by Eric Smith
“Sorry?”
“I’m not going to juggle everything. I’m putting the baby up for adoption.”
Silence. So much silence I can hear the whistle of the wind from the sea, the caws of the seagulls, the thrum of my own heart. The baby kicks again. Fireflies twinkle across the fairground, which is odd because I’ve never seen fireflies here before.
I dare a look at the girl’s face. I can see she’s replaying everything she said to me and feeling embarrassed because of the way she spoke about her birth mother, but I can also see she almost feels betrayed too, as if she thought I was someone she could like and then I turned out to be just like the girl who left her behind.
She clears her throat. “Can I . . .” She hesitates. “Can I ask . . .”
“You want to know why,” I finish for her.
She nods.
We can’t possibly have the same stories, her birth mother and I, and there are a million and one reasons to keep a baby or to give one up. But maybe she feels that this is the closest she’ll ever get to understanding why her mother gave her up. All I can do is give her my truth, and maybe it will give her a piece of hers too.
“I don’t think I’d do it right,” I say.
She frowns. “But no one does it right at the start, do they?”
“It’s not that. I know that. It’s me.”
Killian told me he’d support whatever I wanted to do, that he’d stick by me. And his voice is the one I’ve relied on when I’ve had my own doubts, his voice and my body, the body on hundreds of videos, dancing, always dancing. I’ve watched them a thousand times, and each time I dream of getting back on a stage again. I know you can dance and have a baby at the same time, I know people do it, but I don’t think I can. I don’t think I could do both well.
I don’t think I want to do both.
I try to explain. “I don’t think she’s the life I want,” I say, “so it feels like it would be unfair to her to keep her despite that. I love her, but she’s not right for me and I’m not right for her. A broken condom doesn’t mean either of us should have to be shoehorned into lives that don’t fit.”
“What if it’s what she wants?” she asks. “You’re not exactly letting her choose.”
That’s kept me up at night too. It’s true; this baby doesn’t get to make a choice. Do babies ever get a choice? Isn’t that the point of a parent, to be the person who makes the choices even when it’s hard? This may be the only choice I’ll ever make as her parent. And it’s the right one. I know that. I trust that. I just—
Regret.
—I just wonder sometimes.
“I don’t get it,” the girl says, quieter now. There are tears in her eyes. “I don’t understand why she doesn’t matter more to you than that.”
My temper flares, but I stamp it down and try to be gentle to this girl who is so happy in her home and so happy with her family and yet has carried around a small, secret pain for so long. “She does matter,” I say. “That’s why I want to give her up. She’s not my dream, but she is somebody else’s. She deserves to be there, with that somebody else. She deserves to be the dream.”
The tears spill out of the girl’s eyes and run down her cheeks, but she wipes them away. “Sorry,” she mumbles, pink and awkward.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“And I’m sorry I was rude. What you do with your baby is not my business. I don’t have any right to judge.”
“It’s okay. I know why you said it; I don’t blame you.”
She takes a minute to look across the empty fairground, and her tense, unhappy expression eases away as she calms down. She takes a couple of more chips from my cone. “Do you think maybe my mother felt like you do?”
“Maybe,” I say, “or maybe not. But it doesn’t matter unless you want it to. I mean, you’re happy. Your birth mother can’t make or break that, no matter what.” I hesitate. “You are happy? Aren’t you?”
And then suddenly I’m the one with tears on my face. I look out at the sea, at the horizon of gray water and silver sky. My feet itch, dancer’s feet desperate to run to the horizon and soar over the edge into a life full of dreams and color. And yet I’m leaden, grounded, afraid to go over the edge.
“I don’t want to break her heart,” I whisper. “I don’t want to break her world.”
The girl’s hand creeps into mine. We both look at the sea, two girls, an unborn baby, and creatures on a ghost carousel. “Is that what you’re afraid of? That you’ll choose badly and the world she ends up with won’t be so great?”
“If I could only know . . .”
The girl nods. “If I could only know,” she repeats. “I’ve said that too. Story of our lives, I suppose? If we could only know.”
The baby kicks again, another big one, and it knocks the rest of the chips right off my lap. We both laugh. The girl climbs out of the ladybug and crouches down to pick up the box. As she does, a pendant falls out of her coat and glints gold in the weak spring sunlight.
My heart kicks harder than the baby. The pendant is a gold ballet slipper.
I slide off the pony. My voice breaks. “Where did you get that?”
“This?” she frowns. “My birth mother sent it with me when she put me up for adoption.” An odd look crosses her face. “I suppose she must have cared about me a little, mustn’t she, if she gave me this?”
There’s a roar in my ears, louder than the sea. I look at the fairground, alive and vibrant and tacky last I saw it and yet inexplicably deserted and disused now. Fireflies and rusty metal and dreamlike quiet that shuts the rest of the world out. I look at the girl with Killian’s bright, clever eyes. I look at the necklace my grandmother had made for me, around my neck, and somehow around hers too.
“What year is it?” I ask.
“What sort of daft question is that?”
I wait.
She huffs. “2032.”
My world teeters, but I try not to cry. “When I fell asleep on that bus today, it was 2016.”
She gives me an odd look. “If you say so.”
“Look,” I say. I pull out my own necklace and show her the ballet slipper. Her eyes grow wide. “The back of this slipper, see? It’s engraved. Just one word.”
Soar.
She turns her own pendant over. And there it is, worn down by the years but still clear.
Soar.
“This is impossible,” she breathes.
“Maybe it’s a dream.”
“Yours or mine?”
“I don’t know. Maybe both. Maybe neither. I don’t know.”
She stares at me, eyes enormous and incredulous. “So you’re my—”
She stops. She can’t say it. Neither can I.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I say, “until one of us wakes up.”
So we do. If only we could know, we said, and now we can. We tell each other everything. I talk about Killian and that first time we kissed and how his eyes grow bright like the sun when he watches me dance; she talks about her parents and stepparents and how she has this best friend and they want to go on a road trip together like in old movies, and I tell her those movies aren’t “old” for me, thanks very much.
We stand on the pebbly beach with the sun turning hard and red on the horizon. Her beach is no different from mine sixteen years ago, just perhaps a little more worn down. The sea looks the same, but then maybe the sea is always the same no matter which side of the horizon you approach it from.
“I won’t pretend I completely understand why you’re going to let me go,” she says. “I won’t pretend I don’t get pissed off about it sometimes. Maybe I’ll understand one day, maybe I never will. But I know you care. I do see that. And that means the world to me.”
“Are you okay?”
She looks at me, and she smiles, my smile. “Yes,” she tells
me. “I think so. You don’t have to be afraid. It’s like you said: I wasn’t your dream, but I was someone’s else’s. You grew me, but they made the shape of me. And I will soar.”
“I know you will,” I say.
“And so will you.”
“Just not with you,” I say, and it’s funny how much that hurts. I’m okay with this choice, I am, but she’s in my heart and I’ll never get her out. “Come say hello one day. If you want to.”
I look out at the water again. There’s no question it will break my heart when I give her up. There’s no question it will break hers every time she wonders why we weren’t right for each other. But that’s okay because you can soar with a heart that’s been broken and mended so many times you’ve lost count.
When I look back, my daughter is gone and the fairground is alive with lights and music again.
Sangu Mandanna was four years old when an elephant chased her down a forest road and she decided to write her first story about it. Seventeen years and many, many manuscripts later, she signed her first book deal. The Lost Girl, a YA sci fi novel about death and love, is available now. Sangu now lives in Norwich, a city in the east of England, with her husband and kids.
“I was very young when I first realized families come in all shapes and sizes. The choice to give a child up is as valid as the choice to keep one, and the choice to welcome a child into your home makes you as much a parent as someone making the choice to carry a baby to term. I’m so excited to be involved in an anthology that celebrates all those choices and all the different loving, messy families out there.”
Lullaby
by Matthew Quinn Martin
“There is a mark upon a stone. And in this place a life was written, And there a stain was laid where I was born.”
––Michael Gira, from My Father Will Guide Me a Rope Up to the Sky
What would you say if you knew that tomorrow you would leave Earth, never to return?
The question was centered on a single sheet of thick paper hand delivered to me by a member of the Defense Courier Service. He stood there, waiting and watching, as I sat on my barracks bunk pondering what it meant. The envelope was addressed to me: Marine Corps PFC, Ibrahim Walker. But other than that, and what was printed inside . . . nothing.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“You are to verbally answer, private,” the DFC man said with the curtness of all career military. “If your answer is deemed acceptable, you will be given an opportunity for reassignment.”
“Reassignment? Where?”
“Classified.”
There was no making sense of this. But then again, very little of my life had ever made any sense. Sense and fairness were luxuries reserved for others. Not for orphans. Not for foster children.
All the foster kids I’d ever known carried with them the same two dreams. There is the public dream, and there is the one we keep secret––only occasionally sharing it in hushed tones with other members of the loose cabal we’d been drafted into. The first dream is simple. We wait––some of us for years, some of us until we are grasping adulthood––to be adopted, to be welcomed into a family that will love us not for the genes we’d received, not because of which sperm made it to which egg, but for us––and us alone.
Then there’s the secret dream. The mythic dream. The one we all go to bed wishing for until we’re so old that our wishbones have grown ossified and arthritic, ready to snap. We keep it secret because we know how fragile it is. If you’ve spent your whole life trying to angle, to wheedle, to tap dance, or to flat-out lie to get what most children take for granted, the last thing you want is to watch that one last hope burned to cinders by the cruelty of others. Other orphans. Other adults asking you to manage your expectations. Other experts, other “care” takers, and that sly other that lives inside your head.
The secret dream goes like this: One day, the orphan, the throwaway kid, the stepped-on stepchild, the street urchin––honestly, take your pick––will wake to find out that there was a reason why they were abandoned, something beyond random chance or selfishness. Grave circumstances, as it turned out, forced his or her noble parents to make the hardest choice imaginable in order to protect their beloved child from an evil beyond measure. That dream whispers to us the impossible: that the suffering we’ve endured was not without purpose. It was, instead, a purifying fire. And that what happened to us was not a tragedy––it was destiny.
You know this story. From Moses to Harry Potter, it’s always the same. You know it in your head, but it takes an orphan to hear that song––that lullaby––singing in his blood.
I joined the Marines hoping to find some foundation. Always a good student, despite the hardships, I graduated from high school early, with top honors, at sixteen. The day after my seventeenth birthday, I shipped out for boot camp. Four months later I found myself here––Camp Dwyer, Afghanistan, a desert hell pretty much exactly how you’d picture it. What I’d hoped to find in the Corps was a surrogate family––not a perfect one, just one I could call mine. Just one that would call me theirs.
What I found was dust.
Acres and acres of dust.
What I found were bullets, blood, and the dubious honor of being able to call myself a murderer––a government-sanctioned murderer, but a murderer just the same. Still half a year shy of being old enough to vote and I’d already racked up three confirmed kills along with all the backslapping that comes with it.
I read the question again. The paper felt as heavy as a stone tablet. “And I just tell you my answer? That’s it?”
“Those are my orders, private. Mine and yours.”
Reassignment. The word ricocheted in my mind. Any place would be better than this. I’d made exactly zero friends since my deployment––forget about family. I wondered what this reassignment would mean. “Last day on Earth?” Space? NASA? Something else? Something stranger?
My head filled with the kind of pabulum a high-ranking bureaucrat might want to hear.
––I’d feel like a proud pioneer! I’d wear that badge with honor. I’d hold fast, like the mariners of old who’d tattooed that edict across their knuckles.
––I’d miss my home. But nothing of value is gained without great sacrifice.
––I’d feel terrified. But only by conquering that all too personal terror would I be able to play some part––no matter how small––in ushering humanity into its next golden age.
Bullshit. All of it bullshit. I’d spent my life spinning out line after line of bullshit and always in the name of survival. And yes, I’d survived. But is that all my life would ever mean? Surviving? I didn’t want to survive my life. I wanted to live it.
I looked up at the man still hovering over me, hands clasped behind his back as he stood at ease. “The world has showed me nothing but indifference on my best days,” I told him. “Flat-out cruelty for the rest of them. If I had a chance to go someplace else, even if it meant never coming back, what would I say?
“I’d say, ‘why did it take so long?’”
The man smiled. He held out his hand. “Welcome to Project Nephilim.”
The flight to the port of Karachi took less than an hour. The time we’d spent at sea took more than a week. There were roughly four hundred souls packed in that floating sardine can. All of us, it turned out, had been presented with the same single question. And while our answers differed, each of us had been extended an invitation to join this probationary phase, as they called it.
Some were like me, culled from various branches of the armed services––and not only the US military, but from all over the globe. Many more had been pulled in from other areas. PhD candidates in various specialties. Engineers. Ballet dancers. Agriculturists. Doctors fresh out of medical school. Linguists. Artisans. Musical prodigies. You name it. We were headed to Port Foster. Ironic, as it turned out, fo
r every single passenger was an orphan. Ironic, but no coincidence, as I would later learn.
No one told us which organization or government had brought us here. No one told us anything else about the enigmatic Project Nephilim. The word, while obscure, was known to enough of our number that competing definitions soon spread through the ranks. Some said they were giants. Others, demigods. Still others, a race of watcher angels. Many pondered the significance. Those of us who were familiar with code names pointed out that they usually amounted to jack shit, nothing but smoke screens.
There were more tests. More questions. Interviews. Evaluations. We ate and lived together. Fights broke out. Flames ignited. We formed cliques, knowing they would be short-lived, but hoping some would continue if we reached the next phase. And then we docked at Port Foster. Like all short but intense periods, it felt like a lifetime . . . and it felt like a dream.
We assembled in the main hold. One of the mariners stood on a catwalk, clipboard in hand, staring down at us. “If you hear your name read aloud,” he said, “proceed up the ramp and you will be directed from there.”
Name after name was called out. There were cheers from the elect. High fives delivered to friends who’d made it on that list together. There was no order. No waiting for the letter of your last name to pass by. There was simply the litany and a steady emptying of the hold until the mariner put down his clipboard and turned to leave.
I looked around. Fewer than thirty of us remained. I didn’t know a single one of them. “What about us?” I called out, saying aloud what we all wanted to know, trying not to let it get to me, that all-too-familiar feeling of being left behind. “What do we do?”
“You . . .” said another voice from behind us. We turned to see a man whose name I would shortly learn was Dr. Ramirez. He wore a white lab coat and a grin. “. . . have made the cut.”
The base looked just like an ice-locked hut no bigger than a fishing shack, dimly backlit by the Antarctic dusk, wavering in and out of view as the wind kicked up scrims of biting snow. We were told that the bulk of the facility lay hundreds of feet below the surface. This was simply the access port. The only access port.
