Authors: Ashley Rhodes
“My name is Elena Murray,” Cassandra recited. “I’m twenty six—even though I look young for my age—and I was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in nineteen ninety, on March eighteenth. I moved around a lot and never had many friends. Up and down the east coast until just recently when I decided to settle down in… well, far away from my home town.”
“Practice it often,” Nick said. “The details need to become your past.”
She tapped her fingers on the bench, and glanced at him. “So… is ‘Nick’ your real name?”
Not anymore it wasn’t. “It’s the name my mother gave me,” he said. “Nicholas Ashton Graves. But that’s the last time anyone will hear it.”
“What’s your new name?” She asked.
Nick just shook his head. “Better if you don’t know.”
“Right,” Cassandra sighed. “Well… I better go.”
“Wherever you end up,” Nick said, “just stay safe.”
She stood, and Nick stood with her. Then, she threw her arms around him, pressing her face to his chest. “Thank you,” she whispered. When she pulled away, her eyes were wet. She wiped them, and then accepted her duffel from him that he’d been holding for her. It was heavier than before. “What’s—”
“Money,” Nick said. “Enough. Get an account going with your new papers. They’ll be looking for someone who's hiding, so don’t hide. No deposits over a thousand dollars and no more than once a week. I put a note in there about the amounts you need to save—pay your taxes. The less scrutiny you get from anyone, the better.”
It was a lot to take in, he knew, and Cassandra’s face was a mix of concentration and confusion. “Okay,” she said finally.
“Good bye, Cassandra,” Nick said.
Cassandra took a step back, and then another. “Good bye, Nick.”
Then she turned, and melted into the crowd, and was gone.
A few moments later, so was Nick. It was time to start over.
Denver had seemed like a good place to go. Cassandra—no, she had to constantly remind herself, it was Elena now—had always loved mountains and she’d never been that far west before. Maybe if she got out of her normal environment it would help her get out of her normal routine, maybe even her life-long identity.
Her list of skills was not terribly extensive, but she had some options to choose from, just in case. She now had a degree teaching English as a second language, in hairstyling, and had a commercial driver’s license. ESL was something she could probably do but there wasn’t much call for it in the States. Driving trucks was something she didn’t want to attempt without actually getting certified to do it, but she and her later mother had done one another’s hair for a long time and she was confident she could fake it while she honed her skills.
It took some time to get her license in Colorado but once she had it getting work didn’t take long. She did research, bought the tools she needed with the money Nick had given her, and claimed that she hadn’t had a job just yet. They did call the school she’d supposedly gone to. At that point, Cassandra assumed she was done for; but to her surprise, records existed that suggested she’d been a diligent student with decent grades and completed her practicals.
She was hired and working barely a month after she arrived.
A month after that, she could no longer pretend that her missing period was a fluke of the altitude or the recent stresses of being nearly-assassinated and having to change everything about her life again. The uncomfortable pressure in her stomach couldn’t be brushed off as indigestion. It was the three day run of morning sickness that made her gather her courage and get a definitive answer.
In her new apartment—nicer than any other place she’d lived but not so nice she couldn’t sustain it with the new job once Nick’s money ran out—on a Wednesday, she stared at the clear lines on a pregnancy test assuring her that she was not stressed, or sick. She was a mother.
She didn’t make the final decision until halfway through her second trimester. By then it was basically too late, for one thing; at least as far as her conscience could figure. She’d been raised Catholic, but really, in the end, that hadn’t been the reason she decided to keep the baby, and it hadn’t really taken that long to make the decision so much as come to terms with it.
Judicious handling of the money Nick had left her with meant that she could raise a child on her own, and her benefits from work meant that she could take maternity leave and wouldn’t have to pay much to have the baby. Her concern had been that she wouldn’t be able to give it a good home, a good life.
But that changed, gradually. She had a knack for her craft and learned quickly by consuming videos and workshops to make the best of her basic skill at it. She got better. She started making a real living.
She was still afloat in the world, though. Ungrounded in her own history—her actual past—she felt like the world had become ephemeral, intangible, and entirely likely to blow away on the wind.
There was no question who the father was. There was only one option to choose from. And that she wrestled with most of all. She had no way to find him, to tell him that he was a father. Her child would grow up knowing less than she did about him. What kind of a life was that for a child?
And yet… it felt like something real. Something firm, and fixed, that might stop the world from spinning around her. A family meant home. It always had, and she’d been too long without it.
So when her doctor, who had been very open about discussing her options with her throughout the pregnancy, asked her finally if she was ready to make a firm decision, she didn’t hesitate. And she never regretted it.
She named him Ramon, after her grandfather. Her abuelo had been the kindest, most wonderful man Cassandra had ever known. More so than his son, her father. She hoped that naming her own son after him would, somehow, impart a bit of her abuelo’s spirit.
He was beautiful. Cassandra had always loved babies, and children had always seemed to like her, but this one was, without a doubt, somehow more beautiful than any other child she’d laid eyes on before. Sweating and sore and ecstatic from her journey to what felt like the very precipice between life and death, she held him for the first time and understood at last what people meant when they talked about love at first sight. This was it.
The most honest conversation she ever had with him about his father happened the night she finally got to take Ramon home. She laid him down next to her on her bed, swaddled in a plain blue blanket from the hospital, and watched him blink and squirm and yawn after she’d fed him, and talked to him now because she knew that later she wouldn’t be able to be so candid.
“He was a troubled man,” she told him. “He… he killed a lot of people, and his soul was heavy. But he saved me. And whatever else he’s done, he managed to put a little bit of light and good back into the world. That’s you, mi hijito. My little light from your Papa.”
That worked, for a while. Until Ramon was five he never really questioned not having a father. They were happy. Cassandra had managed to get through the most difficult stage of his life on her own and that that time he was nearing kindergarten and balancing his schedule with hers would become drastically less complicated.
He had grown into his father’s shape already—she could see the ghost of those broad shoulders, the promise of a prominent brow. He had the same cleft in his chin that no one in Cassandra’s family had. He was a brooding child, at times, too, and that worried her with irrational thoughts—what if he’d somehow inherited his father’s darkness?
Whatever darkness Nick had had, she told herself, he had light, too. That was what warranted focusing on.
After his first week of school, he asked about his father, in a roundabout way.
“My friend Tommy has a mommy and a daddy,” he said that evening while he pushed peas around his place with a fork.
“Some people have mommies and daddies,” Cassandra told her son casually. “Some people only have mommies and some people only have daddies. Families come in all configurations and shapes. Some people even have two mommies or two daddies. It just depends.”
“Tommy says you have to have a mommy and a daddy,” Ramon insisted plaintively.
Well, Tommy was a privileged little runt, Cassandra thought; but she didn’t say it. She’d known this was going to happen eventually, and thought for five long years about what she would say when it did. “Everyone has a mommy and a daddy, mi mijito,” she said. “But sometimes… sometimes their mommy or daddy doesn’t get to stay and see their little love grow up.”
“Why?”
“Because when you are an adult, life can require you to make hard choices.”
“Why?”
“Because…” he was gazing at her with those intelligent, penetrating eyes. “…because we have to make our way through the world, and we can’t always do what we want to.”
“Why?”
She chuckled, and ruffled his hair. “So many questions. I will answer them all, but not right now. You need to eat your dinner, and then it’s time for a bath before you go to bed.”
Ramon shrugged, and lifted a small mouthful of peas to his mouth. His little gears were turning, though. She could see it. He was frighteningly smart for his age, she thought. But, maybe all mothers thought that of their children. She didn’t know.
She still hadn’t made many friends. It was a long habit and hard to break. Ramon was making friends at school, though. Soon she’d have to socialize.
The story she had given other people, other adults, was that Ramon’s father had died. It was the easiest thing to say, really, and while responses often were sympathetic it wasn’t what she was looking for. She just preferred not to deal with further questions on the matter. Questions would invite her to slip up and she couldn’t afford that.
But she couldn’t quite bring herself to tell Ramon that his father had died. With anyone else, there was no chance at all that they would meet Nick and realize she’d lied to them. Other single mothers—she knew a couple—would probably appreciate the value of the lie in simplifying things. Ramon, though, stood some chance of meeting his father one day, however remote.
Though, for all she knew, Nick
was
dead.
So when he asked again, that night, she held Ramon close to her and told him a story while he drifted off.
“Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a young girl, a princess, who lived with a… an evil king. The King wanted the princess to be like him, to rule his empire after him and do things his way. He wanted her to marry an evil prince, and until she did he kept her locked away in the highest tower in the castle.
“The one thing that kept the evil king from being truly despicable was his wife, a kindly, beautiful queen named Esmeralda. It was for Esmeralda’s sake that the princess wasn’t forced to marry the evil prince until she had come of age.
“Well,” Cassandra went on, stroking Ramon’s forehead to soothe him into sleep, “on a very sad day, maybe the saddest day of all the days that the Sun had ever shined on, queen Esmeralda… she grew sick, and she died. The wicked king was beside himself with grief, and the princess knew that very soon she would have to marry the evil prince.
“But the princess’ mother had a secret. She had prepared a… a magical boat for the Princess to take to a far away land where the king and the prince would never be able to find her. She entrusted this plan to her most faithful maid, and in the cover of darkness the princess escaped the high tower and traveled far, far from the castle, all the way to the ocean, where the magical boat awaited her.”
It had been barely a boat at all, and it had not been magical. It had been full of people fleeing a corrupt government riddled with the influence of the cartels, and many had died as it crossed the Caribbean from Cartagena. Cassandra had nearly been among them.
“The boat crossed a brilliant blue ocean, braving storms and monsters alike. But the kind queen was watching over her princess from heaven and she sent armies of angels to surround her and wrap her up in their wings.” Cassandra’s eyes burned with the memories of all the moments she was certain were her last. Throughout, she could feel the presence of her mother standing with her. It had been a long, long time since she remembered.
“At last, the princess made it to the far away land,” she said, struggling to control her voice. She took a long breath. “And for a time, the princess was safe. But back at the castle, the evil king’s enemies… they… overthrew the kingdom. And the new king was just as bad as the old one. He didn’t want to risk the princess returning home, even though she never would have, so he sent a black knight to find her and make sure she never did.”
Ramon’s eyes were closed, but when Cassandra paused to see if he would stay asleep, he opened his eyes. “What happened next?”
She chuckled, and went on. “Well, the black knight found the princess. But when he saw her… the darkness in his heart parted, and he remembered what it was like to be a white knight, or maybe what it was like to
want
to be a white knight. He couldn’t bring himself to do as the new king wished.”
“Like Snow White,” Ramon said. “The huntsman couldn’t kill Snow White even though the queen wanted him to.”
She laughed and snuggled him. “Just like Snow White and the huntsman, yes,” she agreed. “Just like that. So, the black knight, who had become a white knight, swept the princess up and cast a magic spell—”
“Knights don’t cast spells, Mommy,” Ramon informed her matter-of-factly. “Wizards cast spells.”
“Well this knight did,” she insisted, “he was special. He turned the princess into a new person, with a new name and everything, so that her father’s enemies would never be able to find her again.”
“And they lived happily ever after,” Ramon said.
“Not quite,” Cassandra sighed. “No, not quite… You see, the new king, who had sent the knight to find the princess, wouldn’t forgive the knight easily for defying his duty. So the knight hid the princess on a high mountain, and then left her to live her life in peace. If he had stayed with her… well, she would have been in danger.
“But he left her with a precious gift to remember him by for all time. A beautiful baby boy. And the princess and her baby boy—they lived happily ever after. That was the true gift of the knight, the most powerful spell he had to offer her.”
Ramon nodded slowly, and this time, when Cassandra finished the story by lowering her voice with each word until she was whispering the end, he didn’t stir when she was quiet.
She didn’t move though. Instead she kissed him on the forehead, and pulled the blanket up over both of them. Then, for just a little while and for the first time in years, she prayed for Nick’s safety.