Gemma was a psychiatrist, which meant she could take care of everybody’s problems but her own, just one of a dozen ways we were alike. But our looks was not one of them. While I had dark hair and gold eyes, she was the classic blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty that set men’s hearts aflutter. I could set men’s hearts aflutter, too, but I owed my success to mad skill. The things I could do with my mouth.
“So, you already know I remember the day I was born?”
“Duh, you told me a thousand times when we were little.”
Wow, I didn’t remember that. “So, I told you about the huge scary being enshrouded in an undulating black robe that filled the entire delivery room, like ocean waves crashing against the walls, and how he hovered in a corner, stayed with me for three days, promised me Dad would be there soon, though I never actually heard his voice? And how I was deathly afraid of him because his mere presence seemed to sap my strength and steal my breath?”
After a long pause that had me wondering if she’d fallen asleep again, she said, “No, you didn’t mention that part.”
“Oh, okay, then.” I thrummed the fingers of one hand on the steering wheel to the classic rock playing in the background, happy I could get back to my story. “So, that happened, then on the third day, when the little girl’s father finally showed up to take her home, she really wanted to ask him, ‘Where the fuck you been, Dad?’ but she lacked the motor skills necessary to speak. A year passed and the little girl was a happy camper. She hadn’t seen the big scary creature again, and her dad seemed to genuinely like her. Except when she ate pureed peas, but that was his own fault. Then he brought home a woman named Denise, and camping pretty much sucked from then on.”
“Okay,” Gemma said, “I get the whole stepmother thing. Go back to the powerful-being thing.”
Reyes was probably the one and only mind-blowing part of my life Gemma didn’t know about, besides that night with the 122nd Fighter Attack Squadron. They’d been celebrating the promotion of one of their comrades. I helped. Damn wine coolers. I learned a lot about evasive maneuvers that night. And my boundless will to survive even the most voracious of hangovers.
“Okay, I’m going to give you the Schoolhouse Rock version.”
“Are you driving?”
“… No.”
“Are you sure? I hear road noise.”
“… Yes.”
“Okay, I’ll have to settle for that version. I have a nine o’clock.”
“Got it,” I said, glancing at my watch. “So, I’m born and this massive being is there, cloaked in black and such. And he’s just amazing but scary. And he called me Dutch.”
“Wait a minute.”
“You have a client in like five seconds. Can you hold your questions until the end?”
“He called you Dutch? When you were born?”
Wow, I was a little surprised Gemma picked up on that. “You remember, don’t you?”
“That night, when you stopped that man from abusing that kid. The boy we saved called you Dutch.”
She was good. When Gemma and I were in high school, I was helping her with a school project late one night on the seedier side of town. She’d wanted to capture life on the streets for a video about the harsher side of Albuquerque. We were huddled in the corner of an abandoned school, basically freezing our asses off, when we noticed movement in the window of a small apartment. We realized in horror that a man was beating a teenaged boy, and my immediate and only thought was to save him. Out of desperation, I threw a brick through the man’s window. Miraculously, it worked. He stopped hitting the boy and came after us. We ran down a dark alley and were searching for an opening along a fence that blocked our path to freedom when we realized the boy had escaped as well. He was doubled over on the frozen ground, coughing and trying to breathe past the pain.
We stumbled back to him, and when he looked up at us, blood streaked down his face and dripped from his incredible mouth. We tried to help, but he refused our offer, even going so far as to threaten us if we didn’t leave.
We had no choice. We left him there, injured and bleeding, but I’d gone back the next day and found out from the landlady the family had slipped out in the middle of the night and stiffed her for two months’ rent. She also told me his name. Reyes. That was all I had—for years that one name sustained me. When I finally found him over a decade later, I wasn’t completely surprised to find that Reyes had spent the last ten years in prison for killing that very man.
And that night, the night we’d tried to save him, he called me Dutch.
“I can’t believe you put that together,” I said. “It took me years to do that.”
“Well, I’m smarter. So, is there a connection?”
“Yes. That being and Reyes Farrow are one and the same.”
After taking a moment to absorb that nugget, she asked, “How is that even possible?”
“Well, you’d have to know a little more about Reyes.” While I rarely told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Reyes to anyone but a select few individuals whom I’d probably placed in mortal danger by doing so, Gemma already knew so much and I’d kept her at arm’s length for so long. I wanted our relationship to be what it once was. I wanted to be close to her again. Our stepmother Denise had driven a wedge between us that I was no longer willing to leave wedged. No more wedgies. Period.
“Before I tell you, I have to know three things,” I said.
“Okay.”
“One, are you sitting down?”
“Yes.”
“Two, are you mentally stable?”
“More than you’ll ever be.”
Well, that was uncalled for. “And three, how do you spell schizophrenia?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to see if you’d tell me.”
She exhaled loudly. “You were saying?”
“Okay, but just remember, I warned you.”
“Wait, no you didn’t. There was no warning.”
“Right, I know, that was my warning. ‘Just remember, I warned you,’ was my warning.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Are you finished?”
“Yes.”
“Can I continue?”