Revelations (3 page)

Christian sprung for the forty-eight hour test. We had our cheeks swabbed with cotton swabs. We watched the doctor apply our individual DNA to plastic dishes then seal and label them. We were done. Now we only had to wait.

“You’ll have the results in forty-eight hours,” the doctor said as he ushered us out of the room. As if we didn’t know that already.

Afterwards, Christian took me out to lunch.

I was starving since I hadn’t eaten any breakfast. We only waited an hour in “the Clinic” so it was eleven-thirty when we went back to the car. He took me to his favorite local diner, and we took a seat as far away from the counter as possible, as to not be overheard.

“Tell me more about yourself,” Christian asked after we’d ordered.

Thinking only of the French dip sandwich I ordered, the question caught me off guard. “What?”

“Tell me about you. You’re eighteen, right?”

“As best I can figure,” I said. “I don’t know my birth date, and I don’t know the year either, so I’m estimating.”

“You never celebrated a birthday?”

“Not really,” I said. “In the orphanage, they gave me the birth date of January first, like I’m a race horse or something. They never gave me a party, but that made it easier for them to keep track of how old I was…or how old they thought I was.”

“So you could be older or younger, I guess,” he said.

I shrugged. As is typical of myself when I have no words, I let my shoulders talk for me.

“What do you remember about your mother?”

“Ah,” I said. I glanced over his shoulder at an approaching waitress who was carrying two glasses of water and an iced tea for me. “My mother.” I waited until the woman put the glasses on the table and left before I continued. “I don’t really remember her. Not as much as I would like to anyway. She was tall and slim with long, brown hair she would let me braid sometimes. Her eyes were brown. She worked at a make-up counter at Macy’s. I remember that. She was pretty. She had to be where she worked.”

“She was beautiful,” Christian said absently.

“Yes,” I whispered. “I know she loved me. And I want to know how she died.”

“You don’t know?”

I shook my head. “A police officer came to the door one day after she’d gone to work. He said she’d died. He didn’t say anything else and I didn’t ask. I was too young to ask questions, especially of a policeman. So I didn’t ask. I don’t know how she died.”

“You don’t know anything?”

“A car accident,” I said. “That’s what they told me, anyway. I was smart enough to read the paper the day after she died, and there were no stories about car accidents. When someone dies in a car accident in Los Angeles, there is almost always a report in the paper, no matter how small or insignificant the accident. I don’t think that was it.”

“Christiana,” he said, saying my name for the very first time. “You think someone killed her, don’t you?”

I nodded then bit my lower lip.

Conversation came to a basic stand still when food was delivered to our table. He asked me about school, wanted to know if I’d been to high school and what I studied. The answer to this was yes and nothing in particular. He asked me if I wanted go to college, to which I said yes but I knew it was impossible. I was grilled about what my favorite book was—
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexander Dumas— and my favorite movie—
Rebel without a Cause
—because who doesn’t love James Dean? They were basic questions to which I gave truthful answers. We never mentioned the DNA test, or what would happen when the results came back. Yet I knew this was what dominated both our thoughts.

After lunch, we went straight to the grocery store to restock his refrigerator. Then we went back to his house and unloaded the food and drinks. He put on a movie, an oldie but goodie starring the ever-so-handsome Clark Gable and the enticing Marilyn Monroe, entitled
The Misfits,
and handed me a beer. “You do drink, don’t you?” he asked as I took the bottle. He didn’t bother with the fact that I was most likely under the age of twenty-one.

“Yes,” I said. “Sometimes too much. You have been warned.”

“Well, I’ve been known to pound a few, too, so we’re on even ground.”

I laughed and settled back into the sofa while he got comfy in the recliner. He pulled a lever on the side of the chair to put up his feet.

* * * *

The day wore on into evening and eventually into night. He cooked spaghetti and made meatballs from scratch. I was surprised he was a very good cook. He even made his own sauce from fresh tomatoes. All that time wandering beside him in the grocery store I’d been wondering why he bought stuff. I couldn’t fathom what he planned on doing with all those tomatoes. My father, the brilliant cook. His daughter, who’d never cooked a thing in her life. Not even cookies or do cookies only count as baking?

We ate at the dinner table with very little really spoken between us. Our minds were still full of unanswered questions with neither of us willing to begin such a conversation. Instead, we discussed the inner workings of the mind of David Hume—if you don’t know, don’t ask. Dinner was most interesting. It was one I would remember for the rest of my life. It didn’t seem to matter in the least there always remained the possibility of my mother being wrong, maybe this man was not my father. This hung in the back of my mind, though I would never admit it aloud to him. His thoughts were the same, wondering if I told the truth. Sure, he remembered my mother, remembered her well. That didn’t mean there couldn’t be another man out there who shared my DNA. I’m sure my mother didn’t tell me everything.

All our worries on the many subjects in our thoughts were not to come to pass.

A young man rapped on the door a few days later and handed us an envelope giving us one hundred percent certainty we were father and daughter. Well, ninety nine point nine percent, but who sweats over a minor thing like that? I felt only relief. What he felt was love. My father loved me from the very moment he opened the white envelope and read the results. His doubts vanished, replaced with a heartfelt love for me. I could do nothing less than throw myself into his arms.

He hugged me tightly to him and surprised me by saying, “You have no idea how happy this makes me.”

“Me, too,” I said back.

He pulled away from me and held me at arm’s length. “You really do have my eyes,” he told me.

“Whenever I looked in the mirror,” I began, “I wondered about my eyes. They certainly aren’t from my mom.”

He smiled, shook his head, and reached out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “You know, you do look like her.”

“Doubtful,” I muttered. He thought she was beautiful, and I knew I was nowhere near this description.

“No, I mean it,” he said. “You have her features. What I can remember of them.”

“I wish I’d known her better,” I said.

He managed a laugh. “Me, too.”

* * * *

Christian and I spent the better part of the next four days just getting to know each other. He made me repeat my knife trick, as he called it, over and over again, both on myself and on him. It was easier for him to believe I was his daughter than for him to believe I could heal with my hands. After the hundredth successful healing, Christian began to really believe. Then I suddenly had a question for him.

“Why were you alone in the hospital?” I asked. I sat at the kitchen table, playing with the blade of my knife, cutting small lines into the hard surface of my palm, and healing them instantly.

“Ah. That,” Christian said.

When he didn’t say anything for a full minute, I asked again. “Where was everyone? I know you have friends.”

“I sent them away,” he said. “I said my good-byes and got rid of them. I wanted to die alone.”

“I have a huge fear of being alone,” I whispered, surprised by my words even though there was plenty of truth in them.

“You won’t be alone ever again,” he told me, drawing me to him once more.

As he held me, I cherished his words. I believed he and I were going to be together for the rest of our lives and he would always be there when I called. When I needed him. I believed it. It was not to be.

Chapter Four

Later that week, on that last, fateful day, Christian decided to take me shopping. He said I’d been living in the same jeans all week, and I needed new ones. So we took the Mustang to the mall. He bought me a couple changes of clothing, saying he’d buy me more the next week. He also told me, over smoothies from some random ice cream place, that he insisted I not leave his home, not until I’d gotten myself into a well enough financial position to move out, at least. Since I had very little money, I informed him I’d be happy to stay, though it would probably be a long while before I could afford to move out. I also said I’d work hard to get a job and get myself on my feet. Christian said, “Don’t hurry. We have a lot of catching up to do.” He also assured me he could get me a job on base when he went back to work, which he planned on doing the following Monday, following a little bit of an explanation, of course. We were working on our explanation, but so far had come up with nothing plausible to explain his suddenly still being alive.

I loved him. I mean, I always held a special place in my heart for my long lost father. Once we’d spent those few days together, I really, truly loved him. I couldn’t have asked for a better man to be my father.

Our happily-ever-after was not to be.

I noticed them as we walked the mall with bags in our hands from various stores. Then there was a man seated outside the mall entrance/exit. They all looked exactly the same. They wore black suits, white collared shirts, and slim black ties. The black sunglasses topped it all off and made each look like he stepped out of the
Men in Black
movies. With the theme song to that film playing in my mind, I gave him only a glance. What scared me the most— and I don’t scare easy—was every one of their minds was a complete blank.

Now, I’ve met men like them in my lifetime, both before and after finding my father. The men I knew before were on Holt’s base. They were men who roamed the hallways and in various rooms; men I’d always wondered about, but never questioned. I knew all of these men, including the one waiting outside the mall and all those previously met on the base, belonged to my creator.

Yet I said nothing to Christian.

We drove home without incident. How easy it was for me to think of Christian’s home as my own. In the back of my mind I knew these Men in Black followed us. I knew they were after me.

* * * *

Back at the house, Christian pulled his prized Mustang into the garage and closed the heavy wood door behind us. He didn’t bother to lock it as customary; he would lock the door before going to bed each night but he never seemed to bother with the garage door. A highly trained Air Force pilot with at least one gun hidden in the house had no need for door locks. In a quiet part of town, who thinks of such things? We went inside the house and instantly heard the knock on the front door.

My heart lodged in my throat. I grabbed Christian’s arm and said, “Don’t answer it.”

Christian looked at me curiously. “Why not?”

“It’s them,” I said. “They’ve come for me.”

I wondered during the entire time I stayed at his house why no one had come for him. A man just doesn’t up and lose the cancer that was going to kill him within hours. He walked out of a hospital room a cured man, one hundred percent cancer free. Doctors and news media should be knocking down the door. Instead there was a single man on the porch a week later, and not one we expected.

Then again, I’d been expecting this all along.

“Just don’t open it,” I said again.

Christian gently took my hand from his arm. “I’m not going to open it,” he said. “I’m just gonna go have a look.”

I nodded and followed him to the front door. He put his eye to the peephole and stayed there for a moment. When he pulled away, I said, “Let’s just get back in the car.”

“It’s just one guy,” he said.

“Yeah, but just one guy can kill us both. Come on.”

A voice came from the other side of the door. “Open up, Mr. Fletcher. You have no idea what you are harbouring inside your home.”

“It’s only me, sir,” Christian said. “There’s no one else here.”

I smiled up at Christian, and my heart swelled with gratitude.

“Sir, we know the girl is there,” the voice said in a deep resonating tone. “She belongs to us, and we want her back.”

“It’s just me,” Christian repeated. “I live here alone.”

“Let us in, Mr. Fletcher, or we will force our way in.”

Christian gave me a single knowing look, then said quietly to me, “Come on.”

He might have known, deep in his soul, this day would come. A girl with the power to heal with her hands could not go unnoticed during her lifetime, no matter how short her lifetime had been. I myself knew they would come for me eventually. I didn’t think it would be so soon.

My life, as I knew it, was over at the moment that man knocked on that front door. As Christian and I hurriedly got back into the car, top up now, I knew my life with him was probably over, too. We’d had less than a week together.