Feversong

And some were simply unwilling to believe at all.

Secure in his love, certain of his intentions, my mother told Seamus about herself, her heritage, and me.

His shock took a darker turn to concern for her mental health, this woman he’d nearly entrusted with his young sons.

This woman who actually believed she had a child that could move so fast no one could see her.

She’d presented him with an insane and vividly detailed delusion about fairies and women who’d been selectively bred to protect the world against them.

She’d affixed her delusional paranoia to real world people and businesses, insisting a local, highly respected abbey was really a secret society of women that guarded the world from these ancient, immortal monsters and, in Dublin, they posed as a bike courier company called PHI (that his office frequently used to dispatch files about town) so this special cult of gifted “fairy-killers” could keep tabs on their city, ever alert for threats to humankind.

She’d contended that her daughter had been so strong by the age of three that she’d shattered the toilet merely by crashing into it too fast in something she’d called “freeze-frame.”

(I remembered that day. I’d struck the commode with my little kid belly so hard it’d been black and blue for days. We hadn’t been able to afford another toilet for months. When she’d finally brought one home, it was cracked and discolored and she had to repair it. I have no idea where she found it. Probably in someone’s trash.)

Then, the coup de grâce—my mother told Seamus that she’d been forced to handle her very special daughter by keeping her locked up in a cage.

For years.

This woman he’d nearly taken home to his precious young sons.

I remember the look on his face when I freeze-framed into his office late one night, after everyone else had gone home for the day, leaving him alone. I’d been trailing him for weeks and had finally realized I would never get the answers I wanted without forcing them from him.

I’d blasted in, moving so fast I was undetectable, and whirled around and around the chair he was sitting in, unfurling thick, heavy rope behind me, tying him securely to it.

I remember his expression when I finally slowed down enough for him to see me—curly hair wild, eyes wilder. My strength so enormous by then that I’d been able to simply toss his heavy ornate desk out of my way without the slightest strain.

When I was done with Seamus that night, he believed.

Accepted that every word my mother had told him was true, even wept at the end.

If only he’d believed her sooner, if only he’d been willing to learn and accept, I might have gotten a father to help raise me. If only he’d come to the house, met me, kept an open mind, my mom could have proved the truth to him and he’d have gotten a wonderful mother for his sons. The erosion would have stopped. Erosions need new, solid soil to be brought in every now and then.

She’d never wanted to keep me in a cage. A woman without family, alone, without education, didn’t have many choices.

She’d just needed a little help. She’d never gotten it from anyone.

And Rowena, that stone-cold bitch, never once offered aid. I’d known that night I would one day kill the powerful headmistress at the abbey. But I still had questions, big ones, and I’d begun to suspect Rowena was the only one with those answers.

I knew what had broken my mother’s heart but I still didn’t know how we ended up where we ended up that fateful night I gained my freedom.

Outraged, horrified, Seamus had thrown my mom out of his car in the dark, twenty-two miles from home. She’d walked through the pouring rain, crying the entire way. He knew that because he’d followed her, arguing with himself, debating whether he should pick her back up and take her straight to the nearest psychiatric facility.

The irony: if he had, I’d have been found in my cage by social workers and freed from it. Placed in a center, or foster care, I would have vanished in no time, grown up, and gotten her out. Taken her home and taken care of her. She wouldn’t have died.

Seamus had driven away.

Then he’d gone one step further the next day and had her fired from her cleaning job, lodging a formal complaint of theft against her with his firm.

He’d said he wouldn’t press charges if she went quietly.

She had.

My mother always went quietly. She didn’t know any other way.

Word got around, after she’d been fired, that she wasn’t to be trusted, and others refused her employment.

We’d needed that job. And the many others she was never able to get again.

I didn’t kill him.

But I wanted to.

I didn’t because, like my mom, he wasn’t a bad person.

He was just the final erosion that started the landslide.

When I was thirteen I made a plaque for my mother’s grave that said:

Emma Danielle O’Malley

Weep not for the life she lost,

But the life she never got to live.

JADA

I’d once taken a vacation Silverside, about three years in.

The planet I’d christened Dada—because it wasn’t full-blown surrealism and Shazam’s nihilism had been getting to me—was a crazy, rainbow-colored world that made me feel as if I were living in the game Candyland.

Nothing on that planet was the right color, assuming you used Earth for a gauge, but after a few months on Dada, I decided Earth’s gauge was boring and wrong.

It was a small, lushly overgrown world with humid rain forests and pink oceans, dunes and beaches of powdery cerulean sand, and craggy burnt orange mountains. I’d explored that world from end to end, finding neither civilization nor ruins to suggest any had ever existed. It was paradise for me and Shazam.