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Chapter Thirty
Calai
I’m not sure how I’m managing to stand on my two feet. My nerves are eating away at my insides, turning my core to liquid. I feel responsible for the lives of these women around me, for these children. Knowing what I do now, their lives are hitting me like a great tragedy. Knowing how much I’ve lost, what I’m starting to come to grips with, and looking into their eyes, knowing how much was taken from all of them, it’s nearly too much to bear. I can’t even comprehend the number of lives that our leader, no- I can no longer think of her like that. Her name isGreta. She is simply a person who made too many wrong choices. A person who thought she was too powerful.
Gretatried to ruin all of us, and I know that even if we find homes for all of these women, we will all be bound together by our past. We all need each other to lean on, to get through what is coming up. I have my alphas, and even if we came to be happy in a roundabout way, I don’t think I would be standing here, if they hadn’t found me.
If it was anyone else in the woods that day, any other pack that might have gone after me, there's no way I could have made it to this point. These men help me feel whole.
But there's nothing like that for anybody else as they go through this.
It’s possible, likely even, that not everybody has families like mine; families that looked for them all these years. Many of these women will probably be on their own, without any sort of support system. It’s going to take a lot to integrate them into society, to teach them how the world truly works. It’s taken me a lifetime of brainwashing to understand my life here, and after the weeks that I’ve been outside of this compound, I’m still grasping what my life should have been like.
“None of this is easy on any of us,” I tell these women. I just want to hug them, to tell them that they’re going to be OK. I don’t know how to make them believe it though. “You must all have so many questions, and there’s no way for me to answer them all. For now, just know that this compound is not your home. The cots we sleep in, the dirt floors that we walk upon, they are not your home. The fact that our younger citizens aren’t even given names, should make you all outraged. Youwillbe outraged when you truly start to understand. The extent to which this whole farce has played out, is sickening. It makes me ill.
“I want you all to understand that this was not your fault. You did nothing to deserve any of this. It is Greta's fault, because she is the one that took us, the one that altered our minds. She told us to think differently, to accept this fake reality that she’s built. You’ll be experiencing a lot of change in the next few days and the next few months. Your lives are about to change drastically. Whether you want them to or not, life cannot go on as you’ve known it. Great Mother is not coming back. This compound, is no longer.”
Feeling like I’m done saying my piece, I let myself fall into the arms of my mates. I cling to them, not caring if it makes me look weak. I kiss them because I need something real right now. It’s messing with my head being back here, seeing all these women in the state I was when my alphas first found me.
Law enforcement takes over then, directing all the women to go back to their rooms for further instructions. One of them tells me that my part here is over if I will only walk them around and show them where everything is. I pull my father and Parker with me as we go, walking them through the halls of the compound. I explain to everybody as the law enforcer records everything, that it’s a hierarchy with the letters in the names. I tell them the duties of each number of letters, and how they go about earning more letters in their name. Hearing it all spoken out loud, makes it worse somehow.
They see the rudimentary kitchen stocked with such a pathetic amount of ingredients, they see the dining hall with the dirty floors. I walk them through Greta’s office, telling them about the ritual where I met James. More officers fill in here, going through her office looking for anything incriminating. They tell me I’m free to go then, promising to contact me with further questions and asking if I’m willing to work with some of the ladies that might need more help.
I agree and pull my pack and my family with me to show them my room. It’s smaller than I remember. My alphas have spoiled me with a luxurious house that they built, even though it may be small by their standards, it’s palatial to me. I’m almost ashamed to show this to them, to let them feel the cot that I slept on for so many nights. The bed is hardly big enough for me to even be on, my feet always sticking out unless I slept curled up a little bit.
My father sits on a cot, feeling everything with his hands as if he needs a tactile memory to go with the visible one. Parker is crying, not even trying to hide anything. I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me, merely to let them see what I’m used to.
“Is there anyway,” my father asks, “that we can discuss calling you by your birth name? I respect that Calai is your identity now, but being here and seeing all of this, seeing how greatly this woman has ruined so many lives…it feels like a tarnish on my tongue to say the name that she chose for you. Your mother and I chose Darcy after her favorite book. It is a part of her memory that lives on. If you choose to let it. This woman, Greta, took so much from me, darling, and I’m struggling to find a way to connect with you. I can’t just reach into your mind and erase all the damage; I can’t build a time machine and go back and keep you safe. Every time the name Calai is spoken, it’s a reminder that you were taken from us.”
His request has me sitting down as well. It’s honestly not something I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about. With the way we were raised at this compound, names are not all that important. Sure, thenumberof letters in our name are, but what actual characters we carry in them, are not. Nothing is personal, none of our names were chosen with care. I wouldn’t be surprised if Greta had some sort of spreadsheet, or some other non-personal way to choose names.
I roll the name Darcy around in my mind, trying to decide if it feels like me or not.
I didn’t think about my name from my family's perspective, but I suppose in the real world, names are powerful. When you have parents that love you, names are chosen with great intention. It’s something that we carry with us throughout our entire lives, something that not only is a way to get our attention, but that adds to our image.
Could I possibly keep the name that was assigned to me at this compound? Or is it just a bad memory that needs to be expunged?
I can see the pain rippling on my father’s face. He’s hating every moment of this, but I know that he needed this. It hurts him right now to be in the place that took me from him, but it’s going to make us stronger in the long run.
He seems nervous to meet my eyes after that request, and I have a feeling that if I denied it, he would find a way to continue to call me by whatever I wanted him to, even if it caused him pain to do so. But haven’t I caused him enough of that? Even inadvertently, even if it wasn’t my fault at all. Hasn’t my life done enough damage to him, to my family?
How many days, how many nights, have they spent imagining me out here, thinking of my name? Talking about me, posting pictures with the name Darcy listed underneath it; for me then to show up back in their lives, and proclaim that that’s not my name, sort of feels like I’m slapping him in the face. I’m telling him that his identity of me doesn’t matter.
If I’m being honest, I’m really not that attached to the name Calai. The spelling doesn’t even make sense phonetically speaking. There’s also the fact that it’s already morphed so many times as I reached a milestone set by Greta.
But Darcy? That is unchanging. It’s solid.
I will never get a letter added or taken away for something I do or fail to do. It’s a way to connect with a mother that I’ll never know.
“We can do more than discuss it,” I finally say. “I think I’ve been so adamant that people call me Calai because I was scared. I’ve been living in your world for a little bit now, but it hasn’t truly felt like mine. Coming back here, being part of the demise of this place, is greatly shifting my perspective.
“I think maybe I just needed a way to feel like I was a little bit in control of my life. Keeping that little bit of me back from you, felt like a way to do that. But things are different now.”
My father finally looks up at me, pulling my hand into his. “They are?”
I nod, looking at the room of men that I can now call my own. “I feel settled now. Knowing that the great evil that stole me is locked away, having other people be apart of tearing down this place, making it actually happen… I don’t need any association with it anymore.
“I like Darcy. I haven’t had the opportunity to truly be a daughter for most of my life, and I don’t want to ruin it by doing something that intentionally hurts you. I’m starting to understand the names given to us here are just a collection of letters. There are so many hidden meanings in true names, so many things they can represent.”
