Redemption Song

by Tanya Anne Crosby

  Caía blinked. “Pop . . . are you telling me I had a brother?”

  He nodded—a gesture that looked more like a man choking. And then he cleared his throat. “Your mama and I . . . we wished to stay. But your baba said go.” He was faraway now, as he told her this, and Caía shuddered. “She said she would send Stefan when it was safe.”

  Stefan. Goosebumps erupted on Caía’s arms and legs.

  Sorrow, like stone weights, sank into the depths of her heart. Just when it seemed her grief couldn’t reach greater depths . . . there was this . . .

  “They never made it?”

  It wasn’t a question. She knew the answer. There had been no pictures of that boy, Stefan, no pictures anywhere, but how could there have been? He was a child conceived in a time of war by a young couple who could have been no more than children themselves. Her father and mother had always been such sober people, doting on Caía throughout her life. But then, of course, they would have wished to protect their only surviving child—even from the truth.

  All that had ever mattered to either of them was to provide Caía with a good home. All their quiet evenings, their stoic silences, and heartfelt looks . . . the picture of her baba on the dresser, the only one that existed in their home. All of it made horrifying sense.

  “They never made it,” her father said, and his entire face seemed to quiver with emotion. His paper-thin flesh turned translucent pink. “But we had each other, Caía. And we had you.”

  She understood what he was trying to say, and there were things Caía probably should have said, but she couldn’t think of any of them. She couldn’t think of anything at all. What was he like? This boy, Stefan? Did he have the same blue eyes?

  Her father slipped into his native tongue. “Komu pora, temu czas.” When it’s time, you have to go. “But not yet,” he said. “An old man, on the other hand, has no reason to stay.” He too flicked a glance across the room, toward Gregg, who was holed up in a corner with his cell phone.

  “Bądź odważny,” her father said, patting her gently. “Be brave.” And then he hugged her tight for a long time before walking away, red-faced and physically depleted by their conversation. Caía let him go, for now, so he might find himself a corner to sit and recover. There was so much to say. So much to be said. But not here, not now.

  The next day, her dad insisted upon keeping his return flight to Athens. Caía assured him she would see him soon as she drove him to the airport, unable to cry, even when she saw him to the gate. She’d been so sure nothing more could happen. But she had been so wrong.

  And her father was gone barely a month later, leaving Caía with more questions than answers.

  You’d think a bombshell like that might be dropped over coffee—that it should come with closure. You didn’t expect to find out you had a brother, and then suddenly the one person who could answer any of your questions would be . . . poof, gone.

  Anger was easier to process.

  How could her father leave her with this knowledge? How could he leave her without helping her tie up everything in a neat little bow? How could he leave her here with no one?

  Alone!

  *

  Spain, present day

  There were moments in life that were excruciatingly ironic. This was one of them, Caía realized, as she peered up into Nick Kelly’s face. What were the chances both she and her son would lock gazes with the same man during the final moments of their lives?

  Except that Caía was alive, judging by the ache in her ribs . . . and her arm . . . and her head . . . and her heart. She had a concussion, two broken ribs, a fractured knee that would take some physical therapy, plus a dislocated wrist and deep scrapes from having grabbed a gnarly cactus on the way down. Fortunately, the cactus broke her fall just enough so that when she came down on her knee on the shelf below, it didn’t suffer the full impact of her weight after a six-foot drop. Nevertheless, Caía felt the impact and blacked out. She rolled down another eight feet, smacking her head against the foundation of one of the Bedouin huts.

  “Welcome back,” Nick said.

  At least a day’s worth of whiskers shadowed his well-defined jaw. His dark green eyes were closer to black, his pupils overlarge. Leaving Marta and Laura, Nick had rushed down the hillside to the overlook, and there, he called for help. Caía only vaguely recalled the ride to the hospital in the back of his car. They didn’t wait for an ambulance, because Caía had apparently lifted her head on her own, glassy eyed, freaking about her iPad. “Don’t touch it!” she’d screamed. “Where’s my iPad?”

  Perhaps she’d thought she’d brought it with her, and maybe she’d broken it during her fall. But, really, Caía couldn’t recall what she was thinking. Aside from the fact that her iPad contained access to her photos, she wasn’t particularly attached to the device itself. She had considered the eventuality of its loss, and had uploaded all her photos to the cloud, leaving only a select few on the device and her favorite set as the sleep-mode background.

  Looking her straight in the eyes, Nick laid the iPad down on the bed, beside her. Caía didn’t reach for it. She couldn’t. She didn’t try. She didn’t know what to say. Thank you?

  “He has your eyes,” he said.

  The muscles in Caía’s throat tightened. Words refused to form.

  There was no condemnation in his gaze, only sadness. “I turned it on to see if we could . . . get numbers . . . to contact your . . .”

  “Next of kin?”

  He gave her a half-hearted smile. “No. The doctor needed permission to treat you, and we didn’t know who to call.”

  Caía turned away. “And what?”

  “What, what?”

  “Did you reach . . . someone?”

  “Yes,” he said softly, and Caía turned again to face him, tears swimming in her eyes. Who, she wanted to ask, but pride wouldn’t allow it. Who was left? No one.

  His dark eyes were like mirrors, reflecting Caía’s grief. “I recognized him right away,” he managed to say, over the lump visible in his throat.

  “Jack,” she said, testing the name. “His name is Jack . . . my son . . .”

  He nodded soberly. “I had a feeling I knew you, Caía.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. She pushed her head back into the pillow, in terrible pain—not just her body, but her heart and soul.

  “I get it,” he said.

  *

  Life was messy, Nick thought, as he studied the woman lying in the hospital bed. She was broken in ways he feared doctors might never fix.

  Deep in his gut, he must have realized who she was. The kinship they’d shared had been far deeper than anything he should have for a woman simply because they were both from the same hometown. She stubbornly avoided his gaze, staring at the door, as though hoping it would open and someone might burst through and prevent their discussion.

  “Were you ever going to tell me, Caía?”

  She made a slight movement he thought might have been a shrug. “I don’t know,” she confessed, and when she turned to look at him again, there were tears glistening in her eyes. “How long have you known?”

  “The instant I turned on your iPad,” he said. “If I live a million years, I will never forget his face.”

  Caía began to sob then, in earnest, turning her face so far to one side that it seemed she would break her neck. Nick reached out, gently touching her left arm, uncertain which parts of her didn’t hurt. If he hadn’t been around to see it happen, he wouldn’t have known this was the same woman. Her face was swollen, her skin black and blue. There was edematous swelling beneath the skin of her face, and an orbital floor fracture in her left eye. Her hair had been shaved on one side to stitch up a wound. The blood loss frightened him. Only later was he reassured that head wounds sometimes seemed worse than they were, because the scalp was riddled with blood vessels. Fo
rtunately, they were right; it looked worse than it was. Caía’s ribs would heal quickly. Her wrist as well. The knee would take time and therapy. Nick petted her arm, waiting quietly for her sobs to subside. Finally, she swallowed and asked, “Does Marta know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she hate me?”

  “No.”

  She swallowed again. “Laura?”

  “She doesn’t know, Caía.”

  And then she turned her face again, tears streaming down her cheeks and went back to staring at the door, with trembling lips.

  Nick wasn’t about to allow her to ignore him. Wherever they went from here, it was better to leave nothing unsaid. “I need to know, Caía . . . what did you expect to do?”

  Caía shook her head. She pursed her lips, refusing more sobs. She looked like she was on the verge of having a fit, her face red, and her body shuddering violently. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.” And then she met his gaze, and in her eyes Nick saw what he needed to see. She cried, and he let her, and then she said, “Mostly, I guess I needed to know he wasn’t forgotten.”

  Nick nodded, thinking back to that sunny Wednesday in June—a day not even a lobotomy would help him forget. Deep down in his soul, even if he didn’t actively think of it, it was a horror he would relive until the day he died. It defined him now, his every decision, his every waking move. “I remember,” he said. “I will always remember, Caía.”

  She blinked a few tears from the corners of her eyes, then wiped them away. “He was a good boy . . . Jack was . . . he was . . . my whole life.” More tears, silent and heartrending. And then, after a while, she said, brokenheartedly, “It was his birthday, did you know?”

  Nick felt a stab at his chest, but it was a familiar pang he lived with every day, some days more intensely than others. He shook his head. Tears pricked at his own eyes.

  Not once during their time together had she ever asked him to elaborate on the actual event—all the gory details. If she were to ask him now, he would tell her, but there was nothing significant he could add that would make her feel better. He wasn’t speeding that day. He didn’t run any lights. He wasn’t on his phone, despite the fact that he did turn to look at it for that split second. Jack Lawrence Paine—a good-looking kid from Roscoe Village, with dirty-blond hair like his mom’s, and expressive blue eyes—had skated directly into his path.

  Nick remembered odd bits from that fateful moment—the metallic glint of a cell phone in Jack’s hand, the wide, terrified eyes, and, most of all, he remembered the final parting of his lips—a single-syllabic formation of his mouth that might have been a moan of pain, but Nick thought he’d called for his mom. For one terrifying moment after his car came to a complete stop, he’d stared at the half of Jack’s face that lay so still on his windshield, blood trickling from one corner of his mouth. For one split second, he saw the life in that boy’s eyes, and then, the very next instant, as though someone flipped a switch, it was extinguished. By the time Nick stumbled out of his car, dazed and scared half out of his mind, there was a gathering crowd.

  “Oh, my God,” one woman said. “Oh, my God! Is he dead?”

  “Doctor!” someone screamed. “We need a doctor!”

  Someone else took hold of Nick’s arm, maybe because his legs didn’t seem to want to support him. “I saw the whole thing,” some lady said. “He skated right smack in front of your car. Just like that. My dear, you couldn’t have stopped. Nobody could have stopped. Don’t worry, I’ll stay and talk to the police. What a shame. What a shame.”

  All these years, Nick had held himself responsible, despite realizing on a logical level it could truly have happened to anyone. It made sense to him that the boy’s mom would blame him as well . . . except he didn’t see any condemnation in Caía’s eyes, not anymore. What he saw now was a look of defeat . . . a woman in pain. He slid his hand down her bruised and battered arm, and nestled it in the palm of her hand. She closed her fingers around his, attempting to squeeze.

  “Where do we go from here?”

  It was a fine question. Nick thought about it a moment. Where could they possibly go from here? “We forgive ourselves, forgive each other, maybe start again . . . as friends?”

  “I’d like that,” Caía said, and they sat together in the hush that followed, she in her hospital bed, and Nick in the chair beside her, silently holding her hand.

  A Life so Fair

  With more than three million wheelchairs in use in the U.S. alone, it was safe to say no, life isn’t all that fair. If Caía had a mind to, she could list pages and pages of things that weren’t, and could never be described as fair. The Holocaust. Poverty. Hunger. Abuse. Pick up a newspaper—any newspaper—on any given day; add twenty new items to your list.

  It was a hard pill to swallow for a naïve girl from Athens, Georgia, whose parents had loved her so completely that life could seem to be nothing less than fair.

  But Caía saw her parents in a whole new light now—the points of light in their eyes that, like Marta’s, had been both happy and sad. Those emotions must seem complete dichotomies, but in truth, they were like facets of a diamond that didn’t diminish its sparkle. Rather, they intensified it.

  Their sadness for the child they’d lost never lessened the love they’d felt for Caía. And Caía realized now that their love for her had never diminished the grief they’d felt for Stefan. Her parents had devoted their lives to making sure Caía never doubted their love for her—as Marta had done for Laura. Caía had basked in her share of love, and Stefan’s share as well. But this was the thing about love—and it wasn’t a platitude—the more you gave, the more you had to give.

  Love, like anger, or fear, was a choice to be made.

  That day, on that hill, Caía might have made any number of choices and there might have been a different outcome.

  If only she’d accepted Nick’s proffered hand, perhaps they might have strolled uneventfully to the top of the hill and shared a poignant moment with a little girl and her grieving mom.

  Together, they might have scattered Jimmy’s ashes, lifted to the winds in Chinese lanterns. Caía could actually envision this in her head . . . a trio of white lanterns launched at sunset, after a picnic on the summit. So dramatic. There would be tears, of course, but there would have been laughter as well, because it was difficult to wallow in sorrow with a precocious five-year-old running around. “¡Mira! ¡Mira!” Laura would have shouted, as those lanterns danced on the breeze. “¡Adios, Papá! ¡Adios!” Good lord, there wouldn’t have been a dry eye on the hill.

  And then, if only Caía had placed her hand on the small of Nick’s back and slid it around to his side, gently encouraging him to turn around. Maybe then she might have wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him, and said, “I forgive you. Can you ever forgive me?”

  Who knows where things might have gone from there.

  There was so much to say . . . so many confessions to make. So much talking to be done, but her father would have said, “Milcz i całuj.” Don’t talk. Just kiss.

  He might have also said, “Gdyby kózka nie skakala, to by nózki nie zlamala,” which loosely translated meant, “If the goat didn’t jump, she wouldn’t break a leg.” In the very same breath, he might have also said, “If the goat didn’t jump, she would have a miserable life.”

  So, which was true?

  Both.

  Whatever, a broken leg was an easy enough price to pay for a happy life. Right?

  But there were so many “what ifs.” Such as, what if Caía had paid more attention to her son? What if she had said no when he’d asked to go to the park? What if Gregg had never given him that cell phone? What if she had never called him from the bar? What if Jack had never picked up his phone? What if Nick hadn’t been on his way home at just the right time?

  And later, what if she had never followed Nick to Spain? What i
f she had never approached Marta that day in the mercado?

  What if she had sat home and cried and cried and cried, and never left her bed? What if her mom hadn’t died? What if her father wasn’t so heartsick after her death? What if Caía had been at his side, holding his hand as he passed from this life to the other, to join his wife and son? What if Caía never pressed Gregg into moving to Chicago? What if they had never even gotten married?

  Well, Jack, you wouldn’t have been born . . .

  It was so easy to imagine how this story should unfold.

  Relationships don’t thrive on lies. So, what else can you do but move on, go home—make a new life, because the life you left already feels strange. Hopefully, you walk away changed, with the understanding that we all exist on borrowed time. You make the most out of life, with the simple knowledge that even if life isn’t fair, death is. It comes for everyone eventually, and every story ends the same way . . . whether you’re a little boy in Poland waiting for his mom and dad to bring him home . . . or a little girl in Athens, Georgia, who thinks the sun revolves around her.

  But this could be another ending: Her father also used to say, “Swój ciagnie do swojego.” Same kinds attract. What if living things are bound by the energy that surrounds us? What if we can change the course of our lives by listening to the right frequencies? What if nothing is a coincidence and everything is connected? Even those strange, little exploding cucumbers . . .

  “Stella, no!” Caía shouted.

  Seizing her four-year-old cousin by the hand before she could touch one of the dischargeable green pods, Laura said, “Don’t worry, Tiíta, I have her.”

  At twelve, Laura was already becoming a little lady, wearing hoop earrings that made her face look too mature. She’d lost her baby fat and was dressed like a little hipster, with a Star Wars backpack looped over one shoulder. Her mom walked ahead, with a new boyfriend, an Italian who seemed secure enough in their relationship to allow Marta to come here and celebrate her ex-husband.