AMBER_His to Reclaim

by Theodora Taylor

“What?” My panicked mind can barely register the request. “No, Amber.”

  “Start recording now. It’s the only way to make sure everyone knows what really happened here,” she continues on, her voice now just as deliberate and calm as it had been when she was giving orders to the kid. “I don’t want my mistake blowing back on you. And Lucky needs a father.”

  Fuck… “No, Ambs… no…”

  “Please, Luca. There’s no time to argue about this,” she says, her voice tight with tears. “He’s almost here.”

  “Hide! You hide, too!”

  “No, Luca. I hid once and everybody I loved died. This is what I’ve been training for. I’m the mom now. The wife. And I’m going to keep my promise to protect our son. So please, Luca, if you love me. Push record. Please, he’s almost here.”

  I want her to run. I want her to hide. However, in the end, she’s right. We’re almost there, but so is he. I open up a recording app on my phone “Okay, okay, Ambs. Okay, I’m taping the call now. But stay alive. For me, stay alive until I get there.”

  “Believe me, I’m going to try,” she answers. “I love you. I’ll always love you, no matter what.”

  “Don’t die,” I tell her, my throat clogged with emotion. “You’re the only woman I will ever l—”

  “What the hell are you doing up here?” a voice demands before I can finish telling her how much I love her, too. It’s nasal with a harsh Boston accent. Just like Amber’s father. And when I hear it, closer…so much closer to Amber than I am, it feels like Danny Peretti’s hammy fist is punching me again, right in the gut.

  “Did that fucking kid let you out?” the voice demands, his tone crazed and violent. As if he’s on the verge of killing everything. My wife, my child, and the little girl she told to hide.

  Somewhere in the distance of my headphones, the pilot’s voice tells us we’re about to descend, and that’s when I see it. The cabin Deltano pulled me out of sixteen years ago. If not the exact same one, a replica so precise I can’t imagine the similarities aren’t intentional. My stomach turns to concrete at the sight of it.

  This.

  This is the nightmare.

  I’m strung up in the basement.

  I’m standing next to my wife’s hospital bed.

  And I have never in my life felt so fucking useless, as Amber proclaims, “Danny Peretti Jr., you have conspired with your brother to kidnap me and my baby, Luca Jacob Ferraro Jr. You’ve also kidnapped and killed Rock.”

  Fuck, Rock. My heart tightens. I’d been so relieved to find out Rock hadn’t betrayed me only to discover now that I’ve failed him, lost him.

  I glance over at Stone, and find him already staring back.

  “Rock?” he asks through the headphones.

  I shake my head, wanting to reach out to him, but knowing better than to try.

  Knowledge darkens his gaze…. then is quickly replaced by ice cold murderous intent.

  Meanwhile Amber continues laying down the facts.

  Her voice sounds much further away now. She must have put down the phone and purposefully stepped away from it. But she’s speaking just as clear and loud as if she would if she were in a courtroom, arguing what could possibly be her last case. “You will pay for your crimes unless you stop now and turn yourself into the police.”

  A beat of silence. Then: “No… no, that’s lawyer talk! Peter said you’d do this… try to get in my head,” Danny Jr. yells back. “You’re trying to turn me against my brother, but he’s got it all planned out. Ferraro will think you just left him until it’s too late.”

  “Danny Peretti Jr, you refuse to see reason,” Amber continues on in the same loud, courtroom voice. “The body of Rock Ferraro, Luca’s cousin, is downstairs in the basement where you placed him after torturing him and stabbing him to death. And now, you’ve returned to kill me, too, so that you can pin my and my baby’s murder on my husband, Luca Ferraro, who I love and definitely did not leave. You helped kidnapped me so that Peter Peretti could frame the man I love for murder.”

  “What? Why are you talking like that?” Danny Jr. demands.

  “Your unclaimed daughter, Daniella let me out of the cell you locked me away in after you beat her mother to death in a fit of rage. She is blameless in all of this. You kidnapped me, and she let me out of the cell you were unlawfully keeping me in. She’s very brave and deserves a good home. One much better than this remote life you’ve set up for her in the woods. If anything happens to her, that’s squarely on you, Danny Peretti Jr, the man who has kidnapped my baby and me on the orders of Peter Peretti. Because I’m the illegitimate sister you two wish had never been born—”

  “What the fuck is that? Is that a helicopter?” Danny Jr. suddenly yells. “Did you call somebody?”

  Amber doesn’t answer, but the helicopter’s loud descent must be answer enough, because he yells, “FUCK! Okay, I’ve got a gun trained on you, you blind bitch. If you want to live, you’re coming with me. That baby, too, or else I’m going to—”

  He never gets a chance to finish that threat.

  Amber let’s out a battle cry and then comes a loud male grunt and the sounds of dishes and heavy furniture crashing to the ground.

  She’s fighting him. Fighting him with her bare hands, in order to keep him away from our son. I’ve never been so proud or so scared.

  Almost there… almost there… But all I can do is listen to the fight as the helicopter sets down. Praying that we’re not too late—

  But then the sound of a gunshot abruptly cuts off my prayers.

  The Best Is Yet To Come

  LUCA

  Seven months later

  You know, in the future, scientists could come up with some way to keep rich fucks like me alive forever, like sci-fi authors are always threatening. But even if they did, I doubt I’ll ever forget what I saw when I ran into the kitchen of the house that looked exactly like the one I was kept prisoner in sixteen years ago. Hell, a thousand years could go by, and I’ll still remember every second of following that trail of blood until it ended at the dead body. The first one.

  Too late…too late.

  “Mr. Luca? Mr. Luca?”

  I turn to look over my shoulder at the now six-year-old girl calling my name. She’s sitting on the kitchen floor with Luca Jr. on “don’t kill yourself” duty since he’s crawling right up to anything that could end his life these days.

  “Are you okay?” Daniella asks me.

  No…no, I’m not. And, not for the first time, I wonder if buying the sprawling estate next door to Zahir and Prin was the best idea. Especially considering what happened on the day I toured it. Too many memories.

  “I’m good, kid,” I answer, voice tight as I watch Danny Peretti’s two grandchildren play on my kitchen floor. “Just thinking.”

  “About the bad stuff that happened?” she asks, studying me in the same soft, worried way her aunt did before her eyesight was taken.

  “Yeah,” I answer. Easily. No use lying, I figure. Daniella’s a kid, but right now I’m dropping a couple of Ks on a psychologist to help her process all the “bad stuff” that happened, too.

  “I’m sorry my Dad killed your…” she starts to say, doing exactly what the psychologists warned me about. Trying to take on the blame for what her parents did. Trying to make up for their evil deeds. Just like Amber spent her entire working life doing before I kidnapped her and set off the grisly chain of events that would end her career as a lawyer for the disabled.

  “Not your fault,” I answer, cutting her off before she can finish that thought.

  She cast her eyes down, not accepting my absolution. It’s probably going to take a lot more sessions with her shrink before she believes the truth. That she’s innocent. That she deserves her place here with Lucky and me, instead of in the group home she would have landed in if I hadn’t intervened. Another flash of memory hits me. The image of finding her curled up in the farthest corner of that perfect replica jail cell seven months ago, along w
ith Rock’s dead body. A huge messy afro and four skinny brown appendages, wrapped around my wailing son, so obviously prepared to take a bullet for her baby cousin. Until I announced myself as Luca, and she’d looked up at me like a savior. “Aunt Amber said you would come! Is she okay?” she’d asked.

  “Mr. Luca?” The voice once again tugs me back to the current day. Like a touchstone.

  “Yeah, kid?” I ask, coming out of my bad memory daze.

  “I think the waffles are burning,” she says, pointing at the waffle iron she helped me pick out at Crate N’ Barrel a few days ago. There’s smoke coming out of it now.

  “Motherfucker…” I pull open the lid, and sure enough, the heart-shaped waffle inside isn’t a light brown color like on the box but burnt to a black crisp.

  “Want me to do it?” she asks.

  I look at her. Do I want to cede the special breakfast I pledged to make myself to the six-year-old daughter of the man who irrevocably changed the course of my life?

  “Yeah, go for it, kid,” I say. Then I step right aside and go over to pick Lucky up off the floor.

  She’s very brave and deserves a good home.

  Amber’s words ring in my ears as I hold Lucky close and for the next twenty minutes, watch Daniella handle the waffles, even more deftly than Amber would have.

  But my life wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. And maybe that’s why the bad stuff memories are piling up worse than usual this morning.

  “Mr. Luca?”

  I look up from nuzzling Lucky’s soft dark curls to find Daniella depositing another perfect heart-shaped waffle onto a third plate with a spatula.

  “Breakfast will be done soon. Are you ready?”

  No, I think. The hard discussion I’ve got to have with her over this breakfast she made, looms in the back of my mind. But aloud, I say, “Yeah, let me just get these toys cleaned up.”

  My heart storms in my chest with memories and indecision as we walk down the hall with the breakfast tray, because seven months ago, my worst nightmare came true…

  Daniella opens the door.

  I lost Rock and some mornings…

  I pull in a deep breath and step through the door.

  …some mornings, it’s still hard to believe that I didn’t lose Amber, too.

  Even as Daniella shouts, “Happy Wedding Anniversary, Aunt Amber!”

  Amber’s already sitting up in our bed. She’s probably been in that position since I told her she needed to stay her ass there and let me handle breakfast and the kids all by myself this morning. And knowing her, there’s a laptop lurking somewhere on the bed, quickly shoved underneath a pillow when she heard us coming down the hall.

  “Oh my God, this smells delicious! Did you make me waffles?” she asks, turning her face in the direction of Daniella’s happy voice.

  “Mr. Luca helped,” Daniella answers graciously because apparently, she lives in some kind of universe where fucking up your own anniversary breakfast so bad, a six-year-old has to take over is the same as helping.

  “Oh, wow, baby. This is so romantic!” Amber says with a huge smile, though I can tell she’s biting back several comments about me delegating the making of our second first-anniversary breakfast duty to her six-year-old-niece. “And Dani girl, seriously, you shouldn’t have done all of this for me,” she says, as Daniella and I set up the tray across her lap.

  Amber’s probably less surprised than I was that her niece could actually pull off waffles like a pro. Alcoholic mother syndrome, Amber had explained to me about her niece’s ability to do everything from cooking to cleaning to managing all her own first-grade homework by herself. “You learn to be pretty self-sufficient early on when your main parent’s not dependable.”

  Amber and I talk a lot more now. About our pasts. About our future. But today as I settle on the bed with Luca Jr., the past comes rushing back at me with a new wave of memories…

  Danny Jr’s eyes still crazed even in death. He’d been planning to kill everybody I love. My wife… my son… maybe his own daughter, too. But Amber had stopped it. Had kicked the gun out of his hand and fought him viciously.

  The fight had traveled out of the kitchen and into the living room, where Amber had tripped over a side table. That fall would have been the death knell for most people in mortal combat—blind and sighted alike. But for Amber, it became the Hail Mary she needed against her much larger opponent when a half-empty beer bottle fell onto her prone body, like a gift from God. Recognizing its shape, she’d grabbed it by the neck and smashed it against the ground… then stabbed it into her brother’s neck, just as he got on top of her in an attempt to strangle her with his meaty hands.

  The beer bottle stab had done the trick, but it had also put her in a dangerous position when Danny Jr. fell forward on top of her, dead and spurting blood. Even with all the adrenaline pumping through her body, she hadn’t been able to push him off. And that’s how Stone and I had found her, nearly smothered to death underneath Danny’s dead body.

  “He’s thinking about the bad stuff again…” Daniella says to Amber, pulling me back to the present for the third time this morning.

  “Luca, are you okay?” Amber asks, her voice filling with worry because these days she knows the things I was too macho to tell her before. About the PTSD from her father’s beating. And that occasionally I still have nightmares, in which we lift Danny Jr’s dead body, and she’s not alive underneath.

  “I’m fine,” I tell her, my eyes trailing over to Daniella. No, this wasn’t how I expected life to turn out, but as Amber pointed out when we received her niece’s paperwork from the state, “Look at this, she was born five days after we lost the baby.”

  She’s not a replacement for the baby we lost, but there’s no denying she fits into our family. Better than I expected when Amber insisted we foster her now parentless surprise niece until she received a permanent adoption placement.

  Back then I’d given in because fuck if there was anything I wouldn’t do for the woman who threw herself at her lunatic, gun-wielding brother to keep our son and the niece she’d just met from harm. But now it feels like a missing piece has been pushed into place, making the picture of our family complete.

  Speaking of which, instead of dwelling on the past, I go forward with the decision Amber, and I made a few days ago after talking to Daniella’s shrink.

  “Your aunt and I have got something we want to discuss with you,” I tell her, setting down my plate and fork.

  “We know you’ve only been living with us for a few months,” Amber continues, also setting down her fork. “But if you’re ready for the next step, we’d like to talk about officially adopting you.”

  Daniella stills with her own waffle loaded fork halfway to her mouth. “You want to adopt me?” she asks, her voice little more than a shocked whisper.

  This is one of the rare times I wish my wife wasn’t blind. Because we’d be exchanging looks right now, trying to gauge that response.

  Still, I run point on the conversation, just like Amber and I agreed. “Yeah, we were thinking you, me, Ambs, and Luca Jr could be, you know, a family. If you want.”

  This time the silence goes on for a long time. So long, it feels like I’m losing a game of chicken when I say, “Listen, we’re not trying to replace the family you lost, but—”

  “But we weren’t a family,” Daniella points out, and her eyes cast down to her plate as she mumbles, “My dad wasn’t like the ones on TV. He just wanted Mama. He didn’t want me. He was mad about me. And you don’t want me in your family, Mr. Luca, right? You just want Aunt Amber, but she’s saying you have to do this to keep her like my mama tried to make my dad give her Lucky to keep her.”

  “No, that’s not true,” Amber answers. “Honey, no. Trust me. I didn’t force Luca to go along with this. We made the decision together.”

  “Because he feels guilty about killing my dad?” Daniella asks Amber, still not looking up from her plate.

  “No—” Amber
starts to answer.

  Only to get cut off when Daniella says, “It doesn’t matter why anyway… I don’t know how to be in a family. I’ll just mess it up.”

  I don’t know how to be in a family…

  Amber opens her mouth to reassure Daniella. But my wife’s hand with mine to stop her, sensing that her niece needs to hear this next part from me.

  “Listen, kid. Amber, Lucky and I want you to be part of our family. That’s the holy truth. And as for this family stuff, that’s something me and Amber had to learn, too. We can teach you.”

  Daniella stays tense, and I brace myself for more accusations. But then she says, “Really? You had to learn, too? But you’re really good parents.” peeping up at me, as if I just told her Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the tooth fairy was real and she’s still too afraid to believe.

  “Yeah, really,” I answer. “And thanks, but we’re still not one-hundred percent sure we know what we’re doing. So don’t be a jerk about it. Don’t make us beg.”

  Another long beat of waffle stare down, then she peeps up at me again to ask, “Can I call you Dad?”

  “You want to call me Dad?” I repeat, too shocked by the question to keep the surprise off my face.

  But I guess the kid’s decided this is the time to be brave again because she chooses that moment to look me directly in the eye…and nod.

  There are a thousand ways to answer that question, including, “we’ll see” and “let’s talk about it with your therapist.” But hey, ruthless don here. And I still do what I want. “Yeah, sure, knock yourself out,” I answer, reaching across the space between us to ruffle her silky brown curls.

  I guess that’s the right answer, because after knocking my hand away with an irritated, “Stooooop!” she turns her hopeful gaze on Amber and asks if she can call her mom.

  “Of course,” Amber answers, her face lighting up with happiness at the question.

  But then Daniella asks, “Does that mean I’ll be Daniella Ferraro from now on?”

  Amber’s answer to that question doesn’t come nearly as quick as her response to the mom one. And unlike Daniella, I know why.