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“Here we go,” she says. “I’ll leave you to it.”
She turns and goes, and I knock on the door, my heart thundering in my chest now, suddenly nervous.
Abe answers it, his blue eyes shining through the doorframe. “Ah, I was wondering if you’d come by,” he says softly, not opening the door enough to let me in.
He can hear us, so I’d rather talk to you like this, if I’m not being intrusive, Abe says inside my head.
Not at all. How is he? Lenore explained what went down, I tell him.
Well, I tried hypnosis on him, he says.And that helped a little in that he knows now that your parents are his real parents and he knows that they don’t mean him any harm. But I didn’t want to go into the deeper, traumatic sections. He doesn’t remember the kidnapping or the experiments. It’s too much for now for him to process.
But he knows Bellamy is dead?I ask.
He presses his lips together and nods.He’s been handling it well, considering. But your brother is the type to shove everything deep down and either deal with it later or not deal with it all.
Gee, sounds familiar, I say, thinking of Valtu.
There are some similarities, he says.But I think Leif is a tougher nut to crack. Anyway, come in and say hello. He won’t attack you. Just don’t mention what happened at the bazaar.
I nod and step through the door as he opens it.
The room is dimly lit, a large suite like ours, and my mother and father are sitting on the couch, talking to Leif who is sitting in an armchair. Though he seems very subdued and is slow to turn his head to look at me, I still approach as if I’m coming up to a wild animal.
I give my parents a quick nod and smile and they look at Leif.
“Leif,” my mom says, “this is your sister Rose.”
I raise my hand a little in hello and take the seat across from him. “Hi Leif.”
Holy crap is this a fucking trip.
I know I’d already laid eyes on him, but to see him again, and up close like this, feels surreal. It’s Dylan alright, but it’s also a man who is years past that. The haunted look in his eyes can’t be compared to his brother, who has never known hardship a day in his life. Leif is just a tightly wound ball of complications, unyielding and impenetrable and in the back of my head I wonder if it’s possible to ever save him.
“You’re the girl I saw the other day,” he says slowly, his words thick. “The one that Atlas attacked. I thought you’d be dead.”
I shake my head. “No, it takes a lot to kill me and even when I do die, I always come back,” I finish that with a smile.
He frowns. “You always come back?”
“So far, anyway. It’s a long story. Actually, it’s many long—or short—stories, depending on how you look at it. But I just want to say that I am so glad that you’re here.”
From the hard look on his face I can tell he doesn’t feel the same way.
I go on, “And that no matter what, I’m here for you. I know we’d never met when we were young and you don’t know me, but I feel I know you. That might not help to hear right now but I’m hoping in time you’ll really know that I have your back.”
I don’t want to add that it was actually me who instigated this whole thing to get him back and out of Bellamy’s clutches. I’ll save that for another time.
And I am so fucking relieved that there is going to be another time.
He may be wary of me, he may not know me, he may be experiencing deep loss and confusion and a sense of not knowing who he really is, but I hope that we’ll eventually be close. I don’t expect the same relationship I have with Dylan, but I hope it’s still something honest and real.
Leif doesn’t smile but something in his eyes tells me that he accepts me, and that’s good enough for now.
* * *
The drivefrom Portland to Newport is only a couple of hours barrelling down the I-5 and then a quick hop across from Corvallis to the coast, but it feels like both incredibly long and incredibly short.
My dad is at the wheel of our SUV they had left at the airport, Valtu beside him in the passenger seat, and me, my mom and Leif are in the back. It’s been five days since Leif came back into our lives and we just landed at the Portland airport. Abe went back to England and Solon and Lenore flew direct to San Francisco.
