Do you understand.
It is, perhaps, one of the cruelest sentences, and so often spoken to children.
I understood nothing, and somehow, I already knew everything. My life, as it had been, was over, and I was brought to this place to be birthed into another. I understood that my insight was not wanted, nor needed. I knew that it was my job to accept my fate with grace.
What else could I do? I nodded and fisted my blanket, watched as the only home I’d ever known prepared to ride off and lose himself. He finished tying up his provisions and I knew it was time. He knelt before me. “Don’t forget me,” he whispered, gripping my chin with his thumb and forefinger.
Perhaps being forgotten is the worst thing an adult can imagine, but as a child what mattered wasn’t the forgetting, but the removal. Being isolated. I was a stranger in a strange world, too small to navigate these waters. Too young to understand what was happening. Everything narrowed. Reality became defined by the shattered-glass sound of my own frozen screams.
I did not know that a person could feel so powerfully. I did not know that sorrow could scald.
I was not sad that he would forget me, or I, him. I was afraid because suddenly I knew what it was to be cold. I was frightened because now I understood the awesome power of the word alone.
When I was a child, I did not know how much life could hurt.
I have gained one truth over the years: The heart is a knife. Each beat of it cuts.
We locked eyes. He nodded once, already pulling on his cold, distant mask. Then, he stood up, got onto his horse, and rode away, the mist swallowing him up as though he never was.
I watched the spot, the small hole in the trees he’d disappeared through. Watched it for what must have been hours, waiting for him to return. Waiting for him to show up again with a big smile, “Just kidding, little flower,” he’d say.
But He never returned. The birds chased each other through the sky. The day slowly melted away the mist.
When I look back on that moment, what I remember most is the sunlight. The way it spilled into that small clearing like a river of molten gold or a waterfall of honey. My entire life had changed in an instant, but the sun remained unmoved.
I smelled wood smoke and sizzling fat. My stomach moaned. The door opened and Annie appeared, wearing a thin shift and a thick shawl, her hair pinned up high and covered by a light bonnet. Her smile was sad, and somehow knowing as well. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “He’s gone then?” She asked.
She didn’t wait for an answer before she pulled me into her embrace. I let her hold me close. She was not my mother, but I needed someone to cling to. Everything I’d ever known had just ridden away.
“Oh, you poor, sweet thing,” she whispered against my hair. I let her wrap her arms around me while I grew more and more brittle. More and more cold.
Touch me, and I might shatter. Hold me, so I can stay whole.
What kind of man leaves his only child in the arms of strangers? What kind of pathetic daughter was I, for being so easy to leave?
I know now that he was desperate. I know how love can twist a person. But as a child, all I saw was the knife, and all I felt was the wound.
“Come inside and eat,” Annie said. She wiped her eyes and smiled at me, and I tried to smile back, but something inside was frozen.
She knelt before me. “Chris, your da, has always been his own person. He’s a good man, but he’s never been one who could deal with the hard realities of life. He’s more prone to running than sorting through his soul. He’ll come back, Cassandra. He’ll come back as soon as he realizes what he’s left here. Don’t blame him for being broken. Sometimes the world is too hard for the people who live in it.” She pressed her lips against my cheek. “He’ll be back. I swear it.”
I nodded and let her take me inside to break our fast. I now know what resignation tastes like. It is savory, like fresh bacon cut from the side of one of Annie’s pigs.
And that’s how I started my new life.
The train thundered away on the tracks. The gentle sway of the car should have been rocking him to sleep. Instead, he was wide awake, eyes fixed on the other side of the window. Mountains. So many mountains. He’d never seen such things. Of course, he knew of them. He’d spent hours upon hours tracing his fingers over those wrinkles on the maps he’d studied. He was an Esco, after all. He was well versed in the formations of the earth, and what it hid under its skin.
He’d just never actually seen them.
They were tall. So tall, and so…
“You ready for this?” His companion asked, settling his bulk into the chair across from Arlen. Sterling Wallace was in his early fifties, with brilliantly combed mustaches and age spots on his bald pate. Beside him, Elroy McGlover, Arlen’s bodyguard, snored peacefully, his brown hair mussed against the glass.
They’d boarded the train in People Town, and were almost done with their four-hour ride through all the unclaimed in-between. This was the last leg of their seemingly endless journey. He was ready for it to be over. Ready to see what lay on the other end of these railroad tracks.
Until then, he marveled in the adventure of it all. He’d never seen anything like the frontier. Up they went, and up, and up. Up until he felt like was riding through the sky itself, scattering the stars with his fingertips and laughing with the moon. Silvery starlight showed him a world thick with pine trees. The fabled West peeking from between their trunks like a bashful lover, tempting him to savor its hidden delicacies.
It would be his when his father retired, and that would be a long way off. Which was fine. Running an empire was a lot of work. He was well-versed in the numbers, but he had a lot to learn before he was ready for the kind of responsibility Matthew Esco would require of him.
“When will we get there?” Arlen asked, pulling his gaze away from the scenery outside.
“We’ll hit the Boundary in about ten minutes.” Sterling shifted in his seat. “You took the tonic?”
Arlen grunted and waved the empty vial in the air. The tonic tasted horrible, but the Boundary was fatal to anyone who passed through it without the substance in them. Everyone on the train paid not only for their ticket but for the life-saving medicine, which his father had strict, complete control over. Matthew Esco knew everyone who went in and out of the Boundary. Kept an ancient, weathered book in the safe at home, full of names and exhaustive research on each person.
“It’s a horrible experience, even with the tonic. You’ll wish you were dead, but the train slows down to give you time to recover before we hit Freetown. It’s a kindness, really. I always feel like the Boundary is turning me inside-out when I go through it.”
Anxiety twisted Arlen’s gut. He’d heard of people passing out, throwing up, or wetting themselves. The tonic just allowed them to pass through the Boundary alive, it didn’t soften the experience. His hands twisted in his lap. Every person reacted differently. He couldn’t predict how he would do, and that unknown made him anxious. He was an Esco, he had some measure of pride to protect. He could not allow himself to be brought low by this passage.
“We get off at Freetown first, visit with the governor. He’s a pompous ass. He thinks he has the whole world under his thumb. Smile and nod at him, Arlen, but don’t make promises. You offer him an inch, and he’ll take a mile.”