The Eve Genome

by Joanne Brothwell

  A piercing scream woke me up. Sitting bolt upright, I opened my eyes to see highway stretched out in front of me.

  “What’s wrong?” Kalan slammed on the breaks and I lurched forward. He reached out, placing his arm across my chest to protect me from hitting the dashboard as he pulled over to the side of the road, his eyes wide.

  I took a deep breath. “A nightmare. Just a nightmare.”

  “Are you okay?” Kalan asked.

  “I think there’s still something I need answered,” I said. He nodded, so I continued, “I know Marcus can control thoughts, but do you have any personal examples of it? Have you seen him do it? What’s it like?”

  Kalan took a deep breath. “When Marcus initially entered my life, I was ecstatic that I had real, flesh-and-blood relatives. It’s a foster child’s dream come true to have a real family. But my happiness was short-lived. Marcus has quite a mean streak. Probably because of how he was treated at home.” Kalan glanced at me. “He was always trying to tempt me to get into mischief with him. It started with pranks, leaving snakes in the bathtub, cockroaches in beds. As time went on, his pranks grew strange and malicious. A dead bird in my foster sister’s bed. His mother’s dog, Muffy, her throat slit from ear to ear, hanging from the rafters of the garage where she parked.”

  “Christ,” I muttered. “If he was killing animals and scaring children when he was fifteen and sixteen, what is he capable of now?”

  “He’s capable of anything. I believe that.”

  Now I understood the tenuous relationship between Kalan and his brother. He may be his only known blood relative, but that didn’t mean he could trust him.

  The landscape out the passenger side window brought me back to the here and now. Instantly, I knew by the carefully planted elms staggered every five feet, I was on the street that led to Uncle Les’s senior’s home.

  “How is this going to go?” I asked.

  Kalan parked the car. “I’ll tell him he has a choice. He can willingly give us the information we want, or I’ll take it.”

  I shivered at the way Kalan said those words, I’ll take it, so matter-of-factly. He’d always been so gentle, but I was beginning to realize there was more to Kalan than his angelic good looks. “Okay. But I can tell you right now, he’s not going to cooperate.”

  “His mistake.”

  We went into the senior’s home, and as we neared his apartment, my heart began to stutter. By the time we reached the door, I was certain Kalan could hear the pounding.

  Kalan rapped on the door three times. A barking voice answered. “Who’s there?”

  “It’s your niece, Adriana,” I called out. Nasty old fuck. There was a moment of hesitation before the chain latch was slid across, followed by the dead bolt turning.

  The door creaked as he opened the door only wide enough to poke his head out. “Oh. You.”

  My palms dripped sweat. This is the man who molested Analiese when she was only twelve years old. He opened the door the rest of the way, wide enough to finally see Kalan. Then he froze, stock-still, his mouth half-open.

  “I’m here to ask you some questions,” I said through gritted teeth. I could hardly keep my voice from wavering. “This is my friend, Kalan.”

  Uncle Les’s brows lowered and he gave Kalan a quick once-over. Then he grunted and opened the door. His near-black hair hadn’t been trimmed for some time, and also clearly hadn’t been washed, the way it stuck up in greasy points around his head. His green eyes had turned a mossy hue from the veil of cataracts that covered them. His teeth were yellowed from years of cigarette smoking, his skin reddened and criss-crossed with wrinkles like boot leather.

  Les walked back into his apartment. “Well, are you coming in or not?”

  I shoved my sweaty, shaking hands into my pockets and glanced at Kalan, whose grim expression told me he wasn’t impressed. We went in.

  My skin crawled. Uncle Les had every window covered, the curtains drawn. The space was dimly lit with one tiny lamp in the corner of the room. It served to highlight the eerie quality of the space with drab furnishings and washed-out colours. The entire palette was in shades of beige and gray. The smell of stale smoke and dirty laundry turned my stomach. The weighted door shut behind us and eclipsed all remaining natural light, so that we were plunged into a dingy, smoke-filled dungeon.

  “Why are you here?” Uncle Les asked. No attempt at social niceties.

  I drew in a breath. “Genevieve. Do you remember that name?” I waited a minute to see if he’d respond, but he didn’t. “Auntie Bethany and Grandma do. I bet you do too.”

  Les’s eyes narrowed. “It don’t matter if I remember or not. Why would I tell you a goddamn thing?” He pointed at me with his lit cigarette, the smouldering end bright red, a tiny weapon. The round white scar on Analiese’s left thigh flashed through my mind. Fucking. Asshole.

  My voice wavered as I failed to contain my temper. “You don’t say anything about Analiese dying? You can’t call your niece, my mom, to say sorry for your loss? And you can’t answer a simple question, even if my safety depends on it?” I was speaking far too loud in the enclosed space.

  Les chortled. More of a hoot, really. “You come in here with your damn white bodyguard,” he gestured to Kalan with his cigarette hand, “and try to guilt trip me? You’ve got another thing coming, girlie.”

  Kalan’s spine straightened. Uncle Les sat down on the sofa next to the lamp and set his cigarette in an ashtray, a thin thread of smoke rising from it, creating curlicues that rose up into the lamp shade. Once he settled his ass into the sofa, he grabbed the cigarette and took a drag from it, staring straight ahead as if Kalan and I weren’t even there.

  I strode across the room and sat down adjacent to Uncle Les. Kalan remained standing, coiled and ready, as if he would pounce across the room at my word.

  “Les. After everything you’ve done, don’t you think you owe me this much?”

  He glared at me, his eyes slotted, his nose flared. He refused to respond.

  “You have inflicted more pain on me and my family than you could possibly imagine. Now is your chance to make things right and tell me what you know. You have no reason to keep it from me.”

  “I want compensation. I’m an old man. All I got is my old age security. I want money.” His gruff voice was gravelly, from too many years of chain-smoking. “And don’t you try to guilt-trip me. That little slut of a sister—”

  I launched myself from my chair and backhanded him as hard as I could. His face rocketed to the side from the impact, and his mouldy eyes widened in disbelief. “Don’t you talk about Analiese that way you fucking pedophile!” The back of my hand stung and my wrist throbbed. I could so easily kill you right now, old man.

  “Bitch,” Les muttered under his breath, rubbing his bright red cheek. He pointed with his cigarette hand, right at Kalan. “Is he one of ‘em?”

  “One of…?”

  “Genevieve’s oddball twins.”

  My cheeks flooded with heat. He did know. “He is.”

  “He don’t look nothing like her. I guess sometimes those family genes get all screwed up, don’t they?” Les looked at me, a creepy smile tugging at the corners of his face. “Except for you and Analiese. You look just like your daddy, don’t you?”

  My blond-haired, blue eyed dad popped into my mind. He was the ultimate California boy. He couldn’t have been more opposite of me and Analiese, with our nearly black hair and green eyes. “What the hell are you talking about, you old fool?”

  Les chuckled and took another drag from his super-heated cigarette. “What? Your mom never told you who your real daddy is?”

  My stomach turned to lead, my heart heavy in my chest. He wasn’t implying…

  A chuckle erupted from his mouth. He obviously saw something in my expression that amused him. “I think you’re catching on now, aren’t you? You’re pretty smart. Just like yer old man.”

  It couldn’t be. T
he possibility was too vile to consider. Dr. McGill’s words flitted through my mind, unbidden.

  “Homozygous, or recessive traits are typically inherited when both parents are carriers of the traits. Their father must have the majority of recessive traits.”

  Recessive traits. Homozygous traits. Traits found in blood relatives.

  Kalan’s hand on my arm brought me back to the horrific reality of this situation. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  I shook my head, unable to answer, my thoughts racing, my emotions flinging around in my body like a wild ferret looking for a weakness in its cage.

  “I have to leave,” I managed to squeak out. My stomach turned and threatened the back of my throat. Bitter bile filled my mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” Les guffawed. “You mad at your mom for lying to you all these years?”

  With that, Kalan set off across the room, his long legs carrying him to Uncle Les in less than three strides. Les startled and jumped backward against the sofa. He dropped his smoke into his lap, but stared at Kalan for a beat before fishing it out from between his legs.

  Kalan’s voice was low and menacing. “I’m not interested in hearing you goad Adriana for one more second. The pain you have caused her and her family is enough. I can’t begin to understand what the hell is wrong with you that you have chosen to behave this way, hurting people for your own selfish desires, and I don’t really care to know. But you will give us the information we came here for. And if you don’t tell us, I will take the information from you. Voluntary or by force. It’s your choice.”

  A strange sensation unfolded deep in my belly. A twisting feeling. Like my body was about to internally combust and I’d suddenly become millions of ashes, floating, directionless.

  “You’re going to take it, are ya? Well, try it, because that’s the only way you’re going to get it out of me, weirdo.”

  Kalan’s hands were on Uncle Les’s face so fast, the movement reminded me of the way a snake attacked its prey. Les’s mouth dropped open the moment Kalan looked him in the eye.

  Les’s voice came out in a string of high-pressured, toneless words. “Last I saw her she was on the streets of Denver. The slums. She’s known on the streets as Jenny. I took a picture of her. It’s in the bottom of my top dresser drawer.”

  Kalan turned to me and nodded.

  I went to his bedroom and rummaged through the drawer and endured the smell of stale laundry and dirty old man. When my fingers touched the edge of the paper photo, I pulled it out of the drawer and quickly glanced at it. It was a woman with vivid teal eyes. Just like mine. I left the disgusting bedroom.

  Kalan was already standing at the entryway, holding the door open for me. I handed him the photo.

  “Will he remember this?” I asked.

  Kalan shook his head. “No.”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “He’ll feel disoriented for a while, but he’ll snap out of it in a few hours,” Kalan said.

  We exited the dungeon-like apartment, me walking on wooden legs, my movements robotic, stilted. I welcomed the light of the hallway.

  The fact that this was the first time Kalan had seen what his own mother looked like was completely eclipsed by the fact that I’d just learned my whole entire life had been one, giant lie.

  “Homozygous traits,” I said, my voice oddly flat. “That’s why the scientist wanted to run tests on my biological father. That’s why my mother was so sketchy. She didn’t want me to know.”

  “God, I’m so sorry,” Kalan said.

  I couldn’t even look at Kalan right now. “Recessive traits that both parents pass down to their offspring. Do you know who has recessive traits? Yeah. Relatives. That’s who.”

  I started to cry then, tears streaming down my face, re-igniting sore cheeks that had been exposed to salty tears for far too many days in a row. At what point did tears run out? At what point would I stop feeling like I was stepping from one nightmare into another and another, only to find out I would never wake up?

  I hardly even noticed when Kalan gathered me up into his arms. I buried my face in his chest, and let the tears flow. There was nothing left in my life that I’d once known to be true. Not even my own parents were who they seemed. Kalan was the one and only person I felt like I could count on, and I’d only known him for a few days. I missed Analiese so much my bones ached with it.

  After what must have been over thirty minutes of me crying in his arms, the silence of the interior of the car magnifying every single gasp, Kalan finally spoke. “Genetics aren’t everything. My foster parents and siblings are more my family than Marcus will ever be. He may be your biological father, but he is not your dad. And if he molested your sister, it is more than likely he did the same to your mother.”

  I hadn’t even reached that conclusion yet. I was so fixated on my mother’s lie I didn’t even stop to consider why she might be lying. Had he sexually abused her, too? I counted the months back from my parents’ marriage and our birth date. Analiese and I had been born in May. Our parents were married in December. Five months. She definitely conceived us prior to their wedding. A shotgun wedding. Now my mother’s young age at marriage—seventeen—seemed far less romantic and more horrifying. As a young girl, I’d always believed they got married young because they were madly in love and about to have a baby. Following their divorce, I rearranged my belief to be about misguided, stupid teenagers.

  Maybe they got married because she was pregnant with her uncle’s children.

  I pulled out my cell phone. Mom picked up after a few rings. “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I just left Uncle Les’s house, Mom.”

  Silence.

  “Why would you go there, Adriana?” Mom’s words were slow. Too slow. She was trying to maintain her calm, I knew it. “I told you to stay away from him.”

  “He told me.”

  Another drawn-out silence. Then, “What? He told you what?”

  “He made it sound like he is…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. It was just all wrong. “He inferred that he is my… me and Analiese’s… our father.” The moment I said it I felt like throwing up.

  “What?” My mother shouted so loud I had to pull the phone away from my ear. “That stupid old man was always such a godamn liar—”

  “Mom. Is it true? Did he abuse you?”

  A string of high-pitched cursing emanated from the receiver of my phone, once again so loud that Kalan could hear it. His eyebrows rose on his forehead.

  “This is absolutely preposterous! Don’t listen to a word that dirty old man said. Promise me, that,” Mom said, her voice pitchy and teetering on hysteria. “Will you promise me that, Adriana? Will you?”

  I glanced over at Kalan, who was now looking at the picture of his homeless mother. Meanwhile, my mother was going slowly insane on the other end of the line.

  “Mom, I’ll forget about it. I promise. I have to go.” I hung up, knowing it was rude, but not really being able to deal with her hysterics on top of the stress I was already dealing with.

  I stared at my phone in my lap. Was she lying? Or was Uncle Les up to his usual tricks of mind games and manipulation? Either was plausible. Mom would be admitting to me, her only remaining daughter, that she was the result of an incestuous union, a rape, sexually molested by her own uncle. Secrets like that tended to make people deny things, sometimes even to themselves. But lies were all part of Les’s MO, and he seemed to take particular pleasure in messing around with people’s emotions. He got off on it. Sick old fuck.

  I had to stop thinking about it. It was a question that wouldn’t be answered tonight, and I was partially relieved that it wasn’t, because I couldn’t quite face the possibility that my uncle was my father. It was just too… sick.

  “She denies it,” Kalan said.

  I stuck my phone into my purse. “Yeah. I’m not really surprised, though. Something like abuse and incest is
a hard one to admit out loud.” I shuddered. I honestly couldn’t even imagine. Everything about Les made my skin crawl.

  I couldn’t think about it anymore. “Does your mother look the way you thought she would?”

  “No. She looks…miserable.” Kalan handed the photo to me. The woman was lying on the sidewalk in her sleeping bag, a raincoat done up tightly around her head. All that showed was her pale, drawn face with dark shadows under her eyes and hollows below her cheekbones. But her eyes blazed, even from within the photograph, the colour of them as bright as laser-cut jewels. While her colouring was nothing like Kalan or Marcus, it was obvious she was their mother. Her high cheekbones, full lips and arched brows were exactly the same as theirs. Even in this photo, living as a street bum, covered in layers of dirt, she was extraordinarily beautiful. I’d seen this face before, in a photograph. It was the same as my mother’s cousin’s face. Virginia’s face.

  Kalan stared straight ahead, blinking. Were his eyes moist?

  “I’m sorry. This must be so painful,” I said.

  Kalan shook his head. “It’s just that… I suppose I never believed it was possible to find her. The thought of her was always so idealized in my mind. To see the reality of the situation now, the horrors of it…”

  “I know.” I placed my hand on Kalan’s arm. “Let’s go find your mother.”

  Even though identical twins supposedly share all of their DNA, they acquire hundreds of genetic changes early in development that could set them on different paths, according to new research.

  -Live Science

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  KALAN KANE

  “I’m sure I know where this picture was taken. I went through that area with my Sociology class. We were studying homelessness,” Adriana said.