My composure broke completely. The only thing I ever knew about my mother was that she died during childbirth, and that was one hundred percent more information than I had about my dad.
"Wait!" I spluttered, "You can't—I don't—"
"You promised to listen, Thomas," she scolded.
Listen. Christen. Glisten. The periphery of my vision blurred and darkened as if I was staring into a tunnel that drew me forward against my will. Sounds began to muffle and echo in my head, my concentration fractured and threatened to break. I hadn't had a major episode in months, but the stranger's unwelcome revelation after a morning of dangerously high anxiety had softened my grip and I was rapidly losing control.
"No!" I forced the word past the fog. I may have said more, but in those moments my short term memory is unreliable. "You can't just—" I stumbled further, "you can't—you—"
"Be silent!"
Her voice pulled me back from the edge. It wasn't exactly an order, but it wasn't a simple request either and something deep inside me responded, as if the turbulence in my mind had heard it too and obeyed. I clung to that, forgetting everything else I might have said.
"I will hear your questions, but please do not interrupt." She paused again, her expression stern, as if addressing a poorly-behaved child. If only she knew how close I'd come to a melt-down, and what I was capable of when the world around me crumbled away.
"Your parents were never married," she continued calmly. "They met in a college town, not unlike this one," she gestured to our surroundings with one hand and a casual glance, "where he seduced her, bedded her, and murdered her."
"Murdered—?" The unnatural stability held, but I had no time to choke down the added shock before the words burst out. The woman's eyes went hard as she spoke over me.
"Thomas, if you want me to finish, do not speak out of turn again. You may hear many revelations today and you will have the opportunity to be overwhelmed by them on your own time." She gave me another chance to end the conversation, and I honestly thought about standing up and leaving.
I had never given my father much thought at all, except in typical orphan fantasies that he might be a billionaire or a secret agent, but her news was far outside my most ambitious dreams—or nightmares—and I found it hard to digest. Instead of leaving, however, I clenched my jaw and nodded. She answered with the stern, measured look of one accustomed to authority.
"They were together for a few fiery days and he left her without word or explanation. The shock sent your mother into a deep despair from which she never recovered."
"You told me he murdered her," I said without thinking. She shot me another glare but no reprimand followed.
"Her despair was not the irrational pining of a naive young woman. Your mother was addicted to a very rare, very potent drug and he was her sole supplier. When he left, she lapsed into a profound grief, never suspecting its true nature. I found her in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital where she was taken after she assaulted and seriously injured a fellow student. Her name was Janet Lane."
She withdrew an aged photo from her handbag and placed it on the table in front of me. I stared at the picture of my birth mother, not knowing what to do or say. This strange woman had spoken her name with unexpected warmth, and seeing that smiling, freckled face framed by wavy auburn hair, her light, penetrating eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, pushed everything else from my mind.
I remembered wondering about the woman who had given me life, trying to find the face of a kind, loving mother in my own reflection, some hint of my origin, but the few facts I'd been given were so vague I may as well have been left on someone's doorstep without a note. By the time I turned eight, the year I was placed into my first foster home, I had stopped asking.
"I had previously made her acquaintance," the woman went on, "but saw her rarely. By the time I became aware of her situation, she was pregnant, barely coherent, and shunned both food and sleep. I took her into my care until you were born."
My heart clenched around what I knew came next and a hint of grief bubbled to the surface. The closest thing to a mom I'd ever had was a woman named Tracy who lived eight hours by car to the west. I'd lived with her and her husband Mason for six years and she'd been as good to me as she knew how, but she couldn't give me a legacy, that sense of being part of something bigger. Now my gut was twisting around a simple name, a tattered photo, and the word of a questionable stranger. How could I so badly miss someone I'd never known?
"She became lucid at times," the woman continued. "She told me how you were to be named, Thomas for her father, and Caelan for yours."
I spoke without thinking. "Wait, Caelan was my dad's name? The man who poisoned my mother?"
She smiled in a way that might have been intended to express tenderness and understanding, but it felt cold and impatient. "Your father's name is not Caelan, that was a lie, but it was all your mother knew of him. I convinced her to give you her father's name first. It is strong, as I knew you would be, but she would not forsake her obsession, and I could not deny her final wish."
I had never been a strong man, and suggesting I might have been something more seemed cruel. I stood a little over six feet tall, but I was thin, with little body fat and less muscle. Medication left me sore and put me off food so I never had much energy. A flight of stairs was more than enough to wind me, leaving me shaking and unsteady.
"She died less than two weeks after giving birth. Her mind was broken, and she refused food and proper hygiene. In another age, she would have wasted away alone, but I brought her to a hospital where she was made comfortable until she surrendered to the grave. At the time I was unable to care for you, and as your legal guardian, I signed you over to a children's facility to oversee your care."
"Greenhill," I acknowledged. It was a charity home designed to transition orphaned children into foster care, which also provided for a handful of displaced infants. It resembled a permanent daycare more than the dystopian orphanage of Oliver Twist, but I had no affection for it.
"I did not wish to place you directly into the foster program and orphanages are exceedingly rare in this country. Options were limited, but they were able to give you what I could not."
"Couldn't or wouldn't?"
"Both, perhaps." At least she was honest. "I am not your mother, and I had business that prevented me from settling in one place. I did, however, keep watch over you."
"I've never seen you before," I said, aware that she was allowing me to be more a part of the conversation, like we'd crossed some nonspecific threshold. Or maybe she was simply tired of telling me to be quiet.
"As intended. It was better that you did not know me. Before you ask, I will not explain why. Not yet." She placed her handbag on the table and crossed her hands in front of it. "I hope this will not the last time we will speak, but if you have any further questions, you may ask them now. I will answer those that you are ready to hear."
She paused expectantly, and I bristled at being treated, once again, like a child, but she had granted me an opportunity and I was determined to take it. It seemed like a test as much as an offering, as if she wanted to see what I would ask, to determine whether I had heard and understood what she said. I had hundreds of questions, all scattered and disconnected, and her posture suggested she was already preparing to leave.
I blurted out the first thing that came to me. "Why did you have to take care of her when she was sick? Why not her family?" I could easily think of a reason, but I needed her to say it.
"Callista, your grandmother, died giving birth to Janet and her sister. Her father was killed before she reached adulthood." My heart skipped at the thought that I might have an aunt, but that hope collapsed as quickly as it appeared. "Your mother's twin, Jennifer, became ill and died as a young child. They had no extended family."
"Nobody?"
"Callista had an estranged cousin who has since passed, but no others I am aware of. Your grandfather's parents also perished before he reached adulthood."
"My family doesn't sound very lucky."
"Your family has endured," she answered, cryptic and distant.
My head spun with more questions, but I needed time to articulate them in my brain, time that was quickly running out. I tried to ask something open-ended so she'd volunteer more information than the question alone implied. It was a trick I learned from my therapist years ago, but I wasn't very good at it.
"My mother's name was Janet Lane?"
She nodded.
"I have my father's last name then."
"No, you do not."
The relief I expected didn't come. "Then what was it?" The purpose of my question came into focus even as I asked, but the woman understood it even quicker.
"I will not tell you that."
"Why not?"
"What would you do with the information?"
I didn't answer because we both knew. I'd Google him for a start, try to find him. The real question was, what would I do if I succeeded? She seemed to follow my thoughts and dismissed them with a bored smile.
"Okay," I said, "then what is Corwen? Did you just make that up when you dropped me off or was it assigned?" When the state bestowed a name it was usually something common, like Smith or Jones.
"That was my contribution, the name of a good man I once knew. It is derived from an Irish word that means, 'Friend of my Heart.' "
"Irish?"
"It is fitting," she replied. "Your mother's father was from Galway."
"But why Corwen? I get that you wouldn't give me my father's last name, but why not Lane, after my mother?"
"As I have said, I believed it best that you remain ignorant of your past. If I am cautious with my information now, how much more should I have been with a small child?"
I was emboldened by the fact that she made an effort to justify herself. It made me feel more in control. An illusion, maybe, but a welcome one.
"Why?"
"Many true answers will reveal more questions than they settle. I will not indulge the subject further at this time." She said it kindly, but her tone was firm.
"Fine," I replied after a brief pause. "You seem to know a lot about my father. You won't tell me his last name and you said his first wasn't Caelan."
"That is correct."
"What's his true name?"
Her eyebrows rose and she hesitated. "That is a very interesting way to put it, but yes, I think I can tell you that much. It is Caratacos." She said it with an accent that made it hard to understand.
"What now?"
"Ca-RAH-ta-kos," she sounded it out. "It is an ancient and powerful name."
It sounded weirdly familiar, summoning a memory from my childhood. I strained to gather stray thoughts and snapped my fingers repeatedly, trying to jar it loose. Something about a car...
"Disney."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The name. It's from a movie. Crazy inventor—Dick Van Dyke?"
"You're thinking of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," she sighed. "The protagonist was an inventor named Caractacus Potts. But no, your father was not named after Ian Fleming's character. Caratacos is far older." The way she said it made me wonder if she meant the name, or its owner.
"You actually saw the movie?" I asked, following the distraction. She didn't seem the type.
A shadow of annoyance flickered in her expression. "I was compelled." She shifted impatiently in her seat. My clock was running down, so I changed tactics.
"So why did he leave my mom?"
"He never intended to stay. Their meeting was not random chance. He sought her out to settle a very old debt, one that began with your great, great grandmother. Janet was killed for revenge."
"Wait, what?" I was having a hard time controlling the impulse to shout, and she sensed it.
"I am permitting your questions as long as they advance and clarify the story you need to hear, do not waste the opportunity by asking me to repeat my answers. I will not lie to you, but I will not tell you everything. Not yet."
"Why not?"
"You are not ready."
I allowed myself a moment to glower before pursuing another question, "Revenge for what?"
"That will remain a darkened window to you for now, I am afraid. I will speak no more of it."
Frustrated that I'd reached another dead-end, I circled back to the last bit of information I had that made any sense. I could imagine a drug dealer getting a college girl strung out, even if the rest was hard to accept.
"Caratacos was responsible for addicting my mother?"
"Yes."
"What was she addicted to?"
The woman pursed her lips, then cocked her head to one side as if weighing my question and how much she could say without telling me anything, "A powerful euphoric. Her doctors never identified it."
"Then how do you know about it?"
"I knew your father." She couldn't have been more condescending if she tried.
"Then you know what it was. Can you get a sample?"
"I do not, and no."
"What were the symptoms of her withdrawal?" I began to pick up steam as the discussion fell within my field of study. I thought I might at least be able to narrow down the possibilities.
"The imbalance she suffered was very similar to that which causes your illness."
"That's not what I asked."
"It answers the more relevant question."
I shook my head, trying to deduce her intention. "It did permanent damage then, like a poison, and they didn't know how to treat it."
"Damage is a poor way to think of it. Your mother was out of balance and had no means to correct it."
I thought she was being overly semantic with her answers, but I played along, "Alright, then it added something to her system, or inhibited something, or reprogrammed it, and it tipped the scales. You're suggesting that the poison in her system was passed on to me, or did something permanent to my physiology?"
"Not a poison, Thomas, and not as such, but certainly there is a piece of that which caused her death which lives on in you and influences, if not directly causes, your illness."
I shook my head to clear it. My thoughts were beginning to spiral out of control again. Each answer led to more confusion.
"How is that possible? I'm not dying. I'm sick because my body can't regulate gamma-aminobutyric acid. I've known that since I was twelve. Benzodiazepine and a crapload of other prescriptions,"—I waved my hand to indicate a long list—"helps to correct it."
"No," she shook her head soberly. "Your doctors grasp because they do not see, and guess because they cannot know. The drugs they have given you merely disrupt your system in a different direction. Your condition is pulling you one way, the medication another. You are in a maelstrom, spiraling out of control around a tenuously stable center. That is why, despite years of testing and prescriptions, you frequently experience pain and nausea, why you have trouble eating, and why you find it difficult to control your thoughts and feelings."
No doctor I'd ever seen had so much to say about my condition, which was why I studied so hard. I wanted to discover what they couldn't, maybe find a cure, or at least a better control. Pain and fear are strong motivators.
"If you know so much about it, why didn't you tell someone?" I was angry, but even then it felt superficial. I indulged it anyway. Instead of answering, she gave me an enigmatic smile and tented her fingers over the table. I didn't know how to interpret it and the defenses that kept my illness in check were dangerously close to breaking again. "I don't know what you want from me," I breathed in frustration.
"I want nothing from you, Thomas. I came to you today with gifts. The first, double-edged though it may be, was information."
"Who are you, exactly?"
"That is a long story. I am someone who feels a certain responsibility for your wellbeing. Janet named me your godmother, and I wish to. . . " she hesitated as if looking for the right word, "honor that role. For now, you may call me Miss Gold."
I choked out a humorless laugh, "That's not your name."
"No, but it serves well enough."
I rubbed my temples, trying to come up with something else, but my thoughts were more turbulent than ever.
"Okay, I'm done. I need some time to sort this out." I wanted to run home and take my meds, allow them to calm me even with their hated side effects, but my next dose was hours away.
"Very well," she said, then picked up her handbag and produced a small, manila envelope. "Here is your next gift. I think that you will appreciate it."
"What is it?"
"Inside are three items. Open it when I am gone. I trust that you will know what to do with what you find." She set the envelope on the table. "This is where I ask you to place your trust in me. We cannot proceed from here unless you do. I will contact you again in two days, which should give you plenty of time to review the contents." She stood up, snapped her handbag closed, and replaced her overlarge sunglasses. "You are an intelligent boy. Do not disappoint me by asking for further instructions." Then without giving me a chance to respond, she turned and walked off.
I sat there a long time just staring at the envelope and willing myself to relax. It took a while, but eventually, the tricks and habits I'd learned after almost a dozen years of therapy and practice did their job and I began to mellow. When I finally took the package—I was surprised at how heavy it was—I thought of another question I should have asked. She didn't seem very much older than me, maybe early thirties at most. How could she have cared for my mother more than twenty-three years ago?
Miss Gold