“I’ve got a lot of questions.”
“I know you do. Let’s rest right over there. By the Knock Outs,” she said.
He wheeled her over to where a flourishing set of rosebushes were contained behind a knee-high iron fence. Three Adirondack chairs with thick cushions were situated before it, facing the fountain.
As Blue reached over to smell one of the blooms, William sat, watching her. “I just… I just can’t believe…”
“That I’m alive?” She laughed in a tone so similar to his grandmother’s that goose bumps raised on his arm. “It’s a good question, one I’ve asked myself more than once. I honestly wished to die so often as a young woman that maybe I cursed myself, hoping death would come for me. But I’m certainly glad it ignored me. Because here you are. I just wish your grandmother were here too.”
“She needs to know that you’re alive.”
Blue looked past him. “I’ve wanted to call her every day for the past fifteen years. As soon as I found out she was alive. No family should have endured this. But it appears this is the burden of ours.”
She turned to him. “You thought you knew her story; how your grandmother’s mother died young and she was raised by her father. Now, you’ve read what happened when we found Lynn in Mexico. We placed the letters in chronological order for obvious reasons; you see that my husband and Dr. Martin obviously believed I had died when the building collapsed. In turn, I was told they died in the hurricane. But the truth is quite different.”
“How did you survive?” he asked.
“I didn’t want to. Everyone I loved was gone. I had no extended family; my parents were already dead and I had no siblings. My body was crushed, I would certainly never walk again. Even if I wanted to leave and return home, I couldn’t. But I kept hearing their whispers, their suggestions. You may find in life, my boy, that anger can keep you alive.”
“Whispers? Suggestions? From whom?”
She folded her hands on her lap. “From the very organization that is hunting you. The same agency that constructed the building in Mexico, that collected the abducted who were returned. They are not characters in a movie or comic book. They are very real, with a very real purpose. And I became one of them.”
William’s ears flushed. “You joined them? Even though they knowingly took your daughter? And then gave her something that erased her memories?”
“And now you know they did it to you as well. And I know that must make you angry.”
William frowned. “I don’t think angry comes close to how I feel about it. It took years for me to adjust to the strangers who claimed to be my family. I just… can’t understand why you would join a government operation responsible for what they did to your daughter.”
“The SSA isn’t just a US government operation. It’s in every country in the world. And yes, I did. And I know you’re angry. But trust me, your anger doesn’t begin to compare to mine when I realized what had been kept from me. I lost out on an entire life with my daughter and husband.”
The anger building within him began to quell at the bitterness in her voice. “I don’t mean to blame you. I’m just confused.”
“Understand that I was told that my family was dead, but that I could help others like me. I could devote my life to a cause that was trying to understand why people, like my Lynn, were being taken and returned to earth. That I could avenge her, and my husband, by seeking the answers. All this planted in me by the extremely encouraging agents who routinely visited me in my recovery. It lit a fire within me. Ultimately, it gave me a reason to live. Ultimately, they were successful in keeping me silent.”
She motioned to the wheelchair. “My legs were shattered. But in time, the rest of me healed. Enough for me to quietly be wheeled into the new, tiny, research facility in Mexico run by the SSA. Everyone there spoke Spanish, so it took me a long time to learn the language. But I did. And my life’s work began.”
“All this time… you’ve been in Mexico?”
Her lips pursed. “It’s strange, now, to think back on all those years. A simple but fulfilling life. I lived alone, did my work in the archive division. Since I had no family, I naturally yearned to create another. ‘The widow of the library,’ the agents called me when they didn’t think I could hear. They all became my children, and many treated me with kindness. I was grateful that I had a job that supported a disabled woman with no education, and that I was allowed to be a surrogate mother and grandmother to my coworkers. They appeared grateful to have me, and I focused all my energies on the abduction cases in Mexico.”
“But how could you have not known about my grandmother?” William asked. “She was married to a US senator. Her picture was in newspapers and certainly online. And if you researched abductions, surely you came upon…”
“I quickly learned in order to survive, the past would have to die. Freda Stanson died when her family did. When the agents started calling me Blue, because of my eyes, it became my new name. Mother Blue, then, as I aged, Grandmother Blue, then Great-Grandmother Blue. My office in the Yucatan was covered in hundreds of pictures of my agents’ families. I had to fill a void. And it meant completely and utterly shunning anything that had to do with the United States. In time, it became a foreign country that conjured up too much pain to even think about. And it was the greatest mistake of my life. And if it hadn’t been for the Rapture, I would still be there now.”
“The Rapture?”
She took a deep breath. “The SSA’s code name for when the ships returned to Argentum and to all the bases where the abductees were contained all over the world. Including the rebuilt location in the Yucatan. When they were all taken up, you can’t imagine the internal chaos. The SSA thought they’d contained it all, but they didn’t count on your grandmother. Everyone at the office was whispering about it. For the first time, I got online to a US news website and read about the one case that had gone public.”
Blue shut her eyes and slightly shook her head. “I did not know that your heart could heal and break all at the same time. I realized then the great tragedy of my life. That it had all been a lie. They’d kept me in Mexico to silence me. And I knew, very soon, they would make certain that the widow of the library had finally gotten too old to live.
“So here I was: an old woman without working legs who needed to go on the run to find her daughter. I wanted to try to call her, but I knew all of our phones were constantly monitored. I learned about the Researchers in the article and the YouTube video they’d released. So I reached out in desperation with an encrypted message to them, and they responded.
“The days that followed… were among the most frightening of my life. I had stolen the files on your and your grandmother’s cases and copied the videos. I hid the best I could, jumping at every noise outside the motel room where I’d disappeared to. I knew the agents were searching for me, desperate to recover what I’d taken. When at last I heard a knock at my door, exactly in the manner the Researchers said it would be, I opened it to find another face that had become plastered across the world’s news organizations.”
She looked over to Steven.
He nodded once. “Once we were able to decipher her message, I was determined to get her out and bring her home. Lynn needed to know her own mother was alive. Rudd, with his military background, was essential in coordinating the effort. And we almost slipped her out without notice.”
“Almost?” William asked.
“We were discovered. We lost two good people. The SSA lost more. But we succeeded in getting to the private plane. As soon as we landed in Florida, we took her into hiding.”