Turn Back The Clock - Part III

Here's the third installment of TBTC. Warning: This one's a bit long. Happy reading!
xoxo

Xila was a little taller than Emma Morris - possibly because of the older woman's slouch and curved posture from limping. Her eyes, upon closer inspection, were a deep blue, flickering into hues of purple. They were completely unlike the bright green eyes Emma Morris had seen so many times in her dreams, her nightmares, her memories. How could she ever forget the eyes of the child that had stared at her with so much conviction, with so much helplessness?

But the girl - Xila's - other features were uncannily like Emma's. Her stark raven hair, hanging, wavy to her shoulders, reminded Emma of looking in a mirror ten years ago. Her nose was sharp, but the rest of her face was soft, with smooth cheeks and high eyebrows. 

Emma stood on her side of the threshold staring blankly, as though nothing had happened in the past minute. She stepped back after a moment of silence, rocking on the balls of her feet. She could not comprehend the meaning of it all - the strange girl, the thought that she was still, beneath it all, a mother to a child somewhere in the world. 

The realization crashed down upon her in torrents; waves that obscured her view of the girl. Streams that blocked her memories and clogged them with sodden images. Ideas and what-ifs that had nagged at the back of her mind for so many years. Questions she had shoved deep within her in the understanding that the child was forever out of her life.

Why waste her broken life contemplating what could have been? Why ponder what happened to her? The child was no longer hers. When Emma Morris had given up the baby girl with the glimmering green eyes so many years ago, she had let go of that part of her life - a part interwoven with pain and strife and regret. 

"I-I don't have a child," she said quietly. And it was the deepest of truths. She no longer did. Emma Morris had been a mother for nine months and a handful of days. Beyond that, she was merely Emma. Emma with a history she would not discuss. Emma with a future she did not want to think about. Emma, torn between the past and the future; what was and what could be. Emma, who was lost to the games that life played when it toyed with human beings and their souls.

Emma Grace Morris had given up her child, and along with that, a past in which she had had a child a long time ago. Fifteen years, to be precise. 

Xila watched Emma with furrowed brows. She looked up at the sky, and at Emma again, as though hoping for an answer from the heavens. She had expected her mother, but this woman was anything but. And yet...it did pass by her, as it had not Emma, how much she resembled Emma. Perhaps she had the wrong name. Or perhaps her mother was gone, and Emma was a relative. That would explain the resemblance. And it would fairly justify the striking difference in their eyes, in their demeanor. 

"Thirty-one?" Xila had asked incredulously, when Emma had opened the door. The woman looked far too old to be thirty-one years old. And Xila knew for a fact that her mother had been a teenager when she had given birth. But Emma had not denied her age. And a child was a painful and drastic thing to have at such a tender age. It would have left a scar. Maybe even a scar that lasted fifteen years, and made this woman look the way she did that day. And Emma had exactly the same name as Xila's alleged birth mother. Either Xila had searched for the wrong woman, or...or Emma Grace Morris was lying.

"Oh." Xila responded. "I-I don't know my parents. And I thought, maybe, because my mother's name was the same as yours, and she had me at sixteen, and you said you're thirty-one, that -"

"I did not." Emma interrupted. "You asked if I was," she cringed visibly. "thirty-one." She paused. "I said no such thing."

Xila's heart hammered. The woman's aloofness frustrated her. Either she was her mother, or not. And a little bit of empathy would not have hurt. "Are you?" Xila asked sharply. She was not going to play this woman's games. 

Emma Grace Morris had not intended to answer the question truthfully. If she had had her way - if fate had agreed, - she would have lied, told the girl she was not. She would have told the girl she was far older, and no, Xila had found the wrong person. The girl would have left her door, and Emma would have been left alone - just as she had wanted. Just as she had been for so many months. 

But fate disagreed. Fate, in fact, vehemently opposed this idea. It swung, with full force, a pendulum, into their half-conversation of words and affirmations and questions and irritation with each other. 

"I am." Emma said slowly. "I am thirty-one years old, and my name is Emma Grace Morris, and I have black hair and...I am five feet and five inches tall." She swallowed, attempting to regain control of her voice, of these words that impermissibly escaped her lips. 

Xila reached up to tug on a dark lock of her own and glanced down at her five foot six inch body. She breathed slowly, confusion clouding her brain. This woman was her mother, she was certain of it. But she did not have a child...or was that merely something else she was holding back? Was that something she would outright lie about to her child? If she had one, that was.

"I was born sometime in December," her voice cracked. She had grown up celebrating her birthday on the fifteenth of the winter month - it was right in the middle, a half-day away from a perfect average. Not that she had ever had much occasion to celebrate the day she was brought into the world...and then released, unwanted. 

But she was only truly released to the person who had abandoned her, and even then, she wondered if she was ever completely gone from their memory. In reality, she had not been released. Only thrust into another life. She wanted to meet the one person who would know the beginning of her story. 

Xila had grown up with no real birthday. All of the other children she knew had one. Even the orphans and the adopted children and the children in the children in the foster care system and the juvenile detainment centers. And the children with parents. Parents who had known them from the moment they entered the world. Those children had real birthdays. They heard stories of their life - from the beginning to the present. All Xila knew was that she had been born sometime in December. "I am...fifteen years old. And I could not find anything about my father. Just a few clues that directed me to you. And I might be wrong, but I -"

Emma Grace Morris stepped back, more ready than ever to slam the door on this strange girl. The only thing more unsettling than a girl with purple eyes at her door, asking her name and age, was that very girl claiming to be the infant she had let go of so long ago. 

Once again, fate seized Emma Grace by the shoulders, shook her hard, and propelled her into it's path. "December?" she asked, her voice so low that it could have been stolen by the slightest of breezes. Xila nodded slowly, swallowing. "Fifteen?" Xila blinked rapidly, hoping her eyes would not swell with tears. With the anger she had tucked carefully away for so many years. 

"Xila." Emma Grace Morris said the girl's name with an inconceivable amount of emotion. She spoke as though the two syllables stung her tongue, scalded it with knives of fire. As though it doused her burning soul with cool water, kissed her hot forehead with snowflakes. She spoke it as though it had pushed her, screaming and begging, into an infinite darkness; had stolen her heart and soul and very breath. She breathed it as if Xila's name was the elixir that would pull her back from the half-life she had lived for so long.

"Mother?" Xila asked, her heart pounding, gasping for air. Emma's eyes burned in a way they had not for so many years. They burned with anger and excitement and life. 

She lurched back abruptly. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I really am. But I am not your mother." Xila's eyes widened. Now, more than ever, she knew. She opened her mouth to protest, but Emma continued. "I don't know what to say. I just...there is no way. I cannot be." She reached out a hand, but pulled it back quickly. 

Xila stepped away, her face contorting. She squinted, pulling it all back to the mask of calm she had worn all her life. Her lungs screamed, her heart thudded against her rib cage. Her emotions roiled, a sea of fiery hopelessness. Of efforts crashing to a halt. 

"I am sorry, you know." Emma sighed. "And I hope you find her, whoever she is," The words sliced at her throat, but she dragged them out nevertheless. "Xila." 

***

For the first time in months, Emma Grace Morris lay on top of the white covers with little flowers embroidered on them. Her body was a crumpled heap atop the tight sheets. The house was cold, winter at the year's heels, but the bed had been made too tightly, she sheets tucked in precisely. And Emma was too tired to pay attention to the covers. 

Instead, she clutched her thick coat around her, her work shoes still on her feet. Her blue factory pants stuck to her skin, damp with sweat. She shivered, hot and cold simultaneously - but most of all, confused. She breathed slowly. Inhaled the musty air of her abandoned room, of her tidy, broken house. Exhaled the memory of the infant with piercing green eyes. Exhaled the image of the tall girl and her violet eyes and pleading voice. She rocked herself on the bed, eyes closed.

But the stories behind her eyelids continued to flash. they played in sequence, over and over, until Emma lost track of the time and the day and the cold and her name. The infant and the girl. The infant and the girl. And sometimes, in between, she heard the cranking of levers and the metallic smell of the factory. Sometimes she saw the wood of her childhood home, the beams of the firehouse. Felt the cool rain on her skin - the rain that had tumbled down from the skies that fateful night.