Chapter 9
TRIS
With my head in a whirl, I creep my way back into the Abnegation sector of the city. By the time I get there, it's almost two in the morning and I'm absolutely sure my mother is asleep. She had left me with a key to the back door and I use it to let myself in.
When I turn the lights on, I find her fast asleep on the couch in the living room, wrapped in a blue and yellow blanket I had grudgingly knitted when I was fourteen years old.
I step inside and she stirs awake at the sound of the door closing. She sits up and releases a breath I can see and hear all the way from where I'm standing. "Beatrice," she smiles nervously. "You're back."
"Yeah," I whisper. "We got him."
She walks over to me as I begin to make my way toward her and we meet somewhere in the middle. My mother wraps her arms around me and kisses me on the forehead. It's like she can see my soul is weary, and it takes everything in me to not break down in her arms. She sighs and then examines my face for a moment. "I'll be right back," she says, and she walks into the kitchen.
I begin to look around the house where I spent the first sixteen years of my life. Every time I come back it looks a little different; I believe my mother is bored so she occupies herself with housekeeping. She knits covers for the chairs, and sews bedspreads even though she's the only one who sleeps here.
I walk over to the fireplace where there now sits a beautiful arrangement of photos, all in tiny wooden frames she most likely made herself. There's one of me and Andy that we took on his third birthday, a school photo of me and Caleb when we were about eight years old, and an old one of my parents, when they were much younger, my father dressed in Erudite blue and my mother in Dauntless black.
The Abnegation don't believe in keeping photos around the house, but after my father died, my mother began to move away from the more ridiculous practices of the Abnegation. She figured if she'd be alone, she'd at least be comfortable in her own home.
She returns from the kitchen with a cup of warm tea in one hand and a pill in the other.
"Thank you," I smile and I take both items from her hands. "How did you know I have a headache?"
"Because you're my daughter. And because you're rubbing your temples and squinting your eyes," she chuckles. I hadn't even realized I was doing that. "Are you hungry, Beatrice? You left without supper."
I am hungry, actually. Andy and I left Dauntless around supper time but we didn't eat, and after I dropped him off I went back with Zeke to help rescue the others and get Tobias.
"Oh no," I groan when a thought dawns on me. "Andy. He fell asleep before he could eat something."
My mother smiles at me knowingly. "I woke him up shortly after you left and made him a sandwich."
The pill still between my fingers, I put my hand over my heart. Natalie Prior has perfected the art of motherhood. "Thank you," I whisper, and I finally swallow the pill with a small mouthful of her special ginger tea. It's warm and soothing; almost makes me forget my head is throbbing. "Did he ask for me?" I ask with another sip of tea.
She nods. "I told him you stepped out but you'd be right back."
Andy is attached to me and I him. He doesn't sleep well if he can't hear me in the next room, and I can't function unless I know he's okay. Keeping him pacified will be a challenge, as I'll be in and out whenever I have to be for however long it takes to save his father. Apart from his babysitter Lila, my mother is the only other person who can seem to get him to relax for extended periods of time.
"I hope this isn't too much trouble," I whisper to my mother.
"Of course not," she smiles. Her eyelids are heavy and she sways a little on her feet.
"Oh Mom, you must be tired." I feel a hint of guilt for dragging her into this.
"I took a nap with Andy. It's the best sleep I've had in a while," she smartly rebuts. "Come, sit with me." She leads me over to the couch and after I sit she takes the empty cup from my hand and goes back into the kitchen. In no time she returns with another cup of tea and a plate with a few warm slices of buttered bread on it. She passes it to me and then after lighting a candle on the centre table, she turns the lights off.
"We must take care to not be seen. Ridiculous," she grumbles. "Who is Marcus to tell me when I should and should not see my own daughter and grandson?"
I chuckle softly. Then, in the candlelight, I take in a deep breath, savouring the sweet smell of my mother's freshly baked bread before I take a few bites. It's amazing how much more I prefer it over the sweet treats and sugared bread of Dauntless. Tobias always said the same, and she'd always give him more bread than he could carry every time we snuck in a visit.
"What do I tell him in the morning?" I ask my mother, thinking about Andy. I sink my back into the couch. "He'll expect to go to school. What four year old likes school?"
My mother laughs at me, and she sits beside me and pulls the blanket over her feet. "Your brother did."
"I remember," I smile. Caleb was always the first to raise his hand in class, and he had a ton of books that he borrowed from the library. It made me feel stupid for not noticing the Erudite in him until I had.
"So how did it go?" Mom breaks the ice, diving right into the topic that I know I need to talk about but at the same time would rather not. She had no doubt we'd rescue Tobias. Her concern was what am I going to do with him after.
"Horrible," I sigh. "He really believes everything his mother told him. He refuses to accept what's staring him right in the face."
"So he's just as stubborn as he's always been."
"Worse," I whisper. "He's been brainwashed."
Seriously she says, "You need to be careful, Beatrice." I turn my face to look at her. "Tobias is living in an entirely different reality. Right now, he's not the same person and he might not act in the way you expect him to. He might say things… do things…"
"He doesn't know what he's doing," I defend him.
"I know," she nods a few times. "I just don't want to see you get hurt."
I remember the exact moment when they told me Tobias was dead. I remember it vividly. At first it felt like time had stopped, like there was no air in the room, and after a few seconds of nothingness, there was pain- an unspeakable, excruciating pain, like I had been hit head on with the very train he was on. My body shook simply because it didn't know what else to do. My heart felt like it would explode right inside me, like it was clawing its way out of my chest. My knees folded, and my stomach clenched so tight I thought I was dying.
Nothing could ever hurt more than that.
"That's a risk I'm willing to take."
Mom sighs and I know she's worried. I'm worried too. I'm scared out of my mind. But what else am I supposed to do?
"Mom," I begin. She looks at me anxiously. "If there was just the slightest chance that Dad was out there somewhere… Wouldn't you go looking for him?"
"In a heartbeat," she whispers.
I set the plate and the cup of tea on the centre table beside the candle. I scoot a little closer to her and I take her face between my palms. "This will be difficult, but I have to do this. There's no other way. And he's in there; I can feel it."
Maybe that is why the pain of losing Tobias never got old. Maybe that extra little magic we always had was trying to tell me he wasn't really gone.
"How did this even happen?" My mother shakes her head, placing her hand over my own. "Evelyn was always troubled, but this is much too far. As a mother, I don't know how she ever could." She shrugs. "I was devastated when you and your brother left Abnegation. As for you, I was as prepared as I could have hoped to be. You were my little girl, but I always knew you would follow Tobias. But Caleb," she frowns, "I was entirely unprepared for that, and even so, I would never do such a thing."
"Dad wasn't prepared for either of us leaving," I mutter, and I hang my head; my hands fall to my side.
My mother instantly raises my chin. "You can't keep blaming yourself for that, Beatrice. You and your brother both had a duty to yourselves and we understood that. As parents you know your children will leave you one day. Refusing to let them go is just…"
"Selfish?"
"Yes," she answers. "And Evelyn's selfishness stands second to none."
She's right, as she always is. Even though Andy is just four years old it has crossed my mind that maybe he might choose to leave Dauntless. And as much as I would miss him, terribly miss him until it aches, if that is what he had to do to be true to himself, then I would let him go in love. I will love him always, and I know he will love me, no matter where we are.
Not to mention, Evelyn was the one who left Tobias. She had absolutely no right to steal him back.
"Besides, you came home," my mother smiles. "You visited, even when you weren't supposed to, you kept us updated about what was going on in your life, you sent pictures, you wrote letters when your father refused to keep a phone. You reached out, and you should know your father appreciated that very much, even though it went against every rule he'd ever taught you. And he would be honoured to know his grandson bears his name."
What she doesn't say is that Caleb left Abnegation and never looked back; we were all genuinely surprised when he showed up for Dad's funeral. My mother met Andy when he was just a few weeks old; last I heard of my brother, he has a son about Andy's age whom none of us have ever met.
"You know, I had confessed to your father that I had known about you and Tobias from the beginning," she smiles. "I thought he would have been upset that I was permitting the two of you to meet privately, but he said he knew all about your late nights on the rooftop."
"He did?" I look at her curiously with my mouth open. I can't imagine my father knowing such a thing was happening and allowing it to continue.
She nods with the sweetest smile. "He said he allowed it for Tobias' sake. He knew Marcus was not the kindest father to him and you were a positive force in his life. To be honest, it was easy to see for anyone who was looking. Tobias was a different person after he met you. He smiled, he spoke, he was prone to tiny gestures that gave away his affection for you." She snuggles a little closer to me, inviting me under the blanket. "I remember the first time Tobias approached me. He was barely fifteen years old." I hear the smile in her voice, "And he introduced himself… said he was my daughter's best friend. Right then and there I knew where it was headed. He was always quiet but he went from being distant and closed off to being so courteous… self-controlled, determined."
"And mischievous," I smile, remembering how he would always wake me up at two in the morning to make him a sandwich as if he didn't know how to make it his damn self. He just enjoyed watching me standing naked in the kitchen making food for him, and I knew it made him happy, so as tired as I was I would oblige him. Then he'd start kissing my neck, touching me where he knew I liked to be touched. We'd always wind up having sex on the table or the kitchen counter or wherever we felt like, and then we'd go back to bed, sated, wrapped in each other's arms.
We were hopelessly in love, but Tobias and I were never perfect. We fought from time to time about work, about how much he was taking on, about how much of a crime he thought it was to let me help him carry his burdens. Tobias only cared about protecting me, as if it were his life's purpose, and it was always hard for him to understand that I wanted to protect him too. I was not the type of wife who could sleep knowing my husband was wide awake, regardless of how many times he sent me to bed.
Still, he insisted on keeping certain things to himself, not wishing to burden me with it. And just now when he looked me in the eye and told me that obviously I didn't know him as well as I thought I did, it reminded me of that. And it hurt so much.
I can't help but wonder if all this, everything that's happening right now, is a result of him keeping secrets from me. He told me he never once responded to his mother's letters, yet there he was, living with her all this time, albeit without his memory. But he had to have gotten there somehow; he might have gone to see her and she jumped at the opportunity to keep him there.
"He will find his way back to you, Beatrice," my mother says knowingly as if having read my thoughts.
"I know," I say with a sniffle. "I'm just afraid he was hiding things from me," I admit.
"You should be more afraid for his safety," she says lowly.
I look up at her.
"You have to trust who Tobias was. He would never do anything he knew would ultimately hurt you," she continues. "One day you will ask him how this all happened and you will get all the answers you seek. Justice, on the other hand, you might not. Dauntless leaders and their incessant need to establish dominance, they might not pardon him." She frowns. "Dauntless was always a cruel place. I don't doubt that it still is."
I have no reservations about Tobias being innocent in all this; he's acted solely on the lies he's been told. But my mother is right about Dauntless; having spent the first sixteen years of her life there, she knows it as well as I do, if not better. She left so she and my father could be together. Dauntless was much too harsh for my father, and Erudite too pretentious for my mother. My father was too miserable for Amity, and my mother too tactful for Candor. So Abnegation it was.
"Tobias helped make it a little better," I shrug.
"For his sake, I hope he did."
"I guess I have to be hopeful." I take my mother's hands in between my own. "What I can't do is do nothing."
"I understand," she replies. "Have you told him about Andy?"
"No," I say strongly, shaking my head. "And I won't. Not until he gets his memories back."
"And does my grandson know his father is alive?" she whispers.
I look at our hands. "Andy wouldn't understand what's happening. It's too complicated and I'm not going to let my son get hurt in all this mess." My voice breaks and I feel the tears rushing to my eyes.
"And what a mess it is," my mother whispers, pulling me closer. I lay my head on her chest and her hand immediately finds my hair. She rubs it tenderly, gliding her fingers through the tiny nots. It's all so comforting I feel like a child again, like nothing could hurt me here.
"How is Zeke?" my mother asks, and I wrap my arms around her waist. She pulls the blanket over us both.
"He's handling it okay."
"But how is he otherwise?" I realize she's changing the subject. Most likely for my sake.
"He's good. He and Shauna are thinking about adopting."
"That's lovely," she says sweetly. "And Christina and Uriah?"
"Did I tell you they were getting married?" I look up at her.
"No, you didn't," she says with a smile. "I'm so glad for them. They deserve to be happy."
"I think so too," I whisper, feeling the tiniest hint of jealousy. With the wedding coming up, now more than ever I want Tobias back. It's not easy watching everyone else move on while feeling like I've been forever cemented in turmoil. Saving him might truly be my only chance at real happiness.
Softly, my mother begins to hum; it's the same sweet lullaby she sings to Andy when he visits and it's time for his nap. My eyes become heavy and the light from the candle seems farther and farther away. And just like my little boy always does, I fall asleep in the comfort of my mother's arms.
