Chapter Two - Birthday Boy

My mother sweats determination.

It's an admirable trait, in my opinion, her own mother often mistook for stubbornness. "You're just like your father," my Grandmother would harp, sending my mother into an infamous moody silence my Grandmother detested even more.

That determination makes my mother a force to reckon with. Giving up is the most foreign of concepts in her world and it's only under the most intense duress and the most mitigating circumstances that she finally, and reluctantly concedes.

You can see that will in the shadows of her eyes. That resolution, that comes from past secrets, to keep at it even when the answers are scarce and there are dead ends at every turn.

Gabe Freedman is nothing more than a child.

And when a child goes missing my heart aches as I watch and I wait for that fortitude to explode and consume my mother from head to toe.

It takes a trained eye to see the silent shift in her as a heart makes decisions that her mind knows are perpetually unrealistic.

She can work for hours on end, long into the night, with only darkness and static pieces of a life for company. She can chase down every lead, turn over every stone. And she can make promises to herself. Only to herself, that she will bring this child home.

There's nothing worse than false promises. She's been there. She's been the parent on the receiving end of such promises. And she's been the parent to see every single promise disappear into nothingness.

She won't make promises anymore, it's not productive. It's not fair to give other parents a false sense of hope when there is no guarantee that a happy ending is within reach.

That doesn't mean she won't make them to herself. Promises that she will try her hardest. That giving up only comes when the candle is nothing more than a puddle of unsalvageable wax. That a family will have that happy ending and she, she will maintain her sanity, at least this time.

No one else sees the flicker in her eyes. The tiny sparks of a memory here and there, that if allowed would consume her thoughts and reduce her to a puddle of weakness before seizing her mind and taking her on a heart shattering journey of 'what ifs'.

I know her 'what ifs' as well as I know my own. But 'what ifs' can't be allowed to consume you. And I won't let them devour her. They don't exist, not really. They're nothing more than eternal questions for which there will never be any answers. Just more questions. They shouldn't be allowed. Banished to the land of 'wherever's' and 'maybes' and tentative promises that are destined to remain unfulfilled.

It was a casual insignificant comment by Gabe's teacher that took my mother to the land of 'what ifs' today.

"Birthday's are stupid." Gabe had told her.

And the darkness possessed my mother ever so briefly. A memory so insignificant I barely remembered it myself. But it captured my mother, transported her mind across realms and time to a moment she had never let go of.

She speaks to me in that moment, and I look closer but her lips aren't moving. It's only a memory. Nothing more than a couple of voices echoing through two minds and two worlds.

"Your birthday is the most special day of the year."

I hear my own voice asking her 'why' in a time when I perpetually asked that question, determined, like my mother, to find answers for everything.

"Because," she answers simply as if the answer had been obvious all along, "It was the best day of my life."

And just like that the memory fades and she focuses again on the task at hand, determination burning just as strong, even if the new resolve stems from that old notion that finding Gabe, no matter how different the situation, is merely a substitute for finding me.

She's strong, she won't break. And despite the memories that burst through that ultra tough façade she will finish this case alongside the rest of the team.

Now she's on a mission. Perhaps she'll see my eyes instead of Gabe's.

This case will no longer be just another lost child, just another number. Another timeline that can and will be erased, another face on the whiteboard that at the end of it all she can go home and forget.

She doesn't really ever forget although she likes to pretend she does. I know she remembers each one they've found. Each one they've failed. Each story that still remains unfinished. She's a great pretender.

"Are you ok?"

"I'm fine."

And she believes it herself.

She can fool herself into believing that this was exactly the way she wanted her life to be.

I'm not fooled.

Nobody wants to be so completely alone.

So lost in what has come and gone that the future appears nothing more than a mere extension of the past.

Sooner or later she won't be alone, and she won't be lost though.

Because her own hero has already made his entrance despite the fact she is somewhat oblivious to the role he will play.

I know, I know it all.

And thank God for Martin Fitzgerald. He just might be an angel I've decided.

I wonder if somewhere inside of her, in that heart that has far too long been a closed book to the world, my mother sees what I already know and love about him.

He will be the one to save her.

One day.