Katarina

by Alona Jarden

  "I can’t believe it. So you do remember her?" he sat on my bed.

  "I guess so," I shrugged my shoulders. "But I need you to prove that this is actually her. I need you to show me the reason why this specific woman has been waiting in my subconscious for all these years and that this is..." I paused as he placed a photograph of me as a child in the arms of that beautiful woman I drew on my lap.

  I took a few minutes to study it. I looked at each and every detail of that picture and tried to distinguish which of my emotions were actually broken pieces of memories, but I couldn’t.

  My mother stood up straight in that picture, on a bright sunny day, and proudly smiled while she held me in her arms so why? Why couldn’t I remember that moment?

  The smile on my face proved that I was so happy being close to her, so damn it, why? Why was her face stuck in my mind, while the feelings I’d had for her refused to come back?

  "Is this proof enough for you?"

  I nodded.

  "I'm done with being afraid for you, moving too fast, Kate. I thought you needed time and a predetermined pace, but I didn’t seem to appreciate how strong you are. That's over. I'm ready..."

  "This is my mother," I uttered. I heard him going on and explaining himself to me, but I ignored him for as long as I could.

  "Yes, it is. You're coping so well with the memories that..." His words were like a static background noise that disturbed my deep gaze at the picture he had given me.

  Suddenly, every detail of it brought to mind a memory I'd never heard retold before in one of my father's stories, and I wondered how I could know if it was real.

  My mother wore beautiful, white high heels and, within a split second, I knew that I used to steal them from her shoe drawer and walk around the house wearing them, making everyone around me laugh. The shoulder bag on her arm was a creamy color and it immediately threw me into a memory where I saw myself finding mints in it when she wasn’t looking. In that picture, her right hand was hidden by the dress I was wearing, but on her left hand, which was wrapped around my back, lay a distinctive ring and I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it had passed from one generation to the next in my father's family for years.

  "My father..." I exhaled in frustration. "I no longer know who I mean when I say those words."

  "If so, let's leave him be, for now. Let's start talking about your mother."

  "Okay," I turned to him, restless. "Tell me why she keeps coming back to me at night, Andrew."

  "Well, that's pretty simple to explain. Even though you like to control everything in your life, you can’t silence your subconscious, and she keeps coming back because you probably have a lot of questions left hidden deep inside."

  "Do you know why she put me up for adoption?" I already knew the answer, I just wanted someone else to say it for me.

  "She didn’t give you up for adoption, Kate." His eyes couldn’t find mine, as if struggling not to be the barer of bad news.

  "She was murdered, wasn’t she?"

  "She was."

  "And it happened in the kitchen of my house. My dreams, my nightmares, are actually memories of that."

  "I'm sorry. I wish that wasn’t the truth, but it is."

  "So is that why I was sent to the orphanage?"

  "You know the answer to that question," he breathed heavily. "And if you don’t, it's probably too soon to reveal that part of your life story, Kate."

  "Too soon? You and your fucking plan…" I waved my hands at him as I understood exactly what needed to happen. "I don’t want you to tell me what happened, Andrew. I want to see it for myself. I want to go back there, right now."

  "Go back where?"

  "Do your magic. Make me breath slowly or whatever, and bring me back to that moment right now!"

  "Are you sure you want to see those sights again?"

  "Well, I've been seeing them every time I close my eyes since I got here. I have been haunted by the ghost of that moment since I was a little girl and, maybe, if I go back to it, I can finally put it to rest."

  "As I said, I am done being driven by fear for your well-being, Kate, but I need to point out that I don’t think you're ready for it." He shook his head. "Believe me, if I thought it would help you accept the truth, I'd do it. But, I'm afraid it's too early for you."

  It wasn’t that I disagreed with him, it was just too hard for me to accept his exclusive control over the situation.

  It was the fourth day since he had begun exposing me to my true self and every piece that was revealed, made it painfully clear that there were many pieces still hidden behind it.

  "You expressed your reluctance, and I heard it." I felt a need to rebel against his advice for me. "I’ve already remembered my father and I think I’ve remembered my mother. It's time I remember what happened to them."

  "It sounds very simple, Kate, but it's not. I have to be responsible enough to make sure you'll survive these sessions and it's not the right time for you to deal with the full picture."

  "What am I missing so that I'm able to return to that day?" I decided to try and understand the logic behind his precious plan.

  "As of now, you remember the faces of your parents. You may even remember their identities or a few distant images of who they were to you, but you clearly don’t remember them."

  "In English, Andrew," I growled impatiently at him. "I need you to speak clearly now."

  "In plain English, I'd like you to remember their lives before you remember their deaths."

  "Their deaths?" I wished I wasn’t so sharp, but I couldn’t miss the fact that he was talking in plural. "Both of them died? So is that why I was put up for adoption?"

  "Come with me." He stood up and reached out his hand to me, but I didn’t grab it.

  I remained sitting on the bed, wondering if I wanted to go back to giving him my full cooperation.

  I so wanted to make him do things according to my pace, but a single word suggesting that my mother wasn’t the only one who had died in that dreadful puddle of blood that came back to me in my horrific dreams undermined my confidence in my ability to discover the whole truth without him.

  "We'll do it quickly, Kate. I promise." He changed the angle at which he looked at me to one that suddenly seemed familiar, as if from a previous lifetime, and I folded my hand in his.

  I let him lead me into the living room and widened my eyes when I saw the fucking shoebox I’d spent hours looking for sitting there on the table.

  "Where the hell did you hide it?"

  "I never reveal my good hiding places." He sat down on the rug with his legs crossed and didn’t even slightly resemble the little boy he used to be.

  I’d thought I would have to remind him that he’d promised to hurry me up to the essential stage of his plan, but I was glad to find that he hadn’t needed me to do so.

  "Look," he placed a picture of me in the arms of my biological parents, taken from the mentioned birthday celebration, into my hand, "This is from when you were young and stupid, Kate."

  "I was never stupid."

  "Oh, but you were," he smiled. "You refused time and again to marry me, but you kept on saying that you wanted to marry him." He put his finger on my father's handsome face and stretched his smile even wider.

  "It's amazing," I looked at my mother's face. "It's hard to believe how much I look like her."

  "It is, isn’t it?"

  "It's so strange to suddenly see someone carrying the same genetic material as mine, after spending a lifetime getting used to the idea that I have no DNA connection with anyone in my family."

  "I understand," he nodded, giving me the impression that he really did.

  "He, on the other hand, doesn’t look like me at all," I pointed to my father.

  "I'm not sure that that's true." He took another picture out of the box and studied it. "Maybe you'll see more resemblance between you in this one?" He passed the picture to me and I saw myself sitting in the driver's seat on my father's knees.

>   We sat on that unique rug for quite a while, looking at the pictures Andrew chose to pull out of his secret shoebox. He explained that he had sneaked back to my house through my bedroom window and had stolen everything he found, knowing that there would be no one to demand those memories anymore.

  He gave me a detailed account of each and every picture he pulled from the shoebox and I tried to experience the days he described to me in the memories that overwhelmed me from time to time.

  "There is only one thing I haven’t yet understood, Andrew. If that's my mother and that's my father, why couldn’t you just tell me all this? Why did you have to hide it in the first place?"

  "Because the man who raised you is a fucking liar."

  "I was wondering if you knew him."

  "I did... Once..." His expression changed.

  "If so, I guess now is the time to tell me who is the man who raised me."

  "It's not," he shook his head reluctantly.

  "Can you at least tell me how I got to grow up in his possession?"

  "I can’t tell you that either, but I think that soon we'll be able to get to..."

  "Not 'soon'. Today, Andrew," I insisted.

  "I won’t do it. We can always go forward, but we can never go back, and I have to be the responsible adult and force you to put off your desires a bit."

  "You?" I exhaled scornfully. "You will be the responsible adult between the two of us?" I got up, tossing all the memories that were lying quietly on my knees to the floor, and said, sarcastically, "You really are too funny for your own good, Mr. Responsible." I waved my hair obnoxiously at him and again, went back to my room with a powerful door slam.

  Chapter 25

  Mr. Briggs

  It's amazing how things look different when your perspective changes. The following morning I was back to being on the right side of the interrogation room, watching Officer Swenson interrogate Aidan, confronting him with questions which he found difficult to answer.

  The young lawyer assigned to me by the Public Defender's Office had done his job and had revealed the biological evidence of the connection between me and my daughter, Kate, but he hadn’t stopped at just that. He’d demanded the police cease from interrogating me in the context of Kate's abduction without his presence and helped me shed exactly the right amount of light I wanted on my past so I could remain a free man. Lucky for me, no one knew that the whole truth would have put that definition in doubt.

  "I... I don’t understand what you want me to tell you." Aidan looked frightened when Officer Swenson's patience broke and she demanded that he'd answer her questions truthfully.

  "I'm asking if you are known to be a guy who sleeps around with a lot of girls on campus."

  "It's hard for me to answer that, because you ask this as if it's something bad."

  "I'm asking this as if I'm waiting for you to accept or reject my claim, Aidan, that's all."

  "Look..." he paused again. "I'm not going to lie and I'm not going to apologize for having a very active sex life. I don’t know if that's what you meant by your question, but I hope you understand that I'm not known for chasing girls who aren’t interested in me."

  "In that case, what kind of girls do you usually chase after?"

  "Well, that's just it," he greened "You're asking the wrong question, since I don’t need to chase anyone, Officer." I shook my head in disgust, not understanding how he was the one my daughter had chosen to associate with. "They all throw themselves at my feet," he completed, then folded his arms behind his head.

  "I must say, I understand them." Officer Swenson sat down on the table with a seductive look aimed toward him. "You are undoubtedly one of the most handsome guys I have met recently."

  "Thank you," he cleared his throat. "You're definitely among the prettiest police women that..."

  "Aidan?" she whispered as she leaned forward and leaned her face close to his. "I think you have such special facial features." She slid the back of her fingers gently, to his cheek.

  "Um... Thank you?" He finally seemed confused.

  "No, I'm serious." She straightened up again while focusing her undressing stare at him. "You're simply yummy...mmm...mmm..." She bit her lower lip. "Just yummy!"

  "I don’t think this is appropriate behavior for this situation... I mean... It's not that I don’t want to, but..." He moved uncomfortably.

  "Oh, for this situation, no," she laughed. "Of course you're right, but I thought you'd like a little taste of what might happen if you continue to play games with me and find yourself in custody for disrupting my interrogation."

  "If I what? Arrested? For what?"

  "Oh, didn’t you realize that your cooperation with me is your civic duty and not a personal favor to me?" She got off the table and sat down opposite him, noisily dragging the chair. "Too bad, Aidan. It's a shame that a handsome guy like you will learn how real life works behind bars. Oh, speaking of jail, in there, all this is very appropriate behavior. Just saying. Thought you'd like to know," she completed, managing to stretch a satisfied smile on my face.

  Aidan straightened up in his chair, Officer Swenson wrote a few things in her notebook, and I felt tremendous relief. Things seemed much easier to analyze when it wasn’t me who sat in front of her chilling eyes. I breathed calmly and thanked God that the main suspicion had finally been diverted away from me.

  All the threats she sent Aidan made the officers around me roll with laughter, but I didn’t join them. Memories from the previous day, when I was the one who sat uncomfortably in his chair across from her, came back.

  I looked at the change in Aidan's gaze, a change that must have been evident in my eyes, too, when I’d realized that not having a part in Kate's kidnapping hadn’t meant I wouldn’t find myself in serious trouble.

  "So I ask again, Aidan," Officer Swenson broke the silence and stuck the end of her pen in a writing position on her notebook. "Is there a widespread opinion on campus that you are sleeping with a large number of girls?"

  "Yes," he cleared his throat.

  "And is this opinion fabricated or accurate?"

  "I guess it's right."

  "And was Kate one of those girls you slept with?" I closed my eyes and hoped to hear the answer I wished for.

  "No. Kate and I have never crossed the boundaries of our platonic relationship."

  "Are you absolutely sure about that?"

  "I am."

  "I think now is the time to tell you," she caused him to shiver, "I already received a reliable response for some of the questions I’ve asked you. I decided to ask your cute little ass the same questions just to hear what you had to say about it."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means that maybe, just maybe, I'm asking you questions in order to see if you tell me the truth, which, spoiler alert, I already know."

  "So do you want me to answer your question or not?" There was no trace of the arrogant guy sitting in that chair just moments before.

  "Sure," she gestured, indicating that she gave him the time and place to speak his mind. "I'd be happy if you answered now."

  "I admit that I courted Kate for a long time. She is the smartest girl I've ever known and, beyond that, she's one of the most attractive ones in medical school, not that she had much competition," he giggled, and I felt a lump in my throat. "It's true that, at the beginning of our relationship, I expressed sexual desire and attraction to her, but…"

  "Go on," she urged as she waited.

  "Kate and I never took a romantic direction in our relationship, and it wasn’t because I never tried to take us there. It was due to reluctance and lack of attraction on her part."

  "That's my girl!" I commended her, and the policemen sitting around me giggled for a bit.

  "Was Kate involved in a romantic relationship with anyone else on campus?" Officer Swenson kept pressing him.

  "No."

  "You probably meant to say that she wasn’t, as far as you know, right?"

  "I apologize if it soun
ds arrogant but, no, Officer Swenson. I'm not mistaken about this. I know Kate better than anyone else and, although she didn’t respond positively to my courtship, our friendship was the deepest thing I've ever shared with anyone."

  "And do you believe that she felt the same way?"

  "I would like to believe that it was mutual and I am sure that if she was involved in a romantic relationship with someone from campus, or at all for that matter, I would know about it."

  Aidan continued to share everything he knew about my daughter's life and routine and I listened. Through his answers, I discovered the social distress she’d experienced, the doubts she’d had about continuing to live in our apartment versus the thought of moving to a student apartment closer to medical school and a variety of issues troubling her that had never come up in any of our deep conversations.

  "Aidan, is it true that you two met up every morning for coffee at the Starbucks branch near the medical school?"

  "It is."

  "And do you also know a Mr..." She searched her notebook for his exact name. "Andrew Costa?" she completed, with a name that seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember from where.

  "Um…no." I was disappointed that his answer didn’t help me remember the origin of the name she’d mentioned.

  "Do you know the employees at this particular Starbucks branch?"

  "I guess I know some of them. Is he working there?"

  "Andrew is a barista, usually working the morning shift and, according to our investigation, he used to greet you guys when you entered the place."

  "Is it him?" Surprise was evident in his voice. "So that's his name? Andrew? Do you think he did anything to her? Did he do something to Kate?" he got furious.

  "Can I assume, from your reaction, that you know who I'm talking about?"

  "Sure. It's some creepy guy, too old to work as a Starbucks barista, who always looked crookedly at her."

  "Can you explain that look?"

  "He has this game they play. Something freaky. She was supposed to guess his name, as if anyone was actually interested in his freaking name. I guess he had the hots for her, that's all."