When he got inside, his mother was sitting at the table sorting herbs, or at least he thought that was what she was doing. There were a lot of dried plants on the table and she was sifting through them. She was wearing a brown dress and a white apron. She was sitting on a chair hunched over, her hands moving quickly over the herbs. He was amazed that the little plants didn’t crumble as she picked them up. She looked up at him, smiled and gestured with her head for him to sit down. She was deep in concentration and he knew that she would get to him eventually, so he contented himself with sitting and pulling his shoulders back, feeling the muscles across his broad chest stretch and relax.
“How are you today dear?” she said, not looking up from her work.
“I’m doing good mom. What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get these sorted out. They fell off the wall and got all jumbled up.”
On either side of the fireplace were herbs drying on the walls, and sure enough there was a spot that was missing a patch.
“Do you want me to fix it? I don’t think it would take long,” Legon said, gesturing to the wall.
Laura didn’t see him point as she was still hunched over the herbs. “What dear? What would you fix?” she looked up, confused.
“The wall,” he said flatly. She looked over and shook her head as if she was ridding herself of day dream.
“Sorry. You know I can be a flake when I’m concentrating. Let me finish this and we can have some tea.”
An image of the look on Sasha’s face from two days ago when she had “some tea” rushed through his mind like a herd of stampeding cows.
“Oh… I feel great mom… I don’t need anything. Not thirsty, really. You have stuff to do, so I’ll just…” his mind reached into what seemed to be nothingness, coming up with a reason to avoid tea. “I’ll fix the wall, that’s what needs to be done.” He instantly knew this hadn’t worked. As soon as he said it she looked up at him, and he could see she was trying not to laugh.
“We’re not going to have that kind of tea, just good old mint will do today,” she said with a chuckle in her voice.
Legon sat back and sighed with relief. Soon she was done, and before he knew it she seemed to make mint tea appear out of thin air. As he sipped it he felt the hot liquid flow down his throat to warm his belly. They sat quietly for a bit. His mother broke the silence.
“You’ll be eighteen in a month. How do you feel about that?” Her voice was soft and carried with it all the sincerity in the world. This subject had been playing over and over again in his head for the last few weeks.
“I don’t know how I feel about it. There’s a part of me that is excited about coming of age but… there’s a bigger part that is terrified, you know what I mean?” He looked at her and she nodded a bit. He continued on.
“I just feel… I feel like I’m racing toward something I can’t control and something…” he seemed to have a hard time thinking of the words.
She tried to help him. “Scary?”
“Yeah, but not like the scary you would think. It’s not the excited scary.”
Her face looked concerned. “Legon, what’s wrong?”
He paused, wondering if he should tell her about his tattoo. “It’s better to tell her now than later,” he thought.
“Come and look,” he said.
As he said this he gestured to his back and pulled the back of his shirt down. His mother looked a little frightened now and came around back of him to look. He heard a sharp intake of breath and then he felt her fingers inside the back of his shirt and then he heard the fabric rip. It caught him off guard. His mother would never damage good clothes. She held his shoulders in place when he tried to turn. Her hands were moving across his back, over the tattoo. The movement felt frantic and scared. It felt like she was trying to remove dirt or a smudge off his back. They stopped moving and she walked slowly over to the chair. She sat and held her face in her hands. Her whole body was shuddering, and he could hear her say between sobs, “Not my son… not my son…”
Fear crawled up the back of his neck and he was surprised by a crack in his voice. “Mom what’s wrong? What’s going on?” She looked up at him. There was a pleading look in her tear-stained face, a look that said, ‘Don’t make me, please don’t make me.’
Her voice was rough. “I think it’s time I told you how you came to us.”
His forehead scrunched. “Mom, I know how I got here. Dad found me while he was hunting. They came across a camp site that had been raided; they figured that I was left behind by mistake when people fled from the robbers.” But as he said this, like so many other times when he thought about it, he somehow knew that it wasn’t right. Nobody would leave a baby in a campsite. Even the robbers would at least kill or try to sell it. He had never given too much credence to the story of how he came to be with Laura and Edis. They were his parents now, and that’s what mattered.
“No, Legon that’s not how we came to have you in our family,” she said softly. Her face was still tear-soaked, but he could see resolve cross it as well. After pausing for a moment she continued.
“Your father was hunting, that part is true. He found you and brought you home, but that’s where the truth ends.”
Trepidation began seeping into him, as she went on.
“He was in the woods when he heard a baby crying. He was with Brack and Arkin. They moved to the sound and found a cottage, or at least that’s what your father thought it was. He said it seemed more like a tree, but I’m not sure about all of that, he was upset when he got home and I don’t think that he was in his right mind. When they came to the cottage they could see that it was horribly damaged…”
At this she paused and he could see fresh tears filling her blue eyes again.
“When they entered the house they found a woman. She was dead. Your father has never said much about her. I think that what he saw frightened him. Apparently the inside had been ransacked, but it appeared that nothing had been taken. They found you in the house in a hidden space under the hearth.”
Legon interrupted. “They found me in the fire!” It was a statement, not a question.
“No, dear, there wasn’t a fire burning and I don’t think there had been in a long time. I think that your mother put you in a very safe hiding place.”
“My mother,” he thought. His birth mother hadn’t forgotten him or left in a hurry, running away from robbers. She had been murdered and had most likely spent her last few moments alive hiding him, in a place apparently prepared for just that. This also meant that she had at least planned for the possible day that she would have to hide her son from people who wanted to hurt him. The fact that the house had been searched was disturbing as well, because nothing was taken, or at least nothing obvious had been taken. That probably meant that whoever had attacked was there for reasons other than financial gain. Before Legon had time to fully comprehend what he just been told, his adopted mother pushed on, almost as if by saying this she was free of some burden.
“After they found you they took you home. You know the rest. We adopted you and now you are our son, and we love you like you are our own.” She placed her hand on his at this last statement.
Legon felt every emotion coursing through him. On the one hand he was mad that he hadn’t been told this, but on the other he knew his parents were just trying to protect him. He understood the desire to protect the ones you love; when he thought about it, he didn’t know if could have handled this news when he was younger. Still, something didn’t seem right. Where had his birth father been in this whole affair? He had to know about the hiding place and had to know that his son was missing… unless he was killed too, and Edis, Brack, and Arkin hadn’t found the body.
And what had they been looking for in the first place? A thought came to him then that bothered him: if Edis hadn’t been willing to share all the details of what he saw with his wife, then what he had seen must have been pretty bad. Also, the house had been secluded, and so his mother must have been hiding from something. She may have had or at least known something that whoever did this wanted, and it was possible that they had interrogated her before killing her. That made sense; it also explained why Edis had been unwilling to talk to his wife about it. If his birth mother was interrogated, that meant that they had probably tortured her, and Legon could understand why Edis didn’t want to relive the sight in his head. A thought bubbled up.