HORIZON MC

by Clara Kendrick

  If I was different, now, he was different, too. Older. He’d lost a lot. Was it going to change him to know that he could get back some of what he’d lost?

  “There’s someone here I’d like you to meet,” I said, stepping aside, drawing Cheyenne to me. “This is–”

  “I know who this is,” he told me in a tone of quiet outrage. “I’ve seen her on your arm often enough. It’s been a while, though.”

  “Nice to see you again, Mr. Ryder,” Cheyenne said politely, holding out her hand. “It has been a long time.”

  “You’re as pretty as you’ve always been,” he said, ever the gentleman, shaking her hand gently. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “I have some things I need to discuss with you,” I said.

  “Some pretty important things,” Cheyenne added. “Which is why I’m going to be planted in this porch swing until you’re finished.”

  “Cheyenne–”

  “No arguments,” she said, grinning as she sauntered over to the swing and made good on her vow. “I’ll just be right outside.”

  I knew she was right to do that, that what I had to discuss with my father was a private matter, but that didn’t stop me from wishing she would’ve just come inside with me and at least sat beside me while I slogged through the mess this was going to be.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” my father asked. “It’s getting to be a little warm out here, especially with the sun.”

  “Maybe that means spring will come early this year,” Cheyenne pointed out. “But no thanks. I’m all right. You all better get on inside and figure all of this out.”

  My father raised his eyebrow at me as I walked in, shaking my head.

  “You going to ask my blessing to marry her, or what?” he asked, closing the door behind him. “Because I’d say snap that up. You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission. That girl’s too good to let get away.”

  “That’s…” I paused to cough, aware that my face was almost painfully flushed. “That’s not why I’m here, actually.”

  “Then spit it out.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me if I want something to drink?”

  “You’re just stalling.”

  “So were you, offering Cheyenne a drink.”

  “Well. Like uncle, like nephew, then.”

  There was another saying that would’ve made even more sense than that, but I didn’t want to just spring it on him.

  “Let’s sit down,” I said, pointing toward the living room. The television in there was still flickering, tuned to a re-airing of a basketball game that was on a couple of nights ago, though the volume was muted.

  “Go ahead and get this over with, whatever it is,” he said, rocking back in his recliner as I perched on the edge of the couch. “You’re killing me with the suspense.”

  “You told me, the last time I saw you, that you were as healthy as a horse. Is that still true?”

  “There’s not a thing wrong with me. That’s what all the doctors say.”

  “No heart troubles?”

  “No. What’s this about?”

  “I’m trying to warn you that what I’m about to tell you is…shocking. To say the least.”

  “I’ve had all the shocks a man could stand to have and then some. I’m still here.”

  Inhale. Exhale. I could do this. I had to do this. “I regained my memories.”

  His eyes widened. “Really?”

  “Yes. Really.”

  “The doctors said there was only a small chance of that happening, didn’t they?”

  “They did. But it happened all the same.”

  “So you can remember what happened, then? You can remember James?”

  He looked so hopeful that it made me feel ugly inside. I hadn’t loved this man very much, and it often felt like he didn’t care for me at all. That I was a thorn in his side. Something to be ashamed of, when his own brother had fathered a son who was a better man, all around. What would it be like to have him as a father again? Would anything change?

  “I do remember James,” I said carefully. “I remember him quite well.”

  “Are you up to talking about him?”

  “That’s why I came here,” I said. “To talk. About this. About me. And you. Us.”

  I was really flailing through this, but it was hard to know the right way to do it. There probably wasn’t a right way. I just had to try and break the news as gently as possible.

  “Say what you came here to say,” my father said, drawing himself up. I recognized this body language. Even as his spine straightened, he was retreating inward. Protecting himself from what he thought was bad news. Some message from beyond the grave that his son had once again disappointed him. And maybe that would still be true. Maybe I would still be a disappointment. But he deserved to know that I was still alive. That was something.

  “The thing is, I regained my memories when I found an old journal, here in this house,” I said. “The last time I was here.”

  “Is that a fact?” I could practically hear the cogs turning in his mind as he weighed this revelation. “I wonder what triggered it. Any idea?”

  “Yeah. I do have an idea or two about it.” Inhale. Exhale. “I think it took me so long to get my memories back because I was busy trying to remember the wrong person. I spent too much time comparing myself to Jack and trying to be him that it had shut out any possibility of being James.”

  “I’m confused. I don’t…you’re confusing me. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

  “I’m trying to say that when I woke up after the blast that killed my cousin, the doctors told me I was Jack Ryder, and I believed them because I thought I could defer to them. Because I had no memory of being anyone, and they all seemed so sure.”

  “Are you…are you not Jack Ryder?”

  I shook my head. “I’m James. James Ryder. I’m your son.”

  He gaped at me, and we sat in silence for a long time, longer than was probably necessary, but I wasn’t sure how anything else I said would be received. He’d promised that he didn’t have any health issues, but there was probably only so much someone his age could take.

  “I messed up on a lot of things–”

  “I knew you were my son,” my father said, his voice raw with emotion. “Every time I saw you, once you came back. It didn’t make sense. You and Jack had always looked so alike. But I knew you were mine, even if my brain told me it wasn’t possible.”

  “I stayed away from you when I still thought I was Jack,” I said. “Because I knew you thought I was James – well, me. And I couldn’t stand to hurt you like that, to show you this face when you were still grieving. I knew it hurt you.”

  “Is it even possible? Can you really be James?”

  “I got fingerprinted, a DNA test, too, after my memories returned. Just to be sure. I’m James Ryder.”

  “My son.” He stood slowly, looking like every single one of his years weighed heavily on him, and shuffled over to me. I stood, too, quickly, afraid he was going keel over, collapse with the weight of what I had just unleashed on him.

  “You need to know some things about me,” I said. “They’re not nice things.”

  “I don’t care.” Obstinate, bull-headed old man. “You’re my son. I don’t care about anything else other than you standing in front of me. Alive. Here.”

  “No.” I refused to sink into the comfort of that kind of happy reunion. I wasn’t blameless in all of this. If I hadn’t been planning to so ruthlessly assume my cousin’s identity, maybe there would’ve been a chance that I would’ve rejected the doctors’ assumptions I was Jack Ryder. I would’ve never gotten the tattoo, and that had been the main identifying factor for everyone else.

  I could’ve avoided this heartache, and my father needed to understand that.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “I wasn’t a good person. I was…well, I was almost a really bad person. And you need to understand that before we move forward. Can you s
it back down? Can we sit back down?” Because I was afraid for him. Afraid that if news of his son being alive didn’t strike him down, news of his son and the shit he’d been plotting would. But this wasn’t something I was willing to hide from my father. He needed to know that I wasn’t some kind of prodigal son. I was the villain of this story.

  “I was jealous of my cousin, Jack,” I said. “I spent my whole life being jealous of him. He got all the girls I wanted. The grades. The accolades. Everyone thought he was a good person, and they were right. He was good. The best. And I was nothing compared to him.”

  “You weren’t nothing.”

  “I was. You remember. Or has it been too long for you to remember? I just liked to lounge around and get drunk. Jack worked hard for the things he achieved. I wanted them without all of the hard work.”

  “You…just needed the right kind of motivation. To understand the man you were meant to be.”

  “I found the right motivation. It was just the wrong way.” Inhale. Exhale. “I plotted to assume Jack’s identity after getting him killed on one of our Army Rangers missions.” I paused to let that sink in, for my father to try to make some sort of excuse for me, but he just stared.

  “He had Cheyenne. He had the support of everyone in the town. They wrote an article about him in the paper when the news came in that he was shipping out with the Army Rangers, but there wasn’t so much as a paragraph about me. It didn’t matter, though. I thought that if no one remembered me alive, no one would care that my identity died with Jack. Look. I even got his tattoo.” I lifted my shirtsleeve to show him the eagle spreading across my muscle. “That’s why doctors thought I was Jack. Because I planned for them too.”

  “You killed your cousin?”

  I could’ve told him yes. Part of me wanted to so he could hate me as much as I hated myself on the bad days, the days when I couldn’t get over what I had almost done. But I was through with lying. If this was going to be a new start for everyone involved, I needed to be honest.

  “No. I didn’t. I had plans to, but I didn’t.”

  “How did he die? What happened?”

  “We were working to clear a cluster of IEDs,” I explained. “I’d planned from the start to make it happen during one of those missions. The explosion would cover up everything enough for me to get away with what I wanted to do – assume his identity. If they couldn’t properly identify his remains, it would make it easier for me to pretend he was me and I was him.” I hesitated. “We were ambushed while we were clearing the IEDs. I tried to get him away, but he triggered one of them, and the rest went up, too.”

  “He died in exactly the way you planned for him to.”

  The irony wasn’t lost on me, either. “Yes. But in the concussive blast, I lost my memories. And woke up as him, believing I was him, thanks to the tattoo. And the doctors.”

  My father seemed to consider this, which surprised me. His calmness was the most shocking part of it. When I used to screw up even minor things, he would fly off the handle at me. I was accustomed to him losing his temper. I didn’t understand the logical approach he was taking to all of this – asking questions and actually listening to the answers.

  “So what happened to make you change your mind about going through with everything?” he asked.

  “That I would have to live the rest of my life – his life – knowing that I was a fraud. That I was a fake. And as badly as I wanted what he had, it would always be tainted with the truth. That I could never get away from myself, even if everyone else thought I was Jack.”

  “You were both Army Rangers. Handsome young men. Similar in a lot of ways. What did he have that made you so jealous?”

  My eyes prickled, and I dawdled in giving this particular answer. This was a tough one, but it needed to be said if my father was going to understand me.

  If we were going to move forward from all of this.

  “I was primarily jealous of the support Jack enjoyed from his father. My uncle,” I said. “Your brother. I felt like my uncle was supportive of everything Jack wanted to do, even if it seemed like a bad idea at the time. He was a father figure to a lot of our friends. And I always felt…closer to him. Than, you know. I did to you.”

  I was glad my father was sitting down, because I was certain that revelation would’ve knocked him on his ass otherwise. There was a time when being able to gut him so efficiently would’ve made me savagely happy, but it didn’t give me an ounce of pleasure today.

  I plunged onward because I didn’t know what else to do. “When my uncle got sick, Jack was telling me about the life insurance policy he’d taken out. Jack kept going on and on about how his father was making sure his death wouldn’t be a financial burden to anyone in the family, but that the policy was so large it was obscene. It offended Jack, that kind of money that would be released to him at the time of his father’s death. He said he didn’t need a payout reminding him that his father was gone.”

  “That’s the thing about having a kid,” my father said, his voice sounding weak. “You don’t understand yet, but maybe someday you will. You’ll do anything for them. You want them to be successful. To thrive no matter what. And if you can set them up with something that ensures they’ll be all right after you’re gone, you will.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry that I didn’t have the will to do well. That I was so unmotivated. You just wanted the best for me.”

  “You were at a difficult stage of your life. Still trying to figure out who you wanted to be.”

  “And I wanted to be Jack. I wanted to be him so badly that I hatched this entire fucking plan. I wouldn’t have even gone into the Army Rangers if it weren’t for him. I wanted to be him, to have the good relationship with his father that he had. But most of all, I wanted that payout. That money would’ve taken me away from here. It would’ve paid for me to escape all of this and make a new life somewhere else.”

  “Everyone wants the chance to start over,” my father said. “You wouldn’t be wrong to want that for yourself, especially if you were so unhappy with the way things were.”

  “Stop. Just stop. You can’t justify what I was planning to do. It would’ve been murder.”

  “But you didn’t do it. You remembered your humanity. And then life got in the way of everything.”

  “So–” I broke off awkwardly, looking away before I forced myself to lock eyes with my father. “Now you know that your son was a real piece of shit.”

  “No. Now I know that my son is still alive.”

  “Dad…”

  “I’m sorry. You came in here and you told me a lot of things, but the biggest thing I’m taking away from it is that you’re alive.”

  He heaved himself to his feet and I leapt up, too, afraid of what he was going to do. But he simply reached out, gripped me on my shoulder, looked me in my eyes.

  “I knew it was you, you little bastard.”

  “You would know, Dad.”

  From an outsider looking in, those sounded like fighting words. We’d said similar things, and much worse insults, to each other before. But these were different. They were almost tender, like a gentle prodding as we felt out the situation between us. They were almost terms of affection. But his grip on my shoulder didn’t lessen a bit.

  “I’m sorry I failed you,” he said, and if I wasn’t broken down and turned out before, I certainly was now.

  “Please don’t say that. You didn’t fail me.”

  “I did. I’m your father. My brother was a good man, but the fact that you had to look up to him instead of me…that means I failed as father.”

  That wasn’t the conclusion I wanted him to come to. “We had a difficult relationship. I didn’t help by acting like an asshole all the time.”

  “It was a difficult relationship because we’re very similar.”

  I snorted a little bit. “I hope you realize you just called yourself an asshole.”

  “Well, I was. No shame in owning up to that.”
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  “If you say so.”

  “The way you feel – felt – about Jack, that competitiveness, the jealousy. I felt that toward my brother. When we were younger, I thought he was our parents’ favorite. I could never seem to stay out of trouble, and he never seemed to find himself in it. I resented him all the time, but he never even seemed to notice, which pissed me off even more.”

  I nodded. “Jack was always so oblivious. He was used to being successful, to being loved.”

  “That comes easily to some people,” my father acknowledged. “My brother was the same way. I felt like I always had to work twice as hard as him to even receive a fraction of the praise he did. It sounds like to me that you know how that feels, and that’s why you need to know that I’m sorry.”

  “I’m trying to tell you that you don’t have anything to be sorry for. I’m the one who needs to make amends.”

  “No. I’m sorry because I knew the way I wanted to be treated, the way I wanted my father to treat me, and I continued the cycle in spite of my best efforts not to. It must’ve been something subconscious. Seeing myself in you. That’s why I treated you the way I did. I wanted you to be better than your old man. And everything backfired.”

  “I was sullen. I was a brat. A complete asshole.”

  “You were your father’s son.”

  “And I’m going to be better. Do better things. Especially now that I have my memories back.”

  “That’s all I ever wanted to hear. That you were in pursuit of better things. That’s all any parent wants to know – that their child has dreams and they’re chasing them.”

  It meant a lot to hear him say those words, but I couldn’t resist a little jab. It was probably a panic response to the conversation going to such deep places. “You’re getting pretty mellow in your old age,” I told him, cracking a smile. “I remember a time when you would’ve told me to get my head out of the clouds and my ass to work.”

  “Losing my son put things in perspective,” he said. “And regaining him meant the world to me. I just have one more question, though.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You got your memories back, and you realized you weren’t Jack.”