by Blair Drake
“And, if nobody saw an ability in me, then you just don’t tell me. What difference would I know? How would I otherwise know to be disappointed? But for my mother to see my abilities before I was three and not prepare me for that is bad parenting. I know firsthand from that child’s point of view. It led me here. At the age of seventeen, I’m still dealing with all that, having this secretive quest thrown at me with no forewarning or preparation—all to heal that bad decision my own mother made for me when I was three. Instead, now you’re telling me, at the last moment, not only does my mother have abilities but you know her and where she is? When she’s walked away and stayed away all these years?”
“It’s not that simple. And her abilities are complex. She couldn’t stay. You have to trust she did what was best for you back then.”
“I don’t think I can do that.” Melissa stared blindly in front of her. That same deep sense of abandonment slamming into her again and again until she couldn’t do anything but cry.
Chapter 18
In the aftermath of the latest emotional storm, she lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling above her and wondering at the strange turn her life had taken. It wasn’t very long ago she could’ve sworn she had the normal life of a teenager. This was anything but normal—at least not the normal she knew before. This was a new normal that would take a little—a lot of—time to accept.
However, she was determined, and that determination was growing.
At least the crying jag brought up one thing—she wanted to have a relationship with her mother. It might not be the same as other mother-daughter relationships, but it’s all she had to offer—maybe to offer. She’d have to start down that path to see.
The knowledge she was responsible for isolating herself was something she didn’t want to think about, but this quest with its short time limit and the nagging voices in her head weren’t giving her a chance to hide anymore. And, if she were to visualize exactly where she was, it was like she was at the middle point of a bridge crossing a narrow gorge—wondering how to cross to the other side. She didn’t have any answers. But, as she turned to look behind her on that bridge, she realized she already made progress, moving a large distance from where she’d started. So, she’d trust the process, and if she was very lucky, she’d cross to the other side safely. Soon.
She closed her eyes and called out, “Mom, are you there? I’d like to talk to you.”
No answer.
She wasn’t sure if this was the right place to be working from. Surely there was a place somewhere she’d be closer to her mother?
Still lying on the hallway floor, she studied the rows upon rows of framed pictures of staff, students, and headmasters over the years. Plaques filled the wall too. Gray Cliffs Academy had been around for centuries. Okay, maybe not centuries but at least one century. Anything over twenty years seemed like centuries to Melissa anyway. A long line of headmaster photographs were on one wall. This was an old school that took a great deal of pride in their alumni. Had her mother attended here? Why had her father let Melissa come here? She received the invitation and wanted to come. She asked him to let her come. He agreed easily but why? And how did Gray Cliffs know about Melissa? At the time she received the invitation, Melissa was happy to overlook those lingering doubts. It was years ago, after all. Now she had to wonder, was her acceptance her mother’s doing?
Melissa got to her feet, tired but now with a kernel of an idea in her mind, as she crossed to the wall and slowly checked the faces. She was seventeen; her mother had walked out fourteen years ago. For the longest time she’d hoped her mother had died as it made it easier to deal with the sense of abondment. She didn’t even know how old her mother was when she’d given birth to Melissa. She assumed at least twenty. That would put her mother around thirty-seven. If she graduated at eighteen, that would be nineteen years ago. Melissa looked at the class photos, studying each of them. They all appeared to be fairly normal, nondescript, nothing special about any of them. She focused on the years from the time of her birth back another two years, hoping for a picture of her mother, but not one face stood out. Then she wondered if these were the pictures of all the students or just various students who were not magical.
As she now knew, her mother had her own abilities. Where would she find pictures of those gifted students? Then she knew. The headmaster’s office.
Carrying Gideon like a lifeline, she walked into the headmaster’s office and turned slowly to survey the walls. Multitudes of graduation photos were hung there. She walked closer to the large wall, counting off the years backward. Each graduating class had only ten pictures. She frowned. “That’s how many of us were on the roof, wasn’t it? No, eleven maybe if she counted Annalise?” She wasn’t sure. Everything had been so crazy at that time. She hadn’t had a chance to count the students.
She studied each of the pictures. One particular woman’s face made Melissa stop and think. She was a complete replica of Melissa. Or, in this time frame, it would mean Melissa was a complete replica of this other woman. She read the names, and, sure enough, she found her mother’s name, Teresa. When she married her father, she took his name. But there was no way to hide she was Melissa’s mother. They could be twins.
With her fingers, she gently stroked the glass over her mother’s face. There was a slight buzzing as soon as she connected with it as if some energy was tied to that picture. If that was the case, maybe she could use it to call her mother.
She closed her eyes and willed her mother to respond. “Now that I know you’re alive, now that I know so much more, I want to know why you left me. I want to know why you would choose a life without your daughter, and why your daughter should have a life without her mother shaping who she was, shaping her destiny, shaping everything around her, when it could’ve been so much better for your daughter.”
She snagged up all the pain, all the sense of loss and abandonment she’d dealt with for such a long time, and then that determination to get to the bottom of all this just streamed the emotions through her fingers into the picture of her mother’s smiling face as it stared out at her.
“I need to know why you did this. I’ve spent a lifetime locking myself down so nobody else could get close to me and no one could hurt me as much as I hurt after losing you.”
Finally, her arm fell, as if no more energy could pour into it. She felt drained, exhausted. She took several steps back and collapsed into one of the big chairs in the headmaster’s office. They were almost like love seats they were so big. She curled up in a ball with Gideon still in her arms. She dropped her head to rest on his. There were no more tears. There was just that big Why?
Then she remembered Hettie. Melissa managed to reach Hettie because Melissa remembered Hettie’s form, because she’d reached through whatever portal she was in and touched Hettie on the shoulder...and her father too. Did she know how to face her mother? Could she do the same?
She glanced around, realizing no shimmering energy said a portal was close, and decided to create one. If she didn’t make it back, she still needed these questions answered. She closed her eyes, envisioned her mother, the features slightly older than the one she saw in the school picture. Pairing determined intent with action, she reached out a hand, placing it on her mother’s shoulder.
She felt a solid warm, body under her hand. Her eyes flew open, and she stared to see the woman sitting on a couch with Melissa herself standing behind her.
“There you are,” said the woman below her. There was such delight and joy in her voice, Melissa instinctively lifted her hand.
“No, don’t go.”
But it was too late. Melissa was back in the headmaster’s office. She gasped, stared around, stared at her hand, realizing she broke contact by lifting her hand off the woman’s shoulder. She closed her eyes and repeated the process. She felt the same shoulder and closed her fingers. Relief swelled inside. She opened her eyes to see the same woman and the same room she saw before.
“You�
�re learning, and that’s very good,” the woman said earnestly.
Melissa stared at the features so much like her own. It was heartbreaking. “Why? Why did you leave me?” she asked brokenly.
The woman’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t want to. But I was going through issues of my own. I couldn’t stay, not without affecting you.”
“That makes no sense. I was just a toddler. You could’ve stayed, or you could’ve taken me with you.”
“Your father had no one. He knew I had to go. He understood. But he wanted to give you the opportunity to make your own choices when the time came, your own decisions. If you came with me, you wouldn’t have had a choice.”
Melissa stared at the woman in shock. “You really think any person in this world right now doesn’t want to have abilities, doesn’t want to be special in some way? Besides, I ended up here anyway.”
“You are here because your genetics are strong. Your abilities are huge. It was well past the point I could interfere.”
“You wanted to interfere?” She stared down at her mother in shock and anger. “You didn’t want me to come into my abilities?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” the woman rushed to reassure her. “I was always there, watching over you. I was always keeping an eye on you, telling your father when you needed help.”
Melissa snorted at that. “What good is it to tell the same person the same thing over and over again, when he doesn’t act on it?”
Her mother winced. “I can see how you would think that, but he did the best he could.”
Melissa’s jaw dropped. “Maybe you’re thinking about a different child. You are not thinking about the man who shipped me from boarding school to boarding school before I came here.”
Her mother took a deep breath. “I know it must seem like that. He did the best he could,” she repeated.
“As long as the best he could do was really shitty.” Melissa wanted to walk around and sit down on the couch, but she was afraid to break contact and lose this vision in front of her. “And why, if you could watch over me and talk to him, did you not watch over me and talk to me?” She tried to keep the pain out of her voice, but it was hard.
“We have rules,” her mother said gently. “And one of the things we’re not allowed to do is influence our children’s decisions.”
Melissa stared at her mutely. Nothing she’d said so far explained why she would walk away from a three-year-old.
“And?”
Her mother shrugged her shoulders. “I’m very strong. I came to my abilities very early in puberty and gained in power after I gave birth to you. I pushed it off, hoping I could spend time with you. But I couldn’t. I had to make a decision. I had to be true to me, let you be true to you, or I would stay. Because of the strong nature of my abilities—which uses the abilities of those around me—chances were I would impact your ability to develop. There was a good chance you wouldn’t have any, and not by my choice. Once you know and have these abilities, it’s almost impossible to ignore them. They become second nature.”
Did anyone else realize this conversation was ridiculous? A few days ago, Melissa had no idea there were even abilities to fight over.
“Because they’re handed down in some fashion, rarely a duplicate of the parents’ gifts. When you have a child, some of your abilities will be handed down to them, but because of my particular abilities, we were afraid as I came into more power, my abilities would only take from yours. I wouldn’t do it on purpose, but it’s possible I could inadvertently access what was yours when you weren’t old enough to stop me.”
“Well, maybe I would understand that, if I’m greedy and selfish and want anything I can have. But I’ll have you know that nothing I’ve listened to so far out of your mouth makes up for growing up without my mother.”
A whisper of pain crossed her mother’s face, immediately making Melissa feel bad.
“Look. I’m sorry, but it’s a little shocking to find out fourteen years later that my mother, who supposedly just walked away and left me behind, hadn’t. And now you tell me you were watching over me all this time but never let me know. Even if I knew, just knew you cared, that you were there, it would’ve helped tremendously.”
“And I tried to tell you,” her mother said. “I talked to you constantly from this side, but you had to be the one to reach out. You had to be the one opening up to your abilities so you could communicate with me.”
Appalled, Melissa stared at her. “You’re saying, because I didn’t reach out for you, that I locked myself down and wasn’t open to communicating to somebody from some weird dimension, I’m to blame?”
“There is no blame. It’s all about time. Growth. We all come into who we are at different ages.”
“Would that not have still happened if you hadn’t walked away?”
“Maybe. And it might not have happened at all. There’s no way to know. I’d have done anything to keep you safe. And I have done a lot to keep you safe. A day hasn’t gone by I haven’t checked in to make sure you’re okay.”
“Yeah, but what about today?”
Her mother smiled up at her with a caring smile. “Who do you think has been talking to you inside your head?”
She reared back and stared at her mother in shock. “That’s you?”
“I’m one of those voices.”
Melissa shook her head. “So all those cryptic comments about my lesson to learn regarding feeling alone came from you? How very ironic. You’re the one who taught me how much pain there was opening myself up to others and how much better life was alone.”
“That’s why I was elected to be the one to help you through this. Because it wasn’t just your loneliness.” Her mother reached out and opened her hand. “If you take my hand, you can sit down here beside me, and I can see you properly.”
Melissa stared down at the hand. She wasn’t at all sure she was ready for that. There was something a little more comforting about standing tall slightly behind this woman, and she realized why. It gave her the option to run. If her mother said something she didn’t like, Melissa could just drop her hand, and this would all fall away.
Her mother nodded once again in her head, reading her mind. “That’s true. That’s exactly what would happen. It will also happen if you take my hand and sit in front of me. You can break the connection at any time. And I couldn’t do anything to stop you. I can only do what I have always done, which is watch over you. And right now, as you’re going through these trials, I can give you a little bit of comfort.”
She reached out her hand to her mother’s, walked around the couch, and sat down in front of her. As far she could see, her mother still looked to be in her early twenties. She marveled at her glowing skin. “Whatever your life’s been like,” she said quietly, “it suited you. I don’t look as good as you.”
Her mother reached out and stroked the dried tear tracks on her cheeks. “You look much better than I do. You’re standing, facing your fears, honest in your responses, caring, understanding what you must do, and you’re doing it. For that I hold you in my highest regard.”
Melissa frowned at her wording. “I’d rather have your love,” she said bluntly. “In person, your arms wrapped around me as a toddler. Somebody who I could’ve run to and cried to when I was tripped at school, when I failed my first test or two. To have you share in the joy of my first kiss, my first boyfriend, when I got the letter to come here. I thought maybe, for once, something in my world was going my way.”
“And I was there at every one of those times,” her mom said, her voice thickening with tears. “I stood at your side, hoping, wishing you’d reach out for me. You slammed the door, even though intuitively you had to know I wasn’t gone.”
Melissa shrugged her shoulders and stared at her in surprise. “Intuitively not knowing you were gone—or smart, you mean? I was a child. My father said you were gone, and I would never see you again, and I believed him. He was the ultimate adult in my world.
How could anything else makes sense?”
Her mother’s voice turned sad. “I hoped sooner or later you would recognize my presence, and you would reach out for me, asking questions and keep questioning until you found the answers.”
“Why would you think that?” Melissa asked. She sank back along the couch, realizing she held Gideon in her arms. Gideon, who appeared to cross boundaries at will and obviously knew she needed him. “How could you possibly think I would even know this was a possibility?”
“Because I did,” her mother said quietly. “My mother did the same to me, and I started asking questions when I was very young.”
“Was your father also not magical?”
A startled look crossed her mother’s face. Then she shook her head. “No, you’re right. He was. He was of the magic realm.”
“So you got a double dose of those genetics. Maybe your instinct is a lot stronger because I obviously failed in that class. For fourteen years I thought that you were gone, dead to me because you didn’t want anything else to do with me. It never occurred to me you were some magical being, living in an alternate universe, watching over me, supposedly being there for me, even though I had no idea.”
Her mother’s face pinched with Melissa’s sarcasm, but Melissa really wasn’t too worried at this point. She felt battered by the storms of these last few hours. “Is there anything else I have to learn in order to go back home?” she asked quietly.
“Yes, you have to heal the other avenues of your life. Then you should be able to return.”
Curled up in the corner of the couch, her hand still in full contact with her mother’s, Melissa asked, “Haven’t I been through enough yet? Surely there wasn’t anyone else I shut out of my life.”
