Spin the Dawn(112)

“Nothing can break it, for destiny is the strongest promise. You’ll be bound to each other no matter what happens.”

“The way I’m bound to you and Baba, and Finlei. And Sendo?” I was mad at Keton, so I didn’t care if my youngest brother and I were tied together.

“It’s similar, but different.” Mama touched my nose and rubbed it affectionately. “One day you’ll see.”

That night, I took a spool of red thread and cut a string to tie around my ankle. I didn’t want my brothers to see and make fun of me, so I tucked the loose end under the cuff of my pant leg. But as I walked with my secret tickling my ankle, I wondered if I’d feel something when I met the person I was fated to be with. Would the string give a little tug? Would it stretch and bind to its other half?

I wore that string around my ankle for months. Little by little, it frayed, but my faith in fate did not.

Until fate took Mama from me.

It came for her slowly, over many months, like the cypress tree outside our shophouse. Every day, leaves trickled from its spindly arms, only a few at first, but more and more as autumn loomed. Then, one day, I woke up to find all the branches were bare. And our cypress tree was no more, at least until spring.

Mama had no spring.

Her autumn began with a stray cough here and there, always covered up with a smile. She forgot to add cabbage to the pork dumplings Finlei loved so much, and forgot the names of the heroes in the stories she’d tell Sendo and me before we went to sleep. She even let Keton win at cards and gave him too much money to spend on his errands in the marketplace.

I hadn’t thought too much of these slips. Mama would have said if she weren’t feeling well.

Then one winter morning, just as I’d finished adorning our statues of Amana with our three dresses of the sun, the moon, and the stars, Mama fainted in the kitchen.

I shook her. I was still small, and even her head was heavy for me to lift and rest on my lap.

“Baba!” I screamed. “Baba! She won’t wake up.”

That morning, everything changed. Instead of praying to my ancestors to wish them well in their afterlife, I prayed that they spare Mama. I prayed to Amana, to the three statues I’d painted and clothed, to let her live. To let her see my brothers and me grow up, and not to leave Baba, who loved her so much, alone.

Every time I closed my eyes and pictured the future, I saw my family whole. I saw Mama next to Baba, laughing, and teasing us all with the fragrant smells of her cooking. I saw my brothers surrounding me—Finlei reminding me to sit straight, Sendo slipping me an extra tangerine, and Keton pulling on my braids.

How wrong I was.

Mama died a week before my eighth birthday. I spent my birthday sewing white mourning clothes for my father and my brothers, which we wore for the next one hundred days. That year, the winter felt especially cold.

I cut the red thread off my ankle. Seeing how broken Baba was without Mama, I didn’t want to be tied to anyone and suffer the same pain.

As the years passed, my faith in the gods faded, and I stopped believing in magic. I shuttered my dreams and poured myself into keeping our family together, into being strong for Baba, for my brothers, for myself.

Every time a little happiness seeped into the cracks of my heart and dared make it full again, fate intervened to remind me I couldn’t escape it. Fate took my heart and smashed it piece by piece: when Finlei died, then Sendo, and Keton returned with broken legs and ghosts in his eyes.

The Maia of yesterday picked up those pieces and painstakingly sewed them back together. But I was no longer that Maia.

Beginning today, things would be different. Beginning today, when fate caught me, I’d meet it head-on and make it my own.

Beginning today, I would have no heart.