by A. C. Arthur
“No,” Brynne said quickly and moved past him to stand at the railing. “I don’t need your help. I do, however, need you to tell me what you’re doing here. Mrs. Terrington told you I was here and you came. Why?”
He crossed the deck, his shoes loud on the wood. When he was standing just a couple of feet away from her, staring out at the same trees that had frightened Brynne, he spoke.
“I’ve been trying to contact you since finding out that Bernard was my father,” he began. “I didn’t have a telephone number but I got your email address from a group email that Keysa sent to both of us when the doctor said her due date was getting closer.”
Brynne recalled that email, but it had come at a time when she was still very angry and refused to speak to anyone in the family except Bailey. She hadn’t even noticed if there was someone else included on the email, she’d only thought it was her sister emailing her. That’s the way it had always been. This man standing here was a new dynamic to their family, one Brynne hadn’t expected and truthfully, did not know what to do with.
“You didn’t respond to that message and you hadn’t been in Houston when we all found out, so I decided to reach out to you myself. I’ve tried a couple of times every month since then. You never respond,” he told her.
“You’re #donovans#1?” she asked as she looked over at him.
He was very tall, a few inches more than Wade. His shoulders were broad, his complexion dark.
“Yes,” he answered and turned to face her. “I understand your hesitance. With everything that’s been happening with my mother and your…the family. I can see why you wanted to separate yourself from the upheaval.”
“That wasn’t why,” Brynne said. “I mean it wasn’t the only reason. Look, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now.”
She sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. “Are we supposed to hug and kiss and act like we’re long lost siblings? Do we keep in touch with each other and plan visits? What about holidays? Do you come to the family dinners now or do Keysa and I come to you in New York, or wherever you live? What’s supposed to happen here?”
She asked because she really did not know. All her life Brynne had known she’d had a half-sister. She’d traveled to Michigan to visit with Keysa when they were young and then after Keysa married Ian, she’d begun traveling to Washington to visit with them. Keysa and Brynne often emailed or called each other. They were sisters and friends. They were close. What did she do with this brother they’d just found out about?
“We can do all of that or we can come up with new things to do,” he replied. “I’m not real sure how to be a sibling.”
“Yes you are,” Brynne snapped. “You had a sister. Jaydon. The one who tricked Parker into marrying her and then kidnapped Bailey.”
It was his turn to sigh and then shake his head.
“Jaydon was my sister. Roslyn is my mother. I cannot change those facts any more than you can change that our father slept with his brother’s ex-girlfriend and got her pregnant,” he replied in such a simple and no-nonsense tone.
Brynne couldn’t even begin to argue those facts. And she didn’t know how she felt about them either. Truth be told, she hadn’t even given herself a chance to really examine how she felt about this situation. She’d been so busy focusing on herself.
“This is such a mess,” she admitted.
“I agree,” he added.
They were silent then, both of them looking out toward the trees again. Brynne had clasped her hands in front of her, while Dane stood with his legs slightly parted, hands calmly at his side.
“I’m staying at my house in San Francisco. I’m going to head back there now and wait to hear from the Terringtons about when my mother returns. I plan to take care of her and this situation that’s been going on for far too long. It will end now,” he said. “Afterwards, I would like to get to know my sister. You can set the boundaries if that’s how you want to handle it, but I want you to know that I’m here and that I’m not going anywhere.”
“What are you going to do with your mother?” she asked.
“I’m going to have her committed to a place where she’ll be safe and so will everyone else.”
“That won’t be easy,” Brynne said because somehow she knew.
Putting a person in a box and making them stay there was never easy. It was the way Brynne had felt her parents had done with her all her life, until she couldn’t help but break free. Brynne wondered if the results would be the same with a woman like Roslyn Ausby.
“I know. But it will be done,” he said. “I’ll reach out to you again before I leave.”
Brynne looked over at him to find him staring at her. She nodded before she could think better of it. “I’ll answer this time.”
“You should call dad,” Brynne said as she spoke to Jocelyn on the phone a half hour after Dane had left.
For the first few moments after walking her brother to the door, Brynne hadn’t figured out how to feel. She’d wanted to be angry but she wasn’t certain that anger should be directed at Dane. Then she thought of her father and remembered the words she’d said to her mother about him and the situation.
You can’t say he lied to you if you never asked the question.
Brynne had never asked the question either. She’d never asked her father if he had another child and when she found out that he did, she never asked him why he’d ignored that child? With a start she’d realized that she and Dane had that in common. Bernard hadn’t been the best dad to either one of them. She suspected Keysa could probably say the same thing. And maybe that wasn’t Bernard’s fault either. Brynne remembered confiding in her grandmother Dot about how she thought her parents were treating her badly. Of course she’d been eight years old at the time, but what her grandmother had said back then, just now made sense to her.
“Baby, children don’t come with handbooks. Parents simply have them and have to raise them the best way they know how. Some people do it differently. Others say the way some people do it is wrong. They can make good decisions or what later turns out to be bad decisions. It all just depends on the people and the circumstances. In the end, I believe parents do the best they can at the time.”
Had Bernard done the best he could? Hadn’t he provided for them financially? And hadn’t he been in the same house with Brynne, even if sometimes if felt as if he were miles away? Hadn’t he gone to visit Keysa as much as he possibly could and even offered to bring Keysa to Seattle with them? He couldn’t do any of those things with Dane because he hadn’t known Dane was his son. But he could have gotten that DNA test earlier, when he first knew that Roslyn was pregnant. For whatever reasons he, Uncle Henry and Uncle Albert had decided not to do that. Were they simply making the best decision for that situation, at that time?
“There’s nothing else to say,” Jocelyn had replied over the phone.
“How do you know if you don’t try to say it?” Brynne asked her. “I’m just saying that I think you owe it to him and to yourself to at least try.”
“He has another child, Brynne. I don’t know if I can deal with that,” she’d said.
“I didn’t either,” Brynne told her. “But I just met him, my brother, and I dealt with it mom. I looked him in the eye and I listened to what he had to say. I probably should have done that a long time ago.”
“What do you mean you met him? You told him where you are but you won’t tell me,” Jocelyn yelled. “Why would you do that Brynne? What’s going on with you?”
Brynne shook her head as she held the phone to her ear.
“Do you know who we are, mama? Do you know anything about the family you married into? We’re the Donovans, for crying out loud! You could have found me if you really wanted to. You could have hired a private investigator and tracked me down. That’s what people do when they really want to find someone. When finding that person is as crucial to them as breathing.”
She’d thought about Dane’
s words then. He’d hired a PI to find his mother and then he’d traveled all the way out here to get her. He was going to try and put her in an institution, something that he knew was going to be hard. But something he recognized was also imperative. There was no doubt in Brynne’s mind that Dane loved his mother, despite all that she’d done.
“What are you talking about? There’s been so much going on, Brynne. In a year I found out that my husband had not only slept with another woman, but that he’d fathered another child. A child that will try to take a part of the legacy I’ve helped to build with Bernard and who will take away from my daughter. Why can’t you understand that?”
“I can’t because none of that was more important than my health, mama. You knew I had high blood pressure because you were there when I asked daddy about how long he’d had the condition and his mother before him. But you never once in this last year asked me how I was doing.”
“I didn’t know where you were,” Jocelyn spat.
“In your text messages to me, you never asked. All you said was that you needed to speak to me, to see me. You said you were going crazy not knowing where I was. But you never asked if I were okay. If I were hurting because of this situation or any other situation,” Brynne told her mother.
“You’re being ridiculous, Brynne. If something was wrong with you…if something is wrong with you, just tell me. That’s all you had to do all this time was tell me,” Jocelyn said.
“You’re right,” Brynne agreed. “I could have just told you. It’s a shame that I didn’t think I could.”
And it was a shame that Jocelyn would never realize how she’d hurt her only child by not asking the single question, by never asking the question in all of Brynne’s life.
They’d ended the call with Jocelyn still yelling about Bernard betraying her and how she refused to let him think he could take everything from her just because he couldn’t keep it in his pants. Brynne had decided to give up then. Her mother was who she was and there was nothing Brynne could do to change that. Staying away, agreeing to whatever tirade Jocelyn was on at the moment, Brynne hating her father, nothing was going to change who Jocelyn Donovan was. It wasn’t going to make her the mother Brynne needed her to be.
That was a sobering thought. Coupled with Dane’s surprise visit and Wade’s round-about proposal, Brynne was feeling a bit off kilter. No, she was actually feeling overwhelmed. There were things she should have done and didn’t. Things she could still do but didn’t know how. She had a new life, but it was filled with old issues and she desperately needed to overcome them. With that thought in mind Brynne grabbed her purse and her keys and she headed to her car. She would call Sybil on her way into the city because she needed to talk to someone. She needed to figure out what her next steps were going to be and how she was going to make the best of this new life she’d fought so hard to obtain.
She’d been in the car for less than twenty minutes when she decided she’d better call Sybil’s office now. Her purse was on the passenger seat with her phone inside. Normally she plugged her phone into the car charger on her console the moment she got into the car, but she’d been in such a hurry when she’d left the house that she’d forgotten. She was just about to reach for her purse when she noticed that she was coming up on a curve. Placing both hands on the steering wheel then, Brynne prepared to slow down. She pressed the brake but nothing happened. The car continued to glide along at the same rate of speed.
Brynne pressed the brake again, harder this time. The car did not slow or stop for that matter. The curve was straight ahead. If she took it at this speed the car might flip over or roll off the road down the embankment. Brynne held tight to the wheel and swerved to the right, opting to run into the guard rail instead. Only she misjudged how the crash would unfold, and ran through the guard rail, tumbling down a few feet until the car smashed into a tree. The air bag deployed, smacking her in the face and chest. Steel crumbled like wrapping paper and glass cracked. Her body had jerked against the air bag, pain exploding in her chest as the car came to an abrupt stop.
Tears stung her eyes as Brynne tried to move and pain radiated throughout her entire body. It hurt to breathe and the thought of not breathing scared the hell out of her. She had to do something.
As soon as the thought emerged there was a loud sound and then something was ripping and suddenly Brynne could breathe just a little easier. The air bag deflated in front of her and just as she began to feel thankful, to hope that whoever had deflated the air bag was there to help her, she blinked and focused on the windshield, or rather the person staring at her through the broken window.
“Well, well, well. Look at you,” she said tilting her head and smiling. “You used to be a whale, now you’re just a chubby little thing. Spending daddy’s money to get thin. I guess that’s a good idea, although it might be a wasted effort now.”
Roslyn Ausby.
Suddenly everything was clear. Brynne had been driving her car back and forth to San Francisco for days and nothing had been wrong with her brakes. Until now.
Dane said his PI told him that Roslyn was here. Chances were good that she was also the woman at the therapist’s office that day. And Brynne had to figure it wasn’t a coincidence that Roslyn was staying with the Terringtons, just down the road from where she had been staying with Wade.
“Why…are you doing this?” Brynne asked as she tried to move.
She was a sitting duck as long as she was in this car. But she couldn’t move. The steering wheel was pressing down on her legs. Brynne pushed against it, hoping that her weight lifting had garnered some measure of strength. The pain that shot through her legs with that effort was excruciating and she yelled out.
“I’m tired now,” Roslyn said as she leaned against the mangled hood of the car.
She folded her arms and shook her head. “All this with your family has taken a lot out of me.
”Was she serious? “All this” was her doing!
Brynne didn’t bother to try and tell her that. Bailey had told her that the woman had mental health issues, and her own son was trying to have her committed to an institution. There was no point trying to reason with her. And since Brynne needed all her strength to get herself free, she abandoned that train of thought. Instead she tried to stretch her arm across the seats to get her phone out of her purse.
“This didn’t have to turn out like this,” Roslyn continued. “I knew Henry was married when I told him about my baby. He shouldn’t have denied my child.”
She was right, Uncle Henry shouldn’t have denied a baby that actually turned out to not be his. Brynne could hear the woman talking but she wasn’t going to respond to her. She wasn’t going to engage her.
“He walked away from me and I tried real hard to deal with that. But I was gone. I was back in Chicago and away from Henry when I found out about the baby. That was proof that we were meant to be. So I went back to him and he tossed me aside. That bastard chose that woman and her spawn over me and my child! We were first! Dane is the oldest Donovan heir of this generation. He’s the one!”
#donovans#1
Brynne thought of Dane’s email name and wondered if this crazy woman had actually been shouting this rhetoric at him all his life.
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” Brynne whispered as her finger hooked the strap of her purse and she began to pull it closer. At the same time the sharp stinging pain in her leg reminded her that there wasn’t a whole lot to be thankful for at the moment and she hurried to dig her hand into her purse to get the phone. She was already dialing 911 when she heard the scream.
Roslyn had come around to the side of the car and with something in her hand broke the driver’s side window which had already been shattered by the crash.
“You’re Bernard’s spawn! He chose you over my child! They all choose someone else over my baby!” Roslyn yelled as she reached into the car to grab Brynne’s hair.
The phone fell from Brynne’s hand as she reached out to pu
nch at Roslyn, striking her in the face a couple of times.
That didn’t stop her. Roslyn continued to lean into the car, yanking at Brynne’s hair and yelling in her face.
“Bitch! You and your mother! Stuck up bitches!”
Roslyn’s hands moved to Brynne’s neck where she started to squeeze.
Brynne’s eyes watered but she wasn’t about to give up. She reached out again, toward her purse. There was a knife in there somewhere. When she’d left for college Bernard had insisted that she take a self-defense class, as well as carry a knife. She’d done as he said but so far had never needed to use the knife except for one time when she’d had to open a box that had been delivered to the school lab. Today, she needed the knife to do bodily harm, but with Roslyn leaning into the car choking her, the car rocked back and forth and her purse slipped off the seat onto the floor.
Brynne’s vision was going blurry. She could hear her heart beating, the sound was so loud in the air. The knife…she needed her knife…or…
The self-defense instructor had advised them all to carry a can of mace. Brynne bought a new one each year. She liked the one that she could hook to her keychain. Struggling with the last bits of energy she had, Brynne reached forward to the steering wheel that kept her captive in this car, and heard the jingle of her keys still in the ignition. She grabbed the can of mace and yanked hard to free it from the key chain. It took two tries, in which time she felt herself slipping out of consciousness.
“You will die and that bastard Bernard will know how it feels! He’ll know exactly how it feels to lose his precious little girl!”
Not today, Brynne thought as the can finally broke free and she lifted her arm to aim it into Roslyn’s face. She pressed her finger on the nozzle and heard the spray. She also heard Roslyn scream and in seconds felt the relief of the lunatic’s hands falling from her neck.
Because they’d been in such close proximity Brynne caught some of her mace in her throat and eyes as well. She coughed as tears streamed down her face, and she breathed, huge gulping breaths that hurt her throat and her chest. There was less screaming now and more sirens.
