He nodded. “Yeah…well, not just me. Me and my Mom.”
“Who is your Mom?”
The boy didn’t say anything…his hands started to shake and he took out a cigarette and nervously lit it, blowing the smoke away from me. He then slowly turned to look at me and I got the first real look at his eyes. They were amazing…green with gold speckles.
They were my eyes.
“Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you my brother?”
He paused, took a long drag of his cigarette, and then blew it out slowly.
“Yeah.”
***
I had a brother…a brother…Jake. And he was a badass.
He figured out right away wha
t was wrong with the car and had it fixed well before AAA ever showed up.
We stood outside leaning against the parked cars, just staring at each other and without the distraction of the broken down vehicle, we were faced to discuss the inevitable.
“How did you find out about Amanda, Jake?”
“About six months ago, this investigator guy came to our house. We live on the south side of Chicago. His last name was Samuels. He asked my mother if she had given birth to twin girls in 1984. I was like…what?”
“So, what did your mother say?”
“She just looked at me, like she was afraid to say anything, like she wanted me to leave the room. And then I nearly shit my pants, because she started crying…like really hard and told him, that yeah, she had. I was like…holy shit. She told him she was messed up then, ran away from home and was on drugs and that some dealer had gotten her pregnant.”
I nearly fell to the ground at that revelation and felt like I was going to vomit. That answered one of my questions. My birth father was a drug dealer.
Jake continued as I listened stunned. “She wanted to know why he was looking for her and asked if they…you know…you…the girls were okay. The investigator told her that one of the girls had died in an accident a long time ago and that the other one lived in Boston. That’s you?”
“Yeah…that’s me,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.
“So, Mom was like hysterical because he said Amanda was dead. Then she asked, how he found us and the investigator explained that Amanda’s parents hired him to find the other sister and that in the middle of all that he found my mother, even though they hadn’t asked him to.”
“Your mom…what’s she like?”
“She’s cool, Allison, really cool. It’s just her and me now. She was real messed up when she was young, like when she was my age, but she ended up getting clean, went to school, became a medical assistant and met my dad, but he died in a motorcycle accident when I was five, so it’s just us.”
“I am so sorry about your dad.”
“Thanks.”
“What’s is your mother’s name?”
“Vanessa…Vanessa Green. Well, Green was my dad’s last name. Before that, she was Vanessa Bologna. She’s Italian. She looks just like you, actually, it’s freaky. That’s how I knew you were definitely my sister.”
Wow.
I smiled at Jake. He seemed like a really good kid.