MERRY 45

Reacting to that small movement, his mother leaned forward.

“Yes. Come here. Come on, come to Mommy.”

Her heart raced, desperate for the child to reach her embrace.

“Ethan. My baby.”

It was a plea, almost a prayer. The manifestation of her desperation wavered through the deep darkness. Finally, the child began to crawl. It was as if he had regressed to the days before he took his first steps.

Large teardrops fell heavily onto the floor. In the child’s wet eyes, the black shadow shifted from the shape of a hideous monster back into the form of his mother.

“Mommy?”

His tearful voice pulled at her. She rushed toward him on her knees, finding him when he no longer had the strength to move forward. Soon, she held him tight, whispering as if to brainwash him.

“It’s a dream. This is all a dream. It was nothing. Now, close your eyes. There’s a good boy.”

The child flinched precariously, as if he might break. His mother tenderly stroked his body as it fought a fierce battle with fear.

After that, his consciousness was hazy. Leaving behind the man who had become a corpse, they escaped that strange place and headed home.

The child, carried from the car in his mother’s arms, opened his eyes into thin slits. He caught a secret glimpse of his father, who had burst through the front gate and come running in a panic, his eyes brimming with tears.

“El. No, Serena. I can’t do this anymore. We can’t live like this.”

His father leaned his head against his mother’s shoulder, sobbing weakly and delicately. His damp breath drifted down from the top of the child’s head, soaking him. His mother waited for the sobbing to cease before she spoke.

“The moment Ethan was born, your life and mine took a different path. The center of the world shifted.”

His father felt her realization just as deeply.

“Yes, Ethan is our world.”

The child drifted into a deep sleep. He was so exhausted.

The next day, what greeted the child upon waking was a damp blanket. Yellow urine had soaked not just the bedsheets but into the mattress as well, giving off a pungent odor.

The child sat up, sniffing the air. He hugged his pillow and swallowed his shame alone before sluggishly climbing down from the bed. Dragging his wet, sagging pajamas, he went outside to find his mother and father sitting on the living room sofa. Even after spotting the child, they couldn’t bring themselves to approach him immediately.

The air was heavy. It felt as though a terrible silence would snatch away the warmth and drown out all color. The cold darkness of the previous night revived itself to threaten him. The child threw off the creeping terror with all his might.

“I had a bad dream.”

When he rubbed his eyes and whined, the two of them let out sighs of relief and rushed over to hold him tight.

“It’s okay, Ethan.”

“This is reality. Where you and we are, that’s what’s real.”

Mom had been at that strange house yesterday, too. That place where Dad’s voice had echoed through the comms was also real.

But he decided to consider it fake. If you tell yourself it’s fake over and over, it becomes fake.

Ethan Reed chose a superficial kind of forgetting. He wanted laughter to bloom in his mother and father’s world, and on the other hand, it was a form of self-defense to stop himself from wetting the bed. He wanted to fall asleep listening to his father’s lullabies and wake up to his mother’s morning greetings.

Officially retired, Serena Reed started a defense contracting firm, and her husband Henry stayed by her side as a business partner while often leaving the house without a word. Ethan never once asked his father—who looked exceptionally haggard whenever he returned from a trip—where he had been, what he had done, or if he had used a gun like his mother had that day.

They were devoted parents. They were affectionate to a fault and strove to provide the child with the abundance and stability necessary for growth. They believed in the power of goodnight kisses, upsized his room as he grew, protected him, and occasionally served as his guides. The home they painstakingly cultivated was nearly a model one.

When they moved to a wealthy neighborhood in New York, they had no trouble passing as an ordinary entrepreneur couple with a bright college-student son. They had a fabricated past and were more wary of their neighbors than friendly with them, but superficially, they were close to perfect.

Because it was what he grew up seeing, these life habits became a family trait. Ethan blended into the mainstream with ease, yet an invisible wall surrounded him. He had to stay tense to ensure he didn’t accidentally utter secrets that could never be shared. Since locks on lips tend to loosen the closer one gets to someone, maintaining distance was essential.

He viewed himself as a time bomb and occasionally felt like reality was a play. He thought the peace he enjoyed in his daily life could be shattered at any moment. Just like when he was young, a single gunshot would turn the world upside down. This was why the anxiety inherent in Ethan’s psyche did not diminish even as Henry’s secret outings became less frequent.

False forgetting built a trench, and Ethan believed no one would ever be able to pull him out of it. Until he met Somerset Quinn.

He was an excessively energetic man. A man with a voice that caught everyone’s ear but didn’t feel like noise, who spoke to people passing his house as if it were nothing, a man in whom not a trace of wariness could be found.

His amber eyes shone with a light as intense as the sun, and the smile hanging on his handsome lips made the hot early summer air feel fresh. His bronze skin boasted a healthy beauty. His curly hair had a perfect sheen to it.

“Alex Howard!”

At their second meeting, he called out in a loud voice the name Ethan had intentionally given him incorrectly. As if the first-floor window were his designated seat, he leaned his upper body out again and waved. There was a smiley face emoji on his palm. Tossing his pen back as if he had just scribbled it, he offered a greeting.

“Good morning!”

An extraordinary presence rose up like a stone in the path, tripping up Ethan’s stride.

“Hello!”

Even when he pretended not to hear and walked past, the man didn’t tire of raising his voice, so Ethan had no choice but to stop. When Ethan gave a dry nod, Somerset’s lips stretched into a wide grin. It was a vivid, picturesque smile, even more so than the emoji he’d drawn.

“Thanks for making me a psychic. I felt like an invisible man thanks to you.”

Ethan responded to his cheeky remark with a shrug.

The two were even when it came to gaining superpowers through the other. Ethan had briefly fallen into the illusion that his hearing had become highly developed because sounds seemed so loud. It was partly because Somerset’s voice wasn’t quiet, but also because it had the effect of sounding louder than it actually was. The sounds coming from his mouth pierced Ethan’s ears with mysterious clarity. Even his “haha” laughter.

“I’m satisfied with being an ordinary—no, an impressive man. Being given superpowers on top of that is just too much. So, how about you stop making me invisible and come over here? Or I could come to you.”

Wasn’t it close to a superpower in itself to call oneself an impressive man without looking pathetic? Ethan swallowed his questions and took a step. He made a show of treating Somerset like an invisible man and pretended to walk past.

“Uh, wait!”

Only after the urgent, shouting lament pierced his ears did Ethan turn and head toward him. The emoji-like smile soon returned to the eyes that had widened in surprise. While the man smiled so easily it was almost frivolous, Ethan kept his face frozen and expressionless.

Restraining himself from revealing his feelings was a long-standing habit. Though he wasn’t confident he’d never let his guard down in front of the man. During their first meeting, he had been a little dazed.

“What is it?”

He asked in a dry tone while thinking to himself: Can I really guarantee it won’t happen again today?

Judging coldly, even exchanging words with him was dangerous. Hadn’t he already gotten caught up in a pointless conversation and mentioned he’d once walked a dog? It was the dog belonging to Leslie, his parents’ friend who had been attacked during that night’s commotion.

Beyond that, he’d almost ended up discussing a novel he’d read before or his coffee preferences. He’d become particularly cautious because he had burst out laughing in front of the man. Based on these experiences, the right thing to do was to just accept the greeting and move on—he should have—but for some reason, his feet wouldn’t move.

“Does there have to be a reason? Hang on. Let me make one up.”

Somerset, speaking nonchalantly, rested his chin on his hand and tilted his head. He gave Ethan the choice of discussing the weather, throwing out a silly joke, or debating the lunch menu, however cliché they might be.