The Amber Lee Boxed Set

by Katerina Martinez

  But I hadn’t killed her, nor had I hurt her or anyone else. As far as my ‘episodes’ went, this one was mild.

  Aaron and Jackal brought me back to the house where Damien and Frank were waiting, but my mom, who hadn’t seen or experienced anything like this in years, had locked herself in her room. Fear made people do irrational things; that’s what made werewolves such great hunters. A scared prey makes mistakes. But Aaron wouldn’t let me go anywhere near her, at least not until he had spoken to her, so I got changed and waited downstairs in the living room with Frank, Damien and Jackal.

  This wasn’t a hang-out, though. I believed what I had just done, but I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to have kept my cool, to have asked questions. Let the tears come, sure, let the beast come later. Just give me a minute to process the information that my real father, the man whose blood runs in my veins, was dead.

  “It’s a self-defense thing,” Jackal said. “The beast lashes out; it doesn’t like bad news.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “To all of you. I didn’t want to lose it.”

  “Look, what you were just told was some serious shit. I would have lost it too. Pretty sure these two would have also.”

  Frank and Damien had been oddly quiet, but I had barely noticed anyone’s presence since I sat down on the arm-chair closest to the fireplace. On the counter above it, there were photographs of the family; my mom, my dad and Corey smiling and all that. Selfies, mostly.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “My mom lied to me all these years and I… I never… I didn’t even know. I didn’t want to believe this was actually going to happen.”

  “None of us did,” Frank said. “Out of the three of us, your family issues were the most vanilla.”

  “Vanilla?”

  “So your dad thought you were a freak and a lesbian. Big deal. At least he left you alone to live your life. He didn’t try to control you and tell you what to do and how to do it. Aaron’s dad split, Damien’s family was part of a cult, and mine… well, mine was the opposite of Damien’s, but still part of a cult.”

  “I don’t think you’ve ever talked about your family before,” I said.

  “I’m pretty private about that part of my life, but I’ll never forget what happened. My past is a part of me, probably still a part of Damien’s too.”

  Damien nodded, but he seemed vacant. Distracted. Hurt?

  “You had me at cult,” Jackal said, “Spill it.”

  Frank rolled his eyes.

  “Frank, no, you don’t have to,” I said, “Really.”

  “It’s fine. I guess I have a point to make so I might as well.” He stood, crossed toward the window, and lit a cigarette. Even from the other side of the room, I could smell the smoke. It tickled my nostrils. “My father was a pastor,” he said, “A big-shot with the local churchgoers. Made a lot of in-roads, kissed a lot of ass, and had the whole community under his thumb. I was a youth pastor.”

  Jackal’s eyes lit up but she stifled the laugh.

  “Never would have pegged you as a youth pastor, Frank,” Damien said.

  “Better believe it. With my cheekbones, I looked like a fucking angel in white. And my father ate it all up, but then he caught me with another guy and… let’s just say it would have been better if he had caught me with livestock.”

  “I’m sorry, Frank,” I said.

  “Don’t be. My father was a tyrant. If my mom called me up today and told me the man I thought was my father wasn’t my father, I’d be pretty stoked.”

  “My dad wasn’t exactly a tyrant.”

  “That’s probably what your issue is. He wasn’t the best, but he also wasn’t the worst. When is he back?”

  “A couple of days.”

  Frank exhaled a stream of smoke out the window. “Think we can wait that long so you can clear the air with him? Your mom’s gonna tell him, obviously,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Damien said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I don’t know if she’s told him. The timeline is important here.”

  “You saying my mom cheated on my dad?” I asked.

  “Does that change anything?” Damien said.

  “I… I don’t know…”

  I caught Damien’s eyes and for an instant sensed a kind of pain in them. It wasn’t external pain that you can kill with a pill, but internal pain; the kind that keeps you up at night, thinking. Maybe the topic of cheating had brought stuff up inside of him too? We both thought our relationship would work out and, on paper, it should have… but life is never that simple.

  “You need to talk to your mom,” Jackal said. “I may be a casual observer to this whole situation, but I had a lot of questions for my mom before she bit the dust. Questions I never got to ask. You have a chance to get to know your real dad through her. Take it.”

  “I don’t know if I can forgive her,” I said, “She should have told me.”

  Damien stood. He tugged on his shirt, looked at me—into me—and said “We all make mistakes, Amber.”

  I watched him frozen—paralyzed—by… something, as he walked out of the room. What the heck had happened I didn’t know, but I almost couldn’t move. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t breathe. My heart had started thumping hard again and I was almost too scared to reply. What did he mean? And why was that so intense?

  Frank put his cigarette out and closed the metal box. “You think you can go check on him?” he asked Jackal.

  Surprisingly, Jackal nodded and followed Damien into the adjoining room, leaving Frank and I alone.

  I let the breath escape my lungs and turned my eyes toward Frank. “This is all messed up,” I said.

  “I know, honey,” he said, sitting next to me. “But you’ve gotta harden up. You’re already getting a hold of yourself. You’ve taken the first step. Now go take another one.”

  “You think I should go talk to her?”

  “I can’t tell you what to do. I like telling you what to do, but I can’t right now. This, everything that’s happening, the strength—the choices—needs to come from you.”

  I nodded, took a deep breath, and stood. “Thanks, Frank,” I said.

  “Don’t just thank me. Thank Damien, too. I think he needs it.”

  “I’ll go talk to my mom and then I’ll talk to him,” I said as I made my way toward the stairs.

  “Oh, and Amber,” Frank said.

  I stopped, looked at him. “Yeah?”

  “Ask your mom what the Wi-Fi password is? I’m bored as shit out here.”

  A smile spread across my lips. I nodded and pulled myself up the stairs, navigating a house I felt less and less welcome in every second I spent inside it. My mom’s bedroom door, the one at the end of the corridor, was closed, but I could hear talking on the other side of it.

  “Now or never, Amber,” I said to myself. I still had no idea what I was going to do, whether I was going to forgive her or not, but I was done hiding from things.

  I knocked on the door.

  ***

  “Aaron, could you give us a minute?” I asked.

  I was risking losing control to the beast around my mom again, and this time with Aaron too far away to stop me from hurting her, but he didn’t need to be here for the conversation I was about to have. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep Aaron in the dark; I just thought my mom would have been more open to talk to me if we had some privacy.

  Aaron came up to me, rubbed my shoulders, and asked “Are you sure?”

  I nodded. “I’m fine. I promise.”

  He kissed me on the forehead. “I’ll be on the other side of that door. A heartbeat away.”

  “Just like you always are.”

  Aaron smiled a soft smile and headed out, leaving my mom and me alone in her bedroom. I had definitely never been in here before, but it looked like any bedroom a loving husband and wife would share. A big bed covered in pillows, a closet filled with both their clothes, a TV mounted on the wall. My mom seem
ed small on the bed. Hunched.

  “Can I sit next to you?” I asked.

  She nodded. Her eyes were puffy and red and I could smell the bitter, hot fear in the air, but she was handling it well.

  I approached, sat down, and accepted the slight flinch when our arms brushed together. “I’m sorry about before,” I said. “I should have warned you.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said, “Aaron explained.”

  “Everything?”

  “He told me enough; I figured out the rest.”

  I tucked a few stray strands of hair over my left ear so that she could see my face, and then I looked at her, really looked at her, reaching with my mind and with my invisible senses, trying to find her. But she wasn’t there. I mean, she was, of course, physically present. But spiritually? It was like she had no aura to speak of, nothing to give me a measure of her emotions or to even suggest she was a real, living, human being.

  “I didn’t know how to tell you,” she started to say. “You were growing older and you… you started to look so much like him and I just, as the days went on, it got harder and harder to tell you.”

  “Why?” I asked, “Did you think I wouldn’t take it well?”

  “You’re my daughter. I had a feeling I knew how you would take it, but you’re my daughter. I knew you would have questions. Questions I didn’t want to risk answering.”

  The word risk came at me hard and sent a shiver crawling up my spine. “Risk?” I asked, confronting the issue instead of beating around the bush, “What risk?”

  “Your father and I… we were in love, but it was a love we couldn’t keep.”

  “Mom…” I said, “You have to have believed I could have handled this.”

  “No,” she said, wiping the pooling tears from her eyes, “It wasn’t just the love I had to keep from you. Maybe if that was the only reason it wouldn’t have been enough for me to keep me from telling you the truth, but there’s more to it… and it has to do with what you told me downstairs.”

  Her hand was shaking so I took it. “Mom,” I said, “You have to tell me… all of it. I need to know the truth.”

  She smiled at the touch of my hand, nodded, and then stood. I watched her walk to the side of the bed, which belonged to my dad, and pulled a box out from under it. Intrigued, I approached. The box was worn and scuffed by the passage of time. I recognized it as the same kind of brown box she had left behind in the attic back home, some of which still held a lot of her old Wiccan charms and spell-books inside.

  “This was his,” she said, handing the box to me. “This is all I have left of him.”

  I didn’t have to ask her what was inside the box. I hadn’t even looked inside but I was sure I would find pictures of the two of them, at least, or something of his; maybe an old shirt, a necklace, a ring. This box wasn’t big enough to hold much, but the energy of the box was enormous. My fingers were tingling, and a kind of soothing warmth had started to fill my extremities and was working its way into my chest.

  I wasn’t ready for what I found inside.

  Careful not to disturb the box’s contents, I placed it on the bed and unclipped the lid which squeaked when I pulled it open. A wooden smell came up to greet me, but the smell of man was there too. It was in the grease still imprinted upon the many papers and photos in the box, in the fabric of the knitted grey scarf rolled into a tight ball to the side, and in the lock of hair kept hidden inside a pouch at the very bottom of the box.

  One by one I retrieved every piece and laid them next to each other on the bed. My mom, I noticed, was leafing through an old booklet she had taken out of a small envelope. She was being careful not to let tears fall on the pages, wiping her under-eyes incessantly, but I was drawn to the pouch with the lock of hair. It didn’t surprise me that my mom, a witch, would have something like this. What did surprise me, though, was that my mind was—somehow—forming a mental image of the man. Tall, with hair as dark as jet, and eyes as green as a Caribbean sea. How was I getting all that from smell alone?

  My mom handed me the notebook. Inside, I found poems; lines and lines of poems, personal thoughts, and doodles. “My dad was an artist?” I asked.

  She nodded. It made sense, didn’t it? “He sketched too, but I don’t have any of those. He loved writing poems, though. He wanted to turn them into lyrics for songs.”

  “But… my dad was a werewolf, wasn’t he?”

  “He was. But he wasn’t like any of the werewolves I had ever met. He was quiet. Humble. Fiercely loyal to his friends… to me…”

  A great many thoughts scrambled through my mind, neurons firing like fireworks in my brain. But the one question burning a hole in my chest was this one: why had the universe chosen to deny me from meeting this quiet, powerful introvert? I could have learned so much from him, could have had someone to turn to when everything seemed bleak. Why?

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  “Ethan… Ethan Lee.”

  “No way. My dad’s last name was Lee? How is that possible”

  My mom smiled, laughed, and I laughed with her for the first time in a long time. The warm tingles came again, but this time they came from her. She picked up a small envelope, opened it, and produced a number of pictures from it. Pictures. My heart started to thrum in my chest. I braced myself, looked at one, and the image I had formed of my dad in my mind manifested before my very eyes. My mom could have been my twin, and my dad—so strong, young, and handsome—I was stunned. She was pregnant. I didn’t see a ring on her finger, but that still didn’t explain his last name.

  When she showed me a picture of the man who took the photo, a man whom I had known since I came into the world, sitting side by side with my real father, I didn’t know what to say. Charles, the man my mother had married, was sharing a beer with Ethan, the man whose blood ran in my veins.

  “How is this possible?” I asked.

  “Your father and your… Charles… they were cousins.”

  “Cousins?” I stared at the picture again. The resemblance was there. Sure it was.

  “They were more like brothers, but biologically they were cousins.”

  “So they were really close?” I paused to stuff the words back in my mouth. The questions may have been too much for her to handle. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. You have to ask these questions. I want you to.”

  I nodded. “Do you know what I’m going to ask you next, then?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Are you ready?”

  “I am.”

  I took a pause, a breath, a moment to let my heart relax, and said, “How did he die?”

  She sat down on the foot of the bed and took the pouch with the lock of hair in her hands. “Where do I start?”

  “At the beginning.”

  My mom pressed her lips into a line, closed her eyes, and fought hard against the urge to cry. “Your real father died to protect me.”

  In an instant, the ambient temperature in the room seemed to plummet. “W-what do you mean?” I was almost too afraid to ask, but I had to. I felt like she needed it, she needed to tell it as much as I needed to hear it.

  “It was a long time ago,” she said, “Your father and I, our relationship, it was young. But it was about the time I got pregnant that strange things started happening to me.”

  “What kind of strange things?” I asked.

  “I thought someone had put a hex on me at first, and then I thought someone was following me. It was both; a woman was following me and meddling in my life with magick.”

  “With demons?”

  “I didn’t know what to call them at first, but yes. She couldn’t get them to latch onto me, though, and that… it made her mad. One night, she just showed up out of thin air and attacked us both. Your father died so that I could escape. So that we could escape. He was a hero.”

  I closed my eyes, turned away, and counted—in my mind—backwards from a hundred until the fire in my throat subsided. Then I
turned around, knelt before her, and took her hands in mine.

  “Mom,” I said, “I’m so, so sorry you went through all that.”

  “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it all. But Amber, Charles was a hero too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Charles stepped up. Raised you and Corey as his own children. He did it all because he loved your father, loved me, and loved you and your sister. I know he’s got a hard shell, but he really does love you.”

  I nodded and smiled. “I know that now.”

  She put a hand on my cheek, smiled a teary smile, and brushed my hair away from my face. “We did everything we could to protect you. I put a spell on us to keep her out of our reach and destroyed my own aura so that she couldn’t find me. We moved. I had thought about destroying your aura when you were born too, just to be sure, but I was counting on her trail to have gone cold by the time you had grown up. I didn’t want to deny you the chance to become the person you were meant to be.”

  “Did you know all along what would happen to me?”

  “In a way.”

  “That’s why you kept the box…”

  “But I never thought she would find you. I thought she was after me, not you. Before we moved out of Raven’s Glen, I had a dream about a snake. I knew she had found me even after all these years, so I left hoping she would follow me and leave you alone.”

  “Why did you move here? Why not somewhere farther away?”

  “Because if she was going to find me and kill me, I wanted to be buried close to Ethan…”

  “My… my father is buried here?”

  She nodded. “New Heart Cemetery.”

  I must have stared at my mother for minutes without speaking before I finally asked “Can I see his grave?”

  “You can,” she said, “But wait, before you go anywhere, I need you to know that I only threw my magick life away to protect you; to keep you safe so that your father didn’t die in vain, and to make sure she didn’t get her hands on anyone else close to me. I would have been there for you if I could have.”