Midheaven (Ascendant Trilogy Book 2) Page 5

  He ignored her.

  “Well what’s this one then?” I asked pointing to the crescent cradling a star.

  “A moon and a star,” Sophie said.

  “We know it’s a moon and star Einstein. What do they represent?”

  Sophie gave him a dirty look behind his back.

  “It’s Islamic,” I said suddenly remembering. “It’s a symbol in the Muslim religion.” I looked at Caleb and shrugged. “I’ve seen it on the news a lot back home.”

  Caleb nodded. “Well I would bet money that the last one is Buddhist.” He turned pages in the book until he came to the section on Buddhism. There, in the middle of a block of text was the same spoked wheel that was etched into the puzzle box.

  “Well great,” I said. “Now we know where the symbols are from. But how do we find the keys that go to the box?”

  “Charlotte?” Someone called.

  All three of us turned.

  My eyes focused on the library entrance, someone was standing there, someone familiar. It wasn’t who my mind was thinking, it couldn’t be. A trick of the light, my mind playing games. My heartbeat picked up and my arms felt like lead. Any moment, I would realize I was wrong, so wrong and disappointment would roll over me, crush me. I sat, frozen, waiting, my throat too tight to breathe. She wasn’t real.

  “Charlotte?” she stepped into the room.

  Was she standing here? How? I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. If I blinked, would she simply vanish? Only a ghost. I closed my eyes and tried to swallow. Please, let this be real. Hot tears ran down my cheeks and when I finally dared to open my eyes they blurred her from my vision. I wiped my face—she was still there.

  She was crying too, “Charlotte,” she whispered.

  “Mom?” I mouthed the word but no sound would come.

  Her face contorted into an anguished smile while her arms moved and I watched, spellbound, while she opened space, spread her arms wide. For me.

  I stumbled trying to get up. Caleb grabbed my arm and helped me.

  I ran.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Left

  For a long time, we didn’t say a word. She sat with me on her childhood bed and held me in her arms.

  Her arms.

  She held me while I cried and sobbed. I tried to stop so many times but every time I would dissolve again. She kissed my head, my face, her own tears mixed with mine. “I’m so sorry Charlotte, I’m so sorry,” she whispered over and over and over.

  Slowly, my breath came back to me. The muscles in my face ached and my body felt flat with exhaustion. All I could do was lean against her while she held me and rocked. Back and forth and back again, a movement so familiar, a movement that had cured my every childhood injury, my every childhood hurt.

  Except one.

  When the shock of seeing her, actually being here with her, began to fade, I noticed an altogether different feeling start to take shape in the pit of my stomach. Along with the feeling, there were words. I felt them rising, begging for release. They clogged my throat and filled my mouth. Those words were the only ones I could find, as if my brain refused to go anywhere else until this question had been satisfied.

  Why? Why did you leave me?

  But that wasn’t the real question. I had learned the why last year. The why was Franzen, my real father, my mother’s twin flame. The why was that Franzen was dying and my mother had left to be with him. I knew the why.

  That wasn’t the question that pressed me, choked me. It wasn’t the question that my heart threatened to throw at her. What was stuffed inside me wasn’t even a real question; it was an accusation.

  How? How could you leave me?

  She rocked me as I listened to steady shh, shh, shh she blew against my ear. She was here, every part of her. Scent, sound, touch, really here—I didn’t want to ruin this. I closed my eyes and swallowed down what I feared might make her disappear again. I pulled my anger down, stuffed it back, locked all my angry words away. I didn’t want her to run away from me again.

  I wiped my face and sat up.

  Her hand brushed my cheek, her eyes met and held mine. “You’ve grown up.”

  I nodded.

  “Without me there.”

  I looked away, focused on the bedspread’s elaborate stitching beneath my fingertips.

  “I should think,” she started. I could hear her tears stopping her words. She took a deep breath. “I should think a girl might never understand why her mother would leave her. I should think…she might never understand how a mother could make a choice,” she sobbed and placed both hands over her face. “It killed me Charlotte. Know that, you must know. It killed me every day. Every day I thought of you, wished for you.” She wiped her face and took a deep breath while straightening herself to her full sitting height. “It was the most unnatural thing I’ve ever done. Like tearing out my own heart.” She swallowed and looked away. “I would understand if you never forgave me. I will certainly never forgive myself.”

  “Would you do it again?” I couldn’t help the hard edge in my voice. The injustice of the last five years, the fact that she had made a choice. A choice that wasn’t me. My mother hadn’t chosen me. The thought tumbled and spilled through my brain like a poison that burned like fire in my head. It was the idea, she wasn’t taken from me against her will. She had decided, chosen, made a plan to leave me. The destruction this truth caused within me was only amplified by the image that had surfaced in my brain a hundred times since I had seen it last summer on Emerick’s computer.

  My mother’s laughing face while she held her other baby girl.

  Baby Grace.

  Would you do it again? I hadn’t meant to ask it. Part of me wished I could snatch it back because I knew the answer would wound. My mother was not a liar.

  She picked up my hand, traced the lines in my palm, the light touch of her finger left an electric trace. I watched while she swallowed then nodded, preparing to utter the hurtful words. “I would do it again,” she said. Her chest rose up as she sighed deeply. “I would.” She looked into my eyes. “That probably doesn’t make sense to you.”

  I shook my head as fresh tears ran down face.

  She reached up and wiped them gently. “There is so much…so much left for you to learn. I admit, when I think of the leaps you still need to make…” she choked and didn’t finish. She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “I sometimes fantasize about wrapping you up and just running. We would just run and run and never look back. We would be together and leave the world to itself. Sometimes, I get lost in how unfair it all seems. I wish I could close my eyes and not know. Sometimes, I wish I had never learned and we could just live and be.”

  “But why? Why can’t we run? Why can’t I come and hide with you and Franzen and Grace? I don’t understand anything. Why do I have to solve the puzzle? Why does Emerick care about us? If we go away…”

  With sadness in her eyes, my mother smiled gently. “That is the thought that always tortures me. Why? Why don’t we choose to ignore it all?” She pursed her lips and sat quiet for a while. She picked up both of my hands and held them in hers. “You always have a choice Charlotte. I do, Franzen does, Grace will. The choice is always there. But you and I, we are part of a heritage, a heritage of responsibility.” She reached out and touched the cross that was back around my neck. “Our family, through our mothers, passed this key. For keeping, for protection. It is one of five keys, to the puzzle that Franzen showed to me eighteen years ago. Franzen was the last keeper of the puzzle. The puzzle that has passed through the hands of great men throughout history. Men who discovered the secret, cultivated the learning, passed down their knowledge to humanity in hopes that we might all, eventually, be lifted.”

  “Lifted from what? What is the secret?”

  “Lifted from the blindness with which we have roamed this earth for centuries. Lifted from suffering, poverty, hunger, depression, war, subjugation. Lifted from the enslavement of each other, to each
other.”

  “But the secret, what is it?”

  “You’ve already read it,” she smiled. “What is the above is from the below and the below is from the above.”

  I stared at her. “Yes but I don’t know what it means.”

  “I know,” she said flatly.

  I waited for a moment longer but when she didn’t say anything, didn’t give me any answers my frustration made me ask the question. “Well what does it mean?’

  She looked at me, her face completely unreadable. “Knowledge is sweeter found than given, Charlotte,” she whispered.

  I felt my heart pump irritation through my limbs. “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re not going to tell me?”

  “I have told you Charlotte. I have told you, you’ve read it, Franzen has told you. You don’t understand because knowledge, in and of itself, means nothing without the framework, prior understanding or any context to place it in. The world is filled with knowledge, knowledge that people need. But so many, too many, don’t have the foundation in which to understand what they see. We can look right at the greatest truth but if we do not know what it is, we will dismiss it. It might as well mean nothing. It is the same as being blind. Imagine someone who only speaks English is handed a document that declares they have inherited the rights to wealth beyond their wildest dreams. But the document is plain in form and written in Arabic. The English speaker will likely set it aside from the inability to understand what is written. If they did take the trouble to have it translated, they would likely dismiss the information as ridiculous, a fraud, a pipe dream. Great knowledge can never be just told to someone, because they are not able to believe it. If they don’t have the prior learning to see how it could be. The world is flat, the sun revolves around Earth, we can’t see truth outside of our knowledge framework unless and until the framework is altered.”

  “But I get that.”

  “You don’t get that, not yet.”

  “How can you know? You haven’t been here.”

  She nodded, absorbing the sting of my accusation before she asked, “One question. Do you believe in your heart…do you know with a certainty that you could defend, that Franzen is, and you are, the descants of Francis Bacon—Shakespeare, the unacknowledged son of Queen Elizabeth the First. Do you believe it is possible for a human to live to be over one hundred and fifty years old?”

  My breath quickened in my chest. I stared into her eyes for a moment before looking away. It was true, I didn’t believe it was possible. I harbored, in a secret corner of my brain, what seemed to be a logical, much more likely possibility. The possibility that Franzen was clever, persuasive, and a master in the craft of deception.

  “Amazing things are possible, Charlotte. You will, if you choose to, have your eyes opened to all the universal wonder that surrounds you at every moment. But learning about alchemy is no different than learning anything else. It’s a progression of understanding. You can’t teach someone advanced calculus if they don’t yet know how to add and subtract.”

  I looked her in the eye, “The puzzle box. What does it do? How is it solved?”

  She sat back a few inches and shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “But Franzen does. I mean, obviously. If he was the keeper for over a hundred years…”

  My mother shook her head slowly. “The first moves, that’s all. The keys have never been collected together with the box.”

  “Wait…you don’t know how? You’ve never done it?”

  “No.”

  “And neither has Franzen?”

  “No.”

  I was stunned. “Well I can’t do it. Why me? I don’t know anything.”

  “You will. You are the daughter of the last protector of the puzzle and one of the keepers of the keys. It is time for the puzzle to be solved and for its message to be shared with every human that walks this earth.”

  I shook my head, “And what if I don’t want to? What if I can’t?”

  “Those are two different questions Charlotte. If you choose not to? Honestly, I don’t know. Does humanity just continue this rapid spiral until we burn ourselves out of any type of meaningful existence? Would someone else eventually rise to the challenge? I don’t know. As far as your what if I can’t question…I don’t believe it’s possible. I believe that if you start out on this journey, you will succeed.”

  “How can you know that?”

  Because you are my daughter.

  Her lips did not move but her words clearly coursed through my mind.

  And you are Franzen’s daughter. You are capable of wielding a power you can not yet imagine.

  The sensation was strange, just like hearing except skipping my ears. “How do you do that?”

  “You used to do it all the time when you were little.”

  “I did?”

  “Mama?” a small voice suddenly called from the doorway and my mother and I both turned our heads. A little girl with big black curls was peeking around the door. The sight of her, right here standing before me, was jarring. Like looking at a photograph of myself at three. My mother smiled softly and extended her hand towards the little girl.

  “Gracie,” my mother said as the door pushed open and the little girl walked shyly to the edge of the massive bed. A moment later Ms. Steward appeared at the door looking flustered.

  “I am sorry Ms. Stevens. She slipped away from me while I was working in the kitchen.”

  “It’s okay Ms. Steward.” My mother smiled gently at the little girl and lifted her onto the giant bed. “It’s time for Grace to meet her big sister anyway.”

  Ms. Steward gave a nod of her head and left us alone. The sharp click of her heels was muffled once she reached the carpet running the length of the hall.

  Grace burrowed into my mother’s arms and hid her face behind her mass of curls. Silent, I sat and watched her hide in my mother’s protective embrace. My mother bent her head and kissed the top of Grace’s curly black mop. “Grace,” she whispered. “This is Charlotte. You’ve been so looking forward to meeting her, don’t you want to say hello?”

  Grace shook her head and tried to dig deeper into my mother’s—her mother’s—arms.

  “Come on now, Charlotte won’t bite,” she laughed.

  Grace turned her head just enough to peek at me with one beautiful blue eye and reveal a plump cheek raised by the curve of her tiny smile. She slipped one hand free of our mother’s embrace and placed it tentatively closer to me.

  When I smiled she twisted her body around until she faced me completely. “Hello Grace, I’m Charlotte.”

  Her eyes widened when she nodded her head. She looked up into our mother’s face, “Mama, is she going to fix Papa?”

  I looked up and saw the silent pained expression that passed over my mother’s face. “No sweetheart,” she said. My mother swallowed and seemed to struggle to maintain her smile. “We can’t fix Papa,” she managed.

  Last year, Franzen had told me that he was dying. He had tried to explain to me how, since my birth, he had begun slipping from this world. But he had appeared plenty healthy enough while arguing with me about leaving last year. For someone who was supposed to be one hundred and sixty-six but looked forty, wasn’t he just now dying in the normal sense, like all the rest of us? “Is something wrong with Franzen?” I asked.

  My mother opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She ran her hands down the sides of Grace’s head flattening the curls, I could tell she was searching for the words.

  “Papa turned old,” Grace said. “His skin’s gone all wrinkled and he has big brown spots.”

  My mother kissed Grace’s head again then looked up and met my questioning gaze. “It was almost overnight. None of us expected it. Grace was very, very scared at first.”

  Grace nodded as if to confirm that, yes, her mother was right.

  “But then she realized it was still her Papa. Still the man who loves her,” my mother looked into my
eyes. “Loves both his daughters more than his very own life,” a tear streamed down her cheek.

  What did she mean? I looked at Grace and smiled softly. I had so many questions but didn’t feel I could or should ask any of them in front of her. Was Franzen dying because of us? Because of me?

  My mother lifted Grace under her arms and placed her on the floor next to the bed. “He’d like to see you Charlotte.”

  “He’s here?”

  She nodded. I watched as she got off the bed, picked Grace up and positioned her on her hip. “Your father can better answer your questions. Better explain what you’ll need to know.”

  Your father. The expression struck me. Did she even know who that person was for me? My father was Simon Stevens, not Franzen. My father was the man who had cared for me when I was sick, rocked me when I was sad. My father was the only other person on this earth who had silently suffered with me all the years after my mother disappeared. My father was, finally, enjoying his life and touring with his new book. He knew nothing about any of this.

  Did she not know that Franzen would never be your father to me?

  “He has a robot bed,” Grace said. “With buttons that make the ends go up and down.” She scrunched up her face, “And there’s big tubes,” she pointed to her nose.

  “A hospital bed?” I asked getting down.

  My mother turned and walked with Grace out the door, “He’s set up in a bedroom on the first floor.” Grace squirmed out of our mother’s arms and started running down the hall ahead of us. When she reached the top of the grand staircase and was sufficiently out of hearing range, my mother stopped and turned to me. “He doesn’t have long now. He could die any day. I can’t imagine how shocking your life has been this last year but—”

  “The last five years,” I corrected.

  She closed her eyes and nodded, “Of course, from the moment I disappeared—”

  “Left,” I said. “From the moment you left.”

  She took a deep breath and I saw another tear run down her cheek, “From the moment I left. I left you. I left Simon. Yes, I did that and I can only pray you will one day forgive me. That you might one day understand why I would ever make such a decision. That it was because I love you so much, because what I believe this world, and your life in this world, is capable of being. I left to help Franzen protect that potential, the seed of possibility that is you,” she sighed. “But I know the time for forgiveness is not now.”