My Mother’s Voice and the Shadow

by A. W. Prihandita

I pressed my palm onto my chest and said, “Marie.”

I pointed at my mother, took a deep breath and braved her abyssal eyes, asking, “And you? What is your name, Mother?”

I shouldn’t have been in her room, but my father was away, and I was a curious child. I stood in quiet trepidation and waited to know her.

She towered over me, shadow-like in the dark, but by a sliver of moonlight I could see the empty, crooked smile on her lips. It made me shiver—it always did. It looked like the painted simper of a porcelain doll, with eyes too wide and skin too white—except my mother’s skin was dark and wrinkly like shrunken leather. Her pitch-black eyes were an echoing emptiness, a starless midnight sky to fall into, with no thoughts to catch you, only darkness.

My mother was mute and feeble-minded—or so my father said. I would’ve believed him until the end of my days, had the shadow not shown me otherwise.

When I was a child, Father would sit me on his lap as he worked at his desk. I was small enough that his arms could snake around me and reconvene at the site of his surgery: a book, usually at least half a century old, in some stage of disrepair. He’d hold an archival knife in one hand, making precise cuts along the binding, as the other hand held the book open. “This is called a de-spining,” he’d say. I used to think it a violent process—an unraveling made more complete—but he said, “This is what book-mending is.”

I enjoyed the reassembling process much better. I never told him that, though. He wouldn’t have liked to hear it.

I could always tell there were things he wouldn’t approve of. His eyes would turn especially wintry if I came too close to my mother’s room. Mother herself always bowed her head around him, and never said a word when he locked her in her room. So I learned to walk in straight lines; I followed all the signs to silence. This meant never knowing my mother.

When I was eighteen, toward the end of my apprenticeship, two men walked through the shop’s door and announced, “The university library is looking for a book-mender.”

Father perked up. The gentlemen’s gazes hopped between me and him, resting on my girlish face then his wrinkly one, my small frame and his drooping posture, my neatly folded hands and his gnarly calluses. But above all, they squinted at our eyeglasses: both wire-framed and square, but his were twice as thick as mine.

“Would you lend us your daughter, Mr. Sullivan?” one of the gentlemen said. “She’s old enough for a job, isn’t she?”

I could feel Father deflate. But he pressed a hand to the small of my back, pushing gently.

They gave me a room in a dormitory and an office in the basement of the university library. The office smelled like ancient stone and earth when I first arrived, but soon it took on the familiar aroma of wilted pages and fresh parchment, pungent chemicals and metallic ink. There were no windows or sunlight, but I brought in a congregation of gas lamps to illuminate my desk. Light was abundant; shadows were never a problem.

And yet, this was where I saw the shadow for the first time.

I was working on an especially dusty tome—Trade and Exploration at the Dawn of the Century—hunching so close over it that my eyeglasses almost touched the yellowing vellum. As I was sweeping the gutter, deep in concentration, a faint rustle jarred me alert. Something flitted at the corner of my eye.

Along the serifs at the hanging end of a “T”, a darkness was dancing.

I seized the lever of the gas lamp at my desk, turning it all the way up. The shadow didn’t disappear; instead, it grew like a tiny fire being fed more wood, stretching itself from the “T” to an adjacent “h”.

I tried to swallow, but my breath stuck like a painful rock in my throat. What was this? I didn’t know, but it didn’t belong here. And I was cleaning the book.

The edge of my archival knife glinted coldly when I picked it up. I brought it to the shadow like a scalpel to a tumor. The knife’s point caught its tail, and for a long breath, we battled down the spine of an “s”.

I pulled. The shadow stretched. It clung to my knife, and what was once a tiny squiggle was now an endless thread, following on as I raised my arm high. The shadow had a smudgy edge, but was solid enough to be called a thread. I picked up a pair of scissors and laid them flush on the page, over the “s” on which the shadow had taken root. And then, snip.

The shadow loosened, hanging limply off the knife’s metal edge, still looking very much real. My world tilted as I stared at it.

The knife clattered to the floor and brought the shadow with it. I stared. It wiggled. It was an enigma, a wrongness, a piece of darkness from out of nowhere that shouldn’t have been possible.

I rushed out of my office, up the winding stairs and toward the cathedral of books above. Under the light from the library’s stained glass windows, I looked down and watched my hands tremble, sweat glistening like morning dew.

Once, after a rare bedtime fairy tale, I too had asked the question that all children ask their parents at some point. “Father, is magic real?”

He sighed, and I knew he regretted deviating from the usual newspaper articles.

“Banish all thoughts of that,” he said. “I did not send you to school to be a fabulist.”

“But Father,” I protested, “yesterday you talked about a professor researching magic!”

He had read that article as he tucked me in, and I remembered—quite curiously—how his voice took on a strange echo and his eyes a faint glaze, like he was holding onto a fading dream. But he shook himself and glared at me; his colors heightening.

“Did you not listen?” he hissed. “The university expelled him for dealing with barbarian magic! It wasn’t an invitation to research magic. That’s beneath them, apparently.”

Years later, as I chased after the shadow, I wondered if Father would look at me with the same admonition as he had that night. Or would it be, instead, the glimmer of an old fascination?

When I returned to my office, the shadow was gone. But at times, I would see it dancing at the corner of my eye, along the spine of a book on a shelf, upon a detailed illustration of the human skull, and once, behind the bust of an ancient king from the Furthest East. It never stayed longer than a few seconds, except once when I saw it flitting on the front page of a newspaper. King Sends Five More Ships Across the World, To Depart This Weekend. It taunted me from the apex of the “A” in Across, but disappeared before I could seize the paper.

Soon, I started carrying my archival knife and scissors, and watched out for the shadow. It felt like a quiet hunt, a battle. Father knew everything about books and had demanded no less from me, but never had our craft knowledge mentioned anything about shadows that could unravel from a page like a loose yarn in unfinished knitting. But I didn’t dare tell my father. The shadow was elusive, and if it didn’t appear for him, he’d say I was seeing things that weren’t there. He’d call me a fabulist.

One night, a delicate tome kept me working late; the library was already deserted when I made my way out. My steps echoed on the stone floor, and despite the lanterns on the walls, there was only impenetrable darkness shrouding the peaks of the library’s arches. Faint moonlight filtered through the tall windows, too powerless to fight the deep black.

The main gallery had a gigantic painting decorating one of its walls; the gilded frame alone was thicker than my body. On the right side of the painting was a ship upon a wave. At the ship’s bow, a man with a telescope pointed toward a land in the distance, an academy of scholar-explorers crowding him. On the darkening land gathered a group of deformed creatures, who looked human except for the fact that they were shadow-skinned and crawling, like reptiles—with arms that were too long, lips too thick, body hair too wild, like monkeys.

The plaque under the painting proclaimed: Jacob Alexander Blackwell. The Invention of Knowledge, 1605. Oil on canvas.

I stopped dead as I realized the shadows on the land weren’t brushed oil on canvas—it was the shadow, wriggling and taunting me. Every inch of black in the painting swirled into the shapes of disconnected body parts. A finger. Two fingers. A curled-up hand. An ear half torn. A split lip. A mouth contorting in a scream.

I stifled my own scream. I whipped my knife out and plunged it into one of the finger-shaped shadows. I pulled, and the shadow rose with me. “Out, damn you. Out and away, you oversized dust.”

The shadow stretched. I took a step back, and another. It followed. The finger became two fingers, then three, then a whole hand, then an arm. I tried to drop my knife, but I couldn’t—I was a prisoner pulling at their chain, desperate to get away but unable to let go.

A black arm, then a shoulder, a neck, a whole head with bulging eyes. Wrong, wrong, wrong—it couldn’t be here—this shouldn’t be happening. I looked away and squeezed my eyes shut, vainly wishing this were a nightmare I could wake up from.

When it ended and I next dared to look, there was a human on the floor, or at least a human-shaped shadow, a near-human. It lay with its spine twisted around, its head lolling back so I could see its screaming face. While previously it had looked like solid smoke, it was now glossy black and lumpy like charred flesh. Faint steam rose from it, as if it was sublimating into the air itself, dissipating slowly. Its screaming mouth slackened into a smile, becoming the painted simper of a porcelain doll: empty and crooked, unnatural.

My stomach dropped in icy recognition. No, this wasn’t possible.

The shadow-human didn’t move. The shadow-human didn’t speak. The shadow-human looked and felt like something I knew, but I couldn’t, wouldn’t say it out loud.

Instead, I ran like the darkness itself was chasing me.

Here was the memory I didn’t want to voice.

Sometimes it felt like Mother was a shadow that lurked inside our house. She rarely left her room—Father wouldn’t let her. “She’d get lost,” he said. He even insisted on delivering meals to her room, rather than letting her out to dine with us.

But I had grown up seeing mothers walking hand in hand with their children on the street, sharing ice cream and reading books together, and I thought, perhaps if I could just spend more time with my own mother, she’d stop staring at me with an empty smile and emptier eyes, and come to do those things with me.

When I was eight years old, I waited until Father was asleep, then stood on a chair to grab the key hidden atop the kitchen cabinet. I unlocked Mother’s door, a candle in my hand.

“Mother,” I whispered.

No movement.

I tiptoed toward the bed. She had her blanket drawn over her head. Maybe she was cold, I thought. I shook her. No answer. I clutched the edge of the blanket and pulled down.

The face staring back at me was contorted in a scream, tongue curling to the back of the throat, eyes bulging wide. Her skin was glossy black like oxidized blood, but lumpy, like flesh that had melted and charred in a fire.

I dropped my candle and screamed, scrambled away until my back hit the wall, and raised my arms for protection. “Monster! Monster!”

Father came running, his face red and contorted in a furious scowl. He yanked Mother up, tugged at my ear until I slunk back to the bed still screaming. He slapped me on my cheek. That shut me up.

“Look at her,” he yelled. “What monster?”

Mother was back like Mother, with her empty smile and emptier eyes. She felt wrong, but no more wrong than usual, and certainly didn’t look like a burnt shadow.

“You were sleepwalking and had a nightmare,” Father decreed.

For the next two years, he always locked my bedroom door at night, until he was certain my curiosity had been scrubbed clean. But I never forgot that night. I knew how she looked—I knew how it looked. The horror, the sense of wrongness that raised my hackles—these were unmistakable and unforgettable.

The weekend after I pulled the shadow-human out of the painting, I visited home and snuck into Mother’s room, when Father was out for errands. It felt eerily like a repeat of my childhood misadventure, but this time my racing heartbeat had nothing to do with Father’s prohibitions.

“Mother, what are you?”

She cocked her head. I repeated the question. She shuffled on her feet. Her eyes darted back and forth, and for once they didn’t look so empty.

“Mother, were you a shadow?”

She looked like she’d been waiting for that question forever, for now she let out a breath that sounded like relief. She grabbed my hand and pulled me toward Father’s workshop. We both hesitated at the door—we weren’t supposed to enter when he was away. But she yanked the door open and stepped inside, and I followed.

She stopped by the window and bent down, pulled out a loose floorboard and looked at me. Shaking, I crouched beside her and peered into the hole on the floor. A pile of books lay inside. I picked them up one by one, with a frown. Father loved books, always proudly displayed them on the shelves. Why were these here?

I read their titles—and the more I read, the wider my eyes grew. Sorcerers of the Farthest East. Methods and Methodology for the Qualitative Study of the Arcane. Vengeful Magic: Affects, Desires, and Persistence in the Farthest East. New Perspectives on Farthest East Anthropology: The Fabulist Turn. The Imperial Gaze: Studying Barbaric Magic from a Safe Distance.

Father despised talks of magic.

But before I could grapple with the implications of this finding, a rattling of keys floated from the front door. I snatched the loose floorboard, but before I could slam it back in place, Mother gripped my wrist with one hand and grabbed a book from the hole, thrusting it to my chest.

We fled the workshop just in time. And that night, I locked the door of my childhood bedroom and huddled close to the candle on my nightstand, clutching that book. Carefully, with hands cold like ice, I brought the book toward the candlelight.

It was called The Life of a Tribeswoman in the Farthest East, by Carl Edmund Smith. I ran a trembling finger over the leather cover. It was a biography, as the title indicated. The words slipped past me like translucent rapids as I leafed through it.

At the end of the first chapter, there was a full-page illustration of the tribeswoman that was the book’s subject. She looked vaguely like Mother, the way every hand-drawn portrait looked vaguely like its model.

But the book was dated a century ago. The tribeswoman in the book should’ve been long dead.

As a child, I knew there was one event guaranteed to light up Father’s eyes. Every Friday evening, he would gather with his gentleman friends, serious-looking men who came carrying briefcases and piles of books. Their pens danced as they discussed, debated, and scribbled on their manuscripts.

“This is the Independent Scholars’ Research Group,” Father said proudly. Each of them aspired to write books or publish in the same journals that professors of the university wrote in.

Father never ended up publishing anything, but he spent long hours locked in his workshop. “I conduct inquiries for my own satisfaction,” he told me when I asked about it. “Much as I admire the academy, not everything is palatable to them. But that doesn’t mean I ever gave up on my curiosities.” His quiet voice sounded both proud and grudging. “I just did it in the dark, behind closed doors.”

Why was my mother’s likeness in a book about a woman from the Farthest East who died long ago? Surely she couldn’t be her. The book discussed the tribeswoman’s life in great detail, but it didn’t explain its ties with my mother.

Perhaps the other books in the hole could explain this riddle. I didn’t want to risk being found out by Father, so I spent long hours scouring library catalogs, looking for the titles I saw. I couldn’t find them.

A librarian looked at me in irritation when I asked him about the books. “I know you’re just a book-mender,” he said snidely, “but I thought you’d be slightly more … ah, scholarly-minded. Magic was just a fantasy those barbaric tribes convinced themselves was real. Nothing about it deserves scholarly merit, dear. We removed those books from the shelves long ago.”

There was a room in one abandoned corner of the university’s basement, a level under my own office. Sometimes when I ran out of fresh materials, I’d pilfer the boards from the covers of some unused books—I had limited budgets, after all. I never quite paid attention to the contents of those books, but perhaps …

Yes. There they were. Untouched at the very back of the room, piled on the floor into towers as tall as myself: a collection of books on ancient exotic magic, and I recognized some of the titles. I sank into them.

By the end of the month, I must’ve spent dozens of hours in that abandoned room. But it didn’t take me long to realize how out of fashion Farthest East magic had become in the modern scholarly tradition, compared to how vibrant the field used to be. Current scholars said fascination for the fantastic was unscientific at best, but more than that, it suggested an overly intimate closeness to the barbarians’ souls—to their magic. Look too much into their tricks, and you might fall in love, a critique said. It was best to study these people with a healthy sense of distance, to remain a cool-headed outsider and uphold objectivity.

My literature review gave me one theory that could explain the shadows I saw—and Mother. It felt both obvious and silly: magic.

“These barbarians on the other side of the world, they wield magic the way we wield science. But while we develop science for the advancement of our society, they use magic simply to survive—to cling to a life that is traditional and quaint, and while sometimes idyllic, also often monstrous in its embodiment of the arcane.”
—Manon de Saint Marc, Sorcerers of The Farthest East, page 12

“Following Manon de Saint Marc’s assertion that the ancient tribes of the Farthest East ‘use magic simply to survive’ (12), I would like to bring attention to what I call persistence magic, a form of magic used by these tribes to imprint traces of their lives even past their physical deaths. Persistence magic can be observed, for example, in what is now widely known as the Unfading Blood incident, in which soldiers from the Crown’s third expedition to the Farthest East, upon winning a battle against a local tribe, had severe difficulties cleaning the blood of native warriors from their skin and uniforms. Other manifestations of persistence magic include lingering voices of dead natives, corpses that never rot, a seemingly animated relief of a deceased elder, and—perhaps an advanced form of the magic—apparitions of the dead substantive enough for one to hold their hands and hear their voices. This was how tribes of the Farthest East clung to existence even after their de-facto death. One might even see such magic as their second chance at life.”
—Archibald Wellington, Vengeful Magic: Affects, Desires, and Persistence in the Farthest East, page 34

It was a convenient answer, but I had no way of proving its truth. The next time I visited Mother, I read those passages to her in a whisper.

“Mother, are you magic?” I asked awkwardly, doubtfully. My eyes darted to the door, even though I knew Father wasn’t home.

At first, I didn’t think she would answer, didn’t even think she understood the question. But then she stretched out her hand and laid it down on my chest, over my heart.

“Mother…? Are the things I read true?”

Her mouth opened, but nothing came out except for a gurgling sound that vaguely had the rising inflection of a question. Her hand pressed on my chest more firmly.

It was like she was asking me, What does your heart tell you?

My heart told me nothing, murmuring only an arrythmia that came from disquietude. I sought instead for more data, more expertise.

Later that month, the university invited a professor with expertise in the Farthest East to give an open lecture. I decided to attend, hoping I could ask him a question. The auditorium was already filled to the brim when I got there. On the stage, next to the lectern, there was another raised platform with something covered in a white cloth. The room crackled in excitement, their chatter echoing against the sweeping dome above.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the master of ceremonies boomed. The room quietened. “Today we have the privilege to listen to one of academia’s most luminous minds: Professor Johannes Billheimer, who will regale us with reports from the Crown’s seventh expedition to the Farthest East, for which he served as principal anthropologist. Please join me in welcoming Professor Billheimer!”

The room erupted in applause. Billheimer bowed and waved.

The talk was about a tribe in the Farthest East, with whom the Crown’s explorers made first contact in the expedition Billheimer led. There was this one tribesman—the chieftain—that Billheimer spoke about at great length. Then some sort of skirmish. A battle. The Crown won, of course—they had guns. Guns brought peace and cooperation, and with those came knowledge of all things exotic, which people like Billheimer brought home to us, making the kingdom more luminous. This was an old tale; I didn’t need to listen to know how it went.
Billheimer didn’t mention magic at all.

It was only when he descended his podium that my attention returned. The room worked itself to an electric rumble as he approached the thing covered in white cloth.

“And for you, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I have brought a gift, an artifact from my expedition. Here under this covering is the urn that the chieftain guarded, which his fellow tribesmen entrusted to us for safekeeping. Here lie the ashes of seven generations of an ancient tribe, which I and the university are honored to preserve!”

He pulled the white covering with a flair. I gasped.

It was an urn the size of a teenage child. And trapped around it—interspersed with it—was a misshapen shadow-man with skin charred black and cracking, burned pink flesh and dried blood. The man’s head jutted out from the urn’s neck, like a corpse too big for its burial vessel, squeezed so tight its eyes bulged out their sockets. Its shadow-like legs sprouted out near the base, twisting at painful angles where they hit the floor. One arm burst out of the urn’s handle, fingers blooming like a wilting cadaverous flower.

My hands flew to my mouth, containing my scream before it could ring out.

Around me, the audience went into raptures. They were oblivious. They couldn’t see the shadow.

I shook in my seat as Billheimer launched into another periphrasis on the tribe’s burial rites and the chieftain’s heroics in guarding the urn. Bile rose in my belly as I realized the charred shadow-man protruding from the urn was probably the chieftain himself.

At the end of the lecture, a member of the audience shouted a question. “Professor, will you write a book about this?”

“Oh, most definitely,” Billheimer said. “I envision an account as detailed as that in Carl Edmund Smith’s magnum opus, The Life of a Tribeswoman in the Farthest East. But”—he raised a finger dramatically—“mine will be even better, for I am not merely tracing the life of one tribe member—I am capturing the entire tribe.”

An uproarious applause. My head whirled as realization dawned on me.

Johannes Billheimer brought home the knowledge of a tribe. The urn was a piece of that knowledge, and capturing it had meant killing the chieftain protecting it. And now the chieftain was here, entangled with the urn as if he was the shadow of the knowledge it presented.

Carl Edmund Smith captured the life of a tribeswoman, in a biography whose copy now lay on my desk. The tribeswoman looked like my mother—might as well be my mother—was my mother. My mother had looked and felt like the shadows I pulled from a book and a painting.

Smith’s book was knowledge, my mother its shadow.

There is a dark side to every knowledge, the bodies burned for its sake.

And somehow, I knew this was true. I looked at the charred shadow of the chieftain trapped in his urn, and I knew this was true.

I ran out of the lecture hall before Billheimer could finish.

Night had fallen when I reached home. The house was too quiet—Father must be away. He wasn’t expecting me, after all. I hesitated. I had planned to speak with him, but on second thought, maybe it was best if I talked to my mother first, no matter how haltingly.

In the dark interior of the house, Father’s bookshelves lurked like sleeping giants. Everything flickered and swayed under the unsteady light of my lamp—my hand was shaking.

The door to Mother’s room swung open quietly. She didn’t have the blanket drawn over her head; her face was clearly visible. The twisted scream and charred flesh weren’t there; it was her usual empty, crooked, porcelain doll smile—wrong, but not quite the stuff of nightmares.

“Mother, I know the truth now,” I said.

She moved slowly to a sitting position. I sat in a chair, facing her. My hand felt leaden as I flipped through the pages of the biography.

“Mother,” I held up the portrait at the end of chapter one, “I know this is you.”

She stared at me, but her eyes didn’t seem so empty anymore.

“Persistence magic,” I continued. “That’s why you’re still here. It’s magic to keep a trace of you alive even after your death. The shadows…they are traces of lives, and they cling to…to knowledge produced at their expense?”

Mother cocked her head, then nodded.

“Father pulled you out of the book, didn’t he?”

But I knew the answer even before Mother nodded. Father had as much as admitted it—I just couldn’t put it all together.

…the academy, not everything is palatable to them…doesn’t mean I ever gave up on my curiosities…I just did it in the dark, behind closed doors. The long hours Father spent locked in his workshop—it was for research. An unsanctioned form of research, an inquiry on magic. Standing on the shoulders of scholars who worked in the fabulist turn, he must’ve found a way to trace persistence magic, materialize the traces of souls that it preserved, and stitch the soul-pieces the way he bound a tattered book back together. So strong the magic was, and so thorough his stitching, that it all resulted in something human enough to walk around and bear a child.

My mother was a shadow from a book, and my father had pulled her out and…made me.

“Why can’t you speak, Mother?” I choked out.

She gestured her answer. Hand to her throat. Finger pointing out toward the closed door of Father’s workshop. Then a slashing motion.

“Father cut off your voice?”

She hesitated. She pointed at the book, then made a beckoning gesture, repeatedly, like she was pulling many shadows out of the book. She made a back-and-forth, wavy gesture like stitching, then put her hands together. She touched her throat, and shook her head.

I voiced my tentative translation: “He pulled pieces of you out of the book, then stitched you back together. But he didn’t put your voice back?”

She nodded.

“Why would he do that?” I demanded. But I knew the answer; it was plain to see, no matter how repulsive. Her muteness served him perfectly. She was his private curiosity, but she was also a form of magic formally scorned by the university, where he wanted so much to belong. But if he locked her up and took her voice, no one would know her except him.

No one would know her, not even me. All this time being motherless, this was his fault. I could’ve actually known my mother, could’ve had a friend in her, could’ve had someone sing me a lullaby. But instead, he deliberately cut out her voice and caged her.

“How could he do that?”

Her eyes only rippled in unshed tears.

“I’ll speak with him.” I rose to my feet. “I’ll ask where your voice is.”

She threw her arms around me and shook her head. She clutched her throat then waved her hand. I frowned. She repeated the gesture.

Then I remembered how the shadow-thread and shadow-human began to dissipate into thin air moments after I pulled them out, as if they didn’t have enough soul to hold onto this world.

“Your voice is gone,” I said. She nodded.

“I need him to explain.”

She gripped me tighter and shook her head.

“But you can’t live like this forever.”

She opened her mouth, but no words came out, only a gurgling. She pressed her hand onto my chest emphatically. You are more important, she seemed to say.

“But—”

She shook me and held me in a vice-like grip, refusing to let go. The sounds of protests in her throat grew more insistent; her face scrunched up in fear and desperation. She began to cry until her flushed face glistened with tears. I didn’t understand her reaction, but her sobs swallowed us in foreboding thumps that drowned everything else.

The university expelled the professor for dealing with barbarian magic, Father pointed out to me once. Nothing about magic deserves scholarly merit, dear, the librarian told me. But here was my father, with his dream of belonging to the university, with his precious Independent Scholars’ Research Group, nonetheless conducting an inquiry on magic, in secret. What would he lose if anyone ever found out what he’d done?

Everything, I realized. He’d lose his peers. He’d lose what little claim to scholarly status he’d cobbled together for himself.

He’d done the unthinkable: locking up the mother of his own child for her entire existence, just to preserve his dignity. What other unthinkables would he do?

You are more important, Mother had gestured. With sinking fear, I finally understood.

“All right,” I whispered. “I won’t talk to him. I promise.”

I thought long and hard about why Father did what he did. It felt like I never knew him after all, or my mother, or even myself. For a long while, my world felt like a churning hurricane, and my tears the raindrops in it.

But I never ended up confronting Father. Neither Mother nor I could risk it, not right now. And in retrospect, she was right: whether and why he did what he did was no longer the most important thing. He shouldn’t matter, shouldn’t be the center of our world.

I visited Mother as often as I could, still in the same sneaking way I had practiced in childhood. One day I would have enough to take her away, but for now, she had to stay. We followed once again all the signs to silence, careful not to poke Father’s hornet’s nest.

But even in our silence, we never let things fall back to the way they were. Our rage and sorrow burned quietly, but we burned nonetheless, and out of the flames we forged a different kind of revenge: one that sought not for mutual destruction, but instead a remaking, a repair. Maybe one day we would make him pay, but for now, there was something more urgent.

On my first visit after the conversation about her origin, Mother looked like she was waiting for me. We stared at each other for a long time, and I found myself all choked up.

I pressed my palm onto my chest. “My,” I said.

I put my right fist on my left shoulder. “Name.”

I put my index finger on my lips and moved it forward. “Is.”

Then, a flurry of gestures—and a teardrop. Four fingers of my right hand to the palm of my left. “M”. Two thumbs touching at an angle. “A”. Two fingers hooking together. “R”. Both index fingers pressed together, held up. “I”. Three fingers sideways with the other palm as backdrop. “E”.

“My name is Marie. Your name is…”

I broke down into sobs. The little girl who snuck into the locked bedroom didn’t know how to name the pain of never knowing her mother, but I knew. It was spelled like regret and lonely silence.

“I’m sorry. I can’t bring it back. I can teach you how to sign and how to write, but I don’t know how to bring your voice back. I’m sorry.”

Mother smiled. It didn’t look empty. She laid her palm on her womb then brought it to my chest, over my heart. Then she touched her throat and touched me again.

You are my child. You are my voice, now.

At the library I started collecting every biography of people from the Farthest East. I reckoned, a biography was a detailed account of a person’s life, more detailed than a painting or a random book—perhaps that was why Mother looked more human-like than other shadows I’d seen. Through long nights, I bent over the biographies with my archival knife in one hand and resolve in the other. I was made in my father’s image, his knowledge and his method, but I knew better now.

My father could see the shadows because he looked too closely; I could see because I was my mother’s child, a shadowborn. And soon, more of us would walk this fair earth, voices ringing clear, as we all deserved.

I pulled shadows out of books, those traces of souls clinging to the dark side of knowledge. Often they would come in small incoherent pieces like unfinished sentences: the tip of a nose, an ear, half the thinking part of a brain, a mouth with an incomplete voice waiting to be found. I traced and pulled every fragment of every soul, laying them out for stitching. And carefully, intently, with every piece accounted for, I began the reassembling process.

This is what book-mending is.