“Oh… I feel great mom… I don’t need anything. Not thirsty, really. You have stuff to do, so I’ll just…” his mind reached into what seemed to be nothingness, coming up with a reason to avoid tea. “I’ll fix the wall, that’s what needs to be done.” He instantly knew this hadn’t worked. As soon as he said it she looked up at him, and he could see she was trying not to laugh.
“We’re not going to have that kind of tea, just good old mint will do today,” she said with a chuckle in her voice.
Legon sat back and sighed with relief. Soon she was done, and before he knew it she seemed to make mint tea appear out of thin air. As he sipped it he felt the hot liquid flow down his throat to warm his belly. They sat quietly for a bit. His mother broke the silence.
“You’ll be eighteen in a month. How do you feel about that?” Her voice was soft and carried with it all the sincerity in the world. This subject had been playing over and over again in his head for the last few weeks.
“I don’t know how I feel about it. There’s a part of me that is excited about coming of age but… there’s a bigger part that is terrified, you know what I mean?” He looked at her and she nodded a bit. He continued on.
“I just feel… I feel like I’m racing toward something I can’t control and something…” he seemed to have a hard time thinking of the words.
She tried to help him. “Scary?”
“Yeah, but not like the scary you would think. It’s not the excited scary.”
Her face looked concerned. “Legon, what’s wrong?”
He paused, wondering if he should tell her about his tattoo. “It’s better to tell her now than later,” he thought.
“Come and look,” he said.
As he said this he gestured to his back and pulled the back of his shirt down. His mother looked a little frightened now and came around back of him to look. He heard a sharp intake of breath and then he felt her fingers inside the back of his shirt and then he heard the fabric rip. It caught him off guard. His mother would never damage good clothes. She held his shoulders in place when he tried to turn. Her hands were moving across his back, over the tattoo. The movement felt frantic and scared. It felt like she was trying to remove dirt or a smudge off his back. They stopped moving and she walked slowly over to the chair. She sat and held her face in her hands. Her whole body was shuddering, and he could hear her say between sobs, “Not my son… not my son…”
Fear crawled up the back of his neck and he was surprised by a crack in his voice. “Mom what’s wrong? What’s going on?” She looked up at him. There was a pleading look in her tear-stained face, a look that said, ‘Don’t make me, please don’t make me.’
Her voice was rough. “I think it’s time I told you how you came to us.”
His forehead scrunched. “Mom, I know how I got here. Dad found me while he was hunting. They came across a camp site that had been raided; they figured that I was left behind by mistake when people fled from the robbers.” But as he said this, like so many other times when he thought about it, he somehow knew that it wasn’t right. Nobody would leave a baby in a campsite. Even the robbers would at least kill or try to sell it. He had never given too much credence to the story of how he came to be with Laura and Edis. They were his parents now, and that’s what mattered.
“No, Legon that’s not how we came to have you in our family,” she said softly. Her face was still tear-soaked, but he could see resolve cross it as well. After pausing for a moment she continued.
“Your father was hunting, that part is true. He found you and brought you home, but that’s where the truth ends.”
Trepidation began seeping into him, as she went on.
“He was in the woods when he heard a baby crying. He was with Brack and Arkin. They moved to the sound and found a cottage, or at least that’s what your father thought it was. He said it seemed more like a tree, but I’m not