Authors: Joanne Brothwell
A strange sensation unfolded deep in my belly. A twisting feeling. Like my body was about to internally combust and I’d suddenly become millions of ashes, floating, directionless.
“You’re going to take it, are ya? Well, try it, because that’s the only way you’re going to get it out of me, weirdo.”
Kalan’s hands were on Uncle Les’s face so fast, the movement reminded me of the way a snake attacked its prey. Les’s mouth dropped open the moment Kalan looked him in the eye.
Les’s voice came out in a string of high-pressured, toneless words. “Last I saw her she was on the streets of Denver. The slums. She’s known on the streets as Jenny. I took a picture of her. It’s in the bottom of my top dresser drawer.”
Kalan turned to me and nodded.
I went to his bedroom and rummaged through the drawer and endured the smell of stale laundry and dirty old man. When my fingers touched the edge of the paper photo, I pulled it out of the drawer and quickly glanced at it. It was a woman with vivid teal eyes. Just like mine. I left the disgusting bedroom.
Kalan was already standing at the entryway, holding the door open for me. I handed him the photo.
“Will he remember this?” I asked.
Kalan shook his head. “No.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“He’ll feel disoriented for a while, but he’ll snap out of it in a few hours,” Kalan said.
We exited the dungeon-like apartment, me walking on wooden legs, my movements robotic, stilted. I welcomed the light of the hallway.
The fact that this was the first time Kalan had seen what his own mother looked like was completely eclipsed by the fact that I’d just learned my whole entire life had been one, giant lie.
“Homozygous traits,” I said, my voice oddly flat. “That’s why the scientist wanted to run tests on my biological father. That’s why my mother was so sketchy. She didn’t want me to know.”
“God, I’m so sorry,” Kalan said.
I couldn’t even look at Kalan right now. “Recessive traits that both parents pass down to their offspring. Do you know who has recessive traits? Yeah. Relatives. That’s who.”
I started to cry then, tears streaming down my face, re-igniting sore cheeks that had been exposed to salty tears for far too many days in a row. At what point did tears run out? At what point would I stop feeling like I was stepping from one nightmare into another and another, only to find out I would never wake up?
I hardly even noticed when Kalan gathered me up into his arms. I buried my face in his chest, and let the tears flow. There was nothing left in my life that I’d once known to be true. Not even my own parents were who they seemed. Kalan was the one and only person I felt like I could count on, and I’d only known him for a few days. I missed Analiese so much my bones ached with it.
After what must have been over thirty minutes of me crying in his arms, the silence of the interior of the car magnifying every single gasp, Kalan finally spoke. “Genetics aren’t everything. My foster parents and siblings are more my family than Marcus will ever be. He may be your biological father, but he is not your dad. And if he molested your sister, it is more than likely he did the same to your mother.”
I hadn’t even reached that conclusion yet. I was so fixated on my mother’s lie I didn’t even stop to consider why she might be lying. Had he sexually abused her, too? I counted the months back from my parents’ marriage and our birth date. Analiese and I had been born in May. Our parents were married in December. Five months. She definitely conceived us prior to their wedding. A shotgun wedding. Now my mother’s young age at marriage—seventeen—seemed far less romantic and more horrifying. As a young girl, I’d always believed they got married young because they were madly in love and about to have a baby. Following their divorce, I rearranged my belief to be about misguided, stupid teenagers.
Maybe they got married because she was pregnant with her uncle’s children.
I pulled out my cell phone. Mom picked up after a few rings. “Where are you?” she asked.
“I just left Uncle Les’s house, Mom.”
Silence.
“Why would you go there, Adriana?” Mom’s words were slow. Too slow. She was trying to maintain her calm, I knew it. “I told you to stay away from him.”
“He told me.”
Another drawn-out silence. Then, “What? He told you what?”
“He made it sound like he is…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. It was just all wrong. “He inferred that he is my… me and Analiese’s… our father.” The moment I said it I felt like throwing up.
“What?” My mother shouted so loud I had to pull the phone away from my ear. “That stupid old man was always such a godamn liar—”
“Mom. Is it true? Did he abuse you?”
A string of high-pitched cursing emanated from the receiver of my phone, once again so loud that Kalan could hear it. His eyebrows rose on his forehead.
“This is absolutely preposterous! Don’t listen to a word that dirty old man said. Promise me, that,” Mom said, her voice pitchy and teetering on hysteria. “Will you promise me that, Adriana? Will you?”
I glanced over at Kalan, who was now looking at the picture of his homeless mother. Meanwhile, my mother was going slowly insane on the other end of the line.
“Mom, I’ll forget about it. I promise. I have to go.” I hung up, knowing it was rude, but not really being able to deal with her hysterics on top of the stress I was already dealing with.
I stared at my phone in my lap. Was she lying? Or was Uncle Les up to his usual tricks of mind games and manipulation? Either was plausible. Mom would be admitting to me, her only remaining daughter, that she was the result of an incestuous union, a rape, sexually molested by her own uncle. Secrets like that tended to make people deny things, sometimes even to themselves. But lies were all part of Les’s MO, and he seemed to take particular pleasure in messing around with people’s emotions. He got off on it.
Sick old fuck
.
I had to stop thinking about it. It was a question that wouldn’t be answered tonight, and I was partially relieved that it wasn’t, because I couldn’t quite face the possibility that my uncle was my father. It was just too… sick.
“She denies it,” Kalan said.
I stuck my phone into my purse. “Yeah. I’m not really surprised, though. Something like abuse and incest is a hard one to admit out loud.” I shuddered. I honestly couldn’t even imagine. Everything about Les made my skin crawl.
I couldn’t think about it anymore. “Does your mother look the way you thought she would?”
“No. She looks…miserable.” Kalan handed the photo to me. The woman was lying on the sidewalk in her sleeping bag, a raincoat done up tightly around her head. All that showed was her pale, drawn face with dark shadows under her eyes and hollows below her cheekbones. But her eyes blazed, even from within the photograph, the colour of them as bright as laser-cut jewels. While her colouring was nothing like Kalan or Marcus, it was obvious she was their mother. Her high cheekbones, full lips and arched brows were exactly the same as theirs. Even in this photo, living as a street bum, covered in layers of dirt, she was extraordinarily beautiful. I’d seen this face before, in a photograph. It was the same as my mother’s cousin’s face. Virginia’s face.
Kalan stared straight ahead, blinking. Were his eyes moist?
“I’m sorry. This must be so painful,” I said.
Kalan shook his head. “It’s just that… I suppose I never believed it was possible to find her. The thought of her was always so idealized in my mind. To see the reality of the situation now, the horrors of it…”
“I know.” I placed my hand on Kalan’s arm. “Let’s go find your mother.”
Even though identical twins supposedly share all of their DNA, they acquire hundreds of genetic changes early in development that could set them on different paths, according to new research.
-Live Science
CHAPTER SEVEN
KALAN KANE
“I’m sure I know where this picture was taken. I went through that area with my Sociology class. We were studying homelessness,” Adriana said.
I turned onto the freeway that led straight to the slums of Denver. We were going into one of the most dangerous areas of the city. I shook off the jitters that crawled all over my skin. I had to find my mother.
“I feel terrible for dragging you there. It’s not safe for you, or anyone else.” My voice was thick and strained.
“We’ll be fine. We have locks on the doors,” Adriana said, her jaw set.
I entered the darkened back alley where Adriana claimed the picture was taken. My courage waned as I looked at this terrible place, where human misery and suffering was at its most wretched.
I slowed down in the narrow alleyway to avoid running over people who lay scattered about, sleeping on bare concrete, litter strewn everywhere, their possessions in shopping carts or plastic bags beside them. Some individuals had tarps for protection, for shade from the sun and rain, while others hid under trees and makeshift shanty-houses fashioned with wood and scraps of material.
The alley itself was part asphalt, part gravel, dumpsters and garbage cans staggered amongst the people. The crumbling brick walls of the back of the buildings were spoiled further with graffiti, and spindly trees were so overgrown they hung down into the roadway and scraped against the windshield and roof of my car. So much for the paint job.
As we drove along, slow but steady, the eyes of these alley-dwellers tracked our every move. Some with red-rimmed eyes, others with the wild, glassy-eyed look of people out of touch with reality. My palms grew moist.
It was difficult, looking at these people at their most vulnerable, not wanting to stare and yet needing to look for her. For Genevieve. With each passing moment of witnessing the horror of this shocking existence, my attempt at calm grew more difficult to maintain.
I rode the brakes as people stood and encroached onto the road. Finally, I was forced to stop altogether when a thin, gangly man in ripped sweatpants and a food-stained sweater that read
Christian Soldier
stood directly in front of the car, eyes the colour of burnt toast.
We stared at one other.
“Oh, shit,” Adriana muttered.
I took a deep breath. “Let me handle this. Stay in the car, okay?”
There must have been something about the look on my face that told her I was serious, because she nodded, her skin pasty, all the blood having left her face.
I got out of the car and shut the door behind me, tapping the window and pointing at the locks. Adriana nodded and locked the doors. Now I was alone, deep in the slums of Denver, facing a man who didn’t look to be in his right mind
at all.
“Who the hell are you?” the man growled, as he made his way around to the side of the car. I didn’t want to move any closer because of his stench. He smelled as if he lived inside a dumpster.
Show no fear
. I straightened my back and stepped toward him.
“I’m looking for my mother. She was last seen here,” I said. We squared off, facing one another. He was a good six inches shorter than me, but looked crazy enough to still cause some damage.
“What’s her name?” he asked.
“Genevieve.”
The man’s dirty face didn’t move, but his eyes narrowed. “No one here by the name of
Gen-of-eve.
”
“She may be known by a different name.” I shifted my weight when he took another step closer. Now we were a mere foot or two apart, and the man’s particular malodorous fragrance enough to trigger my gag reflex. I swallowed it back. “I’ll show you a picture.”
He stood there without comment, waiting for me, his hostile expression firmly planted on his face. I dug the photo out of my back pocket and held it out to him.
Recognition flickered in the man’s eyes. “This here ain’t no Gen-of-eve. This here is Jennie.”
“So you know her?”
“Jennie don’t live around here no more. Not after those G-men came and—” The man stopped, mid-sentence, his eyes suddenly widening, as if he were seeing me in a new light. “You ain’t a G-man, are you?”
I shook his head. “No. I’m trying to find her, that’s all.”
The man backed up, and I noticed his hands were shaking. What was he afraid of?
Then he yelled at the top of his lungs, “This man’s here for Jennie! He wants to get our Jennie, just like the G-men!”
Like a slow-motion parody of a horror film the homeless descended on me like a pack of mangy, rabid coyotes. They pressed up against me and pushed me back and forth, as if I was in a game of Red Rover with the most heinous smelling humans on earth.
“Kalan!”Adriana called out the window.
My head bobbed back and forth as I tried to maintain my cool. “Adriana, stay in the car!” I called out, but the car door slammed shut. Too late.
“Stop it!” Adriana yelled from the other side of the car. “He’s looking for his mother! Stop it!”
The shoving ceased at once, but there were still a myriad of grubby hands grasping me with varying degrees of tightness. One person held me by the shoulder, fingers digging into my clavicle.
Adriana pushed her way closer, forcing the people aside. She was so brave.
“Your mama is Jennie?” asked one filthy, dirt-smeared woman.
“Yes, his mother is Jennie!” Adriana blurted out. “Now get your fucking hands off him!”
The group of ten or so of them stared back and forth between Adriana and me before turning to Burnt-Toast Eyes for direction.
His face curled up into a snarl. “Bullshit! They’re G-men!”
The group instantly turned into a frenzy of screaming, fists flying and feet kicking. Pain blasted through my body from the various points of contact: knees, jaw and stomach. Adriana screamed amidst the sounds of angry voices.
I had to
do
something.
I dug deep, into that dark part of me I kept locked up, the piece that only Marcus had been witness to before this moment.
I pulled on it, and like an explosion, the fury ripped through my body and out, engorging my muscles and filling me with a burst of energy. One-by-one, I threw the people off of me as if they were tiny children. It wasn’t until every last one of them was on the ground that I finally saw the shock in Adriana’s expression as she looked at me, her mouth open.
My eyes were undoubtedly blood-red, haemorrhaged from the internal cranial pressure, like the last time this happened down at the bridge when I was mugged. I looked away until the strange sensation inside me waned.
I surveyed those getting back up to their feet. Would they come back for another round? Their leader stayed on the ground, flat on his back while the others scattered to return to their various locations along the alleyway. I crouched down on my haunches by the man and grabbed him by the collar, lifting his head an inch off the ground.
“Where is Jennie? Tell me now.”
He stared, his eyes watery, his gaze faraway. It was as if he wasn’t even seeing me. I shook him a little, enough to jostle him out of his dissociative state.
“Tell me willingly or I’ll make you to tell me. It’s your choice. Do you understand? Now. Where is she?” The scent of rot emanated from every pore of the man’s being.
He cringed. “She ain’t been around here for at least six months.”
I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. I shook him again, knowing Adriana watched every threatening, violent move I made. “Then where is she?”
“She’s at the King George Hotel.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
The man began to laugh, his entire body vibrating beneath my grip. I tightened my hold on his shirt collar. The fabric was stiff in my hand.
He opened his eyes and peered up at me, the hostility rolling off of him in waves. “The warehouse district.”
The abandoned warehouse district was one of the most dangerous parts of Denver. My chest tightened at the thought of my mother living in such squalor.
I let go of his collar slowly and lowered him back to the ground. Then he made a sudden violent move upward, head-butting me in the forehead. Pain ricocheted around in my head, my skull throbbing. My knees buckled.
Adriana’s scream rang out. “No!”
She kicked him square in the jaw, so hard he hit the ground beside me.
Despite the ringing in my ears and the throbbing in my head, I stood up. Adriana had a feral look on her face, all fierceness and anger in her curled lips and narrowed eyes. The man lay on his back, holding his jaw. On further inspection, the grimace on his face and neck was a testament to the level of force Adriana put behind that kick.
Badass
.
I glanced around at all of the faces, staring at us. Watching.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, grabbing Adriana’s hand
She nodded and we returned to the car and got in.
We drove off, not a single person standing in our way.