Eden Blue Reed
Every human memory has a starting point. In Eden Reed’s case, it was the sharp crack of a gunshot.
A man collapsed, bleeding, his lips moving toward the child. The silent last words pierced through the child’s vision like bullets, but their meaning never reached him.
Only later did he learn that the man who died that day had been a diplomat scheduled for assignment in Europe.
The one holding the gun in the pitch-black darkness was Serena Reed. The black clothes wrapped around her blurred her outline. She herself was no different from the darkness.
—El. El! Respond.
The voice coming through the communicator was familiar to the child as well. It belonged to the man who gently sang him lullabies every night. Daddy kept calling Mommy by a strange name.
—El! El!
“What’s with the rushing? I handled it. Now all that’s left is staging it as a suicide……”
—There’s nobody in the car.
“What?”
—The kid’s gone!
Silence. Absolute noiselessness. As though time itself had stopped, even movement died away.
Beneath the table, the child instinctively held his breath. Only after the communicator crackled again did Mommy lower the gun and clutch her head.
“What do you mean he’s not in the car? I saw Green taking him with my own eyes.”
—We lost contact with Green.
“What the hell do you mean by that?!”
—Green disappeared. The kid’s gone too!
The child realized the “kid” they were talking about was him.
Mommy’s friend who had put him into the car was Leslie, but just like Mommy, maybe she had another name too. While the woman’s attention had wandered, the child had secretly slipped out of the car to look for Mommy.
He followed her into a house and boldly began a game of hide-and-seek by himself. Up until now, every adult he’d met had treated him kindly, so he believed that even if he suddenly appeared in a stranger’s house, everyone would be delighted and amused.
And that had led him to this situation.
He had never dreamed that not being where he was supposed to be could throw everything into chaos.
“Oh my God.”
—Was Green kidnapped? Did they get her? And the child too…… How did they approach him? Who suddenly gave you the order?
The child was naturally gifted at moving quietly. His reflexes were exceptional, and his mind worked quickly. Compared to other children his age, he was unusually developed and precocious. Though his face still looked babyish, his long limbs made him appear around seven years old, but in reality he was only five.
He couldn’t fully grasp the entire situation, but he understood that what Mommy held was not a toy gun but a real one, and that what had unfolded before his eyes was not a play. She had killed someone, and he had witnessed it.
The child had wanted to stay with Mommy, so he shook off her friend and came here.
He tried to think rationally in his own way, but the more he did, the more he ran into a wall. The Mommy he knew was a good person, but killing people was bad. He was confused. His head throbbed painfully.
If the situation had been even more extreme, he might have simply blacked out and collapsed, but what the child saw now was Mommy desperately searching for him.
“Eden. Eden?”
Trembling as she called for him, she looked terribly fragile. He wanted to protect her, as if she might collapse at any moment, but he hesitated.
Because he was scared.
Scared of Mommy herself.
—Damn it. We just got word. Green got hit. When she regained consciousness for a moment, she said the child wasn’t there. Said the backseat was empty when she got out of the car.
“Oh, God. Thank you.”
—The problem is where he went. We’re searching the area with our people right now, but there’s no sign of him. We can’t even report him missing.
“It’s okay. As long as he’s not in danger, as long as it’s not something like that……”
Suddenly Mommy stopped speaking and dropped the communicator.
—El. What happened?
Her eyes widened as if they might burst out of their sockets. The child was too young to recognize the fear flickering wildly in her shaking gaze.
She was writhing beneath the terror born from the fact that the child had witnessed what she had done. After fiercely battling the agony that felt like it was choking the breath from her, she barely regained her composure.
—El! El!
“I found him.”
Picking up the communicator, she spoke into it and sank to her knees.
—You found him? Really? Is he safe? Nothing happened to him, right?
“I’ll explain when we meet.”
As the communicator cut off, silence flowed back in.
A suffocating stillness thick enough that even the drop of a tiny pin could be heard blended together with the tension. The traces of the two living, breathing people sharing the space felt as faint as those of the dead man.
A long time passed like that.
Toward the child hiding motionlessly beneath the table, Mommy slowly held out both hands. The black leather gloves she wore felt completely different now from when she had held the gun.
“Baby, come here.”
She spoke gently, like she was greeting him in the morning.
“It’s Mommy. Mommy came to take you home.”
At the soft sound of her voice, his heart wavered. He wanted to leap into her warm embrace, but the child was still buried in confusion.
Was she really Mommy?
Or had a wicked demon stolen her face?
For the first time in his life, the child experienced distrust. He had become weak enough to be tempted by such absurd suspicions. His shoulders trembled intermittently.
“Eden.”
Without realizing it, he had sharpened himself in caution and fear, but the moment his name left her lips, he softened.
Even if Mommy herself was the source of his fear, instinctively he knew she was also the only person who could drive that fear away.
Thin breaths slipped through his slowly parted lips. Then, as the tension drained from his body, tears nearly spilled from his eyes.
Barely swallowing his sobs, the child slowly lowered himself onto his stomach and stretched his right hand out from beneath the table.
Reacting to that tiny movement, Mommy leaned forward.
“That’s right. Come here. Hurry now, come to Mommy.”
Her heart raced ahead of her, desperate for the child to reach her arms.
“Eden. My baby.”
A call close to pleading.
The desperate yearning trembling through the deep darkness.
At last, the child began to crawl forward, as though he had returned to the days before he learned to walk.
Large teardrops plopped onto the floor.
In the child’s wet eyes, the black shadow looked like a hideous monster before returning to Mommy’s shape once more.
“Mommy.”
The tearful voice pulled her toward him. Toward the child who no longer had the strength to move farther, she rushed forward on her knees.
Then she hugged him tightly into her arms and whispered as though brainwashing him.
“It’s a dream. This is all a dream. Nothing happened. Here, close your eyes. Good boy, okay?”
The child flinched as though he might shatter apart. Mommy gently stroked the body of the child fighting desperately against his fear.
After that, his consciousness became hazy.
Leaving the dead man behind, they escaped the unfamiliar place and returned home.
Still in Mommy’s arms as she carried him out of the car, the child barely cracked his eyes open.
He secretly saw tears brimming in Daddy’s eyes as he burst through the gate and came running out in panic.
“El. No, Serena. We can’t keep doing this. We can’t live like this anymore!”
Daddy weakly choked back sobs as he leaned his head against Mommy’s shoulder. His damp breath drifted down beside the child’s head and soaked into him.
Mommy waited until the sobbing stopped before speaking.
“The moment Eden was born, your life and mine turned onto a different path. The center of our world shifted.”
Daddy deeply felt the truth of her realization as well.
“Yeah. Eden is our world.”
The child drifted off into a deep sleep.
He was utterly exhausted.
The next morning, what greeted him when he woke was a damp blanket.
Yellow urine had soaked through not only the bedsheets but all the way into the mattress, filling the room with the sour smell of pee.
Sniffling, the child sat up. Hugging his pillow, he swallowed his shame alone before sluggishly climbing out of bed.
Dragging along his soaked, sagging pants, he went outside and saw Mommy and Daddy sitting on the living room sofa. Even after noticing the child, neither of them could immediately approach him.
The air felt heavy.
The terrible silence seemed ready to swallow up all warmth and cover over every trace of color.
The cold darkness from last night resurfaced and threatened him again.
The child desperately shook away the creeping fear slithering over him.
“I had a bad dream.”
As he rubbed his eyes and whined, the two adults released sighs of relief and rushed over to embrace him tightly.
“It’s okay, Eden.”
“This is reality. The place where you and we are together is the real one.”
Mommy had also been there in that unfamiliar house yesterday.
That place where Daddy’s voice echoed through the communicator had also been real.
But he decided to think of it as fake.
If he kept repeating that it was fake, then it would become fake.
