InsaneJournal

The hours were getting longer and longer for Henry, though it was entirely his decision to work longer hours. He was conscious of the impending need for maternity leave, and there was still a great deal many things he wanted to finish by then. The last week had also brought some new and surprising work for him to do, mostly related to the secret Lucas had shared about a group of individuals being kept imprisoned by an unknown trafficker. He couldn’t tell anyone just yet why so many preparations had to be made to ensure they would be able to take in more people, but he had to make sure everything was ready. There had to be space – safe space that the rescued individuals could be taken to, doctors and medicine and therapists available to treat them. He was even thinking more long term – where to house these people should they choose to stay on the island. Or how to ensure they had options should they not want to stay, should they want to go home or make a start elsewhere. He knew next to nothing about the victims, and that made it much more complex. But as a survivor himself, he at least knew the importance of the basics: a secure shelter, food, clothing, dignity and a modicum of certainty and control even if it was for the smallest things.

That evening, after the BBQ, he was sorting through an order of clothes that he had ordered in. For the most part, they looked to getting donations or buying decent pieces from thrift stores to give people a start. But this time, Henry had felt a little bit of an urgency, and had used his own money to order some better (though still largely inexpensive) clothing that would fit larger frames. Lucas had said most of the victims were Alphas and had been used as fighters, so he imagined the clothes Rainbow Foundation had on hand may not fit. He was conscious of ensuring people were able to immediately wear street clothes, rather than bland hospital clothing, as soon as they could, and that they got to pick from the offerings. It was all designed (in his mind at least) to return survivors’ agency.

He was alerted by the security guard and front desk that someone new had arrived in need. He was given a brief description – height and build, so he could approximate size. He inquired about the young man’s condition and heard that he seemed to be quite rattled and exhausted, but had no major visible injuries. The first stop was always to the clinic, however, to get cleaned up. Then Henry would bring them some clothes before bringing them over to a private room where they could sleep for the night, until things were more settled.

He picked out some clothes and placed them on a small rack which he wheeled over to the clinic area. He was a little tired from the long day with the picnic and the heat, but he was very determined to make sure that he had some face time with the new arrival to welcome him. It was such an important thing for Henry that everyone who came to Rainbow Foundation to find refuge were met with a welcoming and warm face, and he always made sure they felt like family right off the bat. On the way, he stopped by the kitchens to grab a couple of bottles of water, a pack of electrolytes and biscuits. They could talk about a more full meal once the young man was ready, but in Henry’s experience they typically weren’t ready yet, even if their stomachs were screaming for food. Chocolate biscuits often did the trick.

He had a brief chat with the nurse who was attending and got the young man’s name and a brief run down of his condition. Other than a grazed knee he seemed in okay condition. Henry smiled and said to the nurse he could take it from there – he had enough first aid experience to be able to help the patient himself until the next day when a full exam by a real doctor could be done. Then he knocked on the door, waiting for the young man to give permission, and then opened the door.

“Hi, Kyle, I’m Henry I…” he started, before abruptly stopping. His eyes fell on the young man sitting on the exam table and it was as if his soul left his body. He was transported far from the confines of the room but into a dream like state of hurtling memories, like a film replaying in his mind.

An explosion of love as he held the wiggling, tow-headed baby with the bluest eyes after a gruelling 20-hour labour that almost destroyed his too-young and underdeveloped body. A desperate evening trying to get the baby sleep to no avail. A happy evening feeding the baby while holding him against his chest while they lay in bed, singing him a lullaby. A day spent at the park with a yellow haired toddler with the brightest laugh and the reddest cheek. A Christmas with just the two of them, the boy showered with endless gifts and giving him a sloppy wet kiss for each present he received. A night of dread as the blue eyes turned cold and serious and knowing as the pre-teen asked about what he had seen. Then the coldness of his silence. Then it was Henry himself on that examination table.

He blinked, and his heart ached, but he was back in the room, staring at the young man with an all too familiar face. But it couldn’t be. His George was safe and sound in England with his family, thriving in school, thriving on the stage with his violin, thriving on the equestrian field. His boy wasn’t here, a runaway seeking refuge the way Henry had only a few short years ago.

He let out a breath he didn’t realize he had been holding and screamed to himself to get a grip. “I’m Henry…” he repeated, again, pulling the rack of clothes in behind him and shutting the door. “I…um…I’m the Executive Director of the Rainbow Foundation. I just wanted to, uh, welcome you, Kyle. And see how you were doing.”

Even as he spoke with some level of control over his voice he couldn’t help but stare at that face. He tried to tell himself that he was seeing things, that there was a resemblance there but that he was just seeing things. His brain was tricking him. It wasn’t as if blonde and blue eyes was a rare combination, nor such a strong jaw and that imperfect nose he saw in the mirror every day. No, this wasn’t his baby returned to him. This was someone else’s lost baby, needing his help, until he found his own home.

Indeed, the scent of the young man was painfully familiar, but Henry did not entirely trust his all too sensitive sense of smell these days. Nevertheless, the scent of this “Kyle” was evocative of early morning skin-to-skin contact, when he would lie with his baby against his bare chest and press his nose against his soft scalp and inhaled the newborn smell of him. Even as George had gotten older, the smell had never dissipated to Henry – as though it were their little secret. George did not smell like this to anyone else, the remarkable mixture of sun and sweet powdery sugar and milk. The smell of heaven, as he had always thought of it, the smell only a mother could detect in their child. But he couldn’t trust the scent, couldn’t trust that his hormonal brain wasn’t just feeding him the scent along with the other memories as he looked at the strikingly familiar faces. He couldn’t trust that this was his body trying to warm him to the idea of another child – not that he needed much convincing even at that point. He couldn’t trust that the smell wasn’t a phantom scent given to him by a body that longed so much for the person he loved most in the world.

But the young man was reacting as wildly as Henry was and it made Henry ache even more because he must have sensed it too. He was asking what he was playing at, and Henry almost recognized his voice as well, a little deeper than what he remembered but still carrying the same timber, sweet even as it trembled in shock and accusation. He remembered the endless cries of “Mummy!” that he savored in George’s early childhood, which grew into pained “Mum!” of embarrassment or annoyance occasionally during the day, and then melted into the sweet “Mummy” again later in the evenings when they were alone. How that voice had increasingly come to annoy him in later years when they came with questions that reminded Henry of the pain of reality, and his failure to shield his baby from the depravity of his mother and father. How he yearned to hear that voice just one more time, and how that yearning gnawed at him day and night since the last time he had heard its last pained cry.

He shuffled forward automatically when Kyle stood up. But in a flurry of action, the kid’s belongings splayed out across the room, violin case flying open. The violin luckily stayed in place but Henry saw the little white square fly out from the case. He bent down to pick it up, hands shaking, as if he already knew what he was going to see. He turned the picture over, and saw an image of himself and his baby.
George had been all of three years old in the photo, making Henry nineteen – a mere child himself, but glowing with happiness at his son. He remembered the day so clearly. Henry had been permitted to take George back to England to visit his family, not long after Henry had recovered from the first stillbirth of who should have been George’s little sister. His family had taken them on an excursion to Salisbury to see Stonehenge and his father had taken this photograph. Henry – momentarily free of worry as he indulged his toddler son with kisses and a loving, tender and understanding look.

“You were crying before this picture was taken,” he said, in a soft, slightly far away voice, not quite looking up, just staring at the photo in his hand. “You had dropped your ice cream on the ground and you were…wailing. You wanted your lolly back, you kept saying, but the line for the van was already very long and Papa wanted to get a nice picture of you – of us – while we had a clear view. I asked you how many kisses would make up for the lost ice cream and you said, “Three, mama” because it was your favorite number because it was how old you were. So I gave you three kisses, and three extra more. And you laughed and laughed like you hadn’t just had your little heart broken.”

“There, I said,” he looked up at George, his heart having accepted this impossibility even before his mind could catch up. “You’ll never have to be sad, as long as Mummy’s here.”

The young man in front of him, babbling about “greedy fucks” paying someone to play a cruel trick on him to bring him home ran counter to what Henry believed would happen. He found himself growing furious, though it was a fury he was able to keep in check for the time being and instead focus on the young man before him.

“George, I’m not…” he tried to plead, but then his son was continuing to speak, supposedly filling in the details and Henry felt so small in the face of his son’s righteous fury. Regardless of Henry’s reasons for the choices he had made, what he had done was abandon his son. And for years, while he’d tormented himself with his longing to have his son back, he had never considered what his son may have gone through in becoming orphaned and being forced to bury his beloved mother. Perhaps he had never contemplated it because of his own selfishness and self-centredness, or perhaps it was because the idea of his son grieving him had been too much to bear. The images in his mind of George was one of happiness. Happiness that he was free of the mentally absent and incompetent mother whose moods and silences haunted him, whose secrets frustrated him. He had imagined only the best future for George – and had been unable to conceive of the thought of his son weeping as he lay flowers on the coffin of the person who mattered most to him. He didn’t know what to say. Perhaps he wanted the earth to swallow him hole, because he did not deserve this reunification, after what he had done.

George was demanding his photo back and Henry looked down at it once more, held in his trembling hands. He hadn’t been allowed to take anything of his past life when he recovered from the hospital and the settlement came. When he was allowed to return to their home in Manhattan, he had found the brownstone entirely empty – not a single scrap of furniture or clothes. Not a single photograph. He could have $75M but not a single memory by which to regard his son. Henry would have happily traded in all that wealth for even just one single photo to remember George by, or even the smallest scrap of his favorite blue binky, stained and frayed at the edges from years of being clutched anywhere and everywhere the young boy went. But Henry had had nothing, only the recollections of a smiling, loving face, a bubbly laugh, a tearful cry, the sweet scent of milk and blue flowers.
He was selfish and wanted this photo to keep for himself, but he eventually relinquished it, holding it out to George, wordless.

“I…” he started, tears forming at the corner of his eyes, his lips wobbling with barely contained emotion as he couldn’t even look at the young man – his George – without the burning of shame from his hideous decision. George didn’t want him, was not searching for him because he had long said goodbye and this was a mistake. This was some other kind of misfortune that befell Henry just when things seemed to be going so well.

“I got you..I got you some water…I’ll…go and get that.” And perhaps in his defeat George would finally see him, see the defeated creature he might have held last in his memory, the one George had been so angry with in those final days. The creature of sad emptiness that had devoured his radiant mother.

Despite his son’s tears, relief flooded Henry to have his boy in his arms again. That he let him wipe away his tears and cradle his face as he cried. George was a fraction of an inch taller than him now, many inches taller than what Henry remembered last, but in that moment he was the crying toddler again, sobbing about a grazed knee and letting Henry kiss away his hurts. Even as he cried about his grandparents cruelty, Henry shook his head, kissing his forehead and his cheeks as his arms looped tightly around him, holding him close and letting him buckle against him. He was a mother again. He had his son back and that was all that mattered for the time being.

Thus, just as he had done in the picture that was so dear to George, he shushed him, whispering comforting words. “It’s alright. We can think on it later, figure out what to do with your grandparents later. I’m here now, Mum is here.” Because they couldn’t talk about what had happened yet – Henry wasn’t ready to admit what he had done to his son and yet had no desire to restart their relationship with more lies or lies of omission. He would tell George everything, when the time was right – and it would be soon. But for now he had his son back, and he needed to comfort him, and make him feel safe.

“You are safe with me now. I am safe – I made this place, I am this place and you knew to search for me even if you didn’t know who it was you were looking for. My love,” he was babbling as well, but he didn’t care, lifting his son’s chin in his palm and looking him in the eyes. He wasn’t seeing a grown young man in that moment, from whom he had been separated by evil people and by time. He wasn’t seeing the teenager he sacrificed. He wasn’t seeing the little boy who grew so angry with his muted silence and disappearance into himself. He saw the baby whose sun rose and sun set with his Mum, who wanted nothing more than the security and comfort of Mummy’s embrace. “I love you so much. I love you so so so much.”