Project Maigo(51)

When I reach the bottom, I slowly peek around the doorway, but my view is blocked by the Christmas tree mom and I put up and decorated. The ornaments are old. 1950s stuff. The bulbs are the fat kind, not the small ones my friends have. My favorite part is the candy canes. They’re real, and no matter how many I steal, my mom keeps resupplying them. I crouch and look beneath the tree. The red and green striped blanket is still draped around the base, but there are no gifts.

Maybe they’re wrapping after the show? Or during and just haven’t put them under the tree yet? Most of my friends still believe Santa does all that work, but I caught my parents last year. Got spanked for it, but now I know the truth. Remembering last year’s spanking makes me wary. But curiosity is blind to the past. I lie down and slide behind the tree, pausing to take a deep breath of its pine scent.

When my father laughs at the television program, the last of my fear melts away. The fight is definitely over. With eager eyes, I push myself up over the side of the couch. My father sits at the far end, turned toward the TV in the corner of the room. My eyes move to the TV. The Golden Girls. Dad doesn’t normally watch this. Certainly not alone. But I don’t see—

A pair of feet on the floor catch my attention. I lift myself up a little higher and find my mother, sprawled out on the rug. There’s blood on her forehead. A scream rises in my throat, but I’m shushed.

The part of me that is an adult spectator is confused by the noise. That’s not how I remember it. When I look up, there is a girl standing above my mother. The me from minutes ago: plaid dress, Hello Kitty backpack, Asian. Maigo is here with me. Watching. She has an index finger pressed to her lips. “Shh! He will hear you!”

But he didn’t hear me. I contained the scream, slunk back out of the room, ran upstairs and used my parents’ rotary phone to call the police. I never saw my father again. My mother recovered from the attack that broke ribs and knocked her unconscious, but she was never really the same.

The memory resumes, playing out differently than I remember.

I step out from behind the tree and say to my father, “You did this.”

He looks startled. Hurt. “No! I found her like this. She did it to herself.”

I look back down at my mother. She’s covered in blood. Shot.

“She killed herself, Jon.”

“She wouldn’t,” I say. I’ve never believed anything so firmly in all my life.

“She did.” My father stands to his feet, his shoes squeaking on the white tile floor.

I shake my fists. “You killed her!”

My father frowns, crouches by my mother’s body and moves her hand.

“Leave her alone,” I demand.

My father looks me in the eyes, a rare calm expression on his face. “Your mother killed herself, Maigo,” my father says, “but she killed you first.”

The gun, now in my mother’s limp hand, is pointed at me.

The explosion makes me flinch. But I feel no pain. No impact. I turn to find Maigo, clutching her stomach, tears streaking down her smooth cheeks. She falls to her knees, dark almond eyes locked on me. I’ve see those eyes before... Then she pitches forward, landing hard on the cold tile floor, a pool of blood spreading from her core, mingling with her mother’s.

I feel the pain of this moment acutely. The heartbreak. The rage. It was very nearly my own fate. And therein lies the heart of my connection to the monster that is Nemesis. I don’t just sympathize with a murdered young girl, I understand her. That thirst for vengeance. I’ve hid from it all my life, but it’s there, in my dreams. I’m not sure where my father is, or if he’s alive, but I’ve thought of finding him more than once. My position at the DHS would make it easy. But then what? Kick the shit out of an old man?

“What if he’d killed her?” Maigo asks from the floor, her dead eyes looking at me? “What if he’d killed you?”

“I...don’t know,” I tell her. But I do know. I already answered this question a year ago when I offered up Alexander Tilly for execution, and I did it without an ounce of guilt. But it’s still not the same. One guilty man doesn’t justify the killing of untold innocents. I attempt to say as much, but suddenly I feel strange.

My living room that is also Maigo’s high rise condo, disappears. I’m surrounded by darkness and otherworldly screams. I’ve never heard anything so horrible. Then pain. Electric. Burning. I’ve never felt such searing pain. I feel my mind slipping away. And then, just as quickly, I’m pulled back to lucidity, and more pain. Never ending. I’m being driven mad, all the while a flow of information is flooding my mind, drowning whatever I had been.