The Real Thing

by Marina Simcoe

  As expected, my parents didn’t take the conversation well.

  “We’re going to be bankrupt.” My mother sobbed, reaching for another tissue. “We’re going to lose the house. Where are we going to live?”

  “It was inevitable, Mom. In situations like this, it’s best to deal with it sooner rather than later. Some things may still be salvaged.” I so hated to be the strong and the reasonable one right now.

  “I know, I know, baby…” She turned to my father. “What are we going to do?”

  He made her tea, took her upstairs and put her to bed.

  “You know she needs help. We need to find her counseling,” I told him when he got back in the kitchen.

  He nodded somberly.

  I inhaled deeply, trying to breathe through the heavy lump lodged in my throat.

  “We’ll need to get you professional debt management advice too.” I rubbed my chest. The pain inside was physical now. “I’ll do some research. Are there any services available through your retirement benefits from work? Can you look into it?”

  He nodded again. My usually cheerful, chatty father refused to talk to me now. I knew he was not blaming me for any of it; he was just overwhelmed by the situation, but it still hurt.

  “I… I need to go now.” I gave him an awkward side hug as he stood there silently by the kitchen counter. “I’ll be around to help you with packing and moving,” I gestured around the kitchen, “and everything else.”

  “Thank you,” he finally replied, his voice raw and so very sad. It broke my heart.

  I walked to the bus station through the sleet and cold of the late January — my mother’s pained face, my father’s somber expression hovered in front of my eyes. I felt I did the right thing. I knew I was just the bringer of bad news, not the reason for them, but I still had a lead-heavy, dark feeling of disappointment and failure weighing on me. It squeezed my chest and made my eyes burn with unshed tears.

  I never cried. I was the strong one. The responsible older daughter. I would not cry in front of anyone. Not ever, not now.

  I didn’t cry on the bus, and I held in my tears on the train, all the way back to the city. I walked to my building and even rode the elevator with a number of other people, still keeping it together perfectly well.

  Then I opened the door to my apartment and saw Marcus waiting for me there.

  I couldn’t hide anything from him. He knew me too well — it took him one look at me to see that I wasn’t feeling right.

  “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” he reached for me, and it was my undoing.

  I dropped my purse to the floor and stepped into his arms. Warm. Safe. Home.

  And just like that, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. The floodgates opened and tears burst out. I let it all go because I knew that he was there to hold me through it, all the way.

  It was an ugly crying, with body-shuddering sobs, with tissue-requiring snot and with one horrendous, unstoppable stream of tears.

  I cried as I’d never cried before. It was no longer just about today’s events. I cried for all the things I had never allowed myself to cry for until now. I cried because my parents were getting old, because I grew up, because there was no way to ever revisit that wonderful, carefree place called childhood, because the things in my family would have to be so much worse for a while now before there was a chance for them to slowly get a little bit better. I cried, letting go of all the heavy feelings of failure, responsibility and guilt, the feelings that I couldn’t deal with in any other way at that moment.

  He held me close. He stroked my hair, and he kissed away my tears even as more of them came immediately after, flooding my face in one relentless, endless torrent. He called me his love, his very own ice queen, his fearless woman…

  “I am, Marcus,” I sobbed into his tear-soaked t-shirt. “With you, I truly am fearless. With you, I’m not even afraid to be weak.”

  30. Coffee with Ingeborg.

  It was Saturday morning, and I ran along the sidewalk on Bloor Street West on my way to the coffee shop where I was going to meet Ingeborg for a coffee.

  Ever since our initial contact, we had been exchanging emails on regular basis.

  Her emails were always very polite to the point of being a little old-fashioned and too courteous. She knew that I’d contacted her for information, and she was extremely careful with her own questions to me. She warned me in the beginning that she didn’t know Marcus or his immediate family personally, but she could tell me more about other people like him, starting with her own family.

  This is when the story turned crazy, making me doubt her sanity. In fact, I would have stopped all correspondence with her the minute she claimed to be close to two hundred years old if I didn’t have the living breathing proof of Marcus himself that anything was possible in this world.

  Ingeborg wrote that she had been living in Zürich, Switzerland for the past fifty years. Her three husbands, son and two grandsons had passed away from old age, all of them having had a much shorter lifespans.

  Apparently, there were many people with a whole range of magical abilities living all over the world. Ingeborg herself claimed to be able to teleport. She also said that she sometimes “knew things that nobody told her about.”

  Her husbands had been regular humans, with no magical abilities, but her son, her grandsons and their children all had it in some form or another.

  Ingeborg’s son could walk through walls and closed doors. Both of her grandsons could levitate in the air.

  Magic seemed to diminish with each generation. Among some of Ingeborg’s great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren, there were some who could only move small objects with their mind; others only lived longer than was humanly possible, without having any other magical abilities at all.

  Only her great-great granddaughter, Cecilia, had much stronger abilities. Similar to Marcus, she could do many different things; unlike him though, she needed to use spells to make them happen.

  Needing to see the woman who claimed to be almost two centuries old, I finally agreed to meet her in person.

  After the conversation with my parents I did quit my job at the store and suddenly found that I had so much more time to live my life! With all my weekends free, I now could have a leisurely breakfast with a two-hundred-year old teleporting woman without having to hurry anywhere.

  Marcus was reluctant to let me go meet her on my own at first, but I assured him I was able to defend myself from a 200-year old woman should she attack me. He still made me promise that I meet her in a public place and have my cellphone fully charged.

  I didn’t ask him to come with me this time. I knew he wasn’t entirely sure about meeting anyone from his past, and didn’t want to force it on him if he wasn’t ready.

  It was March, and although we had very little snow during the winter this year, it was still wet, cold and windy outside. The outdoor patios wouldn’t open for weeks yet.

  I walked inside the coffee shop and looked around.

  “Angela!”

  I turned to see a blonde woman waving at me from the booth in the corner.

  Ingeborg recognized me immediately. She never saw my picture, but maybe it was one of the things she knew even if no one told her about.

  Even with her sitting down, I could tell she was tall. Her light-blonde hair, made even lighter by strands of silver in it, was pulled back into an elegant bun.

  I struggled to guess her age. She said she stopped aging at about twenty-five to thirty years old and then started again about thirty to forty years ago.

  From the distance, she could have passed for a forty-year old. However, when I got closer, I could see her incredible age imprinted on her face. It wasn’t even in the fine lines around her eyes and mouth; it was inside her sky-blue eyes, clear as glass. The look in them was heavy with wisdom, like if she knew everything and in a way was tired from the weight of this knowledge.

  “So very lovely to finally meet you, Angela,” Ingeborg sa
id when I sat down at the table across from her.

  “It’s very nice to meet you too, Ingeborg.” I shook her outstretched hand and noticed a round bauble on a chain around her neck. It was in the shape of a perfect sphere, small and unassuming, but it appeared to be made from the same smoky-looking amber like Marcus’s pendant.

  “You can call me Inge,” she smiled. “Most people do.” She followed my eyes to her necklace. “I got it from my father. It’s supposed to ward off demons or warn you when they’re around — no one knows for sure any more. We wear them mostly as a tradition, as a sign that we all belong together. Have you seen one before? Does Marcus have one?”

  I raised my eyes to meet hers and hesitated. I knew nothing about this woman other than what she told me about herself. I couldn’t start talking about Marcus without at least making sure she was who she said she was.

  “How did you get here, Inge? Did you teleport from Switzerland?”

  “Yes, I did.” She leaned back in her seat, her face relaxed.

  “Could you show me, please?”

  A big smile crossed her face.

  “You need to protect your man,” she nodded in understanding before glancing around. The coffee shop was busy with people. However, our corner booth was out of the way, with us mostly obstructed from view of everyone else. Ingeborg slid deeper into the corner on the bench and almost completely hid from view of everyone in the room.

  “All right. I’ll see you in a moment,” she said, still smiling. I felt the echo of the familiar puff of warm air before her face dissolved into nothing right in front of me, and she disappeared. Her smile lingered in my mind, like that of the Cheshire cat, left behind.

  I looked around the coffee shop one more time just to make sure that there weren’t any people gaping at Ingeborg’s empty seat.

  “Hello again.” I heard her voice from across the table again. “These are for you.” She put a small box of Swiss chocolates on the table between us. “I don’t normally do it: technically, it is smuggling,” she chuckled. “Besides, these are sooo good, they should be classified as drugs!”

  “Thank you, Inge!” I laughed and opened the box, taking one of the chocolates right away. “Mmmm, these are good. Is it your first time in Toronto?”

  I felt much more at ease with her now. Most people would have been at least unnerved by a sudden disappearance and then reappearance of a woman right in front of their eyes. Because of Marcus though, magic had become such a big part of my everyday life that the familiarity of it only comforted me instead of scaring me. To me, Ingeborg’s teleportation was a proof of the connection between her and Marcus.

  “Actually, yes,” Ingeborg replied to my question. “I don’t come across the ocean that often. I was born and raised in Finland, back when it was a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire. I travelled all over Europe since then of course. Some of it was voluntary, and some of my travels were forced on me. The last century was so volatile, you know.”

  She gave me a sad but warm smile and took a sip of tea from the cup in front of her.

  “I do come to Arizona every few years or so,” she continued. “One of us lives there with his family. Every year, they organize a big meeting on their ranch near Phoenix — a family reunion of sorts — for all of us who can attend. I try to make it there whenever I can. It’s nice to visit and catch up with everyone. What do you think? Perchance, Marcus would like to attend it this year? It’s in June.”

  “Marcus? Do you think he should?”

  “I will be completely honest with you, Angela. I am fascinated by this boy! It is his phenomenal abilities, of course. No one I know has the magic of our ancestors manifest in them as powerfully as it does in him. More so, though, I marvel how he survived all this time on his own, without harming himself or others. Any magic is difficult to control in the beginning. One needs a fair amount of practice and, most definitely, the support and guidance of a family.”

  “Do you have any ideas who his parents might be?” We hadn’t talked about Marcus very much during our email exchange. I had plenty of questions to ask Ingeborg, but I wanted to ask them all in person.

  “No. I don’t know anyone who would have lost a toddler about twenty-five or thirty years ago. Even if they did, they would have moved heaven and earth, looking for their child. Children are rare among our kind and treasured.”

  “He thinks he was abandoned,” I replied.

  “Poor boy! It couldn’t have been easy on him to believe all this time that his parents didn’t want him.”

  It was strange to hear Marcus being referred to “a boy” by Ingeborg. To her, however, every living human on the planet must have felt like a child.

  “So, you don’t think that they gave him up? He had been tossed from one foster home to another. Often because people felt weird or scared to have him around once they caught a glimpse of his abilities. He figures his parents did the same.”

  “Well, unfortunately, I don’t know who his parents are, but I am confident that’s not what happened. At least one of his parents must have been one of us and must have possessed some magic, as well. In fact, considering how strong Marcus’s own magic is, I’m inclined to believe that both of his parents had it. They could not have been afraid of him. Marcus has been living in plain sight all this time. If his parents were alive, they would have found him by now. Something tragic must have happened that separated them from their child. As it is, I’m afraid that they are no longer alive.”

  It was a sad statement, but oddly it gave me a sense of comfort: once upon a time, it seemed Marcus did have a real family who loved him. They didn’t give him up because they no longer wanted him. His parents weren’t there for him, because they were dead.

  “With Marcus’s co-operation,” continued Ingeborg, “I could look further into it if you like. He should have some records, from government services? I’m not sure what agencies are responsible for orphaned children in the United States, but there should be a paper trail that we could explore and combine it with the known history of our people.”

  “I don’t know. Marcus doesn’t like talking about any of it, but he must be thinking about his past and where he came from, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. Why else would he remember your email so many months after he saw it once?”

  “We all need to know where we came from,” Ingeborg agreed. “Having strong roots helps us spread our wings with confidence.”

  “Where are you from? I mean your people? Marcus’s people?”

  “No one knows for sure. Some say we are descendants of demons who came to Earth a long time ago. Some say they were fallen angels, banished from Heaven as a punishment. One of them fell in love with a human woman many centuries ago and gave up his immortality for her. There might have been more than one who traded immortality for love. In any case, we are their children’s children.

  “The demons hailed from another world, another dimension, if you will. I was told that the combined life force of both worlds, theirs and ours, is what causes the unusual abilities in the offspring of these unions. It is impossible to predict how the magic would manifest itself in every child. The only thing we know for sure, is that the strength and intensity of our magic diminish with each generation, as we get further and further removed from our demonic or angelic — depending on how you like to view them — ancestors.”

  “What do you believe, Inge, personally? Who were your ancestors? Angels or demons?”

  “I believe it doesn’t truly matter,” she said with a delicate shrug of a shoulder. “We are what we are, and we live our lives the best we can, just like anyone else on Earth. There are only a few dozen of us, spread all over the world. We all look different, but we all have extraordinary abilities as our common trait. Some things are easier for us to do, and then again, some things are more difficult.”

  “Things like what?”

  “Well, I lived longer than my son and both of my grandchildren. I knew I would out-live them long before they h
ad passed away. I had plenty of time to prepare myself for their funerals. Only how do you prepare yourself for having to bury your babies? It’s unnatural, and it is still extremely hard. Even when they pass of old age, after having lived long and productive lives.” She inhaled deeply and took a slow drink from her teacup to compose herself.

  “Also,” she continued, “all of us have to hide. I have moved and changed identities many times over the course of my life to disguise my true age. If we want to live a life as close to normal as possible, we need to hide our abilities. We train our children from when they are still babies to not use their magic outside their home.”

  “It must be difficult to constantly suppress a part of what you are.”

  “We all learn to do it. Hiding becomes second nature. The history of centuries of violence against anyone who is different has taught us to be extremely careful. I’m amazed that Marcus actually found a way to display his abilities in front of everyone.”

  “He needs it,” I replied and explained, “He needs to share his magic with other people. Otherwise it builds up inside of him to the point of hurting him. I’m afraid it could potentially destroy him.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.” Ingeborg tilted her head to the side in thought. “It must have something to do with the incredible strength of his power.”

  I clasped my hands tight in front of me on the table.

  “I was hoping that you or the others could teach him to control it better.”

  “We would most definitely try,” Ingeborg promised softly. “He never had any training in this aspect, so any help from us will be beneficial to him. How often does he need to give the shows? Can he have any break at all?”

  “He can have a break. There are other ways too.” I hesitated for a second. I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to discuss our sex life with a woman I just met, with the woman who could be my many-times-great grandmother. “Well, when we… Um… My… intimate touch calms him down too. So, he makes sure we see each other regularly between the shows. Well, lately we are very much inseparable anyway, despite the long-distance thing…”