26 - ANYSSA
26
ANYSSA
ANYSSA’S THIRTY-BEFORE-THIRTY LIST
“W ell, what are you going to do now?” I ask, wrapping my hands around the steaming mug of coffee.
“What else can I do?”
“His lawyers may contact you, wanting you to say I stole your identity. Otherwise, they may try to sue you for breach of contract or some shit like that,” I mumble, dropping my chin on my folded hands over the coffee mug.
Camila reaches her hand out and places it on top of mine. “Sweetheart, that’s the least of my concerns now.”
I arrived in town an hour ago, and Camila met me at the airport. On the ride to her place, I told her everything that happened and just finished my story.
She’s not behaving the way that I expected her to. No angry words, threatening legal action, cursing, angry tears—none of that.
Tears fill her eyes, but I don’t think they’re linked to what I’m going through.
“What are your concerns then?”
She sighs and looks away, resting her chin in her palm. “I don’t know how to break this to you except to do it.”
She reaches for an envelope on the other side of the table and slides it toward me.
“What’s this?” I ask, eyeing the envelope suspiciously.
Maybe she is suing me after all.
“Open it.”
I pull it toward me with the tip of one nail before glancing at her again. She nods encouragingly, and I undo the metal clasp, keeping the envelope closed. I slide a slip of paper from the envelope, and a few pictures fall out.
Confusion crawls through me as I look at the pictures. It’s a family. There’s a man, a little girl, and a woman. In a couple of them, the woman is curved into the crook of the man’s arm, but she isn’t looking at the camera. Her gaze is cast down, like her mouth. She seems unhappy, but I can’t tell since I can’t see her well.
The little girl has two long pigtails, and she’s smiling. Interestingly enough, she looks like me. The man is deceptively handsome and clearly of some Spanish descent. Cuban? Dominican? He looks proud, but there’s something about him that I can’t put my finger on, which makes me uneasy.
I look up at Camila, who watches me closely before my eyes drift to the woman again. Shaking my head, I go to the final picture. It’s similar to the last one, except the little girl is a bit older in this one. The man has a cigar dangling from his mouth, and the woman looks slightly rounder than in the last picture, as though she may be at the beginning stages of pregnancy and is just putting on weight.
That isn’t what strikes me. The thing that steals my breath like a slash from Nazár’s flogger, only not as pleasant, is that I know the woman.
It’s my mother.
My hands shake, and my bottom lip trembles.
“What’s . . . What’s this?”
“Read the birth certificate, honey,” Camila encourages.
Shaking my head, I shove it back at her. “No.”
“You need to read it, Anyssa.”
Tears fill my eyes, blurring my vision as she shoves it back to me and places a firm hand on my wrist when I try to stand.
“No more running. Please, read it.”
I slowly sit down, and my eyes drop to the birth certificate. It’s Camila’s. The parents are Christopher Martinez and Annalise Rebecca Kelley-Martinez, my mother’s name, except without Martinez.
“Did you know? When we met in Curacao, did you know?” I demand.
Slowly, she shakes her head as tears pool in her eyes. “No. I swear I didn’t.”
“She never . . . I never knew his name,” I say slowly, accepting what I can no longer deny.
“It’s why our resemblance to each other is so striking.”
“How did you find out?” I ask, looking up at her and then at the last picture.
My fingers trace my father’s features, then my mother’s younger ones, and drop to her belly.
“She was pregnant with you in that picture. She left three weeks after it was taken, and we never found her.”
I hear the hiccup in Camila’s voice, and for the first time, I think about how hard it must have been for her not having her mother all these years. It had to be devastating, knowing your mother was out there and had left you behind.
Tears fill her eyes, but a smile lights her lips. “When I came home, I talked to Dad about the trip before the surgery. When I showed him the pictures I took, some of them with you, he said you looked like my mother.”
“We get that all the time.”
Camila nods. “My stepmother, Orenthia, was good friends with our mother before she left.”
“Yet, she married our father?” I ask in disbelief, with a hint of bitterness in my voice.
Camila squeezes my hand. “That didn’t happen until three years later. She initially spent so much time with me, watching me while Daddy worked in the vineyard, ran errands, or just needed time off. She was the only mother figure I knew. Before long, she moved into the house, and we became a family. It may not be ideal, Nys, but it worked for us. It was what I needed.”
“While my mother had to suffer raising me alone because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself!” I hiss, standing up from the table.
“Nys, I never knew. Not until now. When I showed him the pictures, he knew that it was you. He said he knew Mom was pregnant. She’d been trying to hide it, but she’d confided in Orenthia. That’s when he started looking for her but never found her. He said he deserved her leaving him, even if he was initially angry. The vineyard was struggling, and finances weren’t what they should have been. His temper got worse the more he drank. He went from saying cruel things to hitting her. He knew he was too far gone.”
“You don’t think it was pressure for her too?”
“I’m not excusing it, Anyssa. Just saying what he’s told me. I had no idea why she had left all those years ago. For the longest, I was angry with her, hurt, and confused. Mom never told me why my real mom left, either. She said it was better if we didn’t discuss it.”
“Leading you to believe it was Mommy’s fault? That she just didn’t love her child enough.”
Camila nods sorrowfully. “Yes. In time, I got over the anger, but it hurt. It took some time to forgive her, and then . . . When they told me the truth, I was angry at them—Dad and Mom.”
“You call her Mom?” I ask, feeling as if she betrayed our mother.
“She was all I had, Nys. All I know.”
I know she’s right. I can’t imagine what it might feel like to know that your mother walked out and left you behind.
“Did you know about me?” she asks.
“Not really. I’ve seen a picture of you as a toddler, but she always led me to believe it was a cousin. Someone she loved like her own child but couldn’t take with her. Whenever she pulled out your picture, I would ask about you, and she’d tell me you were a pretty, courageous, and smart little girl. She’d tell me stories of things you did and said, and she would always cry. Sometimes, she would hide in her room and stare at your picture. She would fall asleep holding it with tears in her eyes.”
Camila looks away, and I see the tears fill her eyes.
“Sorry.”
Shaking her head, she says, “It’s okay.”
I walk around to her side of the table and wrap my arms around her where she sits. “No, it’s not.”
Camila, my older sister, cries in my arms, and I softly rest my chin on her head, crying into her hair.
I never dreamed of being alone when I crossed this item off my checklist. Yet, watching the beautiful sunrise over the horizon gives me peace.
I shouldn’t be up this early, but I can’t sleep. Not when my world has turned upside down. Finding out that the woman I’ve been pretending to be is my older sister and that maybe fate had us meeting at that resort in Curacao is mind-boggling.
Then there’s the fact that the man I was falling in love with kicked me out of his resort and banned me from his life altogether . . . I’ve tried reaching out to him in every possible way to no avail.
It hurts. My chest aches, knowing I won’t see him again. Last night, after Camila had helped me settle in the guest room, I showered and went to bed. The only thing that I did was cry for hours.
I must have fallen asleep at some point because my eyes were swollen when I woke up again, and it was completely dark outside. Camila’s house was quiet, so I went outside to sit on her veranda.
I searched the internet for a glimpse of what was happening in his life. I shouldn’t have been surprised not to find much. Aside from some articles once again speculating whether he had a hand in his wife’s death, there was nothing.
The accusations were outrageous and sickening, ranging from statements that she was having an affair that he’d found out about and had chased her off the road purposely to he’d walked in on her and her lover during sex. That one claimed that he’d murdered them both and placed her in the car, driving it to the cliff and then sending it over. Some even said that she’d committed suicide after finding out that she was pregnant with her lover’s baby.
Knowing what I knew of Nazár, I now understood his firm stance on his values. The stories were ridiculous, even some of them alleging that he was the one having an affair with another man, and she’d walked in on them, so he’d chased after her, planning to keep his secret, and had chased her to her death.
Reading that, I’d become physically ill, run into the bathroom off the hallway, and vomited the little I had eaten earlier. Then washing my face with cold water and tossing on some clothes, I returned outside and kept walking until I came to this spot on Camila’s property. You can see where the sky meets the earth and how majestic it is as the sun rises over it.
Awe fills me, and I inhale the earthy scent of the fresh morning dew intermingling with the wild smell of the grass around me. I hug myself, staring at the sun until tears fall.
I don’t know whether they’re from me staring for so long or because I’m missing him so badly. I suspect it’s the latter, but I know there’s nothing more I can do about it.
I must let go and move on. I fell helplessly and irrevocably in love with a man I only met a few weeks ago, but my soul knows him well.