The Life - Rebirth (The Life 4)

Until things started to not add up. I held off on contacting Lyon to get his take until I realized that I was getting only half of the conversation, and the other half was taking place in his neck of the woods. I wasn’t sure what he could do at this point unless he had a similar setup to mine, with the automatic speech to text recordings, and besides, the conversation had already been started, so it might be too late for him to get what was necessary to piece it all together.

The more pressed I felt about it, given the many times my mother and sisters found their way over here and always when I was not around, not to mention the by then daily conversations with the women on the island, the more I felt the need to at least contact him to see what he knew if anything, which I did.

I didn’t mince words, just shared my suspicions and asked if there was anything happening on his end. His terse, ‘there’s always some shit going on with the women,’ before he just hung up on me while grumbling wasn’t much help, so imagine my surprise when not an hour later, maybe less, he called me back with the other half of the conversations that had taken place between the women so far going back days.

We shared a split-screen and, using timestamps, were able to piece together what was taking place. The best I can come up with is a well-calculated mission of deceit. It starts off with Gianna sharing the barest details about what had happened to Ma and Natalia, which was enough to start a frenzy. Apparently, the women there are just as disgruntled as their husbands.

I’m not gonna lie; I was impressed at the way they broke down the information and came up with a plan until Lyon let me in on the fact that there was a Fed and ex-air force or marine pilot, I can’t remember which, and a martial arts expert among these women.

Then there were the kids, little asshats as he calls them, supposedly led by his daughter, who he calls Mengele or Catalina according to his mood. Apparently, she was the one to watch out for while at the same time he seemed to find great pleasure in telling me that my sweet little girl had the makings of.

Between them, the women and the children, they worked out a very meticulous list, and this was all in a matter of days, mind you, with precision and verve. First, find out where Ricci is. To do this, they had these kids try to break into the system over there, which they failed at, but they were able to piece together their husband’s movements with the help of the kids. It was the double plane ride to Alaska that gave them the location, not to mention the fact that one of those flights had left Sicily.

Once they convinced themselves that that had to be where he was being kept, their next step was how to get off the island. Here it becomes convoluted as they throw around ideas. There were a lot of insults thrown around about overbearing men, and I’m guessing some laughter from the odd dictations on the screen about how to get around said men.

Vanessa, who Lyon explained was the fighter pilot, would convince her husband that she would lose her license since she hadn’t clocked the prerequisite number of hours since the pandemic and needed to go somewhere, but where. This is where they decide that Lyon’s oldest daughter’s wedding dress, which she’d apparently been waiting two years to pick up in London, would make the perfect smokescreen.

When I asked him why they hadn’t taken care of this once things opened up again, he went on one of his now-famous rants about assholes and pandemics and not trusting one fuck, whatever that means. In the end, I gathered that the designer, whoever she was, had a backlog of work that needed taking care of.

Kat was sure she could pull the wool over Lyon’s eyes with that one and keep him out of the way because, as she told the others who had a good laugh, he wouldn’t be caught dead going there. But how to keep the men from following? Kat again offered up her twin sons, who were apparently trained to protect, but she was sure that they could be easily distracted by anything in a skirt.

This is where either my mother or my bride to be offered up my little sisters as bait, or maybe the twins themselves came up with the idea, who knows. That one took a little getting used to. Someone named Arianna, and I have to admit to having trouble keeping up with the names, threw in her uncle, her father, and her father-in-law as extra ballast to keep the men off their scent, but there was another reason for adding these men to the mix. They needed another plane.