where we land

I

C H A P T E R  O N E

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". . . You've got your peace now . . ."

- You Said You'd Grow Old With Me,
Micheal Schulte

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Present Day

WHEN SANG WAS young, her mother would read her Greek myths before she fell asleep. She'd never been very interested in the child-friendly picture books that littered their home—Sang seemed to be drawn to her mother's shelf of thickly-bound mythology novels instead.

She was raised on stories of vengeful Gods with dangerous vendettas hidden behind beautiful faces. She learned how Athens got it's name, heard the tale of Thesus and the minotaur more times than she could count. However, the myth that stuck with her the most was the one about soulmates.


It was said that humans were first created with four arms, four legs, and two heads. But Zeus, scared of the power that these creatures beheld, cut them in half. And thus, humans were condemned to a lifetime of searching for the half that was stolen from them without the first clue as to where to look.


Sang had always wondered when she would meet her soulmate. Would she find them in the childhood friend next door, with a lifetime of shared memories behind them? Would they be a stranger she bumped into on the street, with a charismatic smile that made Sang weak in the knees? Or worst of all, would Sang walk right past them and never know what life was like completely whole, searching in vain for something she'd already found?


(When she brought these concerns to her brother, Noah, he laughed. She was still young, too young to be worried about soulmates or what the rest of her life would entail, he claimed.
"You'll just know," he told her simply, "you can feel it, I guess." 

But Noah was lucky. He'd already met the woman he called his soulmate. Noah first saw his wife, Sophia, when Sang was eight. He was in the homestretch of his senior year and Sophia was new to town with nothing but a car and a crying baby in the back seat. Noah took one look at her and he was done for. She was who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

Sang had the distinct feeling that things wouldn't be as simple for her.)

As Noah barely managed to shove the last too-full box into the trunk of his car, Sang watched the two of them interact. He'd spent the last few days in an unending state of panic trying to fit two weeks worth of packing into 72-hours. Neither Sang nor Sophia were very confident in the idea that he'd slept at all.


Noah's shoulders were stiff and his brows furrowed, a pose that had rarely changed since the death of their parents. When he was young, he'd been more of the easygoing type. Sang remembered nights where he snuck her into his room to read children's stories under the covers past bedtime, days where he skipped classes to pick her up from school for lunch because she'd woken up crying that morning from a nightmare. He had never been too strict on anyone other than himself. But as time went on and responsibilities weighed down on Noah's shoulders like his own cross to bear, Noah grew up.


The moment Sophia rested a hand on his arm, his entire body relaxed. A lifetime's worth of burdens disappeared just like that, with only a simple touch. They spoke in hushed tones, their voices so low that Sang wasn't able to make out what they were saying through the glass window beside her. But, whatever it was, it caused Noah to break out into a wide smile before pressing a gentle kiss to her cheek. 

(There was no one else in the world that was able to do that to him. On his worst days, when it looked like a thunderstorm hovered over his head, it was Sophia that Sang would call to help draw Noah out of it. Sometimes, she wondered if she would ever find anyone to do that to her.

Noah liked to say that Sang got her father's imagination while he had gotten his looks, but Sang couldn't remember either of her parents well enough to know if it was true.)


Sophia left their driveway first, and Sang watched as the back of her grey sedan grew smaller and smaller before eventually disappearing altogether. Sang's heart ached as she took in the familiar buildings that lined the streets around them.


A few months prior, Noah had lost his job. And Sophia, who worked part time at a takeout restaurant washing dishes, wasn't able to cover the amount that was needed to support a four-person family while Noah desperately searched for someone that would hire him. Eventually the money ran out, and the Sorensons were forced to choose between paying the bills or buying food for the week.


Luckily for them, Sophia had family living in one of the states further down south. A few quiet phone calls and tear filled nights later, they had packed up their things and made plans to move to Charleston, South Carolina.


"Sang," Noah called from outside the car, "come here for a second."

Sang hopped out of the car, sandals crunching on the asphalt below her. The summer air was thick with the scent of lavender and humidity. The smell was one Sang tied directly with her childhood. Her mother's flower bushes were the most potent during the end of the season, and thus Sang's summers were filled with the heady scent of hydrangeas and roses while she played make-believe in their front yard. The idea that she would never smell that particular blend of sweet flowers and summer air again sent a pang through her heart.


Noah was leant against the large oak tree in the yard, hovering near the rickety old swing that hung from one of it's larger branches. Neither of them had even glanced at it since the death of their parents. Sang supposed that losing the people who made your house a home for so many years left little space for childhood to flourish.


"What are you doing?" she asked, looking at her brother with narrowed eyes, "we need to leave soon. Sophia will be mad if you take too long."

Noah rolled his eyes. "it'll just take a couple minutes. Besides, you aren't the boss here. I am. So sit down, short stuff."

Sang groaned, but gingerly sat down. The wood groaned under her weight, and she gripped onto the rope handles tightly. Even then, she wasn't sure how much pressure the rope could take before it snapped in two.


"Why are we doing this?" she asked, carefully testing her weight to ensure the swing would be able to bear it, "we should have left already."

"You used to love this swing, you know,"—Noah started pushing at her back, evading the question with ease—"you could spend hours on this thing. Sometimes dad would have to drag you inside kicking and screaming just to get you off of it."

Sang tried to remember what Noah was describing but came up short. She had some memories of her parents, of course. They were mostly of seemingly unimportant things, like the time they brought both her and Noah to a public pool and her father slipped off the diving board and had to get four stitches, or the way her mother's nose crinkled when she smiled. But Sang still treasured them regardless of how insignificant they seemed.


"I remember. . ." Noah continued, his laugh turning doleful, "I remember you always asked me to push you on here after they died. I never seemed to have the time, though. I was always busy with something that I thought was more important. I figured that I should make some time for it before we left everything behind."

Sang's heart swelled. Noah's voice had turned thick, in that way it did when he felt truly guilty for something. She wasn't quite sure how to tell him that she didn't care that much about being pushed on a swing or not now, and she was certain she felt the same back then. Sang knew however that no matter what she said, it wouldn't change the guilt that laid heavy in his heart. She could see it in his eyes—the brown that normally sparkled with life now dulled down to the point that they were almost empty.


"Late is better than never," she said quietly.


A comfortable silence overtook the siblings as nosh pushed her. A gentle breeze tickled Sang's cheeks, and she took in what was most likely the last she'd ever see of her home.


It wasn't the building that mattered so much to her, but more so the memories that lived inside it. Woven between the cracks of every brick on that brown two-story was the last of what remained of James and Cassie Sorenson. No matter where they went, Sang knew that they wouldn't be able to take those memories with them. They would fade with time as memories always did, and soon she would forget what it was like to watch her parents dance in the kitchen with nothing but the light of their fridge illuminating the room.


She had so few memories of her parents to begin with. Sang couldn't help but fear what it would be like as time passed and they began to dwindle.


Just as Sang was coming down from another push, the right rope gave away and snapped in two. She held back a shriek as she toppled down onto her back, legs tangled in the remainder of the fraying string. Her hip ached and dirt now stained the back of her favourite jean shorts (which she knew would be almost impossible to get out).


But when she looked up at Noah, both sets of eyes wide with shock, she couldn't help but laugh.
It wasn't long until Noah joined her. His laugh was warm and booming, loud enough that she was sure some of their neighbors peeked outside to see what was causing all that noise. The thought of the seventy-something year old grandmother who lived across the street peeking past her dainty curtains with wide eyes and a hand over her heart only helped push Sang into another fit of laughter.


A few minutes passed before Sang was able to tame the fit into a few peals of giggles. She sat up, tugging on Noah's shirt.


"Help me up, you oaf!"

Noah lifted Sang up with ease, setting her back on her feet. She brushed as much off the grass off as she could, fixing him with a halfhearted glare which lost it's effect when paired with her cheek-splitting grin.


"I told you not to let me fall."

"Oops."

Sang rolled her eyes, gently shoving him as she began to make her way back to the car. She was still picking leaves out of her hair as Noah trailed behind her.


"'Oops' my ass," she muttered.


She paused, however, as she passed by the flower bushes beside their front door. A few bees hovered around some of the more potent blooms. Sang reached down and snapped off a few of the flowers at the stem, trying to take as many as possible of each kind. The roses were trickier, as the thorns left a few pricks on her fingers, but she managed to snag one of the smaller ones before she made her way back to the car.


Sang left the rose sitting on the dashboard, but pressed a few of the daintier ones between the pages of her book. She flattened them as much as she could before shutting the cover and slipping it back into the box it came from. Noah watched her with a curious brow raised.

"To remember," she said simply, and that was enough.

As Noah started up the car, Sang picked off as many of the thorns from the rose as she could. The underside of her fingernails began to grow bloody, but she continued until there was only a single, stubborn thorn left near the bud that she couldn't quite get. She'd have to wait until she had access to a pair of tweezers to remove it.


Sang set the flower down once more and turned in her seat to watch her house as they drove away. She tried to commit it all to memory: the chimney that never worked, the cracked glass on the second floor from a flying baseball that they couldn't afford to get fixed, the walkway tile placed slightly to the right of all the others that her mother always swore she would get around to righting one day. She willed it all to be burned into her mind so that the memories of James and Cassie Sorenson would never dwindle.


The last thing Sang saw before the house was pulled out of sight was that broken swing, with it's snapped rope and decaying seat, that had just become Sang's fondest memory of her old home.


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 "Where do you want this?" Silas Korba gripped the edges of a metal desk, hovering outside of his father's room. Charlie looked up just long enough to see what Silas was holding before he went back to his paper.

"Leave it against one of the walls," he said, "they can move it where they'd like when they get here."

Silas hauled the desk into the bedroom, pressing it against the wall near the door. That bedroom, which once belonged to his brother, had been transformed into a makeshift room for three. There was a double bed pushed against one of the walls, and a cot against the other. Charlie had managed to find a mini fridge and microwave one of his customers had been giving away along with the desk he'd just brought in.

Their hallway closet had been turned into another room. It was barely big enough for a bed, and Silas wasn't sure how Charlie had managed to fit an end table and lamp in there along with it. 

As Silas was leaving the room, he took notice of the marks lining the doorframe. Cigarette burns still dusted the wood, leaving behind dark smudges that Silas never seemed to have the heart to get rid of.

Theo had returned to Greece over a year ago. After he burned down a nearby church (which was empty, thankfully) the Academy deemed it safest to have him move back home for rehabilitation. At first, he and Silas tried to keep in touch. Charlie was still much too upset with Theo to even try to talk to him.

As the brothers got swept up in their lives, however, the messages and phone calls began to dwindle. It had been a few months since Silas had last heard from him at all.

After they'd cleared out all Theo's things and shoved them to the back of a storage unit, the only memory Silas had of his older brother were the burn marks he left behind.

The Korba apartment had been painfully silent in the year since Theo left. Now that there was no one to monitor and take care of, Silas discovered that he and his father never had very many things to talk about in the first place.

As the door shut quietly behind him, Silas made his way over to Charlie's room. Cigarette smoke coated the air around his open door. Although Silas wished he'd stop, Charlie's smoking problem had only gotten worse with the absence of his brother.

"What time are they coming?" Silas asked, leaning against the doorframe.

Charlie didn't look up. He sat at his desk, paper in one hand and cigarette in another.

"They'll be here when they'll be here."

Silas held back a sigh. His father was stubborn, much more stubborn than he was, and hadn't spoken to Sophia for close to a decade. Most days he was more likely to pretend she didn't exist than he was to even say her name.

He doubted Charlie knew if they'd even left yet. That first phone call, where Sophia called in tears and they shouted until the sun began to rise, was the last time they'd spoken. Silas had looked at Charlie's phone a few days prior and discovered he hadn't even saved the number.

"You're going to have to talk to her at some point," Silas said in biting Greek, "she was a kid. It's not her fault."

At that, Charlie tossed his paper down, fist banging against his desk. The structure shook with the force of it.

"Your sister made her choice," Charlie boomed, "and I've made mine. Neither of them are any of your concern."

The room dripped with unsaid words between the two of them. They had weighed heavy against Silas' heart for years, begging to be cut free. Charlie had always let Silas speak freely, but never when it came to this.
Charlie had only allowed him to cry once after Sophia left. He'd held him then, allowed Silas to cry on his shoulder and comforted him as he sobbed. However, Charlie made it clear that he wouldn't tolerate any tears shed over his sister afterwards.


Silas was just a boy back then. He didn't understand why his father tried to pretend Sophia never existed, why he folded her out of the photos in his mother's album and smudged her name off of the family tree. But Silas had grown up immensely since then, and he now knew better than to dwell on the past around his father. So he left without another word, and somehow, that silence seemed to say more than either of them ever could.

The walls shook when Silas slammed the door to his room behind him. His phone buzzed on his nightstand with incoming messages. Most of them were from his team's group chat, but there was a few messages below them from his best friend, North.

North: any word on when they're coming?