Writer in the Depths

Watching little Maisie cry her silent tears, trying not to let a sound out so that Mae wouldn’t crumble to pieces, it only made it harder for her mother to stay put together. Every time Maisie looked over her shoulder, through the rain back at John’s grave, more tears fell. She wasn’t old enough, not for this, not to understand just how cruel the world could be to rip away her father, Mae’s husband. 

A hitched breath made Maisie reach up with her hand and take Mae’s. “I’ll be okay, Mommy. You can cry.”

Mae stopped and her view of her black boots on the sodden pavement became blurry with the force of her tears. She hurriedly wiped the wetness away and knelt down to pull Maisie against her, sandwiching the umbrella handle between her neck and shoulder. Her knees became soaked through her jeans and she could feel the umbrella slipping, stray raindrops falling down her face. “I’m okay baby,” she whispered, “I’ll be okay too, I just miss your father.”

Maisie hugged her mother back, fisting the back of her grey flannel jacket. “Daddy loves us, Mommy. I know he’ll miss us, and we- we’ll miss him.”

Oh and Mae’s heart shattered in its mold even further; what kind of mother was she that her daughter had to comfort her in her grief?

When Maisie loosened her hold on her jacket, Mae stood from her knelt position, holding the umbrella, and wiped the tears from her daughter’s cheeks, and then her own. The rain was hard and oppressive, chilling them to the bone, and Mae couldn’t lie and say she didn’t feel absolutely lost and listless, but for the first time in days, she knew her next step. She needed to get Maisie out of the rain and dried so she wouldn’t catch a cold. The sooner they left the cemetery, the sooner they could go to Mae’s mother’s house and be warmed by her fire. 

Almost as if on cue, Mae’s phone started to ring, beeping obnoxiously from her pocket. She pulled it out, flipped it open, smiled at the blocky lettering of Mafalda, her mother’s name, and pressed the answer button. “Hola, Mami. We’re leaving now.”

“Mijita, I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there.”

Mae shook her head despite the fact that Mafalda couldn’t see it. “It’s okay, Mami, you know your doctor said not to put any weight on your legs for the next few weeks, and even you said you couldn’t make it down the stairs to the car.” The house Mae spent her teenage years in was high up on a hill, the driveway so narrow and steep that Mafalda’s car couldn’t safely navigate it. Mae had planned to pay someone to come out and pave the road, or at least help Mafalda find a better car to drive, but then the older woman needed to replace both hips, and then there was John’s accident, and everything sort of fell by the wayside. 

Mafalda clicked her tongue on the other line. “It’s no excuse! Johnny was as much my son as Mateo is! He was just as much my child as you three are, I– I—” the woman broke down sobbing over the phone and Mae bit her bottom lip to stop her own tears. 

She tried to say something, to break the silence, but she was barely holding it together. Instead, a quieter voice said, “Here, mama, stay here and let me talk to her.” Mafalda’s cries could still be heard in the background as someone took the phone and walked away with it. “She’ll be okay, Maite,” her sister, Maricel, said quietly. “This is going to be hard on all of us. Mateo should be getting off work soon, so come and get my baby niece out of that weather and I’ll take dinner out of the oven.”

Mae chuckled through her tears. “Mari,” she said, exasperated, “It’s still in the oven? And Maisie isn’t a baby anymore, she even– even tied her s-shoes by herself today.” She was crumpling, she knew it, and she had to get out of public and back to her family before it got any worse.

“It’s on warm. You deserve a hot dinner, not a heated dinner. And besides! Maisie-daisy will always be my baby niece,” Maricel said, voice full of conviction. “She’ll be eighteen and off to college and I will still call her my baby niece. Just like how you never grew out of being my baby sister, Mae.”

Mae knew better than to argue with Maricel, and she was right of course. It just hurt to think that Maisie was growing up; a scary thought after losing someone. 

They had reached the civilian parking and information center where a friend of Mae’s had parked her car for the funeral, and she was about to tell Maricel that they were getting in the car and it was okay to hang up when Mae stopped dead in her tracks. 

She must have gasped because Maricel squawked over the line, “What? What’s wrong?!” and that was followed by Maisie tugging her arm. 

What could only be described as a lump was leaning against the wall of the information center, covered by the roof awning but still unprotected from the rain. What looked like a collection of soaked dirty blankets shifted, and through a gap, one blazingly bright blue eye stared back at Mae. A little, paper white hand poked through the gap and pulled the blanket back, tucking the fabric beneath a chin. 

It was a child, a very young child, staring at Mae with shining eyes that quickly lost their sparkle. The child, a toddler’s age at most, whispered something, seemingly to themself, and then looked at the ground, tears lining their eyes. 

Mae shuffled closer and directed Maisie under the cover of the building, a part that was dry and only a few steps away from where the unknown child was sitting. Mae crouched a few feet away, holding the umbrella over both their heads. “Are you lost?” she asked.

The child looked up and then around before staring back at the floor. “Mommy said stay,” they whispered. “Mommy said be right back.” More tears fell down the child’s face, which Mae could now see was covered in dirt. 

Mae could read the situation plainly. Abandoned. Too young to know what was happening, way younger than Maisie. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

The child lifted a hand to aimlessly rub their face, losing their grip on the blanket. “Hadley,” they said as the soaked blanket shifted from their form. Clad in a sodden purple unicorn patterned onesie, the child’s condition made Mae’s eyes widen in horror. 

The child’s face wasn’t just dirty, it was bloody, streams stained down their face from two large wounds in their short and choppy hair, which had to be a light color, just darkened to a deep grey with all the rain. The wounds were Mae’s main concern, along with the strange, glowing blue protrusions from said identical wounds, symmetrically placed on the front of their head. 

“Are you a boy or a girl?” Maisie’s voice piped up, louder than she had spoken all week. 

The child stopped crying at the question and looked up at the older kid, muttering, “G-Girl.”

“What are those things on your head?” Maisie continued, curious, leaning forward with her hands on her knees before Mae could redirect her back to the cover of the building. 

The little girl lifted a hand to her head and touched the strange protrusions on her head, wincing at the touch. “I- I dunno,” she whispered. 

Then, from the open and active phone in Mae’s hand, a shrill voice shrieked, “MAITE ISABELA CAROLINA! What’s going on?!”

Mae yelped at the loud sound and felt her stomach plummet when the little girl in front of her cowered at the noise, blocking her head with her hands, which only led to her crying louder at the painful touch on the protrusions on her head. “Maricel!” Mae hissed into the phone, “Why are you shouting?!”

“Because my baby sister gasped and won’t tell me what happened! We are not losing anyone else this year, you hear me?!”

Mae rolled her eyes. “I’m fine, Mari. I gasped because there’s a child here, soaked from the rain. She’s all alone.”

“A child?” a male voice piped up. Mateo. “A lone child? No parents?”

“Maisie and I are the only ones here, Mateo. There’s literally not another car in the civilian parking lot.” It was true. No one else came to the funeral, and everyone who helped with the military honors parked in a different lot. They were alone. “This child is injured too, and… I don’t know what to make of it.”

“What do you mean?” Mateo asked. “If she’s injured, you should take her to the hospital.”

Mae glanced at Hadley’s injuries, and the strange blue bumps on her head, pointed and poking through her drenched hair. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. She…” Mae turned away from Hadley, still holding the umbrella over the girl, and whispered, “She has… horns, I guess.”

“Horns?!” Mateo shouted, so loudly, in fact, that Mae reactively held the phone away from her ear. 

“Give me that!” Maricel shouted. “Maite, did you say this girl had horns?” Mae confirmed her question. “How old does she look?”

“No older than four,” Mae answered, watching as Maise leaned down to whisper to little Hadley, to which the girl lifted a hand with three fingers extended. Maisie turned back to her mother and lifted three fingers. “Make that three years old,” Mae corrected.

“Bring her home first, we can get her dried off and warm and then I can assess her injuries.” Mae could hear her brother arguing in the background, to which Maricel said. “Mateo says that violates child protection law, but since mama’s hospital is five minutes from the house, I think it will be an acceptable excuse to say we got her warm clothes before taking her to the doctor, okay? The lesser twin can start looking for her family.” More grumbling from Mateo was followed by a stomp and a high-pitched yelp before Maricel repeated with emphasis, “Okay?”

Mae nodded and whispered, “Okay,” and hung up the phone. She fished her car keys out of her coat pocket and handed them to Maisie. “Maisie-daisy, can you grab the towels from my trunk, please?”

Maisie took them and dashed off to complete her mother’s request as Mae shedded her thick coat and coaxed little Hadley from the sodden blanket. “I’m gonna help you, sweetie,” she whispered, more to herself than to Hadley as she wrapped the girl in the coat. 

As they worked to help Hadley into the car, Mae didn’t get the chance to pause to realize that she no longer felt as suffocated by the unbearable weight of her world crashing down around her.

–x–

I hope you enjoyed this!