2103:12:23:12:21:44

  “C’mon Sammy, keep up the pace! It’s not much farther, I promise!” Mom lied all too cheerfully.

  I grumbled but didn’t say anything, stoically continuing to walk up the mountain with only a minor glare shot at my mom’s back.

  I hated this. I’d said I would during breakfast, I’d said it before we went on the walk, and I said I hated it as we stood on the foot of the mountain. I had pled my case, but Mom’s case – which mostly consisted of her looking at me with puppy-dog eyes way too out of place for a forty-six-year-old – was too strong. That, and besides, my medication worked, didn’t it? And besides, it was winter, so it wasn’t like there were any pollen. And besides, the mountain is more of a hill, and walking is good for you, and I promise you Sam, the view of the crater lake from up there is amazing!

  So yes, logical as they were, I quickly succumbed to her arguments. That didn’t mean I didn’t hate the forested hill we marched up. My nose didn’t itch, my eyes didn’t water, my breath wasn’t constrained and I didn’t sneeze. But in my mind, all those possible experiences were out there, around every corner and in every shadow, ready to strike and send my body a-sneeze.

  That, or the source of my unease was that it reminded me of those first few hours of my life spent in the forest. It was a memory that I found grew increasingly less pleasant the longer I lived, and it was never a pleasant one to begin with. But still, I marched on with eyes set firmly on the ground and under cheery encouragements from Mom. Such was life as a dutiful… android pretending to be her daughter.

  I shook my head to chase away the depressing turn-of-thought. At the same time, Mom called, “Alright, let’s have a break.”

  I raised my head in surprise and saw Mom looking back at me, staring worriedly. But why?

  Whatever. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that.

  We settled on a fallen tree with its trunk partially hewed out to form an improv bench. Mom retrieved a sandwich from her backpack – some kind of white cheese, honey and walnuts – and I did the same with my egg-and-ham one.

  “You know,” Mom began, swallowing a bite. “When we went here for the first time, we walked this same trail. It was summer back then, so Pierce and I, we thought it’d be fine. You both were young, but so were we; we could carry you if it came down to it. So we packed our lunches, water bottles and whatnot and went ahead, starting early in the morning so we had plenty of time to go up and down.

  “What we didn’t account for was the weather. Turned out, it was a foggy morning. Like, extremely foggy, the kind of fog where even the outline of the person walking next to you starts to fade. But, we thought, so what? What harm could a bit of early morning fog really do? It would clear up by the time we got to the bottom of the trail. And it had cleared up at least a little by the time we got to the start, so why not continue? It’ll clear up as we go.”

  She looked off straight ahead in thought, absently taking a bite from her sandwich. I didn’t say anything, but I was wondering where this was going.

  “Pierce, though,” she said. “Pierce was a bit more cautious. Always was between the two of us. He wanted us to wait until noon, or at least until we were absolutely certain the fog was clearing. But Michael was already whining about going, and you were already whining about Michael whining, and I didn’t see the harm since the weather app said it’d clear up soon. So, up we went.

  “Of course, Pierce was right; the fog didn’t go away. Not for a long while, at least, and the path was…” She stamped her foot on the earthen, unpaved road in demonstration. The place we sat was slightly off the trail, but there was no clear distinction between off-road and on-road. “It’s not the clearest trail out there even without fog. So of course, as your dad and I were busy walking and talking, and you kids were switching between running around and dangling from or pulling our hands; you all of a sudden disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” I asked. “How could-?”

  Mom snorted a bit too loudly. “That’s just how children are. Especially little balls of excitement like you were at that age – before growing all shy and awkward-teenager, I mean.” A wistful smile before shaking her head. “You can look at your kids for fifty-nine minutes of the hour, but in the one you aren’t, they’ll vanish on you like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  “Huh.”

  Mom's smile widened, almost wide enough to be called a grin. “And like any parent when such a thing happens, I panicked – got short of breath, started hyperventilating; all that good stuff.” That surprised me; for all the months that I’ve known her, she didn’t seem the type. “I wanted to immediately go and start, ah, running back along the path to try and find you, but Pierce grabbed me by the shoulders and told me to stay and watch Michael. Which didn’t help my mood much, but I suppose being outraged was better than having a panic attack.” She smiled self-deprecatingly at that.

  She continued. “Of course, Michael immediately connected the dots. My panic, Pierce’s rare commanding tone, you nowhere to be seen; despite being just five at the time, he just knew what was wrong. Of course he immediately started crying ‘where’s Sammy! where’s Sammy!’ while trying to dash after Pierce. I had to nearly tackle him to the ground to stop him!” She laughed.

  I smiled out of obligation, but my mood was still off. That, and I was wondering what the point of telling me this was.

  Her laughter subsided and she wiped her eyes with shaky hands. “A couple minutes later, Pierce came back with you covered in dirt and all scratched up. You had leaves stuck on you all over, sticks coming out of your hair… God, you were a sight! And all because, apparently, you’d seen a mouse and wanted to catch it, completely forgetting us in the process!” Again, she laughed. “Worse, you actually managed to catch it! Had the trembling thing right between the palms of your hands while smiling so brightly despite being so, so dirty, and Michael was still crying and wriggling in my grasp, Pierce looking dead tired and pale and all but ready to faint, and I…”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  She turned and looked me dead in the eyes, still smiling nostalgically. “That was the first time I got really, really mad at you.” She looked away again, her smile dropping a bit. “It wasn’t- Well, it was warranted, but the way I went about it was all wrong. Shouting hysterically instead of trying to get you to understand. And because you didn’t know what was going on, you ended up crying as well and almost ended up strangling the little mouse had your dad not intervened.” Her mood was, strangely, better again. “And there we were, in the middle of the fog, in the middle of the forest, halfway up the mountain; all crying with Pierce trying to soothe all three of us. Or four, if you count the mouse.”

  We sat in silence after that, Mom restarting her lunch while I finished up mine. It wasn’t that Mom never shared stories about other-Sam – she did it all the time, especially in the early days – but something felt different about this one. Maybe it was that the story was about something negative for once, whereas the usual tales around things like school plays, sports, outings, competitions and playdates were more positive. Or maybe it was the inclusion of Pierce, the late father of this family I had wriggled my way into.

  “I… haven’t really told you much about him, have I?” she said hesitantly, jolting me from my thoughts. She’d finished her lunch. “Or shown you many pictures of him. Or much of anything, really.”

  I looked at her, face kept blank.

  “Of your dad, I mean.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “He was… a kind man, above all else,” she said. “He was always the calmest one in the room, and knew just what to say to let others calm down as well.” She swallowed, her mouth twisting into a smile she struggled to hold. “Always ready to have a talk with someone, quick to smile, and whenever he did it would light up the room. Slow to anger, and quick to forgive and forget – sometimes to a fault if you ask me. Some things just need a good grudge, you know?”

  She scraped her throat, her watery smile vanishing. “We technically met for the first time in ’75, but really, truly met in ’77 at a first aid course. He was the assistant to the teacher and was going down the list to help every participant. He eventually came to me and… I don’t know how or why, but after we got to talking I asked him out on a date. Caught me by surprise even more so than it did your dad. We went and saw a movie that same day, and after that, well… things just, worked out you know?” She swallowed, and with a hoarse voice finished, “Just like that, I’d found the love of my life.”

  She put her head in her hands and elbows on her knees, bowing. She didn’t sob or cry as far as I could tell, just a bone-deep exhaustion from discussing an all-too-weighty topic. And I sat next to her quietly, feeling like an idiot as I tentatively, awkwardly rubbed her back, doing what little I could to comfort her.

  In my mind though, I was confused, and strangely afraid. The mood was and had been strange for this two-day vacation, and whatever secret she wished to share… it seemed heavy to say the least. Which I already knew – why else would she have hidden it the way she did, and why else would she have to talk to her therapist about it? – but still, I felt underprepared.

  X

  The rest of the walk was more casual, with a mix of light conversation and silence as we marched on. We reached the top of the mountain, finding a scenic overlook of the massive Seattle Crater Lake.

  And it was a lake, not an inland sea. The meteor's impact had restructured its surroundings in such a way that over the course of decades all the water had steadily transformed from salt into freshwater. If you didn’t count the Caspian Sea as a lake, it might have briefly been the largest lake in the world. Then Lake Superior, Huron and Michigan became one single Lake Mishigami, all thanks to Ur-Marshall messing up his plan to create a giant marsh. Because surely, turning everything from Minnesota to New York into a marsh would somehow stop Malcator from unifying the American holdouts.

  The view itself was… lackluster. The sky was grey and dark and thus the lake was similarly without shine, and outside of its immense size, there weren’t many noteworthy landmarks within the lake – in the view we had of it at least – to give it something special. Only the Memorial Museum built out over the water was remarkable, and then more in the sense of a ‘we’ve been there’-remark than anything else. Of the crater mountains that lined the lake and separated it from the sea, nothing could be seen.

  Not that our mood was the greatest to enjoy the sight of the lake to begin with. I was in a hated place – the forest – and in a overall dour mood. With Mom having had that breakdown during lunch, and the conversation still to come looming overhead, I doubted my mood would improve before the day was done. So, not the greatest of circumstances to enjoy the beauty of nature.

  Well, I say our mood, but maybe it was just me that wasn’t feeling it. When Mom forced me into a picture of the two of us she sure seemed happy enough. Which was good, if a bit odd in the way she could so rapidly bounce back from the brink.

  “C’mon Sammy, look at it and feel it in your bones,” she said after taking the picture. She raised her arms up high exultantly as she looked at the lake, yelling, “Witness nature in all its awesomeness!”

  “It’s man-made,” I countered.

  Mom turned her head to the side, looking at me.

  “Is it?” she asked rhetorically. “Maybe the hole is, but the lake itself? The fish and plants living in it, the rivers feeding it and the mountains embracing it? That’s all nature filling in what Man left behind. Just try and look at it like that; you’ll surely see the miracle it is then.”

  I looked at it again, but, “Yeah, well, I don’t see any of it.” Again, the weather was poor, so most of what she said was out of sight. “The city’s much more beautiful.” Especially from up high, and in crow-vision.

  “Well aren’t you a true-and-blue city girl,” she said, putting on an accent.

  “And you aren’t?” I said. “Born in San Diego, moved to Charm; that doesn’t exactly scream rural.”

  “Ah, but being city or rural is just a state of mind. You see,” she tapped the side of her head, “it’s what you think of in here that really decides who you are and where you belong, even if your surroundings don’t match it.”

  “I think the Midlanders have something to say about that.”

  “Yeah, well, they don’t live here-” which was exactly my point, “-so I’ll just keep thinking how I think.”

  It was obvious she was joking – she didn’t really believe she wasn’t a city dweller – but it strangely sounded like she was making a point about… something. What that something was, I had no idea.

  Seeing that, Mom sighed and turned to face me directly. “Okay, let me be direct then: I’m not blind.” I blinked, taken aback. “I know you’ve been feeling… some type of way over the past couple of weeks – and last week especially. Insecure where you weren’t before. Awkward, hesitant, quickly annoyed, quieter than usual.”

  I shuffled subconsciously, scuffing the ground with my feet. I wasn’t that bad, was I?

  Mom continued. “Honestly, I had expected this to come sooner. Had been warned that it would come sooner. And so, when it didn’t, I had secretly hoped that it would never come – to the point I might’ve ignored signs I shouldn’t.” She shook her head. My heart was beating inside my throat.

  “That was stupid of me. Arrogant, even. And though I did try, I really should have gotten ahead of it more than I actually did,” she said. “I know I can’t really help you figure yourself out, or your place in the world, or how you should fit into this family you’ve suddenly found yourself a part of…”

  I saw her swallow a lump in her throat, and I did much the same, painful as it might be. I was shaking for some reason, nervous and feeling simultaneously hot and cold. It wasn’t from fear, that much I could tell at least. But what it actually was, I didn't know.

  “I just want you to know that-” she swallowed again, “-that no matter what happens, no matter who you decide to be, or how different you are from your-your previous self, and no matter your lack of memories; you’ll always, always be my daughter, and I will always, always love you.” She sniffed. “And I hope, desperately, you feel the same.”

  The lump in my throat became unbearable and wouldn’t go away no matter how much I wished I could swallow it. From stinging eyes, I felt tears roll down my cheeks; I’d begun crying, and I hadn’t even noticed it.

  Mom hesitantly opened her arms and was about to say something, but I was already in her embrace before she could. She returned it, tight and warm and so full of love that the pain in my throat and eyes all but vanished. Yet despite that – or maybe because of it – my tears flowed freely, freer than before – as did my nose, but I’d rather not remember that.

  Some part of me whispered I should feel guilt, or sadness, or even nothing at all because I wasn’t really her daughter. But in Mom’s embrace, and with Mom’s words replaying again and again in my head without need of the memcorder, all I felt was a sense of peace and belonging.