Secrets

Leon’s mother remembered the Rebirth -- had lived through it, in fact. He would sit in rapt attention, curled up against her side in his small, grubby bed listening to her tell stories. Clean water readily available, stores with shelves and shelves of food there at any time without need for your own farm or any particular worry over violent thieves. She laid her head on top of his and whispered the secrets of the World Before, combing calloused fingers through his hair and remembering better days while he gazed at the sullied bronze of her locket hanging soft and warm against her chest, heart-shaped and bright in the darkness of his bedroom.

“It wasn’t better, really,” she amended. “Just different.”

He once asked why everything was the way it was, tracing his fingers over the locket, feeling the seam of it, aching to see what was hidden inside. Why did they have to live in a walled commune, to share everything, to mouse away food and precious World Before artifacts? Why didn’t they share with the people in the Badlands? Why not go back to the way things were before?

“Well,” she began. “Sometimes things just fall apart. That’s the way of the world -- people make mistakes and lose sight of things and suddenly… everything changes.”

“But why?” Leon urged.

She pressed a kiss to his forehead, oily and dirty because it was not yet their family’s day for the community bath. “I don’t know, sugar. Things just stopped working and people got real sick of it.”

Even then he’d known she was lying. She did that a lot. She did it to his father when he was still with them and his siblings, to her Mama and to Auntie Lorraine. She used lies like a child uses a blanket to keep the monsters out at night, knowing it doesn’t do any real good but desperate nonetheless for some form of relief.

It was when Leon grew up that he finally understood. Everyone in their little community knew everything at all times. He’d once snuck out to meet Ian Broc and curl up in the barn together. They ate fresh strawberries taken from the Otis’s back garden and listened to the animals huff and snuff in their sleep and surrounded each other with the earthen warmth of a budding romance.

The next day, Raff Otis charged both of them for the strawberries and Mama tutted at Leon for sneaking out so late when he knew he had to help milk the goats the next morning.

Secrets were currency, and if you somehow managed to keep them to yourself, to keep some little private thing tucked away in a corner, it was almost a legacy. So Leon never pressed his mother, let her keep her secrets and continued his work as she continued telling her stories -- fabricated or not -- until she eventually passed and took those very secrets to her grave.

Leon was in his twenties, a man grown and learning to take care of not just his own family, but the commune in its entirety, as every community member does. He had expected it, his whole family had, but that didn’t make his mother’s death any easier. Sissy, his sister, was already married and moved to a separate commune, while his older brother Nick had left in his teens to join some vigilante group. That had gone over as well as a hurricane, and left Leon, his mother, and Auntie Lorraine to pick up the pieces, keep the work flowing, and continue to take care of Mama.

His mother took all the answers she could have provided Leon to the grave. Just because he had never asked didn’t mean he’d never wondered, never laid awake at night questioning how exactly they got here, where his father, now only a vague shape in his memories, went, and why they never tried to return to the World Before.

Her funeral was as all were in the commune -- small, short, yet spirited. Everyone worked to live, so mourning was often kept behind closed doors after the bodies were burned or buried in future farming space to help provide natural fertilizer.

“Giving back to the living,” Auntie Lorraine called it. “Lettin’ the dead take care of their loved ones even after they pass.”

Leon picked at his plate of scant food. “Worm food, more like…” he murmured.

Mama shook her, “Leon, your mother did a lotta good for this family and you know she’ll keep givin’ her all. Better worm food than rotting away helpin’ no one.”

Leon quieted and took a bite of mushy rice and tough pork, not meeting either of the womens’ gazes.

Auntie Lorraine set her fork down, reaching over the table to press her fingers on top of Leon’s hand. “Mama’s right, honey. I know it’s hard but--”

“I don’t want to talk about it, please. Not tonight.” Leon cut her off.

Mama and Lorrain exchanged a look, Mama’s tufted white hair shifting in the corner of Leon’s eye as she shook her head.

“Alright, but promise you’ll come to us if you need to talk.”

“Okay.”

“Promise me, Leon. We’re the only kin you got left around here, and we stick together even in the tough times.”

Leon took another bite of pork, chewed on the rubbery, tasteless meat and swallowed. It felt like it would get stuck halfway down his tight throat, but he somehow managed to keep it down. “I promise, Auntie.”

She patted the top of his hand. “Good, good.”

“May I please be excused?” He asked, same as he had since he was a boy.

“Go on, just mind your plate.” Auntie Lorraine responded in kind, like nothing had changed except that it was her speaking the words and not his own mother.

Leon stood, kissed Mama on the cheek and nodded to Auntie Lorraine when she squeezed his shoulder, and left after gingerly placing his chipped plate in the big sink.

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His mother’s funeral was bigger than Leon expected, given his previous experiences with other commune funerals. It seemed everyone took a chunk out of their day to mourn her. The immediate family, of course, was allowed a day free of their typical work in order to grieve, but were expected to continue the next day. Leon found himself wondering if the World Before held funerals in a similar fashion and what people in the Badlands, those dusty, wrecked plains between communes, did. For half a second, he thought to ask his mother when he returned home before his heart caught up with his head and he found himself reeling over the reality that she was gone. Really gone.

By sunset, Leon, Auntie Lorraine, and Mama had taken the condolences of the commune and Auntie Lorraine was off to give their plans for the layout of this section of the farm to the Head -- an honor given to each bereaved family to cultivate and choose how their kin continued to contribute to the commune.

Leon wiped the sweat off his brow from the hot summer sun and sighed, eyes aching from earlier shed tears as he looked at the freshly overturned earth. Mama approached him from behind in her slow, creaking gait, and laid a hand on his arm half to support herself, and half to support her grandson.

“Children ought not live past their parents. That’s what I always heard.” Mama said, shaking her head. “But there she is, and here I am.”

Leon didn’t reply, letting silence stretch as he and Mama gazed at the plot of earth. She squeezed his arm, laying her head on his shoulder. He felt wetness through his sleeve but didn’t dare look. Mama didn’t like it when people saw her cry.

“I had so many things I still wanted to ask her.” He said.

Mama laughed, voice as watery as her eyes. “You know she wouldn’t tell the truth, honey.”

Leon tried swallowing to ease the tight fist that worked its way in his throat, but it only seemed to make it worse. “Why’d she keep all those secrets, anyhow?”

Mama huffed. “Your mother, she was complicated. Loved you more’n anything, wanted to keep you safe.”

“From what, exactly?”

“The World Before, the World Now, a lot of things.” Mama replied.

Leon turned to her, eyebrows scrunched. “She never really told me about the World Before. At least, I don’t think so.”

Mama smiled, “Oh honey, she couldn’t have.”

“Did… something happen to her?” He asked.

Mama shook her head. “She never saw the World Before, Leon.”

Leon blanched. “What?”

“She was born in the World Now, like you. Doesn’t know nothin’ about nothin’ because she’d never seen nothin’ about nothin’.”

“Don’t joke with me. Not today, Mama.” Leon said.

She gazed up at him, big brown eyes clear and lined with wrinkles. “You know I ain’t much for joking, honey. And I sure ain’t no liar.”

Leon pulled away from her hand on his shoulder, stomach roiling. “Then… the stories she told me…”

Mama watched him parse it out, frowning, hunched over and small. Leon nonetheless felt like that same little boy she scolded after his night eating strawberries in the barn with Ian.

“Were they all lies?” Leon asked.

“Each story has a bit of truth,” Mama said, placing her hand over her heart. “Even if the words themselves are fiction.”

Mama reached into a pocket she’d sewn into her dress herself and cupped something in her hand, gripping it in her arthritic fingers.

“She asked me to give you this, before she went.” She said.

Leon picked it up gingerly, rubbing his fingers over the tarnished bronze curves of the heart, feeling the seam with his fingernail. So easy to open, without his mother there to protect it. So easy, and yet he hesitated.

“Why not give it to Sissy? I know she’s gone and married but--”

Mama tapped the locket in the palm of his hand. “She said you and no one but you. Said it was important -- that you never asked what was in it but were always lookin’ like she’d never notice.”

Leon looked at his grandmother, and then the locket, mouth pressing into a line. “Did she--did she say anything else?”

Mama shook her head, and Leon’s gaze returned to the necklace turning warm from the heat of his hand.

“Well? You gonna open it?” Auntie Lorraine asked, stepping up to join them after settling things with the Head about their plot in the farm.

Leon looked between the two women -- the last women left in the World Now that knew and loved him, that helped raise him, that were not so far out of reach. He looked to the locket, to the secrets it may hold answers to. His father, that vague shape in his holy memory. His mother’s childhood, not in the World Before, after all, but a fabrication of what could have been. Who his mother really was, hidden away all in this piece of cheap metal.

Leon thought of the World Before, of the supermarkets lined with food, of sweet, purified water for more than just spread out communes -- but for those in between, settled in the Badlands and beyond who do not have the privilege of so many surrounding people to protect and love them. He thought of the stench of illness surrounding his mother before she passed away, of the press of her fingers on his hands and the warmth of her lips on his forehead, the cadence of her voice when she told stories.

He lifted his hands and unclasped the chain, held the necklace and placed it around his neck, letting it fall heavy and warm on his chest. “No,” he said. “Let her keep this one last secret.”