“I’m not stupid,” she says softly.
“Sam, I brought you here so that you can be free. We came here because you can become anything, not so you can trap yourself in something you can’t escape.”
“Why do you think I’m trapped?”
“Because you are keeping a secret from me. Something iswrong.”
Sam’s dark thoughts are crowding her mind. “Nothing’s wrong!”
“You are in the greatest country in the world. You can doanything,if you work hard enough, if you study hard—”
“Then what?” Sam is shouting now. The leak of words becomes a flood.“What?” She throws her hands up. “We came herefor what? Why won’t you believe me? You work twelve hours a daydoing what? What you love? What pays you? When will your reality match up withyourdream, Mama? What wereyoulooking for? What’s the point?”
“You don’t know anything at all.” Her mother says it with vehemence and disgust. “You are a child and you have no idea what suffering means.”
“You have never seen my suffering.”
“And you’ve seen mine? You realize all my suffering is foryou?”
“I didn’t choose your suffering! I didn’t chooseyou!” There is a vein of cruelty in Sam’s words now, and she can’t stop it. “I don’t need to be grateful when I never asked for you! I don’t need to bare my soul to you because you’ve—never—been—here!”
Her mother puts her chopsticks down and leans back. Sam has struck her, has drawn blood. “Selfish child,” she hisses between her teeth. “You think I’m never here with you. Never spend time with you. I wasn’t here because I was working foryou.”
“Not that. I understood that. You’re neverhere.” Sam taps her chest. “I’ve never once seen your heart. And you expect me to show you mine? I don’t even know you!”
“Maybe you just don’t know how to see.” Her mother is here to draw blood too. “All these years, and you still have never managed to step out of your selfishness. You think you know everything. You think you understand me.”
“Do you understand me? Do you know why I do things?” Sam can feel the tears building in her throat.
“Tell me,then. Talk to me.”
“You should have asked that years ago. You should have wanted that when you had me.”
“You’re lucky I kept you.”
The words are spat so quickly, with so much harshness, that Sam barely catches them. Her mother looks down at her bowl, brows furrowed, seemingly angry with herself. After a while, she takes a bite of rice and stabs her chopsticks into another slice of chicken.
The world is blurring now and Sam can’t bear the idea of crying here, right in front of her mother. Instead she closes her eyes and swallows hard. Her nails dig into the wood. When she opens her eyes, she sees that underneath her fingers, bits of the wood have turned black, into ash.
Hurriedly, she transmutes the wood back into its original state before her mother can see. But does it even matter? Their fight tells Sam that her mother likely knows nothing about alchemy or Lumines’s connection to the restaurant explosion. If she did, she would have guessed Sam’s secret. She would have known. She would have said something. Instead, all Sam feels is an insurmountable gulf between them. They are so far apart that nothing can bring them back together.
She pushes away from the table and stares through her mother to the wall beyond. After a while, she stands and quietly gathers her things. Her mother doesn’t try to stop her, doesn’t even look up from her food. Sam turns around and heads to the door.
Outside, the sound of sirens turns deafening and then fades as quickly as it comes.
That night, she dreams of her mother.
She is tying up Sam’s hair in their old apartment’s bathroom. Sam must still be a child here, because her hair is still black, but in the nature of dreams, she can’t recall exactly what she looks like in the mirror. After she wakes up, she will only remember a reflection of her adult self staring back at her. The sadness in her chest is so heavy that she is struggling to stay upright, lest she sink to the floor and fall right through. Something terrible has happened, but she can’t remember what. It is only in the back of her mind, somewhere out of reach.
When her mother finishes tying her hair and she turns around, they stare at each other. In reality, her mother would have simply left to do whatever else she needed to do. Maybe she would have told Sam to go sit down for dinner. But in the dream, she stops to take in her daughter. She has an expression on her face that mirrors the grief in Sam’s chest.
What’s wrong?her mother asks her. It’s a question she has never asked in real life.
Sam just shakes her head.Nothing.But to her shame, she is crying, tears spilling down her cheeks.
Her mother reaches out and gently touches her daughter’s face. To Sam’s surprise, she is crying too. She searches Sam’s gaze for something to latch onto, a reason, an opening.You can tell me,she says in the dream.It’s going to be okay.
But all Sam can do in the dream is cry and cry and feel embarrassed for every tear. She wants to run from her mother and hide from the discomfort of being so exposed in front of her, but she also wants to stay because she has never seen her mother’s heart open before, the sight of tears in her eyes. She wants to tell her mother,Something is wrong with us. Can’t you feel it?
But neither of them say anything. They only look at each other, their hearts breaking, and don’t know why.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The Great Gatsbyby F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
