Come Home

She told me to run. So, I did. I had no reason to trust her. No reason to believe in the words she said, but there was something in her urgency that resonated deep within me. Something that spoke to a buried part of myself that must have always known that none of it was real. Brought up to believe I had been abandoned by my own mother when in reality, they made me an orphan. My whole life had been crafted by an overseeing government that put people in my life to watch me and make sure everything played out exactly as they planned it.

I left my husband, the man I loved, the man I thought was devoted to me, sleeping in our bed. He was devoted, it turns out, just not to me. I told myself that if he truly loved me, some part of him, even while sleeping, would recognize that I was no longer there and come after me. He didn’t even move as I shifted my weight from the bed to the hardwood floor. Nothing. I crept across the room and down the stairs, my heart beating heavy in my chest. The bag I had packed days before was waiting for me where I left it under a sofa in the sitting room. The same room where I found the letter from my unknown mother that upended my world and everything I thought I knew.

The air was still—no movement from anything outside. I let the darkness envelop me as I stepped out into it. The curfew for unmarried individuals was nine o’clock, while if you were married, you had until midnight. Teenagers had to be home by six. I didn’t anticipate seeing anyone but kept to the shadows as much as possible. Living in the metropolis made it difficult to be discreet. Lights flooded the streets even though it was well past curfew.

I walked for what felt like miles before the city started to thin out. The skyscrapers became fewer; the towering buildings more spread apart. As the sky began to lighten, dawn approaching, I reached what I was searching for. We, my father and I, had passed it once on a car trip out of town to visit my grandfather. Never my grandmother. It was a relic of a life long abandoned, barely the shadow of a memory in the history books, leftover from a time when the earth provided sustenance, food, and water. My dad told me at the time that citizens used them, barns, to store equipment for farming, something we were unable to do now as the land has been over-polluted long ago.

I forced the sliding door to move against its will along the tracks. Decades, maybe one hundred years worth of rust made it difficult, but eventually, it gave way. I slid inside what should have been a dark room, but the fractured wood in the rafters bathed the inside with light. All the supplies inside were foreign to me, vehicles, tractors my father said they were called, with wheels taller than myself. Layers of dust coated the floor, walls, and windows. Cobwebs hung in the air between the beams of the ceiling. The air felt heavy and stale, but it would have to do. It would be too dangerous to travel in the light.

I picked a far corner in the back of the barn to settle into for the day. I would wait until dark before leaving again. There were no maps beyond the metropolis itself, so I was on my own at this point. Every path, every direction would be unknown. Every decision would have to be made on blind faith and intuition that I was capable of leading myself out. I did not know where I was going but had to trust my mother’s words that there even was a way to escape.

I pulled her now-familiar letter from my bag and re-read the words I already had memorized. My father lied to me my entire life until he handed me over to my husband, who had been orchestrating my every move so subtly that I didn’t even notice. Our government, the State, raised boys to control while girls were meant to be controlled. I read and re-read, thought, and replayed the critical moments from my life for any indication of overt manipulation, but they were masterful. I could make myself crazy thinking too much about it when I had already made my choice. The moment I walked out the door, there was no way I could return.

Sleep came over me without consciously realizing it. It was the now-familiar sound of rusted metal scraping against rusted metal that woke me. Footsteps crossed the threshold into the barn with me. I was no longer alone. My heart pounding, my breath came silently but faster and faster. I scanned the area around me for a place to better hide myself, but there was nothing. All this other person had to do was keeping walking, follow my footsteps through the dust to the area behind the gigantic tractor to find me, but instead, they stopped. What were they doing? They had to know someone was in here. There was no other reason for someone to come into this land of forgotten relics.

“Clara?” The voice was made to sound gentle, familiar, safe. The concerned tone was almost convincing.

“Clara,” he continued. “I know you’re in here. Please come out and talk to me.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised that my husband had found me. Of course, there would be measures in place to make sure someone couldn’t just disappear. My choices were few. I could stay in my hiding spot, waiting for him to come to me, or I could reveal myself and let him take me home. Would we go “home,” though? What happens to me now that I tried to run? They made my mother vanish. Would they do the same to me? There was no point in waiting for the inevitable.

I stood and walked toward the place I heard his footsteps stop. He was standing in the middle of the room, the light from the setting sun enrobing him like some heavenly being sent to rescue me from myself. We stood at odds, him in his divine glow, me in the shades. We measured one another before he spoke.

“I’ve been so worried about you.” His face was impassive. It did not read as the concerned husband whose wife had gone missing in the night.

“Really? You don’t look worried.”

“I’m confused, Clara. Why would you leave? Why would you come here?” I kept waiting for some sort of emotion to cross his features, but there was nothing.

“Because I finally know the truth.”

“What truth is that?” There was a slight curve at the corners of his mouth, like a sneer, but only for a flash. He was enjoying this.

“That it’s all a lie. Our marriage, my whole life. It’s been designed to play out in a certain way, and you’ve been part of it the whole time. My mother didn’t leave me. They took her.”

“Whatever you think you know, it’s not the truth.” He had shifted back to his blank expression. “Your mother was crazy, Clara. Our advances in medicine have come a long way. We’ve wiped out any genetic causes of mental illness, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still happen as a result of an accident. Your father told me that your mother was hit by a car when she was still pregnant with you. There was swelling in her brain that caused damage that made her paranoid and delusional. She kept thinking people were after her and that some overlord was controlling her life. She tried to hurt you when you were only a few days old because she was trying to ‘protect’ you from the same fate. She was taken to a hospital for people with injuries like hers; they could monitor her and keep her from hurting someone else. She died there a few years ago.”

It all sounded logical, believable, but he was having a hard time selling it. It was strange. He spent the last eight years making me believe everything he said and did with ease, but it was like he wasn’t even trying now.

“I don’t believe you. My dad would’ve told me if that was true.”

“He was the one really trying to protect you, not your mother. He didn’t want to burden you with what happened to her. He told me I could tell you after he died. If you ever asked about her. He couldn’t bear to tell you. He felt like he failed her and didn’t want you to feel that way about him, too.”

The many thoughts racing through my head stopped in their tracks. I did not see a lot of my father growing up, but he was dedicated to me. Anything I asked for, he gave it. I do think he loved me in his own way. He would lie to protect me from a truth that could be painful to me. But he gave me the key to finding my mother’s letter. He kept it safe for me all these years so I could one day know the truth.

“What happens to me when I walk out that door?”

He smiled now. “You’re making the right choice.”

“Can you answer one thing for me first?”

“I suppose we can take a few more minutes.”

“You know I don’t believe you, the story you just told me. What I want to know is, did you ever feel anything for me at all?”

His cold eyes did not move from mine. They made me uncomfortable, but I was not going to relent first.

“No,” he began. “Not until right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had to try with the story. It’s simple, Clara.” He closed the space between us but did not touch me. Instead, he started circling me, sizing me up, dropping the charming facade. “I’ve been bored. Bored to death, knowing what every day was going to look like. I knew you before you even knew yourself. Knowing exactly what your future holds and that there’s nothing you can do to make it any different, it’s mind-numbingly exhausting. But today, you did something different. Something unexpected. And that excites me.”

He stopped so that he was facing me, inches away. I could smell his usual cologne, see the flecks of gold in his blue eyes. These simple things that once felt like home seemed strange to me now.

“I can’t say what they’re going to do to you. I don’t know if anyone has ever done what you have before. Don’t fight them.”

He grabbed my arm roughly and led me toward the sliding barn door. He looked down at me one more time before reaching for the handle but instead grabbed my other arm, pulling me toward himself, kissing me with a ferocity and passion I had never felt from him before. And then it was over. I was dragged out into the fading sunlight. Men in black fatigues surrounded the barn, guns in hand as if they were expecting an army, not one woman on her own. One woman did part through the sea of black. Her silver hair gleaming in what was left of the fading daylight. As she reached me, I saw her hair matched her silver eyes. The most unusual eyes I had ever seen.

“We are so relieved you are safe, Clara.” This mystery woman at least had to decency to pretend to match her tone to her sentiments. “Thank you for your help, Killian.”

I watched my husband nod silently to her.

“Who are you?”

Her smile betrayed her, though. “Clara, honey. I’m your mother.”