Thanks to all who read and reviewed. Hope you enjoy this next installment.
Chapter One - Vanished
My mother is broken.
With one look you know that there are a million secrets in the darkness of her eyes and somehow you can't help yourself. You want to know more. You have to know more.
You want to break down that wall that she's so carefully constructed and understand, even just a tiny bit, of what makes her Samantha Spade.
There are few people who possess that power. Even fewer, that when it all comes down to it are willing to accept her for the way she is. Walls and baggage and all.
She will never let go of her secrets. They're a part of her. So deeply ingrained in who she is that they might be mistaken for DNA.
I wonder if she will ever tell someone, anyone. Whether anyone in this world, in her mind, is worthy enough to bear the burden of her secrets.
Secrets aren't supposed to be kept. They're meant to be shared. A kept secret will do nothing but break you, until beyond the secret and its pain there's nothing left at all.
I sometimes look at her and believe that she really will be haunted by her past, our past forever.
She's never trusted a single person enough to share. Not Danny or Vivian. Not even Jack who despite all his own baggage showed my mother what love was capable of being.
All they know if what she's told them. Bare minimum details that peak through every now and again when that wall begins to crumble slightly from fatigue.
And today Martin Fitzgerald walked into her life like he belonged there all along.
And he smiled.
And I knew in that smile there was something special, that this was a man that if my mother could find conviction in him, I could trust him with my mother's fragile heart.
Maybe in the end, he'll make it all better. He'll love her and protect her in ways I no longer can.
He'll be there when a case goes wrong and past and present mingle in the emptiness of her fifth floor apartment. She'll fall apart as she always does but I'll no longer be her only spectator.
I wish I could hug her then. You know, in that way she used to hug me. So tight I knew she'd never ever let go. A hug that healed all bruises and scrapes, dried all tears and promised so much for every tomorrow.
Tonight it's ok though, even though she's still alone in every sense of the word. Tonight it's happily ever after. At least for Maggie Cartwright and her family.
And in my mother's empty apartment she could breathe a sigh of relief. Today she had made a difference just as she had set out to do. And that's what it is all about. Saving people. And also in the process, saving herself.
There is no need for an agonizing night spent like so many passed, pouring over papers, pieces of a life, running down a million theories in her head until no option is left entirely unexamined.
Instead there's a glass of red wine and a long hot shower to rid her of the day. A ritual I've noticed, that I suppose is a way to focus, however briefly, on her own life.
And when she finally collapses on her bed under layers of blankets and I blow her goodnight kisses, she feels that glimmer of hope that I myself planted.
Her heart still echoes with that familiar emptiness that has haunted her for as long as can be remembered. It's an echo of realization that is always more prominent at night. Always stronger at the end of a good day. Always there.
One life has been saved. A thousand more will go missing, and the most important of all, me, could never truly be saved.
But tonight, as profound as that echo is and always will be that flicker of hope is burning somewhere deep inside my mother's heart.
Because today, she met Martin Fitzgerald.
And he smiled.