Excerpt: Whispers of Yesterday

MATTEO
I didn’t know all that much about myself. My first memory was not all that long ago, the day I first opened my eyes to the only life I knew. Hard as I tried, I could not remember anything before that moment. But then again, I supposed that nobody could—nobody could ever know for sure what happened before, beyond the limits of fallible human minds.
This had never bothered me much before. Sure, I had occasional bouts of curiosity, often accompanied by an overactive imagination. But I had never felt overly concerned about my origins until Roger disturbed my comfortable acceptance of the uncertainty.
There was a widely accepted version of events which I generally believed. The story was that I had disappeared when I was very young. Nobody was sure if I had run away or been kidnapped or fell victim to some other misfortune, but it didn’t matter that much to them. What mattered was that I was gone for quite a while; so long, in fact, that everyone had long relinquished any hope of my survival. Then, by some unexplainable miracle, I washed up on shore near the house I lived in now. It appeared that those who had assumed I was dead were mostly correct, however; I was less than half alive at that point. By all counts, I shouldn’t have survived the aftermath of my ordeal either. And yet I still lived.
What little I remembered seemed to coincide with that story. Here was all I knew for sure: one evening, I woke up on the beach nearby with no memory of how I had got there. I was violently sick for several painful moments before I collapsed back into oblivion. I did not know how long I had been out before I began to hear voices.
“Oh, Roger,” gasped an unfamiliar voice. It was unmistakably feminine. “Is he—is he…dead?” It took me a few moments to realize that they were talking about me.
“I don’t know,” said a deeper voice. I wasn’t all that sure myself. If I was alive, I should be able to move, shouldn’t I?
I heard a shuffling sound, then somebody—somebody large—dropped down next to me and began to probe my body. I felt something on my chest, all over me, actually. It was exceedingly uncomfortable, but I still couldn’t move. Inch by inch, the other person’s warmth gradually seeped into my frozen body. Wherever the heat flowed, it melted the bonds that held me so tightly. But as my freedom was restored, so was my sensation. I realized that I was hot, unbearably hot—no, extremely cold. I shivered and sweated and shivered some more. It hurt, but I had no energy to scream. I whimpered once and the pressure lessened slightly.
“He’s not dead,” sighed the male voice near my ear. “Yet.”
“What are we going to do?” The first voice sounded oddly high, strained. It didn’t occur to me at the time that she might be anxious.
The man seemed to possess an unshakable calm. “Let’s take him home.” I felt a warm breath brush against my face as the man leaned closer and picked me up. The movement nauseated me and I twisted away from him as my stomach heaved up what felt like gallons of water. I half-expected him to thrust me away from him in disgust. Instead, he only held me closer, cradling me like a baby. When my stomach finally settled, I dared to open my eyes.
It was a mistake. Everything was an incomprehensible blur of color, swirling around in dizzying circles. I didn’t turn away soon enough this time, and I threw up right into the man’s chest. I moaned, as much in mortification as in pain.
It felt like a long time before we finally reached the house, but I knew it couldn’t have been any more than a few minutes. Roger hardly even seemed winded, yet I was already exhausted beyond imagining. That hardly made sense considering that I had traveled the distance in his arms, but it was no less true. Roger set me down gently on what I was just barely lucid enough to realize was a downy white bed. I wanted to protest that I was too dirty for it, but my words got lost on their way out. A small sigh escaped my lips and I fell asleep before he had even left the room. What happened next is all quite muzzy in my mind, because I was extremely ill for several days. It probably had something to do with the seawater I ingested, which was neither salutary nor clean. It might also have been related to the fact that the water was cold, as in freezing cold, because it was November and winter’s eager fingers took hold early around these parts. Or it could be due to the wide assortment of injuries I had contrived to collect somehow, some more serious than others, and perhaps…
But enough speculation. I happened to be reasonably lucid when the doctor came to see me, but apparently not quite lucid enough the comprehend his very clinical-sounding diagnosis. I only remember a small part of it:
“…Fortunately, hypothermia sometimes mitigates the effects of hypoxia, so hopefully…no brain damage… severe trauma…probably will suffer from amnesia…No, I’m afraid I don’t…might be a week, a year, or perhaps forever…”
I think I passed out again about this time.
It took quite a while before I was sufficiently recovered to stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time, and even longer before I could sit up without my head spinning out of control. After I was more or less back to normal, meaning that I could almost stand without support, I found out that the woman who had been taking care of me all that time was Roger’s wife, Martha. Roger had to work most of the day so I hardly ever saw him, except on weekends. I always knew when another week drew to a close because, without fail, he would relieve Martha from her bedside duties and sit by me for hours. Once, when I woke up in the middle of the night, I saw him sitting there with his head dropped down to his chest. He woke up almost instantly, as if he’d felt my eyes on him. He placed one cool hand against my forehead.
“How are you feeling?”
“Good,” I tried to say, but I garbled the word and it emerged as a barely intelligible croak.
Roger smiled, and I realized for the first time how weary he was. It appeared to take a great effort on his part just to keep his eyes open. Perhaps that was why he never seemed a man of many words.
We didn’t talk any more that night, but he didn’t leave the room or fall asleep again. He just sat there and watched me as I gradually drifted back into dream world.

That was almost exactly ten years ago. Now it was November again. Roger was home for once, looking weary as always. He sat in his office, a small storage space next to the kitchen which he had converted so that he could work at home. I wanted to tell him to take it easy, but I knew it was impossible because we needed every penny he could earn. Money was tight all over the country, as it had been for as long as most people could remember. I just hated watching him struggle with burdens that nobody should have had to carry, that nobody would have had to carry if his predecessors had been more careful. The debts were rightfully their responsibilities. But they had simply lived as they wished with little thought or care for the future, and when their time had come, they had chosen to ignore the costs of their frivolous pursuits of comfort and material satisfaction. In essence, they had swindled their own children with nary a guilty conscience. And now those unfortunate descendants—all of us, really—suffered the consequences of their selfishness. When the time came for me to begin to help support the family, I would have to face many of the same difficulties that Roger did now. But for the time being, I had nothing more to worry about than school.
Roger was an honest man, but he still had to take a few under-the-table jobs just to keep us from starving. Martha did not approve of his illegal work any more than he did, especially since they took him away every night so that even when he was home, he was far too tired to do anything but work more or sleep. But it was the only way to keep the government from taking everything from us in the name of taxing, and she knew it as well as he did. Still, she tried to convince him and herself that we did not need to eat every meal, that plenty of people survived on less. It was not a successful endeavor. Roger continued to work days and nights, and I watched as he slowly wasted away paying for what he would never really benefit from, what others before him had stolen from him before he was even born. And he wasn’t the only one, either. Not even close. It was work or die in these hard days, and often even those who did work still died from overwork and stress and exhaustion.
So when I tiptoed past his office one day, trying hard not to distract him, I was astonished to hear him call out to me.
“Matteo.” I hadn’t heard him speak for at least a week, so I was alarmed by how weak he sounded. “Come in here for a sec, please.”
I did. I was shocked—again—to see the dark circles ringing his eyes, which stared out from a deep pit of sleep deprivation. And his shoulders, always so straight, were finally defeated now after years of bearing the weight of a nation that had squandered its wealth in its youth. His tiredness always struck me harder when I saw him close up. Are you okay, I wanted to ask, but I knew he would just avoid answering and probably decide that it would be better not to tell me whatever it was he’d wanted to talk about after all. So I just kept my mouth shut and waited for him to continue.
“You know.” His voice was rough, probably from disuse. “There is something I ought to have told you a long time ago. Or showed you, actually.”
As soon as he said those words, I knew at least this much: “You’re not my father.”
“No,” he agreed. “And Martha isn’t your mother, either.”
“No.” I realized that I hadn’t seen Martha since morning. “She didn’t want you to tell me.”
Roger winced. “No, she didn’t. And if she found out…” He shook his head, as if to clear it of an unpleasant thought. “But you already knew that part. And I’ve waited too long to show you this.”
He reached under his desk and drew out a small cardboard box, which he handed to me almost hesitantly. As I opened it, he watched expectantly, like a small child waiting for approval. I saw a small square of plastic; it had once been a name tag, but the ink was smeared so badly I could barely make out the name—my name—printed on it in capital letters. There was also a neatly folded pile of small clothes, and a single shoe that was conspicuously out of place because it was obviously meant for a girl. I glanced at Roger questioningly.
“Those are the only things that you had with you on the beach,” he explained. “I think you should have it now.”
“You’ve kept them for all of these years,” I said in wonder.
He nodded. “Martha would throw a fit if she knew. She told me to discard them when we found you. She was afraid that you’d leave immediately if you ever found out, but I think it’s only right for you to know that…to know where you came from.”
I realized that he was giving me permission to find my parents. And suddenly, I felt the urge to do just that, to leave what I had always considered home and seek out my past. I needed to find my real family, to fill the gaping hole within me that had been for—forever. But I had to ask,
“Why now? Why are you giving this to me now?”
Immediately, I could tell that he had hoped I wouldn’t ask.
“Do you mean why not earlier or why not later?” He was preparing to evade the question. It was an art that he was especially good at.
“Both.”
“Well, you’re seventeen now. You’re rightfully a man.” But there was a slight shiftiness in his countenance which told me that while that may have played a part in his decision, it was not the main reason. I continued to gaze at him. He blinked.
“Well, I didn’t want to wait until—until it was too late.”
I knew he had told the truth this time. However, his slight revision did not escape me. Everyone always knew when his time was coming… I shuddered, and cast the thought away. Or tried to, anyway. Why was life always so willfully complicated?
“You’re still young,” I reminded him. He still had a long time to live. Or he should have, if life was fair.
“I feel old,” he said. “Old and tired.”
I hated to admit it, but he sounded like it.
“Then don’t go to work tonight.”
He did not reply, but I already knew what his answer would be if he had anyway. After a brief pause, he spoke again.
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Impossible.”
“No. You must do what you must do. I will be fine.”
I knew I couldn’t leave him, but at the same time, I couldn’t not go either.
I finally realized that I had actually decided to leave all along when I asked, “What’ll you do once the government finds out I’m gone?”
There were stiff penalties for what was labeled as incompetent parenting. The government was just as desperate for money as everyone else was.
His expression darkened slightly, but his tone was as calm as ever. “I’ll manage.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
I was no more successful this time in dissuading him from his decision this time than any other, so our conversation essentially ended there. And though I tried to stop him, he snuck off to work again sometime in the middle of the night.