SONS of DON

by Brenda L. Harper

  Gwen slowly sat back down in the recliner, sitting on the very edge with her weight on her feet, as though she couldn’t really commit to sitting or standing.

  “I guess that’s not strange, considering who my mother is.”

  “I don’t suppose so,” he agreed. “But it still makes your face light up. You don’t know how relieved to see that I was when I came back into your life.”

  “No,” Gwen said, shaking her head, “you don’t get to say things like that yet.”

  His head dropped, his chin nearly touching his chest as he tried not to look at her. “Okay,” he said quietly.

  Silence fell between them for a moment. Then Gwen, unable to stand it much longer, asked, “Did you ever see her again?”

  “Yes.” He looked up, but his gaze fell on the coffee table instead of her. “The next time I saw her, you were about a year old. I had graduated from Stanford and was caught up in my first semester in law school. You were going to this great little daycare near the university during the day, and my mother—God bless her—would take you at night when I had study groups. My parents…let’s just say they were less than thrilled when I introduced you to them, but they came around when they saw you for the first time.”

  “I have grandparents?”

  “Yes,” he said, a deep sadness coming to his voice. “I haven’t seen them in a long time, but I hear they’re still doing well.” He dragged his fingers through his hair again. “Your mother was waiting for me after study group one night, sitting against the hood of my car like nothing had happened between us. But when she saw me…the panic that emanated from her scared the crap out of me. She started telling me you were in danger, that some woman knew where you were, what you were, and she was going to kill you.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “Of course not. It sounded like the insane ravings of a very sick woman.” He shook his head. “I shook her off and left, went to get you. But two days later, a woman broke into my apartment and she…” He shuddered as the memory played in his mind. “Let’s just say, her intention was very clear.”

  “You believed Blodeuwedd after that?”

  “No. I thought they were working together. I thought it was some sort of trick, like she was planning on fighting for custody and she was trying to make me look like an unfit father.”

  “That would be quite a trick.”

  Paul surprised her by chuckling. “Yeah, it would have been.”

  “Blu came to me a week later, told me everything. I insisted that she was insane, that we needed to call and get her some help. But she kept going over it, kept saying these insane things until I must have gone insane, too, because I was beginning to believe her. And when that woman came back—she attacked us on a bright, summer afternoon in the supermarket parking lot—I knew there must be something to Blu’s story. But I was still determined that I could protect you.”

  “Did you?”

  “For a while.” He stood, as though he was feeling that need to expend energy that often overtook Gwen in moments like this. He walked from the corner of the couch to the kitchen and back again before he continued his story. “You were attacked at daycare, at a moment when I wasn’t around. If it hadn’t been for the fast thinking of one of the workers, you would not be here now. It was then that I realized that we couldn’t just hide in plain sight. We had to leave California, we had to go where no one knew us and these people wouldn’t be able to find you.”

  He stood in the doorway of the kitchen, his hands on his hips as the past came back full blast. “I sold everything I could and we hit the road. Moved from place to place for a long time…months, before we finally settled in a small town in Illinois. I thought, far from the mainstream, a place where no one would know us, a place I could find work over the internet…it should have been perfect. And it was, for a while.”

  “But not long.”

  “Not long enough.” He moved back to the couch, sat again. “They found us again just before your third birthday. I packed up that night and we left, left everything except the clothes on our backs. But it was like they suddenly had a tracker on us, like they knew where we were going to go before I did. They were always one step ahead of us.” He smacked his hand on his thigh, as though it still frustrated him, the lengths they had gone to all those years ago to take her out. “I knew I had to do something radical, but I didn’t know what.

  “Blu came to me while we were staying in a little, out of the way motel in Texas. Said that it was me they were tracking, not you. She said that we had to separate, that I had to let you go.” He slapped his thigh again. “I refused. Just outright refused. I wouldn’t leave a three-year-old child on her own with no one to care for her. But Blu…she knew it was the only way. She wore me down, promised to watch over you, promised she would keep me informed about what was happening. She said you had to disappear, you had to survive to adolescence to have a chance against these people. Deep down, I knew she was right, but I still…I sat there and watched those people walk away with you and I jumped out of my car, opened my mouth to stop the whole thing, but she made it so that they couldn’t even see me.”

  “She was there?”

  Paul looked up, his tortured eyes clearing a little as he focused on her. “She was there.”

  “She forced you to do it.”

  He twisted his head slightly, a kind of shrug. “It was a mutual choice until she stopped me from putting the brakes on.”

  “How could either of you think I would be better off in the foster care system?”

  To his credit, Paul didn’t try to explain. He didn’t try to apologize, either. Gwen wasn’t sure she could have handled either one, so she was glad he didn’t. But there was this part of her that felt like he owed her something for everything she had gone through these last fourteen years.

  “How did you come to be my social worker?” she asked.

  Paul looked over at her. “She kept her promise. She watched over you. And she came to me every few weeks and gave me reports about your progress, usually with an anecdote or two about you, about your developing personality. That scar you have on your right knee? She told me how you fell in the schoolyard while chasing a little towheaded boy.”

  Gwen touched her knee even though the scar was hidden under her jeans. “Isn’t that nice of her?” she asked with all the sarcasm she could muster.

  Paul’s eyes narrowed. “She was trying to protect you, Gwen.”

  “Protect me?” She jumped to her feet, ignoring the pain in her ankle at the sudden movement. “Do you know what happened to me in those foster homes? Do you know how many of those people were sadistic creeps who only wanted to take in kids so that they could do horrible, shameful things to them? Do you realize that when I was hiding bruises from my social workers, I was learning things that even a grown woman shouldn’t know?”

  “I do know,” he said, crossing to her even before she realized he had stood. “I know so much more than you think I do, and it makes me sick every time I think about it.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, twisting away from his attempt to touch her. “You weren’t there. You don’t know what it was like.”

  “I know, and I’m not trying to take anything away from what you suffered, Gwen.”

  “What I suffered because of what you did.”

  His whole body seemed to droop with her words. His shoulders dropped perceptively, his head came down, his gaze fell to the floor. But it didn’t stay there.

  Paul looked up again, his eyes filled with pain as he quietly spoke.

  “You’re still alive, Gwen. You are able to fight for yourself now. Everything I’ve heard, you have fought for yourself and you have survived. You wouldn’t be able to do that if those people had caught up with you and I wasn’t able to keep you safe.”

  “So pat yourself on the back,” she said, attempting to move around him. But he grabbed her arms, and this time he wasn’t going to let go.

  He shook her a little, made
her look at him by moving so close to her that she had no choice but to look him in the eye or stare at his throat.

  “I didn’t want this. I didn’t want any of it.” He shook her again, hard, until the room wanted to spin. “I never asked for her to drop you in my lap. I didn’t want to be a father, to give up my dreams of being a lawyer. I was the one kid who wanted everything my father had pushed on me since I began to read. But this happened. You happened.”

  “No one forced you to take me on. You could have given me up that day in the hospital. I might have had a chance of being adopted by a good family—”

  “You might have,” he agreed, squeezing her arms for a long second before he let her go, stepping back and sinking onto the edge of the coffee table as though he could no longer trust his legs to hold him up. “You think I haven’t considered that? You think I haven’t regretted not giving you that chance?”

  Pain sliced through Gwen’s chest as she backed up, her shoulder painfully slamming into the edge of the lone window in his crappy, tiny, claustrophobic apartment. Tears were flowing freely down her cheeks, the one thing she had always told herself she wouldn’t do—she wouldn’t cry in front of another person, especially someone who had broken her trust—she hated what he was saying, hated the way it made her feel. She hated everything about this situation.

  She wanted it all to stop.

  Gwen pressed her hands against her eyes, screwed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets until she was seeing stars.

  Who would have thought that she would ever wish for the reality of her uncertain childhood rather than the truth she had always so desperately hoped for?

  The truth, really, was overrated.

  “I’ve gone over it a million times, Gwen,” Paul said, his voice choked by something—emotion she didn’t even want to allow him. He didn’t have the right to be upset, to feel grief, or whatever it was he was feeling. “I have tried to figure out what I could have done differently, how I could have kept you with me and still protected you…”

  “But you didn’t. You weren’t there for me.”

  “In saving you from the supernatural forces that wanted to destroy you, I laid you squarely into the hands of human monsters.” He chuckled, but it had a hysterical quality to it. “Don’t you think I’ve seen the irony in that?”

  Gwen dragged her fingers through her hair and, when she realized what she was doing, she buried her hands in the front pockets of her jeans.

  He was watching her, tears on his own face. And she hated him for that.

  “For two years, I just kind of wandered, never really settling anywhere. We had hoped you would be adopted, but you weren’t. And then Blu came to me and told me that…the foster home you were in was not good. I made phone calls to your social worker, I even called the judge who presided over your case when you first went into the system. But no one would listen to me unless I was willing to give my name. I couldn’t do that…what if that crazy woman, Branwen, what if she caught wind of it? Then she would know.”

  Gwen pushed away from the wall, but her ankle burned as she put weight on it, so she fell back again.

  “So, what, you decided to become a social worker?”

  “Exactly. It was the only way I could help you.”

  She looked up at the ceiling, her head spinning with a headache that was threatening to steal her ability to process even one more word, one more truthful revelation.

  “I had to take a couple of courses to get my certification, and there was this internship thing…it was complicated, but I got my license as quickly as I could. And then I had to convince my supervisor to give me your case without being too obvious about it. It all took time—”

  “Time I didn’t have.”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence. There was really nothing else to say.

  Gwen pushed away from the wall again, ignoring the pain in her ankle as she crossed to the door. He didn’t try to stop her even as he climbed to his feet, as he watched her walk away.

  Her hand was on the doorknob when he called out to her.

  “Do you want to know what your name is?”

  Gwen closed her eyes. It had never occurred to her…though it should have been obvious.

  “Gwenydd…that was your mother’s idea. She said it means morning star. She told me she chose it for you because you are the hope of the light, kind of like the morning star.”

  “That’s my real name?”

  “That part, yeah. She had me write it into your clothes so that the people who found you would know.”

  “And Reese?”

  “That was something your first social worker came up with. She thought it fit well with your name.”

  She looked back at him. It was like conceding defeat. He’d won…she wanted to know.

  “Gwenydd Marie Thompson,” he said quietly.

  She bit her bottom lip as the name danced around inside her head, a part of her feeling almost as if it fit, as though some small part of her subconscious recognized her true identity.

  “And you?”

  “Bradley,” he said. “I’m Bradley Thompson.”

  There was something like relief in his tone, as though he was happy to finally be able to own his true identity once again.

  She inclined her head slightly.

  “Sounds like a lawyer’s name.”

  Chapter 19

  Gwen told Theresa she was sick, that the pain in her ankle was upsetting her stomach. Theresa was predictably understanding and sent Gwen upstairs, relieving her of her duties in preparing dinner. She wasn’t sure how long it would be before Paul—Bradley—called and told her about their meeting, but it gave her a little while alone to clear her head and figure out what to do next.

  She paced the worn floor in her bedroom for a little bit—her ankle still hurt, but she really didn’t feel it much anymore—but felt too confined by the four walls. She hadn’t tried to get up to the widow’s walk since she hurt her ankle. But there was this little voice in the back of her head that suggested it didn’t matter anymore. If she fell, who would care? Her father abandoned her and then watched from the sidelines…watched as she struggled, watched as she was abused and ignored and…

  She didn’t want to think about it anymore, but it seemed like it was all she could think about. She regretted going to him, regretting asking for the truth. Why did Rhein have to approach her at school? Why did Cei have to have a meet today? Who had track meets in the middle of October, anyway? Why couldn’t she have just gone to Tony’s like she promised him she would? Why did she go?

  Why…that seemed to be one question she would never answer fully.

  Gwen swung herself out onto the wrought iron ladder that led up to the widow’s walk. Her boot was so bulky that it didn’t sit properly on the rungs. She bent low and undid the Velcro, tossing it back into the room before she climbed up the ladder, nursing her sore ankle along. It wasn’t as swollen as it had been, but putting even the littlest bit of weight on it hurt more than anything she’d ever done to herself before.

  Thank goodness for decent upper body strength. She pulled herself up over the edge of the widow’s walk and hobbled over to the little hideaway under the eaves where her blankets and pillows hid.

  She already felt better, sitting here in the cool breeze, the setting sun falling quick enough that the temperature was noticeably lower than it had been when she first stuck her head out the window. She pulled a blanket over her shoulders and curled up into the pillows, her face turned to the setting sun to enjoy those last few minutes of sunlight.

  If only she could spend all her time outside. Maybe then she wouldn’t feel so tense all the time. Maybe if Paul had told her the truth while they were standing in the middle of a beautiful park, she might have taken it better.

  Well, maybe not.

  A small bird landed on the railing that ran across the front of the widow’s walk and offered a low chirp. Gwen glanced at it and immediately recognized it as a dwarf owl, th
e same bird that seemed to be showing up a lot in the recent past.

  “Go away,” she said, waving an edge of her blanket at it, “you’re blocking the sunlight.”

  The bird chirped again and twisted its head, as though refusing her demand.

  “Go,” she said, leaning forward to wave the corner of the blanket at it again, actually touching it this time. But the bird just hopped up, waited for her to settle down, then returned to its perch.

  “You are a stubborn one,” she said.

  “So are you.”

  The bird seemed to have spoken. Gwen stared at it and, almost like a magician’s illusion, the owl’s face widened and grew, its feathers turned into the most amazing red hair, and its wings spread out to become the arms of a woman.

  Blodeuwedd.

  Gwen shook her head. “Go away.”

  “We need to talk,” she said, her voice almost musical, like the sound of the wind blowing through dry leaves on an autumn afternoon.

  “We don’t,” Gwen said, reaching behind her to find leverage so that she could pull herself to her feet. But halfway there, she lost her balance and her weight landed almost fully on her injured ankle. She cried out, falling to her bottom again as she reached for the ankle.