Disclaimer: Carmen et al are the property of not moi. But little Maggie is all mine.
Summary: Being the world's greatest thief was often at odds with being the world's greatest mother. Snippets from the life of Carmen's daughter, from her POV.
Author's Note: Dedicated to anyone who has ever contemplated motherhood.
Prelude
Growing up it was just the two of us, my mother and me. We lived in a series of dwellings, from a fin-de-siècle Viennese townhouse to a shoebox-sized Tokyo apartment to even a surprisingly comfortable yurt. No matter where we lived, our house had the magical ability to feel both empty and crowded; missing a father, siblings, friends- and yet packed to the gills with my mother's secrets. Wherever we went, she always took them with her.
I don't know when I first realized that my mother was not like other mothers. One of my earliest childhood memories involves waking to find myself cradled in her strong arms as she spirited me out of my bedroom, then the house and ultimately the country. We moved a lot, rarely staying for more than a year in any one location. It had happened so often to me at such a young age, that I suppose I grew accustomed to it. Like army brats and other vagabonds, I learned to easily make friendships and then break them again, to slip right in to a given situation and slip right out just as easily. Perhaps it was encoded in my DNA; my mother's legacy.
It never seemed to weary her, but as I got older I found it harder to keep saying goodbye.
I don't mean to paint my mother's chosen lifestyle with a wholly negative brush. When I was younger, it was the greatest fun, just me and her, taking on the world. I had the kind of childhood most kids could only dream of. I rarely had to attend regular school; my mother preferred to educate me herself and was given to indulge my every intellectual whim. A childhood fascination with castles and dragons turned into a chateaux-hunting cruise along the Loire. I skipped across the Great Wall of China and played hide and seek at the Parthenon before I ever read about them in a textbook. Birthday scavenger hunts were the stuff of legend.
Left to her own devices, my mother would spend Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Easter in Jerusalem. And she probably would have continued raising me in perpetual motion, had I not asked her to stop.
i.
For my tenth birthday, I got a razor scooter, a new chess set, and the shock of my life. I learned my mother's true identity on a lazy afternoon while hunting for the aforementioned presents. I had emptied out every closet, ransacked the attic and the garage until only my mother's bedroom remained unsearched. I hesitated. It wasn't as if she had forbidden me from going in there, but I had been wary of entering ever since I found a handgun under one of her pillows, nestled in the place where a father should be.
But very little will deter a nearly-ten-year-old in search of birthday presents. In the end I thought she really wouldn't be that angry. Part of her might actually be proud that I had found her out. This was, after all, the mother who liked to leave notes written in invisible ink to let me know she was going to the store.
Her drawers turned up nothing more interesting than a sachet of lavender and an assortment of lacy undergarments that made my preteen self blush with awkward incomprehension. Nothing notable in her closets either, except for what seemed at the time to be an overabundance of shoes and purses.
Which only left under the bed. I crouched down on all fours and shimmied into the dusty space between the bedstead and the floorboards. Something long and metallic winked at me and I bubbled over with giddy delight: my scooter. Gotcha, mom. As I extracted myself, my hand brushed up against something cold and smooth and not at all floor-like. It was the door of a safe with a keypad like a telephone.
What I did next astounds me to this day. I pressed my child's fingers to the keypad and typed out 6-2-4-4-4-3 to spell M-A-G-G-I-E, my name. The door swung open. Perhaps I knew the combination because my mother fed me codes and ciphers the way other parents push broccoli. Or perhaps it was because I knew, even then, with childlike certainty, that I was the center of my mother's world.
My heart beat fast and rabbit-like as I reached inside. I pulled out first stacks and stacks of money. Next came a colorful assortment of passports; they had pictures of my mother and me in them, but the names printed inside were not ours. Last, a layer of old newspapers followed by a spectacular red hat with a wide floppy brim. I tried it on, and it sank comically over my eyes.
I took off the hat to get a closer look at the newspapers. They were yellowed with age and in a variety of languages, some I could read and some I could not. But all had front-page headlines concerning the latest crimes of the famous master thief, Carmen Sandiego.
The long dark hair of the lady in red was painfully familiar. And that mysterious smirk- I had known it all my life. I felt sick and dizzy; someone had switched off the Earth's gravity and I was in freefall.
Not caring about my own breaking and entering, I fled our house and ran to the only safe place I could think of. There was a cave about a half mile away that the neighborhood kids and I thought of as our secret hiding place. Seized by a fear I didn't really understand, I wrote my mother's name on a scrap of paper in red crayon, Maria de Cengos. Then, as I had done so many times in the games my mother taught me, I moved and flipped the letters around to reveal the answer I didn't want- Carmen Sandiego.
My mother's grand secret, hidden in plain sight. I started to cry uncontrollably. I was still sobbing over that piece of paper when she found me, hours later.
"Maggie," she said in that deep voice of hers and extended her arms as if to hug me, but I didn't come. She hung her head."Oh, querida."
I was about to tell her that she shouldn't know about our secret hiding place, but thought the better of it; my mother was the infamous Carmen Sandiego and hiding places were her business. I turned my face away from her in stubborn defiance.
She knelt beside me and took the tear-stained paper in hand. "So, now you know."
I nodded. There were so many things I wanted to say. But I was tired and angry and scared all at once. So, I just blurted out, "Why didn't you tell me?"
My mother's eyes looked sad and she closed them as if in pain. "I didn't know how." A thoughtful pause. "I suppose I was afraid you would be ashamed of me." When she opened her eyes, a film of tears had clouded over the bright blue, the same color as my own.
I touched her hand cautiously. "I'm not ashamed." I wasn't really. "Just a little afraid."
She smoothed my hair and I let myself relax into her arms. "Don't be. That life is behind me now. Let me worry about the police."
"It's not the police I'm worried about, it's you." I pulled away so I could look my mother in the eye. "I'm afraid that…that you'll leave me behind."
"Never," she told me, tears slowly rolling down her beautiful face. And wrapped her arms around me so tightly as if to press that sentiment into every cell of body.
It was only many years later as an adult that I realized I had not learned by mother's identity by accident, but by design. The present placed in such close proximity to the safe, the code that was just challenging enough- all the hallmarks of one of her carefully choreographed games. She let me discover what she could not bring herself to tell me.