I looked at Xander and again I agreed.
Pa said to me the other week that I didn’t know much about him, even after all that had happened I still didn’t know as much as I’d wanted to.
All the same, I still loved him. I knew his soul and it was enough. I fell in love with his soul. That was enough to love him.
Even so, we’d reached a point where I needed to know more.
I needed to know more because I wanted to help.
* * *
One hour passed and we pulled off the highway.
All around us was desert land.
It was just a dark expanse of nothingness, reminding me of something from the set of one of those films where one of the characters breaks down on the road and then ended up stranded. Then some kind of a serial killer would take her, kill her and bury her somewhere in the expanse. Nobody would find her.
Sounded like I might have watched one too many films, but when that was your life and your father was like mine, it wasn’t all that hard to imagine. I couldn’t claim to have seen it happen but I knew stuff. I would be very foolish to assume the stuff that happened in the movies was just reserved for just that.
Pa had a cleanup crew that came on the scene when they needed to clear bodies.
My first experience with the like was after I watched my mother get killed and seconds later my father shot the man who killed her. Donny Morales. That was his name and he was, in those seconds, getting ready to kill me too.
Pa killed him, saving me.
Part of me always remembered that, even though Pa locked me away for months after the incident happened. He locked me away to keep me safe. It was horrible but for my safety.
All that time though, I never knew what it was Pa had done to Donny to make him come for us in that way. I still didn’t know.
The cleanup crew took him. A year later I saw on the news that the feds found body parts in the desert. Not even all the body parts. A hand and a head. That was it, and it was of course a skeleton of the hand and head. They were able to establish that it was Donny. The other parts of him were never found.
I knew what had happened to him, and I knew only one person could have arranged for him to be disposed of in such a way.
We turned off the road sharply and it snapped me out of my thoughts.
Frankie and I hadn’t said all that much in the last hour. Xander shifted and groaned like he was going to wake up but then drifted back off to sleep.
“We’re practically there, doll,” Frankie declared.
Ten minutes later we approached a woodland area with a lake. The moonlight beamed down on it in that fairytale manner that made the water sparkle and glisten. It was the sort of picturesque scenery I would have loved to paint. Definitely loved to paint something so moving yet peaceful with the overpowering silver moon hanging over the lake and trees with a shiver of shadows surrounding it.
Something for another time, maybe.
My creative mind was always seeking something, desperate to do what it loved. That was what I should have been doing.
This started out with me just wanting to go to Europe to finish my art studies. That was all.
Then things changed.
We drove for a few more minutes until a cottage came into view.
I gazed on ahead, curious.
We parked up and the door to the cottage opened. A woman rushed out. She looked like a classical image of an Italian mother. Warm presence, plump, long wavy hair that flowed out into the night and when she got close I realized she looked like an older version of Frankie.
“Ma,” he beamed and she smiled.
Frankie got out and gave her a hug.
