and whether she’s talking to me or the Mudo I don’t know. My mother jabs her blade into the Mudo woman’s knee, ripping through the tattered skirt and shredding the bones and ligaments underneath with a sickening crack.
I cringe as the Mudo stumbles. She reaches for my mother one last time, her hands waving in the air and fingers curling.
My mother stares at her for the tiniest moment and I’m about to shout again, about to scream at her to kill the woman, when she closes her eyes and lowers the blade, severing the Mudo’s neck.
I press my hand to my chest, trying to gasp for air. I thought I’d lost my mother. And the enormity of that emotion washes through me, draining me of everything but anger that she could do something so stupid.
And fear that I could have gotten there too late.
My mother stares down at the Mudo’s body. She reaches out her other hand and it hovers over the woman’s face and then she pulls it back.
And I realize that this woman, this random Mudo on the beach, meant something to her. Suddenly my mother feels like a stranger to me. A woman I’ve lived with my entire life, that my very existence has revolved around, and there’s still so much I don’t know.
“Who was she?” I ask.
My mother doesn’t look at me, just stares at the way the water licks at the Mudo’s fingers, and I wonder what else I don’t know about her.
I can tell that she’s spinning the words around in her head, trying to figure out what to tell me, and this makes me feel like even more of a stranger to her.
“Nobody,” she finally says, her voice barely audible over the crash of the waves. “She’s no one. Just …” She clears her throat. “She reminded me of someone from where I grew up.”
She speaks as if she’s in some sort of trance, and I watch the way she stares at the woman and I think about Catcher. I wonder if this is what I’ll be like when the time comes. I wonder if, like my mother, I’ll have as hard a time making that final blow.
Just thinking about it causes everything to hurt and I realize that maybe I understand her hesitation now.
“How do you handle it?” I ask her. Desperately needing to know, needing my mother’s help to ease the pain inside. “What do you do when someone you love or think you might love or could love turns?”
She looks at me, her glance still so far away, and slowly I watch as she focuses back on the world around us.
“It will be okay, Gabrielle. I’m safe. We’re both safe. Nothing will happen to us.”
But I shake my head. She doesn’t get it and I can’t find the way to tell her about Catcher. About what he’s come to mean to me and what happened to him and that I snuck out past the Barrier with everyone else.
There’s silence, there’s the push of the waves to the shore, and my mother stares at where the water tugs at the dead Mudo. Then she says, “You’ll learn how to let it go. You forget until everything is okay again.”
For a while the waves roll between us, the last of the sun slowly fading away. I relive last night over and over again. Seeing Catcher’s face move toward mine, feeling my stomach tingle with anticipation. I think about all the glances, all the times his hand slipped over mine. I close my eyes and try to remember his smell but the salt of the air corrodes the memory.
I try to forget all these details. To push them away into nothingness. But the more I try to let them go, the faster old memories surface, storming through my thoughts.
What use are experiences if we’re not allowed to remember them? If we forget in order to avoid the pain of loss? What is the point of living if we have to always insulate ourselves?
“I don’t know if I want to be okay,” I say, shaking my head slowly. So many memories roll through me and I realize that this is who we are: memories and shared experiences. This is what ties us all together.
My mother bends down and sifts through the sand until she finds a shell, the inside gleaming pink like the sunset-washed sky. “It’s what we have to do to survive,” she finally says, running her finger along the sharp scalloped edges. “There’s no point in holding on to memories that only bring us pain.”
“Then what’s the point of making any memories?” I ask her, my voice heated. My shoulders tense with agitation. “What’s the point of any of it if all we’re supposed to do is forget?” And then a thought begins to unwind in my head and I force myself to put words to it. “Would you forget me if something happened?”
Her eyes go wide. “No,” she says quickly with a gasp. “Of course not!”
“But what if I’d been up on the stage with the others this morning?” I think about Catcher and add, “What if I was one of those who didn’t come home last night?”
“I would go after you,” she says, grabbing my arms and turning me toward her. “I wouldn’t let you go like that. I would find you. Whatever it took.”
I measure my words and dole them out carefully. “So if you really cared for someone—maybe if you even loved them—you’d go after them?”
Her mouth opens and closes and for a moment she reminds me of a fish tossed onto the shore, unable to breathe. “I …” Her eyes mist over for the barest moment but she blinks it away.
She falls silent and I realize that I’ve struck something. That I’ve probed an area of my mother’s life that I never knew about before.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she says weakly.
I think about Catcher, alone and terrified beyond the Barrier. No one to talk to, to confide in. No one to pour his memories into so that he can be remembered. And I think about how I would feel if I were the one lost and alone and infected. It’s a terrifying thought that makes the edges of my vision burn dim.
I press my fingers to my lips, remembering how I felt around him. Right now I don’t know what to do or how to feel and I need my mother’s help. “Have you ever been in love before?” I ask, and then hesitate before adding, “Did you love my father?” She’s never told me anything about my father, never talked about him or shared stories. I’d learned long ago not to ask about him. Not to wonder why my mother was so silent when I brought him up.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says.
“Who was he?”
She shakes her head, retreating.
“What happened to him?” I keep pushing.
She sinks down into the sand onto her knees, water rushing over her legs. Her skirt fans out around her, the fabric turning darker as it gets wet. “I loved two men when I was your age. One became infected and died. The other one I left in the Forest when I escaped.” Her words are a whisper, barely loud enough to be held by the wind.
My mother rarely talks about her life before and this is the first time I’ve heard much about it. It’s such a small glimpse of her life when she was my age and I grab on to it, hoping for more.
I kneel in front of her and hold her limp fingers. They’re damp from the waves pooling around us, the skin already beginning to wrinkle and pucker as if tired with age. “Why didn’t you go back for him?” I ask. “If you loved him, why didn’t you go back?”
She looks at me, her eyes unfocused, as if she’s not there, as if she’s staring past me at someone else. “My brother once told me that you can’t have truly loved someone if you’re willing to let them go. If you aren’t willing to fight for them,” she says flatly, as if reciting a poem learned long ago.
“I always knew I loved him,” she murmurs, almost talking only to herself. “But it wasn’t the kind of love I thought I wanted. And I left him. I let him go.” She stares at our hands. “Maybe my brother was right and what I thought was love was just …” She doesn’t finish. “Maybe I just loved myself more.”
I don’t know what to do or what to say. It’s as if our roles are reversed and I’m the mother. I’ve never seen her like this, never seen her when she hasn’t been strong and in control. It’s terrifying to realize that even the strongest among us have such weakness.
She sighs. “I tried,”
she says. “I tried to go back. So many times I tried. The people in town didn’t believe me when I told them I was from the Forest. They thought I was delusional. That I’d escaped from some pirate ship. They wouldn’t send anyone back into the Forest, and when I could finally go myself …”
Her voice cracks and she swallows a few times. “I lived here for years helping Roger protect the beaches and then I left. I thought I could forget and move on. But I couldn’t. The Forest kept calling back to me. And so I went back. I tried again. And that’s when I found you and I thought the Forest was telling me something. I thought it was telling me to forget about the past and concentrate on the future.”
As her words sink in her eyes snap into focus, widening so that the white surrounding the dark blue glows in the dusky light.
“When you found me?” My voice has no substance, as if it’s less than air. I feel as if I’ve somehow woken up in the middle of the night in a strange place and can’t orient myself, the shock pushing in like thick darkness.
My mother swallows and her fingers close around mine as I try to pull away. “Gabrielle, wait,” she says, but I pull harder, wrenching my hand from hers.
“What do you mean, when you found me?” I ask, panic flooding through my veins, filling my lungs and choking me. I fall away from her, the damp sand soaking quickly through my skirt and chilling the skin at the back of my legs. Water splashes as she reaches for me but I keep backing away. Nothing makes sense and I shake my head, hoping to jostle the pieces back into place.
“Wait,” she says again, and I stop. Waves push and pull around us, slicing between us. I stare at her and she stares back. She holds her hand out to me the way she would to a skittish dog, and I realize how terrified I am of what she’s about to tell me. I want to tell her to stop, to forget this entire evening. But the demand won’t press past my lips.
“You were born in the Forest of Hands and Teeth,” she says finally, her fingers trembling in the air, salt water dripping from them like tears. “I found you there. You were lost and alone and seemed to be in shock and so I brought you home.”
“How?” I don’t even voice the question, just form the word with my lips.
“You were on the path.” The explanation pours out of her and I want to cover my ears and block what she’s saying but it comes too fast, like a wall of water I can’t run from. “I’d left Vista years before but I could not stop thinking about my village and so I decided to go back. I was going to look for them, look for the others I left behind. I found you and there wasn’t anyone else. You were a child—almost catatonic. I didn’t know what to do. I got scared and I ran.
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go and you were so sick and needed help so I came back to Vista. Roger, the old lighthouse keeper, had died the year before and I told the Council you were mine and that Roger had taught me how to run everything and that I’d take it over. No one knew you were not mine originally. No one but me.”
I stare at her dumbly and watch the drops falling from her chin, circles radiating where they hit the water.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” It’s all I can say, the only words I can pull from the whirl of my mind. Every memory, every moment in this town swims through my head and I can’t make sense of it.
She looks down at her trembling hand still hovering between us. “Because I didn’t want to remember,” she whispers.
Rage tears through me. “Then why are you telling me now?”
She lets her arm fall. The waves break around us; the last gasp of light loses its battle with the evening. “Because you’re right,” she says. “We are nothing more than our stories and who we love. What we pass on, how we exist … it’s having people remember who we are. We’re terrible at that in this world. At remembering. At passing it on. And it is not fair that I’m the only one who knows your whole story.”
I can feel every grain of sand pressing against my skin. I feel as though I used to be one giant whole and now I’ve been shattered to pieces and scattered into the night. There’s nothing strong enough to pull me back together again.
She leans toward me in the darkness, the absence of stars and light. “You’ll always be my daughter, Gabrielle. You’re the daughter of my heart.”
Her words strike like a fist against my chest, a brightness exploding inside me. I had another mother once. I belonged to someone else. Another woman used to comfort me. Another mother used to hold me when I cried and laughed.
I close my eyes. I try to remember her. I try to remember another life, another voice, another smell. But I see nothing.
I can’t remember any of it now. Only one thought begins to grow inside me, edging past the confusion and rage. “Who am I?”
She puts her hands on my feet, my legs, crawling to wrap her arms around my shoulder. I want to tear the feel of her from my skin. “You’re my daughter. You’re Gabrielle.”
“But I was somebody else once!” I scream the words, needing her to understand that she’s taken everything from me.
“No. You’ve always been my little girl.” I can hear her tears in the way her voice quavers. She draws in a shaking breath. “That’s what my mother used to call me. Her little girl. That’s what she said to me when she …” Her voice fades into the waves.
I press my palms to my eyes, disbelief and anger and confusion warring inside. “I was someone else’s little girl first,” I say, every muscle in my body pulling tight. I push away from her and stand up, the wet fabric of my skirt sticking to my legs. I stomp through the water in a tight circle, kicking against the salt spray, wanting to pull the world apart piece by piece.
“You were alone in the Forest,” she says. “There was no one there. I looked. You were starving and barely even conscious. You were only four or five years old! You didn’t even speak for a month after I brought you back and even then I wasn’t sure you were going to live! You could barely even tell me your name!”
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.