by Ilia Bera
She pulled out a tissue, and started to wipe away the blood. After a moment, she continued her way towards class.
FOURTEEN
1969 FORD MUSTANG
MACH 1
Kane sat in his car, idling outside of the university. He was waiting for the last minute before he went inside for class.
He held his black pea coat jacket tight to his body, keeping himself warm as the freezing air penetrated his rusty old car.
1969 Mustang Mach 1: The Holy Grail of muscle cars.
The car was painted black with a thin red pinstripe down the side. Kane drove one of the greatest American cars every built.
How did a kid, barely out of high school, afford such a fine piece of machinery?
He didn’t—and it wasn’t exactly the finest piece of machinery out on those icy Snowbrooke roads.
Kane’s car was worn down to the bone. The paint was faded and patches of rust had overtaken the wheel wells, the bumper, the original rims and almost every single piece of exposed metal on the vehicle. The engine was miraculously still the original, with a near impossible half-a-million kilometres logged.
Over the years, parts of the car had stopped working, or completely fallen off. Kane replaced them with whatever he could find—from different models, companies and years. It was very possible that there were parts under the hood that weren’t even made for cars, but instead for small planes and boats.
The car’s internal mechanism was a grotesque Frankenstein machine of mismatched pieces. Inside, the upholstery was worn, torn and ripped. What was once classy black leather was now a chewed up grey mess.
Magically, the car still ran seemingly well—and could still reach nearly one hundred and thirty miles per hour, in true Mustang Mach 1 fashion.
Kane’s father bought the Ford beauty back in 1969—right from The Ford Factory. He drove the beast for twenty-five years before retiring it to an old rusty shed on the family farm, where is remained hidden and forgotten for over a decade.
When Kane finally found it, it became his project. He knew nothing about cars, but something about that rusted old Mustang spoke to him.
Kane learned everything he came to learn through trial and error, swapping parts out over and over until they finally worked.
The family farm backed onto an old junkyard, and there was a hole in the fence that Kane used to sneak over. Once in the junkyard, he would steal parts from rusty old cars.
It took him a whole year of persistence before the car would even move, and another year before he could take it out onto the farm’s little dirt road.
His father was oblivious to his hobby—not realizing that Kane even knew about the Mustang in the shed.
Kane’s father was a lazy man, rarely leaving the house and rarely leaving the television set.
The only reason he ever found out that Kane had been modifying his old car was because he recognized the classic beauty on his television—when the thirteen year old Kane had gotten into a twenty-five minute-long police chase after robbing a corner store.
When the flashing sirens appeared in the teenaged Kane’s rear-view mirror, he panicked. Instead of pulling over, he drove faster—as fast as he could.
Fifteen minutes of frantic speeding later, a dozen more police officers joined in—as well as every news outlet within one hundred miles.
Kane ended up losing control of the car. He crashed it hard into an car that was stopped at a red light—seriously injuring the driver, who happened to be an undercover cop.
Armed robbery, grand theft auto, driving without a license, destruction of police property, assaulting a police officer, mischief, resisting arrest, possession of an illegal firearm, and speeding in a school zone—You name it, the thirteen year old was charged with it.
The Mustang was impounded and Kane was sent to juvenile hall.
FIFTEEN
TANNER & JACOB
Tanner White was one of the new inmates at juvenile hall. He was young—freshly turned thirteen years old. He was shorter and skinnier than Kane, and he had a fresh-face, which the other kids absolutely hated. His skin was dark, as he was a descendant of a pure-blooded African family.
He arrived at the hall with his older brother, Jacob White just a couple of weeks after his mother was murdered—about a month after Kane arrived. Police came to the conclusion that Tanner and Jacob were responsible for their mother’s grizzly death.
They were far too young for prison, so they were both sent to juvy—where they would remain until they turned eighteen, at which point they would be transferred to an adult maximum security prison, where they would spend the rest of their lives.
Jacob was supposedly the brother who carried out the crime, and Tanner was supposedly his older brother’s accomplice. Jacob was a year older than Kane, and was set to receive the electric chair the day he turned eighteen.
The White brothers were the sons of two illegal African immigrants. Their father, Russell White, was the son of a very poor South African couple. Russell’s parents fled the country, leaving Russell alone on the South African streets. He moved from slum to slum as he grew up. The family that eventually took him in had a daughter his age—a daughter named Jalene.
Jalene became pregnant with Russell’s first child when she was just fifteen years old. Desperate to be a good family provider, the unemployed Russell went to a friend to borrow money. But his friend wasn’t just any regular South African man. His friend was a loan shark for a notoriously violent gang. Russell promised to pay the money back within a year—five hundred thousand zar—roughly forty thousand usd.
For anyone in South Africa, that was a lot of money. For Russell, that was far more money than he’d collectively earned in his entire life.
Suffice to say, Russell never came close to returning the large sum of money. When his loan-shark friend came looking for him, Russell took Jalene and his children and left town. They snuck onto a train which took them across the continent. They didn’t stop moving until they were on the other side of the world.
After years of running, they settled in the last place anyone would ever look for them—a place that wasn’t even on any South African map.
Snowbrooke.
They rented a small apartment from a sly man named Frederick Walker, who was willing to accept money under the table, seeing as neither Russell nor Jalene had a passport. Russell got a job working for less than minimum wage as a dishwasher in a nearby kitchen.
Russell grew up around crime, and crime was all that he knew. It didn’t take long before Russell got himself arrested, after he held a corner store up at gunpoint.
He was put on a plane and sent back to South Africa, where he was thrown into prison. Jalene was also sent back, separated from her children who were taken by child services back in Snowbrooke.
Before they were old enough to speak or walk. Tanner and Jacob ended up being put up for adoption.
They spent six months living in the maternity ward at the Snowbrooke hospital, being cared for by the nurses. As the months went by and the children grew older, the hospital staff began to worry. Nobody wanted to adopt the little black brothers. Nobody was even willing to foster them.
When the recession struck, the nursing staff really began to worry. Nearly half of the hospital staff was let go after major funding cuts and it wasn’t long before the nurses were told to cut the children loose.
The nurses knew what that meant—it meant Tanner and Jacob being sent up north to the North Pass Orphanage; a notoriously awful place for children to end up.
However, the North Pass Orphanage would have been better than where they ended up instead.
The nurses kept Tanner and Jacob a secret—keeping them in an unused utility closet. Whenever a nurse began her shift, she would change the brothers’ diapers, and give them a little bit of food. Whenever the children began to cry, the nurses whispered, “Be quiet!” over and over, afraid that they would be caught by their naive superiors. It was the only phrase the ch
ildren ever heard.
Tanner was eighteen months old, and he had just learned to walk on his own—he was actually pretty good at it for his age.
A pretty young woman named Barbara Quick was giving birth to her first and only son, Wallace. Tanner and Jacob could hear Barbara screaming in the other room—screaming for the nurses to get her husband on the phone.
Her husband, Sam Quick was on his way. He’d left the army base where worked as soon as he got notice that his wife had gone into labour.
When Sam finally arrived, a screaming young couple followed him in, claiming that Sam had slammed his car into theirs. They were angrily demanding medical attention and holding their necks as if they were suffering from whiplash.
Tanner stood in the hallway, watching the young couple scream and fight with hospital staff. It was a moment Tanner would never forget—the cops arriving and trying to settle the angry couple down while Barbara screamed at the top of her lungs in the other room while she tried to push a baby out of her body.
“I want to press charges!” the allegedly injured woman exclaimed. “I want justice!”
Tanner walked up to the angry screaming woman and tugged on her shirt.
“What?” the woman screamed at the baby.
“Be quiet!” Tanner said—speaking for the first time in his life.
The woman gasped. “Whose child is this? I demand to know who is responsible for this little brat!” she screamed.
One of the nurses picked Tanner up. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Clarkson. He’s an orphan—awaiting adoption.”
“What a sad excuse!” Mrs. Clarkson exclaimed. “You call that an excuse? I am suffering from a serious injury and that’s the excuse that you give me?”
As the nurse returned Tanner to the utility room, he saw another image that would stick with him for the rest of his life.
The doctor had successfully delivered the baby from Barbara, and was wiping him off with a soft towel. The child’s eyes slowly opened up for the first time.
As he saw the world for the first time in his life, he looked directly at Tanner. The two babies stared at one another for a moment before Tanner was taken back into his closet.
That hectic day in the hospital was the only memory Tanner had of life before living in a foster home.
The Clarksons later returned to the hospital to adopt Tanner and Jacob. They explained that they “felt incredibly sad for the children after their first visit”, and they “couldn’t bare the thought the children were without a family.”
The actual reason was because they found out they could receive twice as much money from their insurance company if they “had more dependents,” as their lawyer put it.
Jacob and Tanner were their first adoptions. Many more followed after the Clarksons received the first foster care benefits cheque.
SIXTEEN
THE APPLE DOESN’T FALL FAR
Life with the Clarksons was miserable. It didn’t help that the Clarksons made no effort to find homes for any of the children they fostered.
The six hundred dollars the Clarksons received per child, per month was meant for a variety of things—one of which was as an allowance. No child in the Clarksons’ care ever received an allowance.
When Tanner and Jacob were old enough to go to school, they quickly learned that life with the Clarksons wasn’t normal. The other kids at school were getting new Gameboys from their parents. Each week they would brag about their weekly allowances, the movies they saw on the weekend and the restaurants their parents took them to. The White brothers had never even been to a restaurant—the Clarksons had told them that restaurants were strictly for adults, and would go out without them.
In the third grade, Tanner and Jacob were invited to their first birthday party. The Clarksons told them they weren’t allowed to go, but the White brothers were too stubborn to listen. On the day of the party, they snuck out of their foster house and took the city bus to the party.
At the party, the White brothers were the only kids to arrive without a present for the birthday boy—they didn’t even know that people received presents for their birthdays. The birthday boy was angry. He threw a fit and demanded the White brothers go home.
Go home they did—but not without a newfound resentment for their foster parents. After that birthday party, Jacob and Tanner asked the Clarksons why they didn’t get things like presents or
allowance.
“You need to start acting more grateful,” Mrs. Clarkson said. “We took you in when no one else would. We’re trying to teach you a valuable life lesson—that if you want things in life, you need to earn them. You can’t expect people to just hand them to you.” The Clarksons’ didn’t realize that their excuse was pathetically ironic.
The advice was confusing to the impressionable young children. They knew that the Clarksons were thieves—talking openly about their insurance and disability scams, assuming the kids were too stupid to understand what they were saying.
The White brothers decided to follow in their foster parents’ footsteps. One night, they snuck out of the house and robbed one of their neighbours. Using a stone, they smashed the back window. They snuck in and stole everything they thought held any value.
Shockingly, the nine and eleven year old siblings managed to execute the robbery successfully, returning to their home without being seen or heard.
However, they were caught the next day when they went to the closest pawnshop to sell their loot. The cops handcuffed the youngsters and brought them into the local precinct. When the Clarksons came to pick them up, they were slapped with a large fine—seeing as the children were still too young to be lawfully punished. However, the crime was put onto their criminal records.
Tanner and Jacob resented the Clarksons, but they resented their own biological parents even more. Every terrible thing the Clarksons did, they blamed their real parents. They felt abandoned, and the very thought that their parents were out there somewhere—living happy lives, as far as they knew—made them very angry.
Over the next few years, the White brothers continued to commit small crimes—never as large as their first. They would steal food from grocery stores, and they became excellent at pick pocketing strangers in the street. Using the Clarksons’ bathroom door, Tanner taught himself how to pick a lock with nothing but a paperclip.
The skill came in handy a number of times when it came to breaking into the Clarksons’ bedroom to steal small amounts of cash that should have been their allowance anyway.
Everything changed one night—The night of Tanner’s thirteenth birthday.
As Tanner and Jacob walked home from school, a strange woman approached them on the street.
She was dark-skinned, with a white bandage on her nose. One of her eyes was bloodshot, and her hair was grey and thin.
It was Jalene—the boys’ mother.
She’d spent a whole decade trying to get her children back, but her criminal record had made things difficult.
She saved every single penny she could to hire a lawyer to get her passport approved for entry into the country. The process took an entire decade, but eventually, she was successful.
Her lawyer explained to her that, if she wanted her kids back, she needed to establish residency in the same town the children lived in.
Jalene moved to Snowbrooke, established a permanent address, got her driver’s license and even voted at a local election.
Once she was fully established as a resident of Snowbrooke, she went to the Clarksons and asked to see her sons.
They refused.
Losing Tanner and Jacob meant losing twelve hundred dollars every month—and they weren’t prepared to do that. They demanded the desperate mother leave.
Jalene left, but she came back again the next day to try again. Again, the Clarksons told her to leave, this time threatening to call the police.
After she left, they filed a restraining order, claiming that Jalene “was psychotic” and that “she was violent and
aggressive”.
The police told Jalene to stay away from the Clarksons, and all of the children in their care.
Jalene started to sit at a café, across from her kids’ elementary school. She sat there all day, secretly watching her grown children, trying to think of a way she could get them back. Seeing her kids grown up for the first time was incredibly emotional for the mother.
One day, the kids went across the street to the local convenience store. Jalene secretly followed them, keeping her hood on her head. The sound of her kids’ voices made her unexpectedly emotional.
She broke down crying in the convenience store. The store owner thought that she was insane, so he called the police.
SEVENTEEN
DIVINE INTERVENTION
Jalene ended up being fined for breaking her restraining order. Tanner and Jacob were still completely ignorant to who the crying woman was—they simply remembered her as “the crazy crying lady”.
The next day, a tall slender white man with a thick moustache showed up at Jalene’s door. He discreetly showed her a police badge, and politely asked her to get into his car. The undercover cop didn’t want to make a scene, and he didn’t want to embarrass the disgraced mother.
Jalene refused to go with him. The cop begged her to be civil for her own sake. “I don’t want to have to use the cuffs,” he said. “I don’t want this to be embarrassing.”
“Where are you taking me?” Jalene asked.
“Mrs. White—I’m afraid you’ve broken the conditions of your working Visa. You’re being deported.”
“But—But I’ve only been here a few months. I established residency,” she said.
“You’ll be able to reapply for another Visa in five years, once the restraining order expires.”