M. Hanover - Graveyard Child

“Gary found out, of course,” my mother said, but I was only half listening. “He knew the baby couldn’t have been his. I tried to explain to him that he was my Joseph. I tried to tell him that it was God’s plan, and about the angels, and that I carried a child and an angel both within me. I believed then that I was without sin, and I told him that. I told him all of that.”

“Can’t imagine that went well,” I said. It was more glib than I would have chosen if I’d been stable.

“His rage was justified. I’d broken my vows to him.”

“What did he do to Eric?”

“Nothing. He didn’t know.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

“Of course not,” my mother said, waving the question away like it was silly. “I was the vessel of angels. I suffered and I endured. But I had her within me. And I had you. He couldn’t kill me, and anything less than that, I could stand.”

The door to the restaurant opened, and Chogyi Jake stepped inside. He looked over toward me, his smile as calm as always, then nodded and went to a table near the front where he could see me and my mother and the front windows too. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, so I figured the Invisible College wasn’t about to attack. And if they weren’t actively going to pull the trigger, I didn’t have time for them. Not right now.

“Gary is a good man. We prayed together for a long time, and I came to see that I had wronged him. That Eric and I had both wronged him.”

“And where was Eric while that was going on?”

“Gone,” she said, her eyebrows lifting in a mask of wistfulness. “He vanished, and I never knew where to. Gary said that Eric had always been like that. Solid as stone one day, and gone the next. I’d heard that before, but I thought he would stay with me. I’d thought . . . Gary could have turned me out into the street. He could have asked for a divorce, and who would have told him no? After what I’d done.”

A tear slipped down her cheek, tracking makeup along with it. I put my hand on hers, thinking a little comfort, a little contact, might make things better. She flinched back like I’d stung her.

“My husband is a good man. He forgave me my sins, and he took me back into his arms. And you. He took you as his daughter. He raised you as his own. He did everything to protect you. And you repaid him with cruelty. I have never been so ashamed as I was the day you abandoned us.”

Not even when you were screwing Eric, I almost said. I swallowed it. There was no point. For her, my leaving was an unforgivable sin. The choices she’d made didn’t signify, because they were God’s work. Beyond her control. And if Eric had been using the magic I was almost certain he had, then there was even some truth in it.

I’d left of my own free will. It had been a choice—my choice—and I’d made it. Mom had been at the whim of Eric and the riders and God only knew what else. I wondered, if I’d been in my father’s position, if I’d have done the same. Raised a kid that wasn’t mine and kept a spouse who wouldn’t even tell me whose cuckoo I was supporting. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d have done it.

“He came back, though. Eric. He came back and he told Gary himself. Do you remember that? Your father came home and made each of us swear never to speak to Eric. Never to have anything to do with him again. He was so angry. With himself. With me. It was the only time he wouldn’t pray with me. That was how I knew.”

“I figured Eric was gay,” I said.

“You were young,” my mother said. Her voice was dry and brittle as slate. “You didn’t know much.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, even though I wasn’t. It was the right thing to say, and my mother nodded once in reply. “The angel? Sonnenrad? What happened to her?”

“She left me,” Mom said. “No bonds could hold her forever. But she’s in you. Isn’t she?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Something like her. I have a friend who’d call her a daughter organism. Did Eric ever tell anyone why he did it? What it was all about?”

“You must get rid of it. You have to cast it out of your body.”

“I thought it was an angel.”

“It is my sin. It’s poisoned you because of me, but you can still be clean. You can put her back in me. I can be your sacrifice. I can carry it for you. I’ll do that for you, because you are my child and I love you.”

Now she was the one to reach for my hand, and I tried to pull back. Her fingers were stronger than I’d expected. Her eyes locked on mine. At the front of the restaurant, Chogyi Jake shifted in his chair, pushing back a few inches from his table in case he needed to come to my rescue. I didn’t give him any signal, and he waited.

I tried to put the woman across the table from me together with the mother I knew. The mousy, quiet, subservient woman who accepted my father’s anger. The meek one who told us all to make peace, to do as my father said. To obey and be good and be quiet. She looked the same. Older, but the same. And that was where the similarity stopped, because everything else about her was different.

“I think I need to go,” I said, my voice shaking less than I expected it to.

“No,” she said, loudly enough that the waitress turned to stare. There’s a limit to how much privacy you can buy in a public space, and we’d reached it. “I am not Mary. I am not without sin. What you carry in you is corrupting you because of what I did. Give it back to me, and be pure. Let me help you. Let me make you pure.”

I stood up.

“Thank you,” I said, the words empty and automatic. I took a few light-headed steps toward the door, and Chogyi Jake rose in my peripheral vision. My mother’s sobs rang through the place as I reached the door, pushed out into the cold air. The wind was like being slapped, and I welcomed it. Chogyi Jake put a hand on my shoulder, turning me gently, and I realized that the SUV I was staring at was mine. Ex was behind the wheel. I tottered over to the front passenger’s-side door and lifted myself in.

“Back to the hotel?” he asked as I shut the door. Chogyi Jake trotted to a side lot where his rental was parked, nose out for a fast getaway. “Jayné?”

“Hmm? Oh. Right. Yes, back to the hotel.”

Ex slid out into traffic, and I craned my neck. Mom was still in the restaurant. Still at our table. Her head was in her hands. The urge to go back to her was powerful and doomed.

“You all right?” Ex asked.

I’m fine fought with Hell no . The streets slid away under the tires, and I didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask again. All I could remember was my mother’s face as she asked me to put the rider back into her; all I could see was the hunger there.

“I mean, I knew my family was screwed-up.” I sat on the edge of my bed, one leg folded under me. The mattress made a soft huffing sound under my weight. Like an exhalation. “But oh my God. That was . . .”

“Kind of reframes your whole childhood?” Ex said.

“Does.”

Chogyi Jake stood beside the little in-room coffeemaker, a black coffee cup in one hand and a tea bag in the other. The machine gurgled and spat heated water into a pot. Chogyi Jake’s stubble was getting long again, his scalp fading into a dark halo. He’d shave it again soon. Ex’s smile would have looked cruel and a little judgmental if I hadn’t known that most of his judgments were on himself or the world. I knew these men well enough to read the way they held their bodies, the way they spoke, and dressed. We’d been in almost constant company since I’d arrived in Denver. Since I’d begun this chapter in my life. It was the kind of intimacy that you got with family. Small indications that grew into a larger whole, that drew along a whole cloud of implications behind it.