“THEY’VE BLOCKED OFF the Copley Lawn exit by the market,” Kofi says.
“What do we do now?” Ethan asks.
“We’ll have to cut through the Reclamation crowd,” Kofi answers, “get to the exit at the far end of Healy Lawn.” Kyung looks extra dubious. “It can be done if we keep to the middle of the crowd, far enough from the stage, but not too close to the Reckoners on the perimeter.”
Not ideal but you are shit out of options.
“Let’s go,” I say, and the four of us wade back into the stream of Tabula Rasa.
Ethan sidles up next to me as we walk and pulls some photos from his backpack—like Paul’s photographs only in color. Holds one out to me.
It’s weathered, corners bent. A picture of two people, with a campfire and tent in the background. “Mom and Dad,” he says. “Professors here at Georgetown. She was theology. He was applied mathematics.”
Theology—that could explain my knowledge of the Bible. Maybe she taught me. I can’t help myself; I grab the photograph. The couple is smiling, ruddy faced. Happy. The man looks like he’s in his late fifties, tall, balding, with horn-rimmed glasses. The woman is younger, in her forties. She looks a lot like me, but I’ve no more recollection of these parents than the fake ones Paul offered up.
I hand the photo back, but Ethan persists. Holds out another baited emotional hook. This one’s of a boy and girl about ten building a sandcastle. I recognize Ethan, smiling, skinny, his too-big SpongeBob trunks already halfway down his butt. He grins at the girl, who’s pointing a shovel at him and laughing.
My eyes roam over this long-lost version of me. Her buoyant smile, jaunty polka-dot bikini, the cheeky angle of her sand shovel. I want to protect her. Freeze her in amber.
“Nice half-moon,” I say, passing the photo back to him.
“Mom had a real gift for capturing her children’s most embarrassing moments on camera,” he says, and I find myself wondering about her. Mom. What we liked to do, just the two of us girls. Bake? Tour museums? Spelunk? When he holds up a third shot, I pluck it from his hand—no attempt at indifference now. It’s of six people standing on a lawn: my parents, then in descending height, two pale boys in their mid-teens, Ethan, about ten here, and me on the end in a yellow dress, that smile again blazing.
Ethan says, “Next to me, that’s Daniel, and on the other side of him is Luke. He was the oldest…” I look closer at the boy/almost-man—and spot something wrapped around his wrist. A string of wooden beads—like the ones flanking my Latin medal from Georgetown Country Day. Luke’s beads.
My Christmas drone memory returns.
I’m in the living room. Nat King Cole’s still singing, but no one’s listening. The front door is open and loud voices out front are arguing.
I walk past it to my mother’s study, open the door, and approach the couch, where something is covered by a blanket. I pull it down and gaze at my father. Glasses are gone now. Body’s still warm, the mark on his neck still pink.
I put my head down on his still chest and sob, burying my face in his flannel shirt. I’m at least thirteen but in this moment I feel five.
My mother calls to me from the door: “Beatrix, you need to come now. I’ve arranged it.” She’s so, so pale. There’s a rouge-colored smudge on her neck, a couple pocks blooming nearby. She walks over, gently coaxes me away from the body and replaces the blanket.
“I’m not going. I’m staying here with you.”
“No, baby. You and the boys need to go with these men.” Two marines have appeared in the doorway. “They’ll keep you safe.”
“No!” I shout, backing away.
Luke slips by the soldiers. Enters the room, trailing Daniel and Ethan. Luke’s eyes are bloodshot but dry—he’s recently wiped his tears, having been hurriedly initiated into adulthood.
He’s still getting his parental sea legs. Tentatively puts his arm with the mala beads around my shoulder, his maiden attempt at being fatherly. “Hey, I’ll give you my Watchman deluxe edition and two Crunch bars…”
I shake my head, refusing his pathetic bribe, run and hug my mother, certain in this moment I will never hold anyone so tightly again.
But the marines’ patience has been exhausted, and now one is calling me “miss” and beginning to extricate me from her, limb by limb—
I stand very still amid the tide of Tabula Rasa filing past us, trying to assimilate this scene that has finally played out in full, all the blocks my mind had set up to protect me from its agonizing content cleared away. The wave of remembered heartache nearly flattens me.
“Bix?” Ethan asks, gently nudging me back into motion.
I describe the memory to him.
“That was the day Dad died,” he says, “and the soldiers came for us—marines the NSA sent to retrieve the kids.”
“What kids?”
“The ones from Georgetown’s early-college program. They were doing this all over the country with kids enrolled in similar platforms. Kyung, Gideon, and others in our group, they were in it with us.”
“You, me, Daniel, and Luke were all in this program?”
“Three of us were…” And I realize he politely means not me. “Not that you aren’t smart, just different smart … You’re an amazing writer—”
I wave off his verbal smile-nod. “But the marines took all of us?”
He nods. My mother, sending her children off with soldiers so they’d be as safe as she could make them in an impossible situation. Then dying alone. Like Worthy said: “You do whatever it takes to protect the people you love.”
“Mom played hardball, said she wouldn’t let them have the three of us if they didn’t take you, too. They could have insisted. There was a lot of that happening, people with guns, insisting … But the marine in charge agreed to Mom’s demands. Dad had just died; she was in bad shape. Maybe he took pity on her.”
Now I know why that memory stuck with me through time machine glitches and the protocol’s punishing voltage—hard to top being ripped by soldiers from my dying mother’s arms.
So what about that memory of Paul and me and that laughing boy at the quarry?
What emotional land mine has it been trying to show me for weeks? What I’ve recalled can’t compete with my nightmare Christmas memory.
What am I still not seeing?