Children of the Uprising (32 page)

Christopher waited in the white room for what felt like hours, though it was actually little more than forty minutes. Then, without warning, the door swung open and Evan walked into the room. Christopher looked at Evan. Evan looked healthy but older, older than he should have looked. Christopher took a small step toward Evan. Before he could make it any farther, Evan reached out and pulled Christopher into a massive hug. They didn't say anything to each other. As the force of their hug subsided, Christopher looked up at the two other people who had walked through the door after Evan. He had expected to see Addy and Brian. Addy was there, her hair fading back toward its natural color but still with hints of the dark flame hue. But the person behind Addy wasn't Brian. The person behind Addy was a ghost. Apparently, the ability to be surprised is not something that you can outgrow, not if the next surprise is bigger than the last one.

Christopher couldn't say how he recognized the woman standing behind Addy. He couldn't remember ever seeing her before. Maybe it was because he had memories stored away that he didn't know existed. Maybe these memories were so powerful that they could bring back the dead. Christopher let go of Evan and Evan moved aside. Addy walked up to Christopher next. Christopher stood there, frozen in shock. Addy didn't try to break the spell. She simply stood on the tips of her toes and whispered to him, “We're glad to have you back,” then gave him a gentle kiss on his cheek. Then she too stepped aside.

Maria watched Christopher's face. From the moment she'd entered the room, she couldn't take her eyes off his face. She'd waited for this moment for a long time and then spent an even longer time trying, and failing, to make peace with the fact that this moment was never going to happen. Now the moment was here and Maria was so worried about what it might do to Christopher that she couldn't enjoy it. All she really knew about her own son was what Evan had told her over the past two days. He looked so much like his father and still so much like his own person that it almost frightened Maria. And he looked so much like a man, so unlike the child that Maria had pictured in her head for all these years. When Christopher looked up at her, he didn't look angry, and she was grateful for that, but she readied herself for the anger that she thought would come once the confusion wore off. She remembered what it had felt like holding him for the first time after she'd found him in California when he was only one year old. She remembered how he'd struggled and cried out for someone else. To say she remembered it wasn't even really true because that implied that she'd stopped thinking about it. She'd never stopped thinking about it, but now she didn't merely remember it, she felt it again—that same ache in her heart. Only this time, she wasn't saving him. Addy stepped aside and Christopher's eyes fell on Maria. “This is wrong,” Maria mumbled to Christopher. “I shouldn't be doing this to you again.” Then she turned and headed for the door. A hand gripped her arm before she could reach the door handle. She knew it was Christopher. She could feel his father in his grip.

Until Maria spoke, Christopher couldn't move. He froze. He was staring at a ghost—both in his memory and in real life. Maria was dead. Max had told him that she was dead. Everyone knew that she was dead. Christopher didn't even want to think about what it would mean if she was alive, if she'd been alive the whole time. He stared at her, and she stared back at him, and he didn't know what to do or to say or to think. All he knew was that when he heard her voice, he didn't want her to go. He needed her to stay. That part of Christopher's memory that he hadn't known existed exploded when he heard Maria's voice. So when she turned toward the door, Christopher went after her. He reached for her and grabbed her arm before she could leave him again. His skin touched her skin. Unable to go forward, Maria turned back toward her son.

Christopher wanted to be angry, but he'd run out of anger. He already had too many people to be angry with. When Maria turned back toward him, she saw what was left of his anger on his face. When someone is all out of anger, all that's left is despair. Christopher no longer looked like a man to her. He looked like the child that she had once held in her arms. When Maria saw that child, her child, she had no choice but to go to him and spread her arms to him and try to comfort him.

When Maria put her arms around Christopher, he collapsed into them. He didn't want to be so vulnerable, but he didn't have the will to stop himself. He was supposed to be a leader now. He was supposed to be a warrior. At least, that was what everyone else wanted him to be. That was the mask that they made him wear. But deep down, he didn't believe that he was those things. Deep down, he had no idea who he was. At that moment, though, he was still a frightened child in the arms of a mother. It didn't matter in that moment that this wasn't his only mother. His body remembered what it felt like to be held by this woman, and it collapsed. And he wept like a child.

“It's okay. It's okay,” Maria whispered to Christopher as she stroked his back.

“They told me you were dead,” Christopher said between sobs.

“I know,” Maria said, still gently rubbing his back, trying to soothe him. “I told them to. I'm sorry. I was trying to protect you. I never wanted to hurt you.” She would have cried too if she hadn't realized that in that moment she needed to stay strong for her son. “You have your own family. Whether I'm alive or dead shouldn't mean that much to you.”

“But it does,” Christopher said, burying his teary eyes in the crook of Maria's neck. “It does.”

“I know,” Maria said again. She held his head against her so that she could absorb his tears. “I'm alive and I'm here with you now and I'm never going to leave you again.”

“Promise?” Christopher said, sounding very much like a little boy who'd gotten separated from his mother in a department store.

“I promise,” Maria said, stroking Christopher's hair. Then she held him away from her and looked into his face. “We've probably got a lot to talk about. Evan? Addy? Can you give us some time alone?”

“Of course,” Addy said. Addy and Evan began to walk out of the room, but before they left, Addy turned back to Christopher. “Are you okay, Christopher?” she asked, sounding almost as maternal as Maria.

“Yeah,” an embarrassed Christopher assured her. “I'm okay.” So Evan and Addy continued out the door. “Guys,” Christopher called out to them as they walked away. Both Addy and Evan turned toward him. “I'm happy to see you guys again. I'm happy you're safe. We'll talk when I'm done here, right?”

“Of course,” Evan replied. “We're good, Chris. Don't worry about us.” Evan's words meant everything to Christopher and Evan meant everything when he said them. Then Evan and Addy slipped out of the room, leaving Maria and Christopher alone, for the first time in more than seventeen years.

“The last time I saw you,” Maria told Christopher, “you were still in diapers.” She remembered what Addy had told her that night in her basement in Quebec. Addy had said that there were still things Maria could teach Christopher. Whatever it was that she could teach him, she would.

“Why?” Christopher asked, not knowing where to start. He could have been asking a million different questions, so Maria went with the one response that she knew could answer every one of them.

“Because I loved you so much. Because I wanted you to be happy and I didn't care how much it had to hurt me to help you be happy.”

“Did you know my parents?” Christopher asked Maria.

“Yes,” Maria told him. “I knew them when I was young. I knew that they would love you and that they would be wonderful to you. And I hoped that by giving you to them I was giving you a fresh start.”

“There's no such thing as a fresh start,” Christopher told his long-lost mother.

“You don't know that,” Maria said. “You only know that we haven't found it yet.”

“I have so many questions,” Christopher said. “Tell me about my father. Tell me about you. Tell me why you never came to find me. Tell me about the couple that I lived with in California. Tell me about everything.”

“I don't know what you've heard, good or bad. Your father was a decent man, trying to become a good man, and I loved him. And he loved you. Those are the things that really matter.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Christopher asked Maria. Though she'd had a chance to answer only one of his questions, he already felt that he could tell her things he couldn't tell anyone else.

“Of course.”

“I hate everyone. I hate everyone involved in this stupid War. I even hate the people who are fighting against it. I hate them all.”

“No, you don't,” Maria told him. “You want to, but you don't. I was the same way. I wanted to hate all of them except your father. Then I met Michael. Then I met Dorothy and Reggie. Pretty soon, you only hate the ones that you don't know, and that means that you don't really hate any of them at all.”

“So, after everything you've been through, you don't hate any of them?” Christopher asked.

“Only one,” she said. “But now's not the time to talk about him.”
I want to talk about you,
Maria thought.
I want to talk about you being done with all of this. Fighting the War is just another part of the War.
But now wasn't the time for that either. She needed to gain his trust first. She needed to be patient. She knew that she wasn't to Christopher what he was to her. The problem was that she didn't have a lot of time. So she had to make the most of the time she had. “You must have other questions for me,” she said. “You can ask me anything.” So Maria answered all of Christopher's questions as best she could. Evan and Addy didn't get to see him again for another five hours.

Dave had never been up this high on the Brooklyn Bridge before. He'd crossed the bridge countless times, of course, and as a kid, he'd even snuck up onto the cables a couple of times, but he ran up only a few feet before getting scared and climbing down again. He'd never dreamt that one day he would be sitting on the top of one of the towers, strapping explosives to its side.

He wasn't the only one. They were all over the city that night, scrambling up its bridges and towers. The George Washington Bridge. The Manhattan Bridge. The Williamsburg Bridge. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The top of the Flatiron Building. The top of the Chrysler Building. The top of the Empire State Building. Even the top of the arch in Washington Square Park.

Dave looked down at the black water flowing far below him. He watched the reflection from the city's lights glisten off the waves. It looked like there were stars twinkling deep beneath the water. Then Dave lifted his head and looked at the real thing, staring out over the city. To Dave, the city looked magical at night. He'd always felt that way. The utter impossibility of it all amazed him. He wasn't going to pass up the one chance he'd probably ever have to see the city from his perch high above the East River. He felt like Spider-Man, for Christ's sake.

“Dave?” Dave suddenly heard a shouted whisper drift up from beneath him. “Are you ready or what?” Hector called up from about twenty feet below Dave. Hector was sitting on one of the cables, strapped into a piece of nylon rope with a carabiner on its end. A forty-pound box of explosives dangled in the air beneath him.

“Yeah. Hook it up,” Dave called to Hector before throwing down one end of about thirty feet of rope. Hector held on to the cable he was sitting on with one hand and reached out into the dark, empty space with his other, catching the end of the rope. Cars drove over the bridge below them. Hector and Dave could hear their engines and see their lights. A few late-night couples and tourists—the true romantics—were still walking across the bridge. All of them were blissfully unaware of what was going on over their heads. Hector took the end of the rope that Dave had thrown down to him and tied it to the box of explosives.

“Here it goes,” Hector shouted up to Dave. Dave nodded and braced himself. Then Hector let go of the box. The box swung through the empty night air. Dave waited until it stopped swinging, until it hung loose below him, and then he started pulling on the rope. It took five minutes for him to pull the box out of the darkness and onto the ledge where he was sitting. By the time he had pulled the box to the top, Hector had managed to climb to the top as well. Dave and Hector had climbed up almost the entire way in these fits and starts, pulling the box of explosives behind them. They started out on the footpath, carrying the box up from Brooklyn. Then they waited for a moment free of strangers. It was late, well past midnight, so the foot traffic on the bridge was intermittent. Once they found the right moment, Dave jumped onto the base of one of the thick cables and, as quickly as he could, scrambled up high enough that nobody on the bridge would think he was anything other than a strangely shaped shadow. Then he dropped the rope for Hector to attach to the explosives and they were on their way. It took them more than an hour to get all the way to the top of the tower. They might have been able to go faster, but once they'd disappeared into the shadows, they'd taken their time. Neither of them was in a rush to finish their job.

“If I'd known it was this easy to get up here, I would have tagged the shit out of this thing when I was a kid,” Hector said to Dave as he sat down next to him. They dangled their legs over the tower's edge and looked at the city together. They could see everything from their secret perch. Without saying anything, both of them began taking a mental inventory of the targets, imagining that the people assigned to each of the other targets were doing the same thing at that moment. They were close enough to the Manhattan Bridge that they thought they might be able to see their counterparts climbing through its cables. The Williamsburg Bridge wasn't too far north of that. The East River was going to be a disaster area. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stood small in the distance to the south, but they could still see its lights towering over the water. They could even almost see the George Washington Bridge all the way on the other side of Manhattan. And then there was Manhattan, riddled with buildings being targeted. “You know P. T. Barnum once marched twenty-one elephants across this bridge just to prove that it wouldn't collapse,” Hector said to Dave as they sat dangling their feet in the empty air.

“Yeah?” Dave answered.

“That was like a hundred years ago.”

“I guess it didn't collapse?”

“Nope.”

“A hundred years is a long time,” Dave said to Hector.

“Do you think what we're doing is crazy?” Hector asked Dave as he stared at the hundreds of thousands of lights on in the windows of tens of thousands of buildings.

“Yeah,” Dave said to Hector, “but sometimes you've got to fight crazy with crazy. You ready to hook this shit up?” Dave motioned towards the black box.

“Let's do it,” Hector said.

The contents of the box had been prearranged. All Hector and Dave had to do was line it up properly and tie it down so that it wouldn't shift in the wind. It was set to detonate via remote control. Somewhere in the city, somebody had a button. Dave looked out over the city one last time when they were almost done. “You think that there's one button that sets everything off at once?”

Hector tightened the last knot holding the box in place. “That would be one serious fucking button,” he said, looking over their handiwork. “Let's get out of here.”

The two of them climbed back down the bridge's cables. When they were close to the bottom they pulled the hoods of their sweatshirts back up over their heads. Then they waited for a moment when no one was looking and they slipped off the cables and back into the flow of people walking over the bridge.