Sonata (North Security 3)

Samantha

I expect the Tuileries Gardens to have more flowers. Or bushes. Trees?

There’s a lot of stone walkways. And grass. Large expanses of grass. The whole gardens are bigger than I would have expected, too. Enough that it’s not immediately clear how we would meet someone.

Naturally, Liam didn’t want me to come.

Except he couldn’t count on anyone showing up if they didn’t see me in the park. And I wasn’t going to miss the chance to meet the mother who left me. I’m not thinking there’ll be a sweet reunion. When your mother leaves you to fate and a barren Russian orphanage, there aren’t a lot of nice feelings left. She asked for this meeting, arranged it, and I want to find out what she has to say. It could be the information we’re in Paris to uncover.

We walk for fifteen minutes. Or an hour. It’s hard to tell because I’m breathing hard, my muscles taut. I’m braced for an altercation. A fight or flight. Lia

m pulls me down to sit at a bench while he murmurs into his watch. “East side entrance,” comes the response.

I turn to the east in time to see an older woman turn down the path toward us. Liam starts to rise, to place his body between mine and hers. I put my hand on his arm. “Let me.”

“Samantha.”

“You can’t protect me forever. Let me go.”

I didn’t mean it to be so poignant, but he looks at me as if I’m asking for him to say goodbye. Those green eyes, so familiar and yet always a surprise. So vibrant for someone who never shows emotion. Except for now, when he looks half-broken.

“Go,” he says, his voice hoarse.

I didn’t mean it like that. The words hover on my tongue. I’m not sure they’re true, though. Eventually he’ll have to let me go. It might as well be now, when I’m in a foreign land, with family I can’t even recognize on sight, unable to play the instrument that’s been like a limb to me. A complete loss. A hard separation from the Samantha from before and after.

The woman stops when she sees me walking towards her.

Wrinkles frame her eyes and mouth. Laugh lines. Frown lines. A lifetime lived without me in it. The brown eyes, though. Those are familiar. They look back at me in the mirror. “Hello,” I say, which feels inane to say to a long-lost mother.

It also feels like more than she deserves.

“You look beautiful,” she says, with those mine/not-mine eyes.

“Why did you find me?” Of course I wouldn’t have asked this question if she had shown up at the orphanage. Or even years later, on Liam’s doorstep. I think even if she’d found me on the US leg of the tour, I would have embraced her. Hopeful and hopeless.

“Take a walk with me.”

An order from a parent who does not have the right to give it.

I look back at the man who does have my respect—not quite a parent. Not quite a lover. He waits with his hands behind his back in a strict military bearing. I suppose that’s who’s in the gardens with me today. The soldier.

With a nod I fall into step beside her. She has an uneven gait, her left leg strained from some old injury. It’s cruel, I think, that I have the urge to ask her about it. That I have the urge to offer my arm to ease her way. Cruel, when she couldn’t spare a minute for me.

She sighs. “Maybe it was too much to hope you’d be happy.”

Maybe it was too much to hope you’d be a mother. There’s more bitterness in the thought than I expected. I don’t sit with this grief every day. There’s a mother-shaped hole inside me, grown over with moss and ivy. It doesn’t have to be seen, but when I pull away the vegetation of everyday life, there it is. “Yes.”

“Do you remember me?”

There are impressions of soft skin and hard curls, the smell of jasmine and hairspray. I remember the colorful batik fabric she wore, though she’s in more modern, plain clothing now. “Not very much. Do you remember me?”

A small laugh. “More than I would like, sometimes.”

I’m determined not to feel bad for her, but a little sympathy seeps in. The curse of being human, to feel empathy for someone else, even if they don’t feel any for you. “The man back there, he’s the only parent I’ve really known.”

She nods her head, as if absorbing a blow, accepting it. “He’s more than a parent.”

“How do you know?”