by A B Whelan
Heather is a beautiful woman with a cascade of thick brunette hair and an intelligent look in her eyes. She works out regularly with her fellow firefighters at the station—an event she frequently shares on Instagram—and travels a lot with her boyfriend. They’ve been to Europe three or four times this past three years. She said my trips with Doug inspired her to see more of the world.
I suspect she isn’t here today to tell me about her trip to Isla de Mujeres last month. So why is she here?
Somebody must have been spying on me from the window because I’m still in my car when the front door opens. Mom’s ashen face comes into view. “Put that damned cigarette out and come inside!”
I flick it out the window, open the door, and step on it. “That’s rich coming from your mouth.”
“Seriously, Vicky, you don’t have to follow all my bad examples.”
I have a comeback for that, but I squelch it. I’ve already been too nasty to my mother, and I feel the emotional struggle inside of me. Making her the object of my frustration is wrong, and I know it.
“Come on, hurry up. The air conditioning is running!”
The new house has more space, a bigger yard, and was half the price of my childhood home, but I haven’t warmed up to it yet. It feels cold to me, impersonal, and void of my childhood memories. There is no fresh pancake and maple-syrup smell mixed with the unmistakable fragrance of Bounce dryer sheets lingering in the air. No baskets of unfolded laundry perched at the end of the dining room table. No dirty shoes are scattered at the entrance. No yelling, music, and TV mixed into one continuous sound of madness. The house is quiet, organized, and reeks of lavender. The only connection I have to it is the overwhelming amount of framed family pictures on the walls. I feel more detached emotionally from this place than I ever have as I step inside the foyer.
I find my entire family seated in the living room. At the sight of me, my father switches off the TV and gets up from the recliner. My body turns into a log as he hugs me. I don’t know this man. He might as well be the killer I’m chasing. He certainly travels to the same areas we’ve been investigating and had the opportunity to carry out the deeds without raising suspicion. A man who can hide his infidelity from the people he lives with can conceal anything.
He holds me at arm’s length and looks me in the eye. “How are you, Vickybee?”
“Not as good as you, I suppose.” I turn out of his clutch and face Heather and Fred curled up on the couch like when they were children. “It’s not like I’m not happy to see you guys, but I thought Mom and I were having a private conversation today.”
Mom steps out from the kitchen carrying a pitcher of lemonade and five cups on a tray. “The story your father and I will share with you today will affect all of you. We are a family. No matter what happens, we will always be a family. I want you to remember that, Victoria.”
“Of course, you are my family. What are you talking about?”
“Please sit down, Victoria. Do you want a cup of lemonade?”
I lick my parched lips and take my place opposite the rest of my family, like the subject of an interrogation. I refuse the glass my mother is handing me, and she accepts my reaction without comment.
“You all know that I talked to the FBI yesterday, but you don’t know what was discussed.”
My father leans forward. “There is something we need to share with all of you.”
“Let my mother finish!” I snap at him. He always takes the words out of her mouth, like he doesn’t think she’s capable of expressing herself without his help. His interruption irritates me now more than ever. “Dickie,” I add to establish a mutual understanding.
The blood drains from my father’s face as a blend of disbelief and shock punches him in the chest.
I don’t care about being a disrespectful daughter. We wouldn’t be in this mess if he hadn’t have fathered bastards all over the country.
Heather is the first one to emerge from the silence. “What’s going on, Mom? You’re scaring me.”
Fred removes his glasses and starts cleaning the lenses with the front of his shirt. “Did you guys do something illegal?”
My mother cups her face with both hands and leans forward. “Oh, Lord, please help me get through this day.”
My ears began to ring, and I press my nails deep into my palms to channel my frustration. “Tell us what’s going on! I can’t take this suspense any longer.”
Mom sips at her lemonade, then sets the glass down on the table with a clang. She kneels in front of me and takes my hands into hers. “I want you to know that I love you more than you can ever imagine. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”
“Okay,” I say, breathlessly, as an eerie feeling gnaws at my insides.
“You are my daughter, Victoria … but I didn’t give birth to you.”
My neck flexes. “What?”
“Your father and I took you in when you were born. You never met your birth mother.”
“I’m … adopted?”
Mom is having difficulty looking me in the eyes. “I never wanted to tell you about this because I didn’t want the truth to affect your life. You’ve grown into a beautiful and confident woman, and we are so proud of you. It doesn’t matter how you came into this world or into our family. What matters is who you are now and who you choose to be.”
“What are you talking about, Mom?” I hear Heather’s voice, but it’s faint in the background, as if my ears are refusing to hear more. “What do you mean Vicky is adopted?”
Mom stands up with the support of the coffee table, walks to the wall, and stops in front of a picture of me as a baby. “There was an … ‘accident’ at the care facility I worked at as a young nurse. We were caring for a young woman suffering from a serious spinal and brain injury following a car accident. She was unable to move, speak, or express herself in any way. Her name was Emma Alexis.” She takes the picture from the wall and hugs it to her chest.
“She lost her parents in a motor vehicle accident. She only had her grandparents to look after her, but they couldn’t provide her the medical care she required. They entrusted us with their granddaughter's care, and we looked after her for years.”
My heart begins beating faster. I don’t know where this story is going, but I have a bad feeling about it.
Mom hands me the picture. “Look at you, you were such a happy and beautiful baby.”
“I don’t want to look at the picture.”
Tears stream from my mother’s eyes. My dad hands her a tissue, and she blows her nose, sitting back down on the couch. “Something terrible happened to Emma. We were responsible because we were the ones who were supposed to protect her. But we didn’t.”
“Do you want me to continue?” my father asks, but I refuse to look at him.
“No, no. It’s okay, honey. I want to tell Vicky what we did.”
“Oh, Mother, what did you do?” Fred whimpers. I can’t look at him either. I’m sitting alone, isolated, like a criminal, an outcast.
Mom takes another sip of her lemonade, then clears her throat. “The establishment was owned by a man named James Sullivan.”
My suspicion curdles into fear.
“He was a kind man and a gentleman. Everybody loved him at the home—patients and employees alike. But he had a deadbeat brother. A … loser … It was hard to imagine the two men were related. After three failed marriages and even more failed businesses, James took pity on his brother. He helped him start a window-washing and roof-cleaning business. James hired him for the care home, and he’d come by every couple of months with a crew to remove leaves and debris from the gutters, clean the glass panels that wrapped around the building, and power wash the tile roof. He also …” Mom looks at Dad in panic. “I can’t say it, honey. I-I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Like a stone statue, I sit unmoving. I want to encourage my mom to finish her story, but the words don’t form in my mouth.
Heather sits down next to her and drapes her a
rm over her fragile back. “You can do it, Mom. Tell us what happened.”
Every tragedy starts with a single event. Going down the road we shouldn’t have taken, saying something with shouldn’t have said, or doing something we shouldn’t have done. Victoria Emma Collins was slowly dying inside. I was about to be reborn as someone else, I just didn’t know who yet.
Mom takes a deep breath and holds it in, trying to buy time to find a better way to deliver the news she is about to bestow on us. On me.
She swallows hard and looks me in the eye. “Emma Alexis is your birth mother, Victoria. She is the one who brought you into this world.”
“Wait! What?” I find myself sinking back into the couch so deeply, I’m nearly lost in its soft cushions. “I thought you said she was in a coma?”
“No, she wasn’t in a coma; she was incapacitated. And Sullivan’s waste-of-space brother took advantage of her. He raped her … only God knows how many times. And she got pregnant.”
A jolt of shock, like a rocket, launches me to my feet, and I grasp my head because my brain feels like it will explode. “What are you saying?” I whimper. “That my real mother is a disabled woman and my father is, is… a rapist?”
Panic is coming. I crouch down before I faint.
“Here, drink this!” My father offers me a shot glass with a dark-mahogany liquid in it. “It’s Jägermeister.”
I drain the glass with one gulp. The burn is intense, but it can’t overpower the throbbing pain in my head. The buzz comes fast—as soon as the liquor hits my empty stomach, and I falter … plop to the ground in shock. I feel Heather’s body pressing against me.
“Where is she? My mother?” I whisper.
“She’s passed away.” I hear my mom saying. “Less than two years after you were born. Emma’s grandfather had died, and her grandmother made the decision to remove Emma from life support.”
I don’t know those people. I have no memory or any connection to my real mother. Yet hearing about her death breaks my heart. I begin to cry like I’ve never allowed myself to cry before. All of my sorrow and grief about Susie’s disappearance, my father’s lies, Doug’s betrayal, and now this come crashing down on me.
“It’s okay. We’ll get through this,” Heather whispers into my ear, stroking my hair.
I’m so swallowed up in heartache and self-pity that I’ve almost forgotten the most obvious question—the one that’s been dangling in front of my eyes for the last week.
“If I’m not your child. If I’m the daughter of a woman in a vegetative state. If I’m the result of a rape. Then who is Blake Sullivan? How can we be related?”
My mother opens her mouth, but the sound doesn’t come out, and she looks like a fish gasping for air.
Dad puts his hand on her shoulder like a knight in shining armor coming to her rescue. “Blake Sullivan is your brother, Vicky,” he says. “Your twin brother.”
27
I’m disoriented and breathing slowly, my mouth emitting random wheezing sounds. I go to the kitchen, refill my shot glass with Jägermeister, and toss the drink down with one gulp. It flows down my throat like hot needles. I pour another one.
A hand gently presses against my back. I turn to look at my mother’s pain-stricken face.
She removes a shot glass from the cabinet and pours herself a drink too. “I’m so sorry you had to find out about this under these circumstances.”
My brain activity is all over the map, my mind firing out an array of thoughts and speculations.
“Blake Sullivan can’t be my twin brother,” I say with conviction. “His birthday is two months earlier than mine.”
“There is an explanation for that. Blake is your twin. He was born a couple of minutes before you. The doctor who delivered you both managed the paperwork. He couldn’t get birth certificates for the two of you dated the same day. We had to wait two months before we could register you.”
“You were tampering with legal documents?” I’m on the verge of hyperventilating. My heart feels as if someone is stabbing my chest. “My birth certificate is fake? My god, what if they find out about this at the Bureau?”
“I didn’t say anything about it to the FBI. I’m not that stupid.”
I can’t even look my mother in the eye. I grew up with a sense of pride, honesty, and integrity. She taught me all those things, but now my whole concept of what’s right and wrong has been ripped out of me like a page from a book.
“I can’t believe you were capable of coming up with this elaborate plan to deceive everyone.”
“We had no choice. By the time we found out about Emma’s pregnancy, an abortion would have been too risky, so we let her carry her babies to full term. James had an old doctor friend from college who helped with the delivery. Back in the 70s, that man was mixed up with a bad crowd. He eventually straightened out his life, but he still had connections from his old days. He was also the one who helped us illegally obtain birth certificates.”
This whole conversation is visibly wearing down my mother. The black circles under her eyes have become darker, her eyelids deeply sagging, and her lips wrinkled and dry. I watch her closely, but I don’t know what to say.
She pours me another glass of Jägermeister. “Nobody will ever know about your birth certificate. We never reported the crime. You were born in a nursing home, not a hospital. Your father and I claimed you as our own and took you home. My boss and his wife adopted the boy.”
I let out a long, troubling breath. “I need a cigarette.”
Mom opens the junk drawer and takes out a pack of Camel Blues. “Let’s go to the laundry room. That’s where I smoke when it’s hot and humid outside, like today.”
In our old house, the laundry room was a place for dirty shoes, sweaty jerseys, coolers, team flags, and a collection of single socks whose pair had mysteriously disappeared. The top of the dryer held an assortment of detergents and cleaning chemicals. A tablecloth draped over a shower curtain rod concealed the hardware on the wall behind the washer and dryer. Their new laundry room is quite the opposite: everything is clean and organized. Perfection.
I feel an urgent need to trash the place.
Mom turns on the exhaust fan and closes the door behind us. I light a cigarette for each of us.
“We did a terrible thing, Victoria. We covered up a heinous crime. But we needed to protect you and your brother.”
“I didn’t know you were such a scheming criminal mastermind. How come I always had to be the perfect kid growing up? You never cut me any slack. You would have skinned me alive if I cheated on a test at school!”
“What I did back then doesn’t define who I am. And believe me when I say that it has haunted me every day since.”
“Bad conscience, huh? I guess that explains your smoking and drinking.”
My mom gives me a hard stare. “Don’t be nasty, Victoria. It doesn’t suit you.”
I take a deep drag from my cigarette. “What happened to the rapist?” I can’t bring myself to call that animal “father.” Let alone digest the truth about my past. I don’t consider my childhood a lie or a waste. My experiences growing up shaped me into who I am today. I won’t allow myself to doubt who I am because my father was a rapist, a perverted criminal. Rapists aren’t born. It’s not a hereditary gene. It’s not in my blood. But that man’s blood runs in my veins. At the thought of it, a shudder runs through me, and I gag. I lean over the laundry room sink and upchuck the four shots of Jägermeister. I throw my burning cigarette into the slosh and wash it down with water.
Mom hands me a towel to wipe my mouth. She places the back of her hand against my forehead, checking for fever as if I were a little kid coming down with the flu. I jerk away. How can I ever trust her again if she is such an elaborate liar?
“I’ll make you a cup of tea,” Mom says, leaving the room.
“Wait!” I yell after her. “Where is he? Did you let him get away with it?”
“He’s in prison.”
Her answer isn’t what I expected. “So, you reported him? Then how did you manage to pull off this scam?”
She takes a deep breath and blinks long. “It wasn’t a scam, Victoria. We raised you as our own. We wanted you to have a happy childhood, a better life, not grow up in the foster-care system.”
Blake didn’t have a happy childhood. “How much time did he get for raping my mother?” I ask, cutting off her self-explanatory speech.
Mom’s neck flexes, and she focuses her eyes on her hands. I now understand her frequent mood swings when I was a kid. One day she would be the funniest and cheeriest mom in the world, taking us to the movies or for ice cream. Then the next day she would fall into depression, having little to no patience with us.
“Twenty-five to life, with no possibility of parole for a minimum of fifteen years.”
“Then he’s out? He committed the crime more than thirty-four years ago. There’s no way he’d still be incarcerated. When was the last time you checked on him?”
Mom leans her back against the doorframe, then slides down to the tile floor. I leap to her, grasping her arms. “Mom, are you okay?”
She touches my face. “I’m fine, just a little lightheaded. It all happened so long ago. It’s difficult to talk about this. I’ve spent my entire life trying to make up for what we did, knowing that our secret would eventually come out. I always knew this day would come. The day when all the good deeds I’ve done throughout my life won’t mean a thing and I’ll be judged by the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
I plop back onto my butt. “You didn’t report him, did you? He’s in prison for an unrelated charge, isn’t he?”
My mom reaches for my hand, but I don’t want her to touch me. I scoot away. I’ve looked up to this woman my entire life. I adored her and was ever-grateful for the sacrifices she made for me. But that person I loved isn’t real. It was a role, a persona played by my mother and inspired by her guilt.
“I need you to understand why we did what we did.”
“What reason could you possibly have for letting that animal get away with rape? Not to mention that if he was capable of assaulting a defenseless, incapacitated woman, what else was he capable of doing? I’m chasing a serial killer right now. For all I know, it could be him!”