by Cynthia Dane
“Your father was a very cunning man. That’s why I didn’t hesitate to help him out when the company hit a bump in the ‘80s.”
“Yes. The grand day when Mann became Mann-Garrett.”
“That’s right. The only reason I asked for my name to be on the letterhead was because I had a slightly bigger ego back then.”
I didn’t know where to go from there. Mr. Garrett had come into my office so he could look me in the eye and see what had come from an offhand comment back in the late ‘80s, when my brother died in a stable and I mysteriously changed my legal name and gender. Apparently, he hadn’t considered that my father was a megalomaniac who was obsessed with his pristinely patrilineal world. For fuck’s sake, I was named after my brother. The real Eric was born two minutes before me. I was an afterthought. From the day I was born, I was my brother’s replacement should anything happen to him.
I knew there was no replacement for me. There didn’t need to be. My father always made it perfectly clear that Erica’s destiny was to be married off to create some great American dynasty. Erica was no better than a heifer, until the day came that she was promoted to bull.
Me. I’m the bull now.
“Mr. Garrett,” I began, lightly slapping my hands against my desk, “I greatly appreciate you coming by to see me at least once in our brief lives. I am also greatly disheartened to hear of your health maladies.”
“But?”
“But I’m not sure what you want from me. If anything.”
“No, I suppose I don’t want anything.” Sam forced himself up. “I… I’m not sure why I came here, other than to see for myself what my words and actions may have wrought.”
“I do not want for much in my life, Mr. Garrett.” As I am constantly reminded when I see my large house, my sports cars, and the lines of staff who are paid to do whatever I want. And now I could recall the lovely lady sitting at her desk in my office, thinking about the wonderful date we had the day before. She was the biggest example of my life wanting for little.
Sam Garrett looked down upon me as if he had never seen a person like me before. I doubt he had. “That may certainly be so, Mann.” He had no idea what to call me beyond my last name, huh? Not surprising. Even people who take the news better than him struggle with pronouns and whether to tack an a at the end of my name when we’re in private. “But I will now regret what I told your father.”
“There’s no need for that.”
“I knew your father probably better than you knew him,” Sam quickly cut in. “He was brilliant in the business world, but absolutely crap as a family man. I can only imagine how he implemented an off-hand comment I made when he was in the midst of mourning your brother.”
“I guarantee you, Mr. Garrett,” I said with a slight grate to my voice, “my father did not mourn. As far as he was concerned, my brother didn’t die. I did. And his daughter was not someone he missed.”
He sucked in a deep breath that rattled the depths of his brittle body. “Then I truly am sorry for what I may have contributed.”
“Honestly?” I stood up as well, intent on showing him out of my office. As soon as he was gone, I wanted to be alone. For a while. “You probably saved my life.”
It wasn’t until I said those words that I realized the truth behind them. It was something I had long suspected but didn’t have the guts to vocalize. My father… saving my life by making me his son? When he was the whole reason my life needed saving to begin with?
My smile was half-cocked and depleted of any genuine qualities. He must have sensed it, for Mr. Garrett departed my office with the words, “Knowing your father, saving your life would have been a necessity.”
I didn’t mean to shut the door with anything more than a soft click. Instead, it slammed into place, rattling more than my desire to close every door on my past.
Flashbacks played before me when I turned around and faced the empty expanse of my executive office. I didn’t see potted plants, paneled windows, or plush seating meant to invite my guests to sit down a while.
I saw a stable. I saw my brother.
I saw my father.
“My” official cause of death is blunt force trauma from a startled horse. They say “I” died within seconds, and probably didn’t feel a single thing before “I” was in Heaven without my precious twin.
I know the truth. I am the only surviving witness from what happened that day, and as far as anyone knows, Erica Mann is dead. So am I really a witness if little girl me is dead?
“Eric?” Sherman knocked on the door behind me. “You okay? I’m coming in.”
Naturally, the head of my security had the code to my office door. Even if he didn’t, it was left unlocked after Mr. Garrett’s exit. That meant I had about two seconds to compose myself and stop seeing ghosts of my past.
Sherman instantly knew what had happened when he saw my pallor face. Without a word, he gave me some space and said that he would be ready to leave whenever I was.
I continued to stand in the middle of my office and stare out my lifeless high-rise window. The same window my father used to peer from when he decided the fate of his family and his company. Sometimes at the same time.
He was always so angry. At me.
Chapter 36
ERICA
I somehow made it through my hundred other appointments that afternoon and evening. It helped that I had mastered the art of putting up a professional front.
It also helped that I could cling to my feelings for Natalie. Thinking of her, knowing that she wanted to see and be with me again as soon as we could, meant I didn’t fall into such a deep despair that I immediately checked myself into Yesterday’s River again.
Sam Garrett was told that he had saved my life by suggesting my father make me a boy. In reality, I was a shell. Somewhere in my body lived a soul, but most of the time, I couldn’t tell you where the fuck it was.
“Home?” Sherman asked when we got into the back of my Mercedes after dinner. We had left a business meeting with one of my company’s biggest investors. I had used the last of my mental reserves to keep them happy and to adequately put on my masculine performance. Sherman had to constantly tap on my shoulder and whisper that “Men don’t sit like that, Eric,” because my thoughts slipped from maintaining my demeanor to thinking of how much I wanted to be with Natalie. And how much of my training came from a dark place.
“If it’s all right,” I said, loudly enough for Clyde to hear me in the front seat, “I’d like to go to Mercy’s Rest.”
Clyde didn’t hesitate to tap that into the Mercedes’ GPS system. Sherman, on the other hand, looked at me as if I had asked to go to the slaughterhouse.
“You sure about that?”
“Yes.”
My resolve was as unbending as steel. When that word hit the air, there was no question that Clyde should pull out of the downtown parking garage and take me to the cemetery on the other side of town.
Strange for me to admit that I visited my father’s grave more often than my still-living mother in her nursing home. At least my father didn’t still give me lip, and Mercy’s Rest was a tranquil place as the name implied. My family has been buried there for generations. My mother will be buried there once she’s gone. My brother is there.
Under the wrong name… but he’s there. His little battered body, now decayed enough to feed the earth, is there.
One day, I will probably be buried there. I don’t know what name I will be buried under.
Twilight had long descended upon the rolling hills by the time Clyde pulled into the parking lot nearest my family’s plot. Even in the consuming darkness I could see the statue of a fierce angel standing atop the giant marble plaque that marked the Mann legacy going back several generations – just because you weren’t buried there, didn’t mean your name might not be notable enough to get a mention on the plaque.
My grandfather had top billing, followed by my father, and beneath him? Eric Quintin Mann, October 28th, 1986 �
�� and a giant blank after that. My twin was an afterthought beneath my legal name. Erica Quinn. Further proof that I had been named after my brother and was never meant to have my own unique, feminine identity.
There was a spot for my mother, Martha. A spot for some distant relative who had died on the other side of the country and I never bothered to add. I stared at those names, briefly imagining that they were actually buried beneath my feet.
No, the graves were beyond the plaque. Little headstones, some of them no bigger than a commoner’s, but all of them made of expensive stone and bedecked with décor, littered the field in orderly rows. The oldest members of the family were closest to the plaque. The more recent generations spread toward the horizon.
It’s surreal being one of the last surviving members of your family and walking among the dead. The fact that two more generations were arranged beyond mine was more surreal. My family had no reason to believe that their glorious legacy wouldn’t continue forever. Even if we lost some of our money and clout, this had been paid for. My plot was already laid out. My firstborn son’s. His firstborn.
I stood before my father’s grave. Charles Mann had lived a long, ornery life based on the numbers on his headstone. Loving Family Man. My ass.
“Erica,” Sherman said, still standing by the large plaque beneath the vengeful angel. “I’ll be over here. Holler if you need anything.”
“Thanks.” My hands curled in my coat pockets. The evening chill would get me before blindness did. The lights coming on around me helped me see my father’s grave.
I was standing on top of him, wasn’t I?
It had been over ten years since my father died from a heart attack. I was nineteen, barely in college and in no way prepared to take over the company until I graduated business school a few years later. In the meantime, the board took over, making most of the important decisions on my behalf while I played CEO in my father’s old office and learned what he couldn’t teach me when he was alive. When my father tutored me in economics and business, he transformed into a shrewd man I could somewhat respect. A man I was anxious to learn from.
When he tried to make a man out of me, I wanted to die.
It wasn’t just the masculinity lessons or the constant threats of isolation and violence if I didn’t behave to his code of conduct. It was the little things, like taking me to Thailand for my sixteenth birthday, because he couldn’t order me up an escort to deflower me in the States when I was that young. (He was not amused when I ran out of the hotel the moment I realized what he had done.) It was the dead look in my mother’s eyes when she introduced me as her darling boy and cried all alone in her chambers in the dead of night. It was the constant sweeps of my bedroom, when both my father and his security made sure nothing too “girly” or “gay” was in my sock drawer or beneath my mattress. He had taken toxic masculinity and cranked it up to a hundred for me. There could be no mistakes. There could be no diverting from the carefully planned path that made me a real man.
It was drunkenly shoving me down when I was eighteen and about to head off to my first public class at college. He felt up my fake dick and informed me that no son of his would ever leave the house with anything less than seven inches, flaccid or not.
My heel dug into the earth beneath my feet and on top of his.
What kind of life would I have had if my brother never died? Would it have been “better?” Or would I have been in another prison of my father’s creation?
I often pondered those questions. My father was a raging misogynist who believed women had no place in the business world, and their sole purpose (at our social level, anyway) was for breeding. Other women were sexual pleasure, at best. He chose to marry my mother because she had “those good genes that are hard to come by these days.” I never saw them show each other affection, even before my mother lost her children. She was a pawn, like me. Being a pawn had driven her insane until she was nothing but a shell of her former self. Dementia, the doctors said, but I was convinced she had embraced it if it meant forgetting everything that happened to her after she got married.
So, I may have been raised as a girl in an alternate timeline, but would that have been any better in my family? Would it at least have felt “right?” Was the prison I confined myself in a product of my nature, or my nurture? Did it matter anymore?
Of course it mattered. I thought as much when I knelt in the wet grass and stared at my father’s headstone.
“Look at me,” I hissed at the marble beneath my face. “Or did you stop seeing me when the mortician glued your eyes shut?”
My father would never have to face what he did. He died with the knowledge that his son would take over the company, and his daughter was dead. Did he think he would see my twin again in the afterlife? How would he face my brother?
Did he think I had a brother? Or a sister? How far did that depravity go in his sick soul?
The thing that always killed me the most and made me toss and turn at night? The fact that I loved women. I had no desire for men. I never knew if it was because I was trained to be attracted to women, or because I would’ve been the angriest lesbian had I been raised a “proper” girl. I probably would’ve been disowned by the time I was eighteen.
Maybe that would’ve been for the best. I would never know.
I got up and found my brother’s grave.
No. I found Erica’s grave.
Sherman was one of the only people who consistently called me Erica. That’s what I told him to call me when we were childhood friends, because I wanted there to be at least one person who called me that and didn’t think it was weird. Sherman had always known what I was like. His mother was the head chef and knew all about the little Mann child. Sherman found out when I got my first period and bled through my white linen pants. He was old enough to know what it meant.
“My name is really Erica,” I told him when he snuck into my room later that night. He lived in another wing of my house, but he knew all the tricks to sneak past security. It was those same tricks that made him an amazing head of my own security. “You can’t tell anyone. Nobody’s supposed to know. I’m supposed to be a boy like you.”
He said that he had always somehow known that I was more than what he was told. Lots of people tell me that after they find out the truth. I wonder if Natalie would ever say that.
No wonder I trusted Sherman with more than my life. He had always been there for me. When my father abused me in the name of my education, Sherman was there. When my menstrual cramps were so bad I was infused with gender dysphoria, he hung out with me and watched TV while I cried into my pillow. When my father died, he told me I could finally be free – but understood when I shook my head and said, “How?” When I said I truly yearned what it meant to be a normal woman, he facilitated the procurement of dresses, makeup, and personally escorted the women I hired to and from my room.
He also was there when I said I really wanted to know.
And he didn’t leave me when I said I could never be with a man again after that night.
What did my brother have, though? Nothing. He died so young that he didn’t really have a life at all.
Strange. I always looked at his pictures and wistfully wondered what it would be like to have my brother back. When I looked at his grave, however, I couldn’t deny the obvious.
Erica was dead. Erica. Erica.
My brother’s body may have been buried, but it was my name on that headstone. A finite life of five years. Erica Quinn Mann was dead. Buried. Forgotten. Eric Quintin was the one up and walking around as if he controlled the world.
That was me.
I was Eric. A straight, cisgender man. I had to believe it if I wanted everyone else to think it was true.
Of course I loved women. I was straight, wasn’t I? What was that business about struggling with my gender and sexuality? Why would I have to do something like that? I was a man. A manly man’s man who drank musky liquors and fucked women when the mood struck.
“Everything okay, Erica?”
Clyde opened my door for me before I got into my car. “It’s Eric.”
Sherman hesitated before joining me in the back of the Mercedes. “Obviously.”
We went home. Instead of dwelling on the ghosts of my blighted past, I focused on the rays of hope in my present.
Natalie. I wanted her more than ever. I wanted the woman that fell in love with the man I knew I was.
Chapter 37
NATALIE
My phone rang at exactly 9:00 that evening.
I was already in bed, having taken a long, warm shower and covering my limbs in moisturizer. The nightly ritual I had adopted since grad school to keep my sanity was relatively simple compared to other women’s, but I made sure to never waste a single second. Every spot on my body was properly washed – sometimes more than once. I patted dry those same spots with a luxurious bath towel I stole from a New York City hotel once upon a time. I put on a comfy pair of pajamas and combed my hair with exactly 100 brush strokes, counting in Mandarin so I never forgot how.
Unless I was cramming for an event the next day, I didn’t allow myself any studying. Everything was for enjoyment, whether it was reading, socializing, or touching myself. In the old days, I would have a pre-sleep smoke by my window. But I had been good since sniping a cigarette from Jimmy Cho. No more nicotine for this recovering addict.
Moisturize. Maybe change into a silk negligee if it was warm enough. Catch up on an interesting TV show. Light some scented candles and pretend I couldn’t hear my mother’s dog yapping downstairs. Depending on the exact time, I might call my aunt in Taiwan to catch up on what had happened since we last spoke. Who knew? Maybe my dad had another kid nobody else would tell me about.