Nameless

by Marni MacRae

  “Linda nodded her head, as if it was just right that he was no longer living.

  “I had thought it had been me. That the fighting and the struggle between Linda and I had driven my father to find a happier life. I couldn’t blame him. But the heartbreak of knowing I would never see him again, that I was truly alone in the world crushed me. ‘No,’ I said, and I shook my head at her and she nodded again.

  “ ‘Oh yes. Foolish man.’ She chuckled and flopped back onto the pillows.

  “ ‘He was going to take you. It was easier than it should have been. A man should be stronger, smarter than his wife. He should lead and protect, but the weakness in his soul was a seed that grew and had already infected you. Taking his life was a mercy. Oh, the joke of it! Take you to a better life, he said. He was ungrateful, had been born a fool, and to steal you away when he knew you were stolen was the biggest joke of all!

  “Stolen?

  “I couldn’t breathe. Her words and venom were like poison, and I regretted asking the question. Regretted the last four days, the last thirteen years, never sending a prayer for Arthur’s soul to find heaven.

  “Oh, stupid girl, you were never mine. You were born a sinner, born from sullied blood, but I took pity on you. Your golden eyes, your long hair, they fooled me into thinking you were pure, that you could be saved from the filth of the world. So, I took you and soon discovered my mistake.

  “Took me?

  “Now it all seemed too confusing and my head was ringing. Arthur was dead, what did she mean she stole me?

  “‘YES!’ She screamed it. ‘Yes!’

  “This time another hiss.

  “I saved your pathetic soul. Snatched you from the foolish playground that would teach you to frolic but not to be obedient, parents who would spoil you and dirty you and never open your eyes to the true world you live in. Surrounded by sinners and devils. Tempted by sweetness, softness, and all the dangling apples served up by serpents. I SAVED YOU!

  “She screams again.

  “But you were never grateful!

  “I heard ringing, my head throbbing in denial. I rushed from the room, into the bathroom and threw up. I heaved and heaved and choked as I sobbed out the pain. I am not Alice, I was never hers, I am not Arthur’s, I was not meant to be here.

  “I looked in the mirror then and saw the slave she’d made, the tortured woman who had been a girl with a family, with someone to love her. Taken to live here in emptiness, to scrape and struggle and survive the hell she doled out. And I hated her. I hated Alice. I snatched the shears from the shelf and cut away all the hair Linda had ever touched.

  “I wanted to shatter the mirror, I wanted to break the image of who I had become, who I may have been if Linda had not taken me, had not killed my father. Not my father. Just a man, a captor who knew I was stolen, hadn’t saved me, he had only been kind. I didn’t know if Arthur’s intent was to return me. I don’t know if he would have kept me himself. I know he loved me, but it was a selfish love. True loving parents would never do what they did.

  “And so, I ran. I left her. I couldn’t breathe, and it never crossed my mind to feed her or to stay for her any longer. I just had to get away as fast as I could before I shattered.

  “I set the animals free. As I ran out the door, I saw them, penned, trapped, like I had been, dependent on me to give to them or to take from them, and I felt sick again that this is how I had lived.

  “I opened the cages and pens, and then I flew. I had no idea where I was in the world. Was never told and in all my reading never discovered how to find out. I didn’t know what direction to choose and didn’t think long on it. I was running from myself, from Alice as much as from Linda and that shack.

  “And then I fell. I tripped into a bush and landed on my back. It knocked the breath out of me, and when I tried to breathe, I couldn’t. I thought I might die for a brief moment, my blood was pumping, heating me, my ears were ringing, and as I finally took a breath, I regretted it.”

  I stop and look around at the faces, Anabel’s wet with tears, Elizabeth’s twisted with pity, and Nick’s, full of compassion and love.

  “I wanted to not be. To not be Alice, to not be me, I was lost. Truly.

  “I wandered for hours, for a day, I wandered through the night and into a cornfield where the ringing grew louder, and I couldn’t turn off my mind. I had been crying for a day, was thirsty and hungry and didn’t know how to die. I had nothing to live for.

  “And then I awoke in that field. Empty. But new.”

  Chapter 31

  The room was deathly silent. Eve had finished her story, laid herself bare for all of us who now sat in stunned silence. There is no way to console, no words that come to us. Anabel sobs silently, tears running down her cheeks and buries her face into Lee’s shoulder.

  I catch my brother’s eye, and he gives me a nod. I know what he will do. I can see in his eyes a fire, and anger and purpose. There has now been a crime. Eve was not a missing person, she is a missing child. She had been kidnapped decades ago. tormented and abused for years, imprisoned. There is a murder and a body to find, and although the criminals who took her, the woman who killed Arthur are both dead, there is still work to be done.

  I take in the faces around the room as I reach for Eve, scooping her up from her chair and holding her against my chest like a child. Shock and pain are evident on the faces of the others. Even Valerie is shaken. Doc Eston looks older somehow, as if the history of this woman in my arms has drained him.

  I say nothing as I turn and leave the room. Eve curled into me, her arms tucked up against her chest, eyes closed. It has been a long day. A long night. And with the answers come more questions. But for now, Eve needs rest.

  I take her from Elizabeth’s castle, to her home down the path, then climbing the stairs to her room I lay her gently on the bed and tuck blankets around her small, slight frame.

  She hasn’t spoken or made a sound since her final words in the sitting room, but she turns to me now and reaches for my hand, grasping at me in the shadows of the darkened room.

  “Don’t leave me.” Her voice sounds small, pleading.

  “Never.” And I mean it. I lay down alongside her and pull her to me, swaddled in the feather comforter. I don’t intend to ever leave her side.

  But she may leave you. It is a voice of reason I have ignored for weeks now. But it resurfaces to push against my heart and tighten my throat.

  Lee will go back. He will scour the cabin, find clues, track down her origins and then Eve will have a choice to make.

  She has a family. A mother and father, perhaps siblings. A true family that share her blood. Not pieced together from the community of a town she stumbled into. But I push back at the voice and wrap myself around Eve. I know she may leave. I know she has mountains of pain and decisions to work through, but if she wants me, I am here. I will always be here for her.

  I feel Eve relax a fraction at a time. She doesn’t speak but keeps my hand clasped to her chest in her small palm. I am curled against her back, her dark hair tucked beneath my chin. Slowly, the tension leaves her, and after a while, I can hear her breath evening out into a slow rhythm. I hope in her sleep she doesn’t dream. I hope she finds rest and peace there.

  Her story had shaken me. Enraged me. Tore at me. I have never felt more helpless than in those moments, listening to her life laid out in resigned words. Her suffering, her imprisonment. I wanted to rage at the old crone who had hurt her, beat the Arthur she loved for entrapping her in that life. But it was in the past, both Arthur and Linda dead, no one to punish, no one to inflict my anger on. Just a sense of injustice and a ball of fury with nowhere to direct it.

  I lay for over an hour with Eve safely tucked against me, my mind going over all the details again, sorting through how she had even survived with her sweet spirit. Her goodness intact. Then I let my mind turn to the future. To reality and my heart clenched, the fury trapped there wanting to take a swing at something.

&nb
sp; I would keep her with me. I would beg her to stay if I thought it was the right thing to do. But as much as Eve is loved here in Brighton Valley, her true parents have loved and mourned her for too long. They are victims as much as she is. They have the right to hold her, to reconnect, to find healing.

  No matter the time passed, there are people out there who have suffered for her, who have searched for her. Together they can find closure, find a way to move on from the pain and grow into the family that they should have been, that they had been robbed of by Linda and Arthur.

  Eve deserved that. She deserved a true place in the world. She deserved to know her rightful name.

  I let the anger slip out a breath at a time. I relax against the small warmth tucked at my heart and inhale her scent. I will let her go. Because I love her. It is the greatest sacrifice I can make, the only gift I can give her to help heal the years of suffering. I can love her the way love is meant to be, not selfishly.

  As the decision settles in, I let sleep pull at me. I keep myself wrapped around the woman I love, knowing soon, I will have to let her go.

  Chapter 32

  It’s snowing today. I watch it through the window as my mother bustles about the kitchen.

  She is always moving, always busy, her hands cleaning, cooking, working. I had a hard time with that at first. Moving here had been the most difficult choice I had ever made. Mother’s distracted and busy nature seemed a grating edge to me then. I had commented on it one day, sitting in the breakfast nook with Father while he read the Sunday paper.

  “Does she ever still?”

  He glanced up at me and then over to mother before laying the paper down, folding it neatly and then reaching for his own coffee.

  “She wasn’t always like that.” He smiles toward Mother’s back as she scrubs at the perfectly clean sink. And then turns his smile to me. It softens and I watch as his golden eyes warm toward me.

  “It started after we lost you. She took it hard. Very hard.” His voice lowered some, and he took a sip of his caramel-colored brew. Leaning back in his chair, he looked out the window. It had been spring then, not snowing as it was now. Spring and warm, with trees in full bloom, the yard behind the home packed with flowers and shrubs neatly pruned and weeded.

  “She broke after the first year.” His tone was low, enough that only I could hear, and I leaned my elbows on the table, watching him remember. “We had your sister then, she was about six at the time, but Joseph hadn’t been born yet. After the year had passed and your birthday came…”

  He shrugged a shoulder and turned his eyes back to me.

  “We thought you were dead. We couldn’t bear to think of you living out there, somewhere, being harmed. And your birthday was a tipping point for your mother. She broke. She hadn’t mourned you yet, had been clinging to hope you would be found. She spent months in bed.”

  Father shook his head, remembering.

  “She wouldn’t bathe or eat. I had to force food into her. After a time, she slowly came out of it. She began focusing on Lilly, began picking up hobbies, gardening, cooking, school functions and clubs. She became too busy to think, too busy to feel the crushing weight of your loss. And then as the years passed and she learned to cope, and then to heal, and then to move on, the busyness had become habit.”

  Now, as I watch Mother drizzle icing over cinnamon rolls warm from the oven, I see her busy nature as a comfort. She never forgot me. She still loved me. As she bustled about the kitchen, instead of grating on me, now it warms me.

  “Are you going for a walk today?”

  Mother brings a warm roll to the table and places it in front of me. We sit here often. Chatting and sharing, exploring each other as we nibble at food or sip at coffee or tea. It has become a friendship nook. We have gotten past the awkwardness, the strange feeling of knowing each other but not knowing each other. We laugh here. We cry here.

  “I think I might. Joe was going to meet me to take me to an arcade.”

  “Oh, that sounds fun. Winter break will be here in a month or so. Lily will be home for the holidays.”

  My sister. Lily. Older than me by almost two years, she looks like Father, taller than me with lighter hair and Mother’s green eyes. I look like Mother, small and slim with dark hair, but with my Father’s golden eyes. Lily is lovely and kind. She was the first to embrace me when I met my family back in May.

  “Sister!” she had said. “You’re back!”

  I had cried then. Sobbed uncontrollably, and when I stopped I was in the arms of two strangers, a man I didn’t know but felt I knew and a woman who was a mirror image of me and smelled like…Mother.

  They held me for what seemed an hour as we all cried. I think it was the tension, the stress, the anxiety, but it was also relief. For them…it was love. They had loved me for twenty-five years and had nowhere to put it. When you love a person, it cannot fit on another, it is made just right, for them. They love Lily and Joe, but when I went missing, their love for me had built into a painful amount. That day it spilled over, and we cleansed our hearts as we found our feet with each other. Clinging to hands, staring at faces, finding recognition and hope and disbelief.

  I smile at Mother now and cut into the gooey cinnamon roll. “He claims my life lessons aren’t complete until I play Mario Brothers ‘old school’ on a machine.”

  “Your brother has a few life lessons to learn himself.” Mother shakes her head, her long hair pooling around her shoulders. “Doing his own laundry being on the top of that list.”

  I smile around my bite of heaven and look back out to the snow. After a moment, my mother reaches across the table and takes my hand.

  “Are you happy, dear? Are you happy here with us?”

  Startled, I look back at her, forgetting the lazily falling flakes outside and look into her eyes. She is concerned, but I can see in her a calmness, a center that hasn’t been there before.

  “Of course! I love it here. I love you and Father, Joe, and Lily—why would you ask?”

  “And we love you, dear, you have brought such joy into our home, filled up all the empty spaces in our hearts, and given us healing.” She smiles softly. “I hope for you, too.”

  I squeeze her hand across the table, and she grips my fingers in a motherly, reassuring way.

  “But you are a grown woman,” she continues. “Although your life has been…sheltered”—pain flits across her eyes before she can mask it— “you still have the heart of a woman.” She pauses. “I know you miss Nick.”

  I feel my heart constrict at his name.

  “I do.” I concede, my voice low and a bit choked. “I miss them all.” I sigh and turn my face to the window, watching as the snow gathers, covering the ground in a soft blanket. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to write or call.”

  Mother remains silent, her hand still in mine and I can feel a warmth of support there. She wants what is best for me. Always. She is selfless in her love, has been a friend to me over these long months, and a shoulder. We have, together, picked our way through the wreckage of what had been left in the fallout of Linda and Arthur’s crime. And we had found in each other a companionship beyond mother and daughter. We are survivors.

  “I thank God every day for you. For bringing you back to us. But I cannot hold you.” She gives my hand a squeeze. “I will keep you as long as you will let me, but a mother’s hardest lesson is releasing her children into the world.”

  Into the wild. The memory floats up, and I smile at a picture of Laurel’s laughing eyes.

  “You are my family.” I state it as a truth and find comfort in hearing it.

  “Yes. We are your family. But we are not the only ones who love you.”

  She slides an envelope across the small table to me.

  “You can do anything in the world you set your mind and heart to, my dear. You are strong, a fighter. You are curious and kind. Perhaps you are ready to decide what you want for yourself. What you want for your future.” She rises from th
e table and steps to my side, running her hand down my hair to my shoulder. Then she leans over and places a warm kiss on the top of my head.

  “No matter where you go in the world, no matter how old you are, you are my daughter, you are loved, and you always have a home here.” Then she leaves me alone with the scent of cinnamon in the air, white fluffy snowflakes falling past the window and the envelope lying in front of me.

  * * *

  Everything had happened so fast. I had woken up that morning after my memories returned feeling almost normal. Almost like Eve, not Alice, or even a mix of the two. Thinking back now, I think I was more numb than normal. Nick was lying beside me, sun was streaming through the window, and the world was turning. I had foolishly planned to go to the garden, clear the corn bed, and continue on as if nothing had changed.

  But everything had changed.

  Lee found my mother and father within hours of returning to Elizabeth’s. As I lay in bed, wrapped up in Nick’s strong, warm arms, staring at dust motes floating in the beams of sunshine slanting through the window, they were on a plane, on their way to me.

  I had turned into Nick’s arms, waking him, pulling strength from him. Aching for a future without pain and hard choices. But that was foolish. Life is made of choices, most of them hard, the hard ones always painful.

  We had returned to Elizabeth’s. Lee had texted both Nick and me to meet him there. I suppose the sight of Dr. Leesing sipping coffee in the large sunny kitchen should have been my first clue as to how hard the day would be.

  She had embraced me. “Eve,” she had said, releasing me and gently guiding me into the hallway. She stopped, just out of earshot of Elizabeth, Nick, Lee and Ezra who had all greeted me with hugs and offers of food, coffee, tea. Except Lee. He had nodded to Valerie indicating she was the one who would break the news.

  “Lee found your parents.” Valerie spoke calmly, her eyes on mine. The words meant nothing to me at the time. I couldn’t fathom what “parents” meant. Not with any weight of anticipation, hope or even a rejoicing at finding what once was lost. My parents were strangers to me.