Gemini (36 page)

             
I needed them as much as they needed me. That’s what it came down to.

Two and a half months later, Ed’s treatments ended and he was in remission. I had been there every day, with him for every treatment and it was safe to say, I had a new number one fan.

I think my bond with Ed, more so than Elaine, had something to do with the fact that I never experienced having a father. My mother couldn’t be replaced, but there was no competition for the role of Dad.

Ed quickly became very protective of me and the advice he gave me was more to the point and blunt than I remember getting from my Mom. Overall, I was figuring out that even though I never felt I needed one, it was pretty damn cool to have a father figure.

One night after dessert, Elaine was cleaning up in the kitchen and Ed and I were sitting down in the living room when he turned to me. “I want you to know something, kid. If I knew that your birth mother had given birth to two girls, I would have adopted you too that day you were born. You would have been my daughter. It would have been for the sheer fact that you were Amanda’s twin. But I never got that opportunity. But let me tell you, now that I know you and the type of person you have become, I know that the right person raised you, because she did a tremendous job. I also know that I would choose you as a daughter today for more reasons that just the fact that you are genetically related to Amanda. You are the best kind of human being, the kind that always puts others before herself and I would have been so proud if your sister turned out to be just like you. I want you to know that from this day forward, you are not a fatherless child. You have a father. I want nothing more in this life to give you back just a fraction of the love you have shown me these past several weeks.” 

             
Tears flowed heavily as I put my head on Ed’s shoulder. “Thank you. Thank you, Ed.”

             
He squeezed me tightly and turned to me, “That being said, Allison, as much as I don’t want to lose you, I think you need to face your life in Boston. I know that you were running away from all of the hurt and that hurt let us have you for a while. But I think until you face what you were running from, you won’t have the same kind of peace that I have found in facing you.”

             
He continued,  “We haven’t told Cedric you have been here all this time, because I know that’s what you wanted. I know that you don’t want to face him…but when Elaine gave me the phone the night you confronted him with the photo, I heard the tears and pain in his voice. I knew then that you must have been pretty damn special for him to be so torn up about losing you. He loves you, Allison. I couldn’t have told you whether or not he truly loved Amanda the same way…but he loves you…that I know for sure.”

             
I thought about what Ed said. Cedric was in bad shape that night, barely unrecognizable when I walked in on him with that long beard and his normally translucent blue eyes were dark and tired. Could he really have been that torn up over me?

Did he really love me?

Did I love him?

I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

***

We decided that I would stay another couple of weeks and head back to Boston the day before Labor Day.

The plan was for me to fly out to Chicago again to visit in a couple of months and then Ed and Elaine would come out to Boston for the holidays.

I notified both the diner and Bright Horizon’s that I would be returning after Labor Day if they would have me back and requested that I be placed back with my original clients, although I was still waiting to hear on that.

My last day in Naperville, I wanted to go somewhere that I hadn’t been yet, but needed to visit before I left: Amanda’s grave.

I asked Ed and Elaine if it would be okay if I went alone, so Ed let me borrow his car.

  As I drove into Pinewoods Cemetery, I followed the directions that they carefully wrote out for me so that I could find the plot.

I had stopped at a florist and picked out pink roses, which Ed told me, were Amanda’s favorite. I remembered the dried up pink rose in Cedric’s binder, the same binder where I found the photo and wondered if he took it from her burial service.

After driving up a hill and admiring the grassy scenery, I finally found the exact spot where my sister was buried.

Upon seeing the terracotta colored granite headstone, I immediately broke into tears, placing the roses down.

Amanda Rose Thompson June 2, 1984-May 1, 2002, Loving Daughter

It crossed my mind that had we known each other, it might have read ‘loving daughter and sister.’ 

I started to pray silently and willed Amanda to forgive me for all of my conflicting emotions surrounding her. I told her that I loved her, even though we had never met and promised that I would always look after Ed and Elaine.

Staying for about fifteen minutes, it dawned on me that my fresh flowers were not alone, not by any means. There were dozens of flowers, some old and some new strewn about.

Ed and Elaine had told me that with all of Ed’s treatments, they hadn’t been there for several months, so I found it peculiar that some, not all of these flowers seemed fresh. They weren’t planted; they were just laid down, like mine. Someone has been here…very recently. I wondered who it was, if not Ed and Elaine. I was happy that someone was thinking of my sister, though and visiting her.

As I turned around to leave, I took one more look back at the stone and blew a soft kiss. It was returned with a soft breeze and I liked to think that maybe it was her kissing me back.

When I returned to the car, I felt satisfied that I could now return to Boston having covered all of my bases here in Illinois.

I couldn’t wait to get back to Ed and Elaine’s and tell them about the flowers. Maybe they would know whom they were from.

As I started the ignition, the car hesitated and wouldn’t start. That was strange. I tried it again and the same thing happened. Was the battery dead? I knew nothing about cars.

Shit.

I didn’t want to bother Ed and Elaine. Thankfully, I had AAA and immediately took my card out of my wallet and called the number. AAA said the approximate wait time would be twenty to thirty minutes, so I could handle that.

Twenty minutes came and went and as I sat in my car, I noticed another car pull up behind me. It was an older rust colored Toyota Corolla. It was pretty desolate out here, so I crossed my fingers that it wasn’t someone shady.

A teenage boy with shaggy brown hair and tattooed covered arms got out and walked slowly over to the headstones. He was carrying purple hydrangeas and my heart dropped when he stopped right at Amanda’s stone.

Oh. My. God.

This was the person leaving the flowers. But who was he? He couldn’t be more than sixteen or seventeen.

He stood in front of the stone with his head down and then kneeled down to place the flowers down.

I stared at him for a few minutes and my curiosity was about to kill me, so I got out of the car, slowly approaching the boy.

“Hi,” I said.

The boy jumped and turned around. “Oh…hey. You scared me,” he said.

“Sorry…um…did you know Amanda?” I asked as I approached him.

The boy was silent for a few seconds then spoke. “Yeah…um…well, not really. I didn’t really know her, but—”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, I never really met her. I don’t even know what she looked like…but she was related to me.”

“Related? How?”

He looked me up and down. “Who are you?” he asked.

I hesitated, and then decided there was only one answer. “I am her twin sister.”

The boy stepped back as if he was scared of me and squinted his eyes as if to examine me.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Allison…and you are?”

He seemed stunned by my answer and didn’t immediately respond.

“Jake…my name is Jake.”

“Are you the one who has been leaving all these flowers?”

He nodded. “Yeah…well, not just me. Me and my Mom.”

“Who is your Mom?”

The boy didn’t say anything…his hands started to shake and he took out a cigarette and nervously lit it, blowing the smoke away from me. He then slowly turned to look at me and I got the first real look at his eyes. They were amazing…green with gold speckles.

They were my eyes.

“Jake?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you my brother?”

He paused, took a long drag of his cigarette, and then blew it out slowly.

“Yeah.”

***

             
I had a brother…
a brother
…Jake. And he was a badass.

He figured out right away what was wrong with the car and had it fixed well before AAA ever showed up.

              We stood outside leaning against the parked cars, just staring at each other and without the distraction of the broken down vehicle, we were faced to discuss the inevitable.

“How did you find out about Amanda, Jake?”

“About six months ago, this investigator guy came to our house. We live on the south side of Chicago. His last name was Samuels. He asked my mother if she had given birth to twin girls in 1984. I was like…what?”

“So, what did your mother say?”

“She just looked at me, like she was afraid to say anything, like she wanted me to leave the room. And then I nearly shit my pants, because she started crying…like really hard and told him, that yeah, she had. I was like…holy shit. She told him she was messed up then, ran away from home and was on drugs and that some dealer had gotten her pregnant.”

I nearly fell to the ground at that revelation and felt like I was going to vomit. That answered one of my questions. My birth father was a drug dealer.

Jake continued as I listened stunned. “She wanted to know why he was looking for her and asked if they…you know…you…the girls were okay. The investigator told her that one of the girls had died in an accident a long time ago and that the other one lived in Boston. That’s you?”

“Yeah…that’s me,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.

“So, Mom was like hysterical because he said Amanda was dead. Then she asked, how he found us and the investigator explained that Amanda’s parents hired him to find the other sister and that in the middle of all that he found my mother, even though they hadn’t asked him to.”

“Your mom…what’s she like?”

“She’s cool, Allison, really cool. It’s just her and me now. She was real messed up when she was young, like when she was my age, but she ended up getting clean, went to school, became a medical assistant and met my dad, but he died in a motorcycle accident when I was five, so it’s just us.”

“I am so sorry about your dad.”

“Thanks.”

“What’s is your mother’s name?”

“Vanessa…Vanessa Green. Well, Green was my dad’s last name. Before that, she was Vanessa Bologna. She’s Italian. She looks just like you, actually, it’s freaky. That’s how I knew you were definitely my sister.”

Wow.

I smiled at Jake. He seemed like a really good kid.

“Jake, do you think your mother wants to meet me?”

“I know she does. She told the investigator that when he found you to let her know. But he never got back to her. We don’t have a lot of money, so it’s not like we could have come to Boston, but I know she wants to meet you…she’s just afraid of what you’ll think of her, I think. That you’ll judge her for giving you up and separating the twins and stuff.”

“Do you know if she chose to separate us, the twins?”

“She told me that the adoption people pressured her to do it…something about no family wanting to take on two…she didn’t really want to…but they told her the babies were going to two good homes, so she gave in.”

I tried to process what he was saying. “I see.”

“She begged the investigator let her know where Amanda was buried and he did, so we come out here once a week. We take turns…sometimes she comes, sometimes I do and sometimes we come together. It makes her feel better to come here.”

“That’s nice, Jake.”

Jake put his hands in his pockets and gave me a crooked smile. “You seem really cool,” he said.

“You too. Hey…give me your phone,” I said.

I grabbed his flip phone and added my name into his contacts. “I leave to go back to Boston tomorrow. You tell your mom when she’s ready, I’d be willing to meet her if she wanted to...no pressure, though, okay? I don’t want to make her uncomfortable or anything. I’ll be back here in a couple of months for Thanksgiving. If she wants to meet me, then I can come to you. If not, that’s okay too. But…you…you can call me anytime, okay?”

“That’s cool, Allison. Really cool,” Jake said.

“It was really nice to meet you Jake.”

“You too, Allison.”

We stood in silence for a bit before we both opened our respective car doors.