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“It would have been better if you’d never been born”
His stepdad Lawrence had said that to him in a burning building 3 years ago. Thought it a thousand times before, maybe. Bernard used to agree. Thought, ‘if I can’t undo by birth, maybe I can make my death mean something’.
Solace was that his mother never agreed. Even though she didn’t plan for him, she always said she loved him as if she had her whole life. Bernard remembered the first year he had gone to Camp Halfblood, when she drove him from Gotham to Long Island in her luxury SUV Lawrence bragged about buying for her. It was there she explained where he came from for the first time. How Lawrence wasn’t his biological father. How she was never actually pregnant with him. But how Bernard’s birth had tied them together none the less.
She had her glasses on, the ones Lawrence hated, that she only wore while driving. They had a sparkly pink-and-gold chain connecting them over her shiny blonde hair. Back then, he had made fun of it for being glittery and girly, but now he remembered her looking like a princess.
His mother laid it all out for him, over the hum of the air conditioner. How she had started going to university for Biology, & Lawrence was her TA for her required freshman economics class. Bernard had heard that part before. Rolled his eyes over his cup of punch while it was retold at galas and house parties.
Apparently, his mother’s freshman year roommate was a pagan, and an enthusiastic one at that. She invited his mother to practice with her, answered all her questions and introduced her to her other friends. Bernard had heard stories about all of them, but hadn’t known why them and his mom weren’t friends anymore. She had always just smiled sadly and told him they grew apart. But that wasn’t the case.
She had been hesitant at first, being raised a middle class New England Protestant, but eventually fell in love with the practice. With sorrowful nostalgia, she described doing hours of research between classes and homework, trying to find a Deity that made her feel the way her friends had described.
After a summer stuck in her room, pouring over overdue library books, she landed on Hecate.
She was older than most of the Greek Gods, and had a varied but connected set of realms that fascinated her. Lindsay Anne Muller had always been a curious person. His maternal grandparents said so, as did his aunt. She claimed it was the only reason she knew without a doubt they were twins. But while Aunt Nina turned her curiosity to uncovering history, his mother was fascinated with biology. They both felt like their fields were places where they would never run out of things to learn. Hecate inspired the same feelings of curiosity in his mother that her studies did.
So when in sophomore year, she and her roommate moved in to a 2-bedroom apartment, she had set up a small shrine on the windowsill in her room. She’d talk to it, she told Bernard, embarrassed. Leave the goddess letters on it, flowers she picked off the side of the road, origami she made of old rubrics. And after a few months, when her room grew cold, Hecate started sending Lindsay dreams.
She never told Bernard what was in them. In that car ride, she carefully skirted around his juvenile questions, and in the following years, she flat out refused. All she said was that they were eye-opening, and that they continued for months, so intense and alluring she said she’d leave events early to go home, finish a bottle of wine by herself to get to sleep in hopes Hecate would send her another.
And when she was alone on the last night in their apartment before she went home for summer break, when the only things left unpacked were her bedding and shrine, she woke up at 3 am with a start. Her eyes were pulled to her shrine, where baby Bernard lay, bathed in moonlight.
She was ecstatic, she told 8-year old Bernard, voice steady but quiet. But after the feeling wore off, she didn’t know what to do. Hecate sent no instructions, didn’t even send her a dream that night. Bernard needed a birth certificate. Needed a father to go on it. Lindsay needed something to tell her parents. They’d never accept it if she told them she didn’t know who the father of the baby was.
So she called Lawrence. He was the only man she talked to regularly (because she’d been curving his advances for months) who wasn’t dating one of her friends. She had told him about the dreams from Hecate, hoping he’d think she was crazy, or get bored and leave her alone. He’d thought she was a drunk, drinking herself into delusions every night because of the influence of her satanist pothead friends, but she was a skinny, blonde drunk who could cook, so he listened anyway.
And when she called him early that morning, he came immediately. He yelled and raged, inspected both her and baby Bernard, went through her call logs and diary. By mid-morning, after she had come back from a run to the store for formula, he agreed to be Bernard’s father, in exchange for her becoming his wife. Lawrence took the three of them to a private clinic that was affiliated with his father’s pharmaceutical business. Strong-armed them into making up a birth certificate, as if Bernard had been born there.
And the rest was history. Lindsay eventually had to drop out of college, and move to Lawrence’s hometown of Gotham once he finished his masters program. Her parents were hesitantly supportive. Her sister had dropped off the grid the year prior, and they didn’t want to lose another daughter, Bernard suspected. She raised Bernard while moonlighting as a consultant for Lawrence’s father’s pharmaceutical empire. He’d be in the boardroom while she poured over the chemical compounds of new drugs, seeing which ones had the best market value. Without credit to her, of course.
It was hard for Bernard to feel like he didn’t ruin his mother’s life. And if he didn’t, Hecate certainly did.
Redemption through pain made sense when your existence had already caused so much.