The Martian Chronicles

Sitting in our bookstore at night, I can feel the stories seeping from the shelves: the neat, round softness of Austen, the sprawling coincidences of Dickens. These worn books hold the histories of their readers - women in petticoats and men in breeches, all looking for an escape. Hidden behind them all is our story. Our once upon a time. It began on my eighth birthday, when a lonely, forgotten girl biked to the end of a lane and discovered a perfect family in a perfect house. Their names were Grace, Cecilia, and Nate. In time, I would marry the boy, give birth to and lose a son, and build this bookstore, our fairy tale. Until the boy grew haunted and disappeared, leaving only the echo of untold stories and a seventy-four-word note on the kitchen table.

The note said he was going back to Redbridge, the town where we grew up, a place I hadn't returned to since the nightmare. “Something's happened very suddenly,” he wrote. He said he'd tried to call, but when I checked my phone, there were no missed calls. He hadn't tried. The first lie was a small tear in the fabric of the life he'd woven for us, but soon I found another. In our glass case of rare first editions, I discovered a hollowed-out copy of *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe*. Inside was a lock of reddish-brown hair, two yellowed newspaper clippings about Nate's father, Joel, and a small notebook filled with a language I didn't recognize. My first thought was of another woman. But as I held the lock of hair, a darker certainty took hold. It was our son's. It was Gabriel's.

I was eight years old when I met them, a warrior princess in my mother's makeup and a yellow sweater-dress, having skipped school on my forgotten birthday. They were digging a hole to London, hoping to ask C. S. Lewis what Turkish Delights really were. “You know,” Nate said, “the Narnia books.” I didn't know, so they told me the story - of a closet that led to a winter wood, a white witch, and a lion who ruled them all. I spent the day digging with them, absorbed in their world. When I returned that afternoon, their mother, Sophia, found me peering through the library window. Instead of scolding me, she invited me in. I sat beside Nate on a brocade sofa, his arm pressed against mine, listening to her read, feeling for the first time that I had found where I belonged.

That was how my real life began. Every day after school, I escaped my own small, messy home for the Sinclairs' magical one. I joined their lessons, learning of Roman emperors and Egyptian rituals, all of it far removed from the turkey hens battling over roadkill in Redbridge, California. But there were shadows I chose not to see. The days I'd find one of them kneeling on the gravel driveway, head bowed in punishment. The afternoon I saw two dark scabs crisscrossing Nate's arm. “It was just a way to stay with the Spirit,” he explained. “‘If thy right eye causeth thee to stumble, pluck it out.'” I was so blinded by what I wanted their family to be, I couldn't see the darkness underneath - a darkness that culminated the day we staged a play of *Narnia*. Their father, Joel, appeared for the first time, a man with eyes like cat's-eye marbles and a voice that was powerful and strange. He sent me away, and Sophia told me I could never come back.

The coded script in Nate's notebook was a cipher from our childhood, one we'd invented after I was banished, a way to arrange secret meetings. The key was a book, and the first was *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe*. The first entry was a letter Nate had written to Gabriel when he was a baby. “I'm sorry for how your life started out, living in that drab house, all the secrets,” he wrote. “But it's all for you.” The code changed, and after a frantic search, I found the next key: *Robinson Crusoe*, the book we were reading the summer we were fourteen, the summer his mother was dying. We played dangerous games then, daring each other to lie on the train tracks, waiting for the rumble. “It's like strength training,” Nate had said, his arm tight around me. “Our insides are stronger now.” It was that spring he confessed he'd stopped believing in God, and that same spring, on a deserted beach, beneath a bruised sky, that we first kissed.

The notebook told the story of the years that followed Sophia's death, a story Nate had never shared. His father's cruelty escalated, locking him in a bathroom for nearly a week. Grace, his older sister, fell in love with the gardener, Cesar, but Joel discovered them. The shame and fear drove her to attempt suicide. Nate, desperate to save her, found her with a bottle of pills. “She needs peace,” he wrote. But there was more. I decoded the next section with the copy of *Romeo and Juliet* we had buried by the creek on the night Nate ran away. Grace had become pregnant. Joel, believing the baby was the devil's spawn, had terrified her into a desperate act with a knitting needle. “I only saw the aftermath,” Nate wrote. “The blood.”

I was seventeen when I found out I was pregnant. Nate had already run away, escaping his father to earn money for us. I brought him home, and we confronted Joel together, our son in my arms. “He shouldn't have been born,” Joel said, his face a mask of disgust. The confrontation was brutal. Grace, shattered by the memory of her own loss, screamed at her father. “He's dangerous, Chloe,” she warned me later. “He's not like other people.” That night, Nate, Grace, and I were together for the last time. The next morning, Grace left for a convent in Santa Barbara, disappearing from our lives forever.

The weeks that followed were a blur of wedding plans and hope. We were finally going to be a family. Then, on March 15th, I came home from my night shift to find Gabriel's bed empty. The window was open, the screen torn. Nate had been sleeping in the next room. For years, I blamed him. Joel was arrested after Gabriel's pajamas were found in his church and a confession letter was discovered in his desk. He was convicted of murder. For twenty-five years, I believed my son was dead. For twenty-five years, Nate carried the truth alone.

Now, in Redbridge, the final pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Nate had gone to find Grace, who was dying of ALS. But she was not, and had never been, at the convent. Her letters had been a lie. She had a son, she'd told Nate, a boy named Thomas. As Thomas walked through the door of the Sinclair house, I saw him. His Sinclair hair, his heavy-lidded eyes, the one-sided dimple. He had my nose. He had my cleft chin. He looked at Nate and then at me, a shy smile on his face. “You look like me,” he said, his voice hesitant. “I mean, I look like you.” It was Gabriel. Grace had taken him, not out of malice, but to save him from our father, raising him as her own by the ocean on Prince Edward Island. My son was home.