Free Into That Darkness by Steven Price

now. I think of her and I can’t imagine it. All the old relics, the temples, the languages, they were going to change something in us. Malaysia’s pure beaches, Cambodia’s temples, Thailand’s cliffs—all of that was going to force us into some hard understanding. So we were romantic and foolish. So what. I hope Kat and Mason both are like that. Epiphanies should come at you night and day when you’re young.
    Something did change in us in that city, when we got stranded. We’d found a small hostel and I remember how unexpected and perfectly ordinary it was when it came. David was staring at me from the bed. We’d been fighting. It was dusk and his eyes were black, his pale face angular among the mosquito netting. He looked suddenly Thai, he looked Vietnamese, Malaysian, Chinese, every country we’d passed through, every man I’d seen trailing me with his eyes that summer. It wasn’t shame I felt, it wasn’t desire. I watched him watching me and it was like some part of my heart had been left behind. Like that train had arrived at a possible future. I feel foolish talking about it. David said he didn’t know where we were. He had a map in his hands but he wasn’t looking at it. I wanted him to find me inside myself, to guide me through. I didn’t say it. My eyes didn’t say it. Three nights we spent like that. We were poor, we survived off rust and water, and all that time a child was being made.
    We didn’t know it then of course. It happens so fast. You’re a daughter at nineteen, at twenty you’re a mother. I look back on my life before Kat and Mason and it seems almost like it was lived by someone else. A shadow self.
    What was the name of that city? Jesus.
    It’s the little things. The sun at the curtains, the fear of being together, the fear of being alone. Maybe that’s all being young really is, in the end. I felt David’s bones through the sheets and how frightening it still was to be so close to a man. I felt outside of my own life, beyond absent fathers and sullen mothers. It wasn’t the first time I had felt that but it was the strongest. I told him about my father, who had left us when I was still a little girl. How he had returned to his native Trinidad for some government post. I was six. I remember going down to the kitchen and finding my mother in her white nightgown sitting in the dark and when I asked her where he was she looked up at me with a very surprised expression in her eyes and said, Who?
    I told David about my mother. I don’t know what I was trying to warn him against. He just held me. He held me like some lost and awkward bundle he’d found at a train station, something not his own. All the while it felt almost like a third presence was listening, like that tiny person on the verge of becoming already had her ear pressed to our hearts. It stuns me even now when I think about it. She wasn’t any kind of reason yet.
    You know what it is being a mother? Nothing’s in your hands. Everything’s accidental and unexpected. Sometimes I get so frightened for my kids I don’t know what to do. Because you can’t make the world safe to walk through. You can’t stop what’s coming.

Where she walked the sun did not rise. It did not rise and the steel-grey light gradually dissolved and paled and a sickly white sky burned off to the east and then the day was thickening and she walked on into it hard and afraid and utterly alone in her fear.
    She walked in the road avoiding the dark buildings on either side and all morning it seemed to her that a figure trudged behind her. Her mind kept straying to scraps of memory but would not stay fixed on any one for long. When she sat to rest or find her bearings the shadow sat also and when she stood it stood also and together they went on.
    She would walk for blocks through deserted streets, past low-lying buildings, crumbled shopfronts, crushed