6 Years Ago
July 28th, 2020
Dawn had been a fragile, gray thing, but the day had swollen into a heavy, bruised evening by the time Rio shouldered his duffel and stepped to the door. The city outside the 7th District simmered with late traffic and the smell of frying oil; laundry flapped like pale flags from balconies two flights up. The apartment felt smaller than it had the night before - all the evidence of a life compacted into corners and shelves that had somehow, overnight, become the border of a country he would cross.
They had not spoken, any of them, since the night's rupture. The silence between Rio and his sisters had been a living thing: Alessandra closed herself in the back room; Marcella left early with a slammed door and a muttered apology; Selene had been visible in flashes - a silhouette by the window, a hand at the hem of a curtain - but she said nothing. Isabela had remained like a kept figure, appearing sometimes in doorways, sometimes pacing the small kitchen, and then vanishing again into the hallway as if she could not be held to a shape by words anymore. Janus had tried once to fix the weather with a joke and failed, his smile folded inward like a bandage.
Rio had eaten nothing that morning. He had packed in the kind of silence that weight was measured in: slow, considered, his fingers thumb-creasing shirts, counting socks like small offerings. The duffel felt lighter than the day outside felt heavy. He had tucked a photograph - a silly, sun-faded print of the family at a cheap amusement fair when he was twelve - into a hidden seam. He put his enlistment papers and travel pass into the inner pocket and zipped it closed. He had rehearsed his goodbyes in his head and found them all wanting next to the real beat of his mother's heart.
He opened the front door and saw her immediately - drawn to the rail of the small balcony like a lighthouse to its own beam. She stood with her hands resting on the ironwork, shoulders squared, framed by the vast smear of Cremont City and the reef of an evening sky. The setting sun had bled orange and purple across the horizon - a theatrical, brutal canvas of color that always made the city look briefly like something noble. Her silhouette was still: an island of dark against the sheen.
He crossed the short stretch of stair and came up behind her with steps that tried not to make a sound. For a breath he simply stood there, watching her watch the skyline, the way her profile cut into the light. Her hair - the long, gray seam he had always thought of as his mother's crown - fell down her back in a smoothed, heavy line. The faint silver threading the strands caught briefly, like tiny irons in the dusk.
He slid his arms around her and hugged her from behind the way boys hug the only harbor they know. He kissed her cheek, feeling the warmth of her skin through the fabric of her cardigan. "Mama," he said softly, smiling into the hollow place at the nape of her neck. "I'll be back before you know it."
She did not move.
Rio's arms tightened a fraction; the sound of the city - a far tram, the low motor of an idling taxi, a child laughing somewhere below - filled the space. He turned his head to see her face, to watch for the smile he could have sworn would come with the tremor in his ribs.
Her face, under the last light of day, was not the face he expected.
It was almost blank.
Her mouth did not soften. Her eyes were fixed on the horizon as if the sunset were something on which she was making a ledger. The warm lines around her eyes, the small grooves that used to map her laughter, were there like a memory, but something else - a severe, measured calm - had layered itself over them. The softness that had always thawed their household, that coiled around him without comment, was absent. Instead there was a quietness so precise it felt deliberate.
He laughed, small and nervous. "You look beautiful tonight," he tried, meaning it. "Like a queen. Maybe even better. The sky does you justice."
Isabela's jaw moved in the smallest, almost imperceptible motion. She did not touch him back. She did not turn.
He leaned his head against the ridge of her shoulder and tried again. "I'll earn a lot. We'll never worry about rent. I'll buy a little shop. I'll bring back whatever you want." His voice shook around the last words, but the promise was there: simple, ironbound, an attempt to make future into currency.
"Always," he whispered. "You're the best mother. I'll always...."
Still nothing from her. Not even the flinch of a smile.
He used the small, ridiculous speech he had saved up for years: the one children use to make complicated futures sound like a promise. "I will write. I'll call. I won't forget your voice. I'll send...."
He paused because there was nothing left to say that would change how she looked at him. Her stare held the horizon like it owned the horizon. The sun's last thin strip went out and the city lights winked on, a staccato of electric breath.
He let his hands slide down from around her and reached to let go, ready to step back into the world he had decided to enter.
Her fingers tightened around his wrist.
It was not a caress. It was not a squeeze born of a mother's ordinary cling. She closed her hand over his, the pressure a measured, possessive grip, as if pinning him to the spot as if he might dissolve if she did not. He could feel the small pulse at her wrist and how resolutely she maintained the hold. It surprised him at first - the pressure - then it took his breath in a tiny little wolf's thud as something older and more controlling revealed itself in the line of her forearm.
"Don't go," she said, very softly, but not pleading. The words were a command disguised as supplication.
Rio tried to step forward and felt the ceil of her need press against him. "Mama....."
"You must understand," Isabela said. Her voice was oddly level, scholastic almost, like someone teaching a hard lesson in a room of geometry. "There are things you do not know."
He blinked. "Like what?"
She did not let go immediately. For a moment he saw the mother he had always loved - warm, restless, capable of laughter - waver like a reflection through glass. Then the shadow of something else passed over her features; for a second it looked like calculation, then something almost like hunger.
"You will come back to me," she said, and the words were not a request. "You will come back to me and you will not leave me again."
Rio's throat tightened. The sunset softened into an indifferent purple. He tried to extract his hand but found that even the small movement pulled at her like a rope. "I will come back," he said gently, because there was no equal to her tone and he wanted to soothe the sharp edges he didn't yet understand. "I promised Papa I would be careful. I promised I'd write. I'll be back soon."
She leaned her head forward first time, not into his chest but against nothing at all - as if the air itself were a thing she preferred over being touched. Then, after a pause that spread like a small cold, she let go.
Her fingers opened and released him, and it felt less like a parting and more like a concession.
Rio stepped away with the duffel on his shoulder. He moved toward the stairs with the practiced awkwardness of someone walking into a ritual. He turned once, to look at her again, seeking the laugh he would remember, the small fierce affection that always pricked him into being better. He found only the outline of a woman in the half-dark, a carved, remote figure, and the distance between that woman and the person who used to press flowers into his books felt more like a canyon.
"Remember to… call me first when you arrived in Vortania," she finally said, and the casual edge of commerce came back into her voice as though it had always been there, threaded into care. The words softened the sharpness for a sliver, then flamed again.
"I will," he said, and meant it. He meant it with a young man's conviction that money solved problems, that the future could be bought with service and sacrifice. He wanted to believe that he could fix everything with a ledger of remittances.
He walked down the steps, each footfall a metronome counting the seconds until the train that would take him away. The corridor's light made a narrow ribbon on the floor, and he stepped beyond it with the practiced gait of someone who had decided the rest of his life.
He turned his head one last time, because habit and something like love demanded it, and met the sight of Isabela bending forward. She did not run after him. She did not call. Instead she sagged, the reserve of her body folding like paper.
She folded down - not into a chair but to her knees on the landing, hands clasped across her stomach like she was holding on to something very fragile. Her shoulders shook, the motion small and contained, the kind of privatized thing that weeks of pretense had made into a ritual.
She cried quietly, not the convulsing, public sob of a household scene meant to be noticed, but a small, private unmaking. Her face was pressed to her knees; the iron of her grin and the theatre of her composure had given way. She made no sound that could travel more than the stair's two feet and the hallway's thimble of air. The apartment's bare bulb hummed and hummed and the city's distant noises settled like dust.
Up the stair Rio paused on the public step, his bag slung heavier across his shoulder, and for the first time the certainty of his decision punched him sideways. Something sickened his throat - not the regret of a boy but the first animal understanding of a mother's quiet collapse into a place you cannot go back from easily. He clenched his jaw and tried to swallow it into a steady breath and pull himself out into the world.
Then, Janus came home the way he always came home - shoulders bent from a day's work, a newspaper folded under one arm, the smell of the bakery clinging to him like a second skin. Evening had thinned into that particular kind of light where the streetlamps were only just waking and the city exhaled after its daily rush. He was halfway up the stair when Rio, duffel slung over one shoulder and the world already packed into the tight set of his jaw, stepped out into the landing and stopped him.
They both stood there for a second like two men who had rehearsed this moment in private a hundred times and yet never quite got the timing right. Janus's hand hovered over the bannister, knuckles white around the wood. Rio set his bag down and, without thinking too much, reached forward and folded his father into a hug - the kind of hug that belonged to small boys tucking themselves beneath a father's wings, the kind of embrace that tried to hold time in place.
Janus stiffened at first, then let himself be held. He smelled of flour and yeast and hard work; his coat was dusted with granules that glittered when the stairwell light hit them. Rio could feel the steady slow beat of his father's heart beneath the rough fabric of the coat, the small, familiar rhythm that had lulled so many nights in childhood into an ordinary comfort. For a moment, the two of them were simply two people clinging to the familiar as if it would buffer the wound of the next day.
"You really have to go, huh," Janus said into his son's shoulder so quietly Rio almost missed it.
Rio froze. He pulled back and looked at his father's face - lined but kind, the cheeks softening with a tired smile. "I have to," he said. "We need the money. I'll be careful. I'll be back."
Janus's mouth curled in a weak, melancholic smile that didn't reach his eyes. The lines at the corners of his mouth deepened like the folds on a map. "Of course you will be careful." He cleared his throat and forced the joke into his voice to make the tension less sharp. "Bring me a medal, eh? Or at least a postcard from the capital."
Rio managed a half-smile that felt brittle even to him. "If I get a medal I'll buy you a new pair of shoes," he said. It was the sort of flippant promise boys made to fathers to keep the world tethered to something light. Janus's laugh was short and wet.
Then Janus took a breath, the kind of breath that smelled of hesitant things. He shifted his weight, the newspaper rustling in his hand like a secret. "Before you go," he said, his voice folding into a smaller register, "there's something I ought to tell you."
Rio frowned, the grey of his eyes narrowing. "What is it?"
Janus's fingers went to the collar of his coat and fiddled with the thread. He looked at the ceiling for a moment, as though searching for the right place to hang whatever words he had. His jaw tightened like a man bracing for a fall. "Maybe it's better if you don't know," he said finally, and the line in his voice cut the stairwell into two places - the safe before and the unsafe after.
Rio's hands dropped to his sides. "What do you mean?" The bluntness of the question was an attempt to yank the escape hatch open. He thought, irrationally and with a flare of anger, that his father had no right to sign him up for something ambiguous. Rio was about to demand details; to tell Janus that he needed to know everything so he wouldn't be blindsided later; to insist that silence would not spare him.
Janus smiled again, and it was the tired smile of a man who had been carrying some small grief for too long. He turned his face toward the pale light spilling into the stairwell and concentrated on it, as if the light might help him shape words. "I don't want to break your spirit before you go," he said. "You need to be brave and sure. The army needs a man who believes his mission is right. I don't want… I don't want you carrying doubts into the barracks."
Rio bristled. "You think I'm weak?" he asked, sharp, because the notion sliced at something he had been building inside himself - the careful edifice of resolve.
Janus shook his head quickly, nearly laughing at the thought of his son thinking him unfaithful to his confidence. "No... never that," he said. "You've always been strong. That's why I fought so hard for you to have options." His voice faltered and slid into a softness that made Rio's chest close up. "But there are things in the city you shouldn't learn in a barracks bunk. They will change you faster than cold weather. There are some things you should face on your own terms, not as a recruit of someone else's war."
Rio swallowed. The weight of the duffel on his shoulder seemed suddenly heavier, like ballast. "Is this about Mama? About...."
Janus's hand came up, stopping him gently. "Not just that." He searched Rio's face, looking for the boy who used to sleep with his head on his father's chest, not for the soldier he would soon be. "There are… things in this city. Things that make men cruel and make women clever in ways that can break them. I have seen a few of those things, son. I thought perhaps you should be spared while you still think the world is a matter of ledger and sweat."
Rio's jaw tightened. He imagined dozens of possible meanings - hints of betrayal, gossip, embers of old fights he hadn't been privy to. The imagination was an animal that filled in all blanks with monstrous images. He wanted Janus to say the word: betrayal, affair, lies. He wanted a target to fix his anger on. The silence between Janus's words became a mirror and it reflected something ugly.
"You think I can't take it?" Rio demanded, but the question had a ring of pleading he couldn't quite hide.
Janus's sigh was long, the kind of exhale older men learned to use when they wished to protect their children from their own nightmares. "I don't think anything," he said, almost apologetically. "I only know what it is to see a young man step into a uniform and then come back different. Different not in the way of courage but in the way of being cut out of the safe cloth we sewed around him. I don't want that for you if...if this can be avoided."
Rio tightened his grip on the duffel and let his shoulders gather themselves into soldier's posture on instinct. He felt anger prick like nettles on the inside of his skin. "Don't tell me what to be afraid of," he replied, softer, because beneath the anger there was a core of something raw: betrayal was a fire that needed oxygen - it would grow no matter how anyone tried to smother it.
Janus's laugh was a small, broken sound. He reached up and ruffled his son's hair, an old gesture that dissolved into something like tenderness and frightening frailty. "You have your mother's stubbornness and your grandmother's wrong-headed courage," he said, and for a breath, humor flitted across his face. "Go strike the world, boy. Come back when you are rich and safe."
"Don't be a coward, Papa," Rio said, and the words were both a prod and an apology. He wanted to cross the street and stand in front of whatever Janus withheld and tell it he could take it. He wanted to be the kind of man who could weather the knowledge and not let it root into him like poison.
Janus's fingers curled around the newspaper, and for a moment he looked like a man stripped bare. "If I told you everything," he whispered, "would it change what you're doing?"
Rio thought about it. In the quiet of that stairwell their world contracted to the size of two men breathing close. "Maybe," he said finally. "But I'd rather know and choose."
Janus closed his eyes as if the movement might stitch up some small place in him. He opened them again, and the look he gave Rio was soaked in a lifetime of simple, human regret. "Then promise me one thing," he said. "Promise me you'll be careful. Promise me you'll come back when you can."
Rio hesitated only a heartbeat, then nodded. "I promise," he said, and the word landed between them like a small stone thrown into a pond - creating ripples that neither would see the ends of for some time.
Janus's mouth curved into that same sad smile. "That's enough," he said. He took a step back and, almost against his will, straightened his shoulders and tried to wear the mask a father thought his child needed to see. "Be brave," he added lightly, the attempt at levity skittering over the sharp edges.
Rio leaned forward and kissed his father on the forehead. It was a childish gesture and the world felt both too small and immediate for such simplicity. "I'll be back," he said again, because repetition made the future less like a phantom.
Janus watched him go down the stairs, the young man's gait finding a cadence that already spoke of hardened muscles and controlled breathing. When Rio reached the street Janus stood there a long moment, hands clasped in front of him, the newspaper hanging uselessly from one wrist. He watched until his son was swallowed by the city's flow and then, finally, with the faintest of sighs, turned and went back into the apartment building.
He did not share the secret. He folded it back into himself like an unlit cigarette, a thing he could not smoke without burning the room down. He walked slowly, thinking of the small sturdiness of the life he had built - a bakery's counters, a steady rhythm of mornings and dough and laughter - and wondering how much of that ordinary fabric would fray once the boy he loved most had learned the world's harder lessons.
At the top of the stairs he paused, fingers on the door, and for a moment he allowed himself the small private forgiveness of a man who had chosen to keep weight from another's shoulders. He turned the key and closed the door softly, the apartment falling into its habitual hush - the hush of men wrapping their children in ignorance like a fragile blanket, believing it to protect them even as the city waited outside with teeth.
The train to the airport would not wait for sentiment. Life had a way of making choices matter only after you had already acted. Rio tightened his hand on the bag, forced his feet toward the tram stop, and kept moving, thinking of numbers and time and the months he would send money back. He thought of letters and phone calls, of cheap photographs and little boxes wrapped in brown paper.
Behind him inside that small apartment, Isabela rose after a long time on her knees. Her face was wet, the last light drying in the tricky angles beneath her cheekbones. She wiped at her cheek with the back of her hand like someone removing the last evidence of a quiet war. She stood, slowly smoothing the front of her dress with hands that had reason enough to shake.
There was a new impression in the line of her shoulders, something colder, something less indulgent. For a long time she walked to the window and looked out over the city's tiny, burning lights, the sea dark and far beyond. Her mouth formed a small, unreadable line. She had allowed her son to leave. She had felt it and she had been torn. In that torn place something else - a practical, hard certainty - took root.
When Rio's figure vanished between the alleys and the tram's dull roar swallowed him, Isabela did not move at first. Her silence had been a furnace, melting things like pride into molten usefulness. The tears stopped. The folds of grief turned in on themselves, and a type of cold efficiency settled where the aching had been.
She turned away from the window at last. Her expression smoothed into an even plane. She crossed the apartment with a new lightness, not a lightness of joy but of purpose. She went to the small wooden chest and opened it, taking out a leather-bound notebook she used for grocery lists and small accounts, and a pen. She wrote a list - names, numbers, small tasks, a tally of things to do. She made it long. The handwriting was steady, decisive. The house's ordinary domesticity resumed its place, but Isabela's hands moved with the slow deliberation of someone who had decided: the day's pain would be converted into action.
Outside, the city's evening deepened. The train arrived with its characteristic squeal and Rio boarded, the doors closing on a boy who had promised to be a man. He pressed his forehead against the cold of the carriage and tried to hold each small memory - his mother's hands, his father's smile - like talismans against the unknown.
At the window, Isabela tucked that folded photograph of her boy - the one he had pressed into his inner pocket - into the notebook. It became a small anchor in a new ledger. She read the list again and then, for a long time, sat there like a woman preparing herself to change the terms of her life.
She had loved and lost in a single afternoon. Now she would make that loss profitable in a way she thought only she could understand. The evening swallowed the apartment's last light and the city rotated on, uncaring and inexorable, as one woman, and one son, each stepped into the places they had chosen.