D6 :: Oz Zissou

Mozart wasn't himself when he showed up on the doorstep that night, a file of identification papers in one hand and a flask of whiskey in the other, ranting about the bounty on his head having been tripled and how we had to leave immediately before the peacekeepers closed in. Oz was only seven at the time and I remember thinking, after we had fled to Six, that he was a miracle. From tip to toe and head to heart, there was nothing on this earth that could be half as amazing as my son.

Despite how messed up everything was, he had triumphed. Usually the survival of a seven-year-old isn't a mile marker in history, but with a few slurred words from Mozart, our lives had been uprooted, ruined, and twisted up into something terrifying. Whenever Oz smiled or laughed after that, telling silly jokes to the self-professed Children of the Earth who had taken us in as two of their own, they all found themselves smiling back and calling him a darling. Darling boy. He would wait outside the church in the mornings to walk the women into chapel, grinning at them with a mouth full of long, perfect teeth. Sometimes I would crack open the front window of the parish house to listen as they would teach him to whistle hymns or he told them sweet, sad stories of our life in Seven, disguised as dreams.

Then a terrible thing happened. Oz seemed to forget. He forgot that we had once lived in another world and that the two of us were part of each other, but not of this place. I had never meant for that to happen. I had spent two and a half decades belonging to a home that was not this church or this land or these people, as kind and unquestionably welcoming as they may be. While I crowed myself to sleep each night, he braided daisies into his overgrown hair and held hands with the other children as they played in the meadow together. For me — as grown as I am — it was still a game of pretend, but watching my son, it was as if I was being bitten on the inside. Over and over. That nagging feeling stays with me even now, nearly ten years later.

Looking back, I'm not entirely sure what I was hoping we would get away from. Mozart, maybe, in the worst harbor of my heart. I never really cared about the peacekeepers at all, I just knew that Oz was always bound to grow up whether I liked it or not and I decided that I could handle that happening any which way except for truthfully. The truth is too much for me.

Fiction became fact anyhow and I was angry when I saw my son settling down as if here and home could be twin definitions for the same thing. The ugly feeling cracked and spilled in my head. Oz began to love it here, you see? I should have been happy for him for finding a sense of normality, that regardless of the criminal shambles he had been born into, he still found a way to be absolutely what he was. Except I realized, if there's one thing a gorgeous, unfathomably normal boy does not do, it's to find home within a hideaway of lies. That's how I figured out that disaster is a hereditary gene, passed down from the badly threaded genetics of two grand failures. It's alright for the living lies of this place and these people to love Oz, but if he loves them back, it's only because the lies have twisted and corrupted him. If he loves anything about this life, it's because I ruined him. I won't pretend that doesn't hurt.

I was only sixteen when I became pregnant with Oz. Mozart was gone by the time I realized, run off to District One to counterfeit diamonds and documents, obsessing over an idea of fortune that I wouldn't understand the implications of until much later. We had grown up in a community home together in Seven and I was still naive enough to believe we were a rags-to-riches faerie tale couple. Fated Cinderellas. I was a silly girl; Mozart is no Prince Charming. Never has been and never will be.

Oz was a secret hidden within my belly and I kept him with a vow of silence. Not that it mattered. Mozart wasn't around to watch me grow heavy with a second heart, but I pretended that the distance was my choice more than my circumstance. Two years passed, wordlessly, before he came home to discover that he had become a father and although motherhood should have meant maturity, I don't think I truly grew up until the moment I realized it wasn't enough to make him stay. None of it. Not Me. Not our son.

I gave the baby his father's family name instead of my own — Twombly — and decided to christen him Nemo, because that was the name of a child in our neighborhood whose father loved him very much. From the beginning, all I wanted for him was love. The very love from Mozart, maybe, that I've never had. That's why, the night that Mozart came to me (drunk, swearing, and ugly with stumbling) and told me that he had bought new identities for us in another District, I broke down sobbing. It was rage, not sadness. I had convinced myself that Nemo Twombly could always have his father in name, if nothing else.

Who, exactly, Oz Zissou is... honestly, I still don't know. Certainly, think the peacekeepers, he has nothing to do with the infamous conman and thief, Mozart Twombly.

No. Nothing at all.

Somewhere in the forest is a woman with my name. I think about her sometimes and her son with my son's name. I wonder who Alissa and Nemo Twombly are now and just how much of my life Mozzie gave her in exchange for turning us into the Zissous. Does anyone call her Lizzie? Does she swear she was a daughter of the Fey when she was a little girl, the same way I used to, watching people's eyes to see if any magic flares up? Believing... I always had a talent for seeing it in people. Not everyone can believe, but Lizzie Fey always could and Lizzie Twombly thought she could too.

I think some part of Mozart thought he was being romantic when he found me the name Lisa Zissou. Somewhere in his head he was thinking about more than just getting Nemo and I out of Seven and keeping all the official paperwork in order so no one would question anything, not even when the Reaping registration comes around each year and his son needs to prove he's a real person in order to prove that his father isn't. Mozzie had been calling me Mona Lisa for years and I'd laugh against his mouth as he whispered it, so happy, because I knew that meant I was art to him and I had to be at least that much to be worth anything. All I really know is that Mona Lisa is the name of a legend; she's the name of something that probably doesn't exist anymore, but that I've heard mumbled in his sleep more often than I've ever heard "Lizzie, I love you." It's a kind of jealousy I can only conquer with resignation.

The same way I looked in other people's eyes for the ability to believe, Mozzie looked into mine and he found it. He knew I believed him when he swore he could become more than the nothing we were as orphaned children in a group home and that I believed him when he swore he'd always come back for me, even as he was leaving without me, and that I'd believe him in this way for always, because Lizzie Fey grew up believing in magic instead of lies. I don't want to be his Mona Lisa Zissou, but I would have to give up the last thing I have left of myself in order to escape that. Even here, in a pagan church full of people who don't truly know me, they call me Priestess. Living goddess. Holy believer.

Everyone who has ever looked in my eyes has known that I see, but only Mozart Twombly uses that to blind me.