by Mary Jaine
"Where's your mother, Shereen, what happened to her?" he asked her softly.
"Mummy died, all the beatings, so many injuries...she had a brain haemorrhage, one day she just...died, peacefully, I think, but he killed mummy, just as surely as if he'd throttled her with his bare hands...Ricky found us, mummy took him in, she loved him, we loved him, he was our brother, and he promised her he'd look after us, and he did. Bobby and Ricky have changed, Nicky, I swear, they're different, they're who they should have been. Yaz and me are safe at last, with them, at least give them a chance please!"
Nicky looked up at us, one arm encircling Yaz, his free hand stroking Shari's hair as he glanced from Rick to me and back again, his eyes hooded, distant.
"I knew that bastard was sick; he's in jail now for the things he did, and he deserves every second of time he'll serve there, but how about you two? What I remember of you isn't good, or happy, and how about Barbara, what about her, what about her memory? She was your mother, you know, I tried to tell you, but you never listened, how do I know you've changed? That part of my life only means hurt and pain to me; why should I let you into any other part of it?"
Rick stood up and moved next to me, taking Yaz's hand and raising her up. Yaz held herself close to him as he spoke.
"Nicky, all our lives we treated you like an outsider; we thought Barbara was your mother, and neither of you wanted or needed us. Dad always told us we didn't need her or you, and we believed him. I'm sorry I left my oldest brother out, I was wrong, and stupid, and selfish and all kinds of other things. Yaz and Shari, and especially her mother, showed me how wrong I was, they taught me what family really means, and now all I want to do is put mine back together again the best way I can. I'm sorry Nicky, I was wrong, and I want my big brother back. We only found your letter a few days before Christmas, it had been wrongly delivered to an empty house, but we came here to look for you just as soon as we discovered where you were!"
Nicky grinned at me, although there wasn't much humour in his smile.
"And you, Robert, what do you want?"
Shari reached out and took my hand, squeezing my fingers gently, telling me to tell him everything. I squeezed back just once, agreeing with her.
"Nick, I came to find you so I could say I'm sorry. I thought Rick and I were going to be big-shot businessmen one day, just like dad, and I learned how to be just like him, and I forgot you were my brother too. What I learned from dad was all so wrong, I know that now; my sisters showed me how wrong I was. I even tried to kill myself, because I worked out how bad it was going to be, but Shari saved me, literally. She made me see that there was another world out there, and she's showing me how to fit into it, how I could be so much better than whatever I was before. I'm still learning, but I do know one thing; I need my big brother to show me how as well. And it's "Bobby" now, I'm not Robert anymore..."
Nick hugged the two girls again and smiled enigmatically as Shari slipped her hand in mine and Yaz stayed huddled against Rick.
"It seems the Davis brothers have a lot more in common than you think!" he commented cryptically. "By the way, you should know our family name is "Davis", not "Davies; that sick bastard's real name is Brian Davis, he changed his name to hide me from my mother when she tried looking for me after he abducted me."
He looked behind me into the passageway, and nodded, and a woman in her mid-forties popped her head in the door and smiled at everyone. I could see immediately her resemblance to Nick; not so much the features, but the same eyes, the same hair, the same jawline. This must have been Nick's mother. She in turn looked Rick and me up and down, her eyes flicking between us and Nick, comparing our features. I had noticed the strong resemblance between Rick and Nicky before, but now they were standing side by side, they were almost eerily similar; apart from the hair and eye colour, they could almost have been twins, even more so than Yaz and Shari. Nick stood up and took her hand.
"Mum, these are my brothers, the tall one is Bobby, the handsome one is Rick, and these two lovely girls are Shari and Yaz, my sisters. Guys, this is my mum, Julia Nixon."
I offered my hand, but instead she hugged me, a warm, inclusive hug. She did the same to Rick, and each of the girls, gently hand-combing a large curl away from Yaz's face so she could look at her properly. Yaz smiled at such a motherly gesture, and the ice was broken. At that point little Barbara decided to make her presence felt, and with a grin Ashley handed her to Shari, who sat down with her on her lap, Yaz sitting next to her, the two of them suddenly completely absorbed with their new-found niece.
Julia took my arm and linked her other arm with Rick, speaking so only the two of us could hear her.
"Thank you for coming, all of you, I'm so glad you came to find Nicky, he needs this, he needs all his family too! Now that you're all here, all that stuff that happened before is finally over. Poor Nicky's been wracked with guilt over what happened, perhaps now he can let some of it go. Who knows, maybe his brothers and sisters can help him do that, you never know. I know how much he loved your mother, I don't blame him; she was all he had, stranded there with that terrible man, and from what I heard, those two girls have the same loss as him. Perhaps all of you can help each other over this now. You're here, and Nicky's family is back together again; before he only had us, now he has you again, or maybe at last. Perhaps now he can find some sort of peace. All of you are going to have to help each other; you know that, don't you? You're brothers and sisters, perhaps now's the perfect time to be just that!" she smiled, letting us both go with a gentle pat on the arm.
I was a little overwhelmed by all this; such a lot had happened in the last hour, and I was still processing where I was, and who was who, and trying to figure-out what happened next. I looked across at Yaz and Shari, bonding with their niece, talking animatedly with Ashley, fitting-in, and couldn't help but feel that perhaps Julia was right; now was the time to be family again.
Judy slipped her arm through mine and grinned up at me, her little pixie face alight with amusement.
"Welcome to the Nixon-Davis clan! Don't worry, Leon's still trying to get used to this, feel free to feel a little shell-shocked if you need to!"
I sat down on one of the couches, and Judy sat next to me, which was good, because I had some questions for her.
"Judy, when did you put it all together, when did you know or suspect that we were looking for Nick and all?" I asked her, and she gave me that grin again.
"You're serious, right? Bobby, as soon as I saw you two at the hotel I knew! Have you looked in a mirror lately? You and Rick are so much like Nicky it's uncanny; I nearly fell over in shock! He once told me what a pair of little shits his kid brothers were, and then to see you two in the flesh, boy was I conflicted! It was a weird sensation, actually seeing in the flesh two of the people Nicky felt he had most reason in the world to hate, looking so much like one of the people I love most in the world! Even the hand gestures are the same. It's still freaking me out, believe me!"
I had to grin, and agree with her; we had been a pair of despicable little shits, but maybe, just maybe, we'd turned that corner and left that all behind. Something else was also troubling me.
"Judy, what is Nicky going to say about...you know, Shari and me, and Rick and Yaz?"
Judy twinkled at me.
"I think he'll congratulate you on your taste! Tell him, I think you just might be surprised; the Davis boys are a lot more alike than you probably think! Go on, go and ask him!"
She seemed to be secretly amused about something, but not in a malicious way, so I followed her advice. Rick was in the middle of being admired by Nicky's mother and Ashley, much to his embarrassment and Yaz's amusement, so I collared Nicky while he was unoccupied.
"Nicky, can I ask you something?" I began, and he nodded, walking me to a part of the room not occupied by sisters, wives, mothers and little girls.
"Okay...Bobby, what's on your mind?"
Now for it; the only way to ask him was to ask him, so I jumped stra
ight in.
"What would you say if I told you that Shari was more than just a sister to me, that she and I, and Rick and Yasmin, have a...a closer relationship than just simply being brothers and sisters?"
Nick looked at me for a long moment, then slowly grinned.
"I think I'd say that you have incredibly good taste, both of you, they're exquisite!"
I breathed a sigh of relief, but now my curiosity had gotten the better of me.
"So you don't think it's wrong...or immoral, or anything like that?"
Nick looked at me, then glanced over at Ashley, and I was struck how much she had in common with the girls; tall, slender, beautiful, deep red-bronze hair, large, expressive eyes, and something began to click inside me. Nick saw the direction of my glance and pulled me closer, so he was almost whispering in my ear.
"My mother's name before she married David, my stepfather, was Lowry, Julia Lowry; Ashley's maiden name was also Lowry..."
I listened uncomprehending for a second, then it clicked into place; Ashley Lowry, Nick's mother was Julia Lowry, of course; Ashley was his sister! Now Judy's offhand remark about the Davis boys being a lot more alike than we suspected suddenly made sense; that, and Nick's cryptic comment along the same lines a few minutes ago!
I gaped at him, and he grinned happily.
"When I first arrived here, almost the first person I saw was Ashley; and I couldn't take my eyes off her, or stop thinking about her. We met on the first day I arrived here, and we've been together ever since. I felt about her, and I still do, the same way you probably feel about Shari; she's beautiful, she loves me, I love her, the "sister" thing didn't matter to us then, and it doesn't matter to us now."
He stopped talking for a second to look at Ashley, happily chatting to the girls as little Barbara clambered over all of them, then carried on.
"I think I know why, too, and it's probably the same for you. Ashley and I didn't grow-up together; she was born long after I was abducted, and she was already an adult when we met; I was just a vague story about something that happened a long time ago, so there was no 'sibling bond' or anything like that. Ashley explained it to me once; apart from that one family relationship through a shared parent, we have no other connection, no life together as siblings, so it was easy for us, just as it was probably easy for you, and for the same reason. Or perhaps we just have a twisted gene that makes us bunk-up our sisters!"
He grinned as he said it, and I breathed a sigh of relief, and then sensed someone standing behind me. I turned, to see Nick's mother standing there. She put her arm through mine again, and reached up to stroke Nick's cheek.
"I heard what you both said, and Nicky's right; if Shereen's the girl for you, then that's who she is. When Nicky and Ashley first got together it bothered me, and made me angry, but no-one in the world had ever loved her like Nicky did, she was his whole world, and he was hers, and I eventually saw it too. My husband loves her like a daughter, he thinks of her as his daughter, just like Judy and our little girl, Rachel, and he couldn't have wished for a better husband for her than Nicky, so these things do work out, it just takes a little effort. Forget about what happened in the past, that doesn't matter now, but if you're anything like Nicky, then you've got it in you to make it work too, just let her know once in a while how you feel about her!"
She smiled, and piloted me back into the centre of the family to meet her husband, Nick's stepfather. Doctor Nixon came across as a good man; Ashley obviously adored him, as did Judy, his own daughter. I noticed Ashley called him "dad" as often as Judy called Julia "Mom", so there was obviously a lot of love there, and Nick was just as obviously deeply in love with his little sister, four year-old Rachel, looking sleepy and shy and just adorable in her little 'Pokémon' nightdress.
I was sitting quietly for a moment while Nick and Leon went to get coffee for everyone, when Doctor Nixon sat down next to me. I'd found him incredibly easy to talk to, he seemed to be able to draw things out of me that I had no intention of mentioning, but he did it so well, and so unobtrusively, that I found myself talking with him like an old family friend.
Somehow, I found myself telling him about Barbara, and what Shari's mother had told Rick about how she'd died, that our father had murdered her, how he'd boasted to her what he'd done, how he did it, and what he did to Nick.
Doctor Nixon looked at me levelly.
"I saw what Brian Davis did to Nick; I treated him for some of it myself. When Nick came here his back and shoulders were a mass of cuts and welts, his clothes were blood-soaked, and he was suffering from post-traumatic shock, almost like those poor boys coming back from Iraq; he was a mess, and that man boasted of it, did he? Well, I'm not surprised, but you don't know the half of it; he blackmailed his associate here to rape and beat Julia, as her punishment for leaving him; he didn't get to her, but poor Ashley walked into the middle of it, and she took what your father had set in motion."
My shock at hearing this, at the final knowledge of just how depraved and evil my father was, must have shown, because Doctor Nixon clasped my shoulder, a warm, human gesture as I let the shock and horror wash out of me. He looked at me sympathetically as I tried to come to terms with what I was hearing. Just then, Leon handed me a coffee, so I took a long sip, letting the rich brew calm me as Doctor Nixon waited. Eventually I was braced enough to hear the rest of what he had to say.
"Please, go on, I know there's more, so please, finish what you were telling me."
He looked appraisingly at me for a moment, then continued.
"Ashley became an outcast at her school after what...happened to her. No-one but Judy was there for her, the others called her names, shunned her, she had no friends, no social life, none of the things a teenage girl should have. Her mother had no money for new clothes or the latest fashions, and that made it worse; the whole school treated her like some kind of pariah, because of what that man had done to her. They used to call her "Rag Doll", and she only had her mother, and Judy, and it was the two of them against the world."
He paused, staring reflectively into his coffee cup, before continuing, his voice soft and far away.
"Only my Judy was there for her, something I will be proud of until the day I die; that my girl stepped up and stepped in front of Ashley, and faced down the bullies and the name-callers for her friend."
He paused to take another sip of coffee, then continued.
"It took Ashley a long, long time to get past that, and it was only because of Nicky that she managed it at all, and is who she is today. When I first met her mother, I was filled with admiration for her; she'd managed to make a life for her daughter and herself out of the shards and splinters of her old life, and that is just one of the reasons I married her. Now, Ashley's my daughter, Judy's her sister, and Nick is my son, and they're happy, they're a family at last. Brian Davis has caused a lot of misery and heartache for his family and the people around them, but now he's caged-up in a place where he can sit and twiddle his thumbs for the rest of his life while he thinks about what he's done."
He paused, and looked penetratingly at me.
"Nicky, however, still needs help; he's still mourning for his mother, which is how he thinks of Barbara; he believes he left her to die, that he somehow caused her death, and he thinks he needs to atone for it. We've done all we could, but you, his family, are going to have to help him out of that, he can't do it himself; will you help him?"
Of course I agreed; how could I not? With these final revelations of the true depth of my father's evil, all those little things inside me, the parts of him I hadn't yet exorcised now dissipated, and I was finally free of every molecule of him and his influence. I noticed the little girl, Rachel, standing next to me, yawning sleepily and staring shyly at me, so Doctor Nixon beckoned her closer, grinning as she climbed on his lap and twisted round to look at me again.
"Bobby, this is Nick's littlest sister; Rachel, say hello to Bobby!"
"Hello Bobby, my name's Rachel. Why do you look
like Nicky?"
I held out my hand and she took it, clambering from her father's lap to mine.
"I look like Nicky because Nicky's my big brother, just like he's your big brother!" I told her, watching her puzzled look as it slowly cleared up.
"Are you my big brother too?" she piped, her head tilted adorably to one side. I looked at her father, unsure what to say, and he shrugged and nodded, so I grinned back at her.
"Yes, yes I am; and see that man over there? His name's Ricky and he's your big brother too!"
Nicky came over and tousled her hair, grinning his familiar lopsided grin at her.
"What are you doing out of bed? Come on, trouble, before mommy catches you!"
Rachel jumped up and hugged Nick as he picked her up.
"Read to me Nicky, pleeeeaasse! Read me some more about Pooh and Pig-uh-let, pleeeeaasse?"
Nick lifted her up and smiled at her.
"Alright, but only a few pages, okay? Say goodnight to Bobby, pumpkin!" She nodded and dimpled at me.
"Nicky and Ashley took me to the 100 Acre Wood and showed me where Pooh and Pig-uh-let live, and the Woozle, and rabbit's house, Nicky knows Pooh and rabbit, and the Heffalump, and everything! Goodnight Bobby!"
I watched them leave, and felt a hand on my shoulder; it was Shari, a small smile on her lips.
"Who'd have thought you'd be so good with children, Bobby? You know, I really do think you'll be okay! And now we have to go, but Ashley and Nicky will be coming to the hotel tomorrow morning, we have things to talk about, you know what, so let's say goodnight, baby, we'll see them again tomorrow, don't worry."
Leon drove us back to the hotel, and walked up to our room with us, hugging Yaz and Shari goodnight and shaking hands with me and Rick, before telling us he'd see us again at the house before we left. He still had a while left of his unspent vacation time, so he wanted to spend some time with us, and Judy definitely wanted to spend some time with the girls again; as she'd pointed out with a grin, Yaz and Shari were kind of, sort of, something like, her sisters too, and she wanted to get properly acquainted with her extended family.