I look out my own window to see that the moon is still high in the sky and the stars are out and still up to their mischievous twinkling. It’s still night. I hear the door creak open and my gran speak softly to whoever is on the other side of it. I sit up, too curious not to sneak out of my room and have a peek at what’s going on, but then I notice my mom standing in the corner, next to my bookshelf.
She smiles at me and I smile back, but something about the exchange feels off. I suddenly feel scared.
“What are you doing, mommy?” I ask softly, my voice heavy with sleep.
“Saying goodbye, My Heart,” she tells me, her smile filled with tender affection, but then she wipes a tear from her cheek.
“Why are you sad?” I ask as I feel my own worry and sadness climb to the surface, but my mom walks over and pulls me into her arms, and I suddenly feel better.
“I’m always with you, Falon. Remember that, okay?” she tells me, and I squeeze her tighter and nod my head against her chest.
“We tried hard to hide you from it all, but it found us anyway,” she tells me on a sob as she pulls me in even closer. Her hug is bruising and it hurts, but I don’t want to say anything. I’m scared. “Just know that you are all you need, okay, My Heart? When the loneliness and sadness feels overwhelming, remember that you are enough, and you will be okay. I love you, and I’m so sorry.”
“I love you too, mommy,” I tell her, but all at once, she’s gone. I fall to the bed, my mother’s bruising hug and words just an echo around me. I can feel her lips against my hair, and yet there’s no one here. Confusion fills my mind, and then fear quickly replaces it. I throw back my covers and call out for my mother.
Did I have a bad dream?
Footsteps rush up the stairs and relief filters through me. She’s coming. She’ll make it all better. My gran’s face peeks in through the door, her complexion ruddy and her cheeks wet.
“I had a bad dream,” I tell her, and she rushes to the bed and pulls me into her lap.
She doesn’t say anything, she just rocks me and cries. This reminds me too much of my dream, and I feel instantly nervous and afraid.
“What’s wrong?” I finally ask
“There was an accident, my sweet. Your daddy didn’t make it, and your mommy got hurt.”
I try to understand what she’s talking about, but there’s a knock on the door. I look up to find a police officer standing there.
“Ma’am, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but we just received news that Noor Umbra passed before the ambulance could make it to the hospital.”
“Oh, no,” Gran keens, and she drops her cheek to my head and starts to rock me harder as she cries. I don’t know what’s going on. I just saw my mommy, and she didn’t look hurt. Does she need a Band-Aid? I always feel better after I get a Band-Aid for my owies. I’ll wait to ask when Gran doesn’t feel so sad. I relax into my gran’s hug and think about my dream, my mommy’s voice like a whisper in my ear.
“I love you, and I’m so sorry.”
5
Iwake up with a start and immediately sit up. I press a palm to my chest as if the gesture will help my heart to slow down.
It wasn’t a dream.
I don’t know why I’ve never made the connection before, but my mother was there the night she died. She held me and told me she loved me. I hadn’t made it up. I try to breathe through the shock of the realization, but I feel like I’m floating haphazardly, and I don’t know how to get my feet back on the ground.
The night my parents died feels like it’s burned into the fabric of who I am. I’ve always replayed my gran telling me, the memory changing with time as I grew older and understood more and could look at it through a different lens than the one my five-year-old self saw everything through.
I’ve always thought of the dream as just that...a dream. I’ve even wondered if my mind made it up. One last moment with my mother that my psyche so desperately wanted that the want itself morphed into a confusing memory. But looking at it all now, knowing what I am and what they were, it changes everything about that night for me.
If I hadn’t left my own body to visit Zeph, if I hadn’t experienced it firsthand, I would easily still call it all a dream, but I know better. She was there that night. She could do what I can do. She said goodbye. So many different emotions fight to be let out, but I try to wade through them to make sense of all of this.
I think back through what I thought I knew about my childhood, and try to piece all these surfacing memories into my version of the past. I feel like I’m trying to put a puzzle together with a bunch of pieces I didn’t even know I was missing.
My mother and father met and learned that they were mates. It seems like all of that went down at a volatile time. If I had to guess, I would suspect all of this happened at the beginning of a Gryphon uprising, since it was my father who seemed to be unsafe, and my mother’s connection to him was what also put her in danger.
Somehow my gran, who wasn’t actually my blood relative, but my mother’s servant, figured out how to escape, and they all ended up in the world I grew up in. We were hiding. My parents and my gran thought it would be safer, but clearly that couldn’t have been the case, because we were still hiding.
I think back to my mother’s journal, and something suddenly hits me. The dates I saw in the first book that had my mother’s name. She was born in 1619, which is a fact that’s hard for me to wrap my mind around, but that’s not what’s puzzling me. It said to see the archived writings, which I now know was my mother’s journal. She writes about being pregnant, but the information in the tome states that the journal was discovered in 1927.
I was born in 1994.
