Welcome Home

by Eric Smith

  So how can I burden her with more? Tell her about The Me under my masks?

  “Good,” Dr. Richard says. He makes a note in his book. I wonder if it says “good” in tight, underlined script.

  I see my words on the wall. The ones I’ve told only Dr. Richard about:

  Boy

  Alone

  Boy

  The letters of these private words are carved into the stone, etched with a dark coal against the glimmering white boulder face.

  “So I think we can all agree that we are working from a place of trust.”

  My mom nods.

  I nod.

  “Are you ready to tell your mom about some of the things that we’ve been talking about over this past year?”

  I see Mom’s posture ripple. A year is a long time to keep a secret. She knows this.

  But I know it’s been way longer than a year.

  And the thing is, I’m not ready. Not even a little bit. Boy. The word is darker now. Pulsing. Taunting. I want to scrape it from the rock’s surface. Bury it.

  I’m so good at burying shit. I should get an A+ in Life for burying the shit I’ve buried.

  “This is a safe place,” Dr. Richard says.

  Sometimes I think he’s an idiot. He can’t possibly know what a safe place means for someone like me. Someone who remembers what it’s like to feel unsafe. No, scared. Scared All. The. Time. When I heard footsteps coming to my room. When the woman who called herself my mother screamed at nothing, at everything, for hours that bled into days and then years. The men she brought home. The needles multiplying on the tabletops. The gun at my head. The hunger in my middle. Dr. Richard with his framed degrees can’t understand how I carry that scared kid’s baggage around inside of me, my suitcases crammed with memories that I want to dump on the side of the road.

  I want to leave all of it behind.

  Start over.

  Start my life.

  And I know that’s what Dr. Richard wants me to talk about now. What that life would look like. If I could really own it.

  My mom waits. She’s patient like that. I sort of envy it and hate it. Today, I hate it. I wish she’d get frustrated at the silence that fills the room. I wish she’d walk out so I wouldn’t have to say the words. I could scrub them from the walls, and Dr. Richard could never tempt me to say them again.

  But then my mom does the dumbest thing. She whispers, “Choo choo,” and squeezes my hand—softly, but in a never-letting-go kind of way. It’s so beyond ridiculous the way she makes this baby choo choo sound, and I laugh at her. Except laughter isn’t what leaves my lips; it’s a giant sob, like all the wind has been punched from my gut. Hurt escapes from the jagged cracks inside of me where I hide stuff. I crumple into her words, into myself, and I feel so real in this moment. So me. So alive and loved that I don’t even try to keep my mask from slipping. I just let it fall, hit my lap, careen onto the floor. I squeeze my mother’s hand as I say the words that I know will make her walk out the door.

  “I think sometimes I don’t feel like I belong in my body.”

  I see my mom break a little, her posture falling. Her eyes latch onto mine in a way that makes it impossible to look away even though that’s pretty much the only thing I want to do.

  “What does that mean?” Mom’s voice is velvet soft as it presses against the dark clamoring in my head.

  I pull my hand from hers and shove it under my leg, let pain screech along my hangnail. I scramble to cover my mistake. “I’m not saying I want to be a boy.”

  “You’re not?”

  No. Yes. Maybe. “I don’t know.” It is the truth. “I think . . . I think sometimes I feel more masculine maybe.”

  “Good,” Dr. Richard says, and I want to cram the word down his throat. Because honestly? Who is he to tell me I’m good?

  Mom doesn’t even register Dr. Richard. Her eyes are all on me. Over me. Around me. In me. Seeing the dark thing. “But this doesn’t make any sense.”

  She leans back on the couch.

  She is pulling away.

  “You always hated boy toys when you were a kid. Just last year I asked you if you wanted to cut your hair short and you protested so violently. You said you didn’t want to look like a boy.”

  I look to Dr. Richard now, hating how much I need his support. “Good. Go on,” he says.

  “I think I was afraid.”

  “Of a haircut?”

  I hesitate, the fear strangling. “I wanted that haircut.” I was afraid of how much I wanted it.

  “I don’t understand,” Mom says. “That was your decision.”

  Short hair. It’s such a dumb thing. Scissors. A few snips. But what if the haircut made me look like who I was meant to be and then there was no turning back?

  Mom leans in, brushing a long wisp of hair from my face. I see the way her eyes linger on the small constellation of freckles on my forehead. The freckles make the shape of a heart. When I met Mom she told me the freckle heart looked like it was drawn with a fine-tipped paintbrush. Right there on my forehead so the whole world would know how big my real heart was.

  My heart is the reason my mom is my mom. Not the heart on my forehead, but the one inside my chest. I begged her to tell me our birth story at least a thousand times when I was little. I loved hearing about that cold Easter day eleven years ago when we met, how she helped me hunt brightly colored plastic eggs in the straw-yellow grass. How she’d cleared her throat when we stumbled upon one and I couldn’t even see its bold color through the haze of my excitement. How she let me bend down, pick each one up. How we pretended we were princesses collecting jewels. And at the end, how I dumped out all of my treasure on my foster family’s driveway, making two equal piles of pennies and Tootsie Rolls.

  “This one’s yours,” I’d told her, offering her a heap.

  “Mine?”

  “You helped me find our treasure, so you should get half.”

  “That’s so nice of you,” she’d said.

  “It’s the easiest thing in the world to be nice,” I’d said.

  Every time my mom repeated this story, she told me that this was the moment she knew I was her daughter. When I’d offered her half, even though I had nothing. It was the moment she knew I was born from her heart, she always says. She knew our hearts were family. I want her to tell me our birth story again now as we sit in the therapy cave. I want her to tell me that one unchanging story that makes me feel safe.

  “Is there more you want to say to your mother?”

  No. I don’t want to say more. I want to stay protected in my adoption story. But then I see my words on the wall, hieroglyphic pieces of me. My past. My now. I want to tell my mom so much, but I dare only this: “I’m not sure what I want.”

  Mom’s chest hiccups, but not with sadness exactly. Her lips form the words long before they pass her lips. “What are you really trying to tell me?” I feel the softness in her question, her patience no different than when she sat outside of my closet, holding my five-year-old hand. She on one side, me on the other. We were connected then. Even through all that darkness. I took her hand, heard the song of her soothing voice. I close my eyes, and I’m there again. In the darkness. Five years old. Scared—so fucking scared—but tired, too. Beyond tired. I tell myself I will let my voice close the distance between us. The way she did then. I will let my voice, my haunted, mixed-up voice, say the thing I have always wanted to say. From the day of the train. From the Easter egg hunt. From back beyond that, maybe. Beyond my earliest memories. I will let my voice tell my whole truth.

  I’m surprised when I look to Dr. Richard. “She picked me. Out of all the kids, she picked me. She picked a girl.” My words are words and tears and fear in such a jumble that I wonder if he can understand me.

  I turn to my mom. I let the echo of my voice crash around us because it is its o
wn train, and I can’t stop it now. My voice has no beginning or end. “I’m afraid you won’t love me anymore if I’m not in a girl’s body.”

  Mom exhales, her shoulders moving away from mine as they deflate. I close my eyes. I go to the part of my brain I can control. A compartment. I pack my clothes. I leave this place. Because I’ve always been alone. Will always be alone.

  “Oh, baby. I didn’t choose a girl or a boy.” My mom’s voice pierces through a thousand layers of doubt. Of fear. “Don’t you know I picked you for your heart? Your heart is the most beautiful thing I have ever known.” Her soft tone fills the space between us, hovers. “Only you get to decide how you want to carry your heart through the world.”

  And somewhere in the dark, faraway compartment where I stuff all my shit, I swear I hear a whistle blow. The kind of whistle trains have. The loud roar of a whistle that tells people to look out. Move away. I am coming through.

  Shannon M. Parker lives on the Atlantic coast in a house full of boys. She’s traveled to more than three dozen countries and has a few dozen more to go. She works in education and can usually be found rescuing dogs, chickens, old houses, and wooden boats. Shannon has a weakness for chocolate chip cookies and ridiculous laughter—ideally, at the same time.

  “Adoption means my sons found their forever home. Our hearts found forever love.”

  Broken Stars

  by C.J. Redwine

  Everything I own fits inside a burlap sack no bigger than my pillowcase. I fold my summer dress, smoothing the fraying fabric with shaking hands, and slide it into the sack, followed by my spare chemise—a treasure found in last winter’s charity bin—and the comb Ms. Adelaide gave me when I turned sixteen last month.

  “Don’t forget your stockings, Bellana.” Ellie swings down from the bunk above mine and drops to the floor. “Ms. Adelaide would never forgive you for going out into the world stockingless.”

  She gives me a bright smile, blue eyes flashing in her freckled face, but her cheerful tone sounds forced.

  I reach for my stockings, still respectable though I had to darn them after I caught my legs against a prickly bush on the way back to the orphanage from the first of many apprenticeship interviews Ms. Adelaide scheduled for me.

  Have you any experience with tutoring children?

  Do you have an aptitude for balancing columns of numbers?

  What skills do you bring to the discipline of alchemy?

  The interviews were a misery. A never-ending parade of questions to which I’d fumbled my answers, vainly searching for ways to stretch the truth into something that would persuade someone to offer me an apprenticeship upon my exit from Ms. Adelaide’s Home for Orphaned Girls when I turned seventeen, as the kingdom’s law required.

  I’d had no luck, though Ms. Adelaide had briskly assured me that I must be qualified for something, and that every “no” brought me one step closer to a “yes.” One step closer to having a roof over my head and food in my belly once I was on my own.

  None of that matters now.

  My heart flutters in my chest, a bird trapped in a cage of bone, and a pit of icy black fear opens within me. I draw an unsteady breath as I stare at the chest of drawers that I’ve shared with my roommates—Ellie, Karis, and Solana—since the day I was left on the orphanage steps at the age of four. I still catch glimpses of the woman who left me when I see myself in the mirror, but her voice has long since disappeared into the shadows of my memory.

  “Did you get everything?” Ellie is still using her too-bright voice, though it shakes at the edges now. She tugs my drawer out as far as it will go and sweeps her hands inside.

  “Better wear the stockings today. You’ll need to make a good impression.” Karis speaks from the bunk beside mine, her nails tap-tap-tapping against the polished grain of her bedstead.

  “She already made a good impression.” Ellie’s hands emerge from the drawer full of winter socks knit with my clumsy stitches and the apron she’d made for me last Winter’s Eve. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be adopting her.”

  “No, I didn’t.” I take the socks and the apron and fold them into the sack. The pit of fear sends shivers across my skin. I hadn’t made any impression on the people who’d be arriving today from the far edges of the kingdom to collect me and my meager belongings. They’d simply written to Ms. Adelaide and said they wanted to adopt an older girl. Ms. Adelaide had done the rest.

  She could’ve chosen Ellie with her quick wit, or Solana, with her gentle smile. She could’ve chosen Karis with her fierce confidence, or one of the fourteen-year-old girls who shared the room beside ours. Instead she’d chosen me, the shy one who’d daydreamed through every class and barely managed to master the basic skills necessary to find employment outside the orphanage. If I still believed in wishing on stars, I’d call it luck, but the stars I used to wish on are broken, and luck doesn’t happen for girls like me.

  Solana climbs down from her bunk and wraps a soft arm around my shoulders. “Don’t worry. They’ll love you.” She squeezes my shoulder and then turns to plait my unruly brown hair into a tidy braid. “You’re lucky to have a family.”

  A family. It’s what I’d wanted since the day I obeyed my mother’s command to wait on the steps of Ms. Adelaide’s until someone came for me. What I’d yearned for as I lay on my bunk at night those first few years, staring at the star-swept sky and wondering if my mother, with her wracking cough and her nervous fingers, stared at the same sky and thought of me.

  It’s what I’d wanted, but time is cruel and hope is a fragile creature.

  Karis stops tapping her fingers and looks at me. “You’re sixteen. You’ll be used as their governess or their maid. Or worse, if the man of the household finds you attractive. People don’t adopt sixteen-year-old girls because they want them in their family.”

  “Karis.” Solana frowns, while Ellie thrusts her hands onto her hips and glares.

  “People do too adopt older girls because they want them in their family.” Ellie’s voice trembles, and twin spots of pink burn bright against her pale cheeks.

  “No, they don’t.” Karis sounds weary. “If they did, none of us would still be here.”

  Ellie opens her mouth, but I beat her to it.

  “It doesn’t matter. I have to go with them and hope . . .” I swallow hard against the pressure building in my throat and gather my sack of belongings close to my chest.

  Ellie flings her arms around me. “Don’t forget about us.” Tears spill down her cheeks.

  The pressure in my throat sends a sharp ache along my jaw. “I won’t.”

  “They’ll love you.” Solana wraps her arms around me as well.

  I lean into her embrace without answering.

  Karis gets off her bunk, pries Ellie and Solana off me, and looks me in the eye. “No matter who they are or where you go, you’ll be fine, Bellana. You’re stronger than you think, and you know how to find your way back to us if you need us.”

  Before I can speak, there’s a sharp rap on the door, and then Ms. Adelaide comes in.

  Her gray eyes are steady as she assesses me in one swift glance. “Good. You’re ready. She’s waiting in her carriage. Say your goodbyes and come along.”

  I cling to my friends for one long moment, my chest aching as the pit of fear within me grows until I think it might swallow me whole, and then I slowly follow Ms. Adelaide out of the room.

  The carriage rumbles over the cobblestoned streets, and I sway against the seat as I clutch my burlap sack with white-knuckled fingers and stare at the woman seated across from me. She’s darker than me. Darker than most Veracians with her golden-brown skin and curly black hair. Noticing my gaze, she smiles.

  “My mother was from the kingdom of Therill. I resemble her.”

  My voice is a breath of its former self as I say, “I resemble my mother, too.”

 
“So you remember her?”

  “I remember her leaving.” I turn and stare out the carriage window at the gray-bricked storefronts with their brightly painted flower boxes and fancy iron doors. My mother used to love the marketplace. We’d trail our fingers over the velvet-smooth petals of the peonies that bloomed in front of the bakery, and she would smile at me like the big, wide world was ours.

  My chest aches again, a sharp pain that pierces the memory with bitterness.

  “I’m sorry.” The woman’s voice is gentle.

  I dig my fingers into my burlap sack and watch the marketplace give way to a wide avenue that cuts directly through a neighborhood of gracious homes built with pale stone and dark roofs. Is she sorry that my mother left me? Or that she’d decided to adopt a girl with no family, no apprenticeship, and no prospects beyond Ms. Adelaide’s determination not to have any of her wards end up as beggars on the streets?

  Silence stretches between us, and the pit of fear gnaws at me as my thoughts tumble into chaos.

  She was going to decide that a girl who barely speaks wasn’t acceptable.

  She was going to take me to her home anyway and make me teach her children their sums.

  She was going to pity me and show her friends what a good person she was for taking a girl whose own mother hadn’t kept her.

  She was going to bring me back to Ms. Adelaide’s and choose someone else.

  I should feel relief at the thought of going back to my friends. To the only home I truly remember.

  Instead, my stomach aches and my palms grow damp.

  “I brought you a present,” she says, her voice still gentle. Still careful. Like I’m a broken thing and she doesn’t want to damage me further.

  She lifts a small rectangular package wrapped in purple cloth and tied with twine and leans forward to hand it to me. I reach for it, the manners drilled into me by Ms. Adelaide stronger than my reluctance to let go of my burlap sack, and hold it in my palm. It’s heavier than I expect, and I nearly drop it.