PART ONE
1
Age 5
The night my mama died was marked with the click-click of the stupid cat clock that hung on my wall. It looked left and right as I stared at it, willing myself to fall back asleep. Mama had put it into my room as a night light and so that I’d know when morning came—but I was five and didn’t know how to tell time yet. Instead I would stare at the cat as he looked left, and then right, and then left again. Willing the sun to rise and for my mother to come in and pull me into her arms so that I could burrow into her sweet cinnamon scent.
Mama had fought with Papa Luis again tonight and Daddy had only sat in his chair and drank yellow liquid out of one of his special glasses. He was always drinking out of those glasses when everyone fought. Papa Sam always stayed out of the fights, happy to just go into his workshop and ignore the unhappy adults in the living area.
I wished I had a workshop to hide in.
Instead, I would sit on the floor next to my toys and pretend like I couldn’t hear them call each other bad names. I wanted to get up and go into my bedroom but I knew that Mama would just follow me in because she loved me and then Papa Luis would follow her because he wanted to continue fighting.
So I stayed and pretended to play with my toys, yawning louder and louder until Mama finally ended the conversation and scooped me up, carrying me down the hall to my bedroom. As she lay me down I looked up into her teary deep blue eyes that matched mine.
“If they make you cry so much mama, why do you stay?” My childish curiosity couldn’t help but be sated and I reached up with one of my chubby hands to touch her cheek.
Mama seemed to think about that quietly, her eyes going far away for a moment as she seemed to leave and go into another world. This scared me, it was like she’d left me all alone in favor of hiding away in her own thoughts.
“Mama?” I prompted putting my little hand over her icy ones and giving them a hesitant squeeze.
Mama jumped, seemingly coming back into her body and smiled down at me before leaning over and pressing a feather-soft kiss onto my forehead.
“Because,mi tesoro,” She always called me her sweetheart, “I could never leave my true love behind.”
“Who is your true love?” I asked excitedly, imagining the prince from the story we had read a few moments before. He’d come and save me and mama from all of the fights and we’d live in a castle until I was strong enough to save her on my own.
Mama just chuckled and brushed my brown curls out of my eyes, clucking under her breath about giving me a haircut in the morning before continuing, “Why, it’s you of course. You Leon are my pride, my joy and my hope. Don’t you ever forget that.”
Mama left soon after that and I was supposed to go to sleep. But for some reason my body couldn’t stay still. So I just watched the clock as it click-clicked the time away.
Just as I was finally beginning to doze off the sound of a splash woke me. Who was swimming in the pool so late at night? Mama and Daddy always said that swimming was for daytime. Who else would break the rules other than the ones who had made it?
I crawled out of my racecar bed and slid on my green dinosaur slippers before opening the door, wincing at the creak it made as I stepped into the dark hallway. The only source of light was the blue coming from the lit swimming pool in our backyard. It illuminated the hallway with a faint, eerie, blue.
Carefully, so as not to get caught, I crept into the kitchen and hid behind the big counter that sat in the center of the room and peeked around out of the giant windows that covered the entire wall and looked out into the pool area. It was a huge pool built into the ground and was surrounded by various beach chairs. I spent most afternoons in it with mama, splashing and having fun. Sometimes we convinced the daddies to hop in with us, but most of the time it was just the two of us.
I couldn’t see anyone on the pool deck, which somewhere in my mind I thought was strange, but nevertheless I continued on to the sliding glass door and tugged on it, pulling it open with a silent hiss.
“Mama?” I called, hoping that she was outside. It was dark, other than the blue glow from the pool and my eyes were playing tricks on me. For a moment I thought that the shadows on the edge of our backyard were moving but when I blinked my eyes the shadows had gone still again as they always were.
“Mama?” I called again, my eyes scanning the dark treeline of the forest that surrounded our home in the mountains of California. Finally my eyes landed on the pool and the pool float that was floating in the middle. It took only seconds for me to realize that it was not a pool float at all.
“Mama, why are you floating in the water at night?” I asked and stepped towards the pool as she drifted closer to me silently. Goosebumps ran up my arms and legs even though it was a relatively warm night. Mama bumped into the pool wall closest and I finally got a clear look at her. She was face up and staring into the sky, her lips were blue like the walls of my bedroom and she had… well…no expression. She seemed to have gone away again, like she had earlier when she was putting me to bed.
“Mama?” I asked again, my voice rising with a panic that hadn’t fully settled into my small body yet, “Mama wake up. Mama? Answer me—why won’t you answer me?” I was fully screaming now.
Lights turned on in the house behind me and suddenly arms were picking me up and turning me away from Mama in the pool. I inhaled my father’s scent of musk and roses as he frantically called for his pack mates.
I had asked my mama earlier: If they make you cry so much, why do you stay?
But she hadn’t stayed at all and had left me instead.
2
The smell of sweat and various other sickly sweet omega scents clogged my nose as I gripped the barre and lifted my arm over my head.
“And one, two, three, one, two, three…” Madame called from her place next to the speakers, her sharp green eyes seeing and judging every move we made as my dance class bent at the knees in clean pliés.
