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“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU did all this, Cali,” Teagan said with a wince. Her head felt like it was going to explode. It’s what she deserved for slamming back strong ass whiskey and pretending it was Kool-aide.
She looked up from the stack of pictures she was going through in time to see Cali, give a little kick to the door to her minifridge. Cali walked the few steps to the bed and handed her a bottle of water. Taking it in hand, the coolness rushed into her palm and up her arm, and she sent her friend a grateful smile. Instead of opening it, Teagan tucked the bottle under her hair on the back of her neck and let the cold heal her aches. Glancing at the wall, she pinned Cali with a stern look.
“You even have a map of where to look for them?” she asked, but Cali remained silent. Instead of answering, she paced back and forth across the small confines of her room.
Teagan shrugged, wondering what was up with her friend. After checking to make sure the house warden was still out from the sleeping pill, Cali brought Teagan — still very drunk — to her room and had thrust a stack of photos into her hands with minimal information. Teagan’s mind started to clear from slightly fuzzy to curious. The men in the photos were handsome that was for sure, but she didn’t know... Teagan flipped to the next photo, and her hand froze. She knew her mouth had to be open. In her hands, was a picture of Colin. It wasn’t just a picture of someone who looked like him, it was without a doubt him.
“What...?”
“Keep going,” Cali whispered and brought her hand to her mouth to chew her nails, a nervous habit she’d always had as long as Teagan had known her.
Teagan flipped to the next picture. Relief flooded her. She didn’t know this one, but she examined it closer. Drawn to it. From his presence in the black and white photo, he seemed to fill the entire page with his masculinity. He wore it like an air about him. Although he wore a shirt, his arms filled the material to the stretching point, emphasizing his largely muscled arms. His face was soft and strong at the same time, with what she thought were dark features. Dark hair, almost black, and eyes that seemed to pierce her soul even though it was just a photo. She didn’t know him, and yet her heart raced. Quickly pushing the disturbing photo to the bottom of the stack, she let out a choked sound as she looked down at the next picture.
It was her father. Her hand came up to her mouth, her brows furrowed in thought. What was her friend doing with a photo of her father, a man she hadn’t seen in eleven years, and Colin, a man she thought only existed in her dreams? What was Cali doing at all? The photos, the map of Ireland with pinpoints all over it, the huge stash of cash in the ratty backpack Cali had stolen from her room. What did it all mean?
“I think you have some explaining to do.” Teagan thought her voice was quite calm for the way she felt, like someone on the edge of freaking out, but Cali’s face turned deathly white anyway.
Teagan unfolded herself and moved from Cali’s bed. She waved the photo of her father as she walked towards her friend.
“Speak, Cali! Why do you have a picture of my dad? Why have you had a picture of Colin this whole time and not said anything to me? You let me think I was freaking crazy.”
With every step she took towards her friend, Cali took a step backward, until finally the heel of her foot hit the wall. Cali looked down and then back up, a look of defeat on her face, and Teagan took a step away from her. Intimidation wasn’t her thing. She felt bad that she’d backed Cali into a literal corner, but she needed answers. Teagan looked down, breaking eye contact and softened her tone.
“Cal, I need some answers. I don’t understand what’s going on here.” She gestured to everything, the pinned map on the wall, the papers and photos strewn across the small bed, the sack of money. “What does it all mean?”
Cali pushed past her and sat down on the bed, not bothering to move anything that was scattered under her. She heaved a deep breath. Her voice was so quiet, that Teagan had to move forward a few steps just to hear her.
“All my life, I’ve been different.”
Teagan gave a small huff but just sat on the bed next to her friend. She definitely knew what that felt like, being different. But she didn’t talk, instead, she took Cali’s hand in her own and waited for her friend to continue. To explain.
“I wanted to know why I was shuffled through the foster system for ten years and no family ever seemed to want me for longer than a few weeks. I wanted to know why I have no memories before that day the cops picked me up in the park, and I was taken into the system. I wanted to know why, when I snuck into the office to look at my confidential file, all the rest of the kids there had one, but my file was empty. No name, no proof of birth, it was like I didn’t exist.”
Teagan squeezed her friend’s hand.
“Cali-”
“No, let me finish please,” Cali said, and there was a sadness Teagan had never heard in her friend’s voice before. “Ever since I can remember, I’ve dreamed about this face. He never speaks to me, but I remember his eyes, like they were mine own.” She turned to Teagan and grasped both her hands in her own. “You know I draw a little. Well, I sketched him, and then one day in the library I tried to run it through a facial profile database on this sketchy “Find your real parents” site. And, holy shit, I actually found him.”
Cali broke her hold on Teagan and twisted around to shuffle through the photos spread all over the bed. She shoved things out of her way without care until at last her hands stilled when she landed on a photo. Teagan watched Cali as she slowly picked it up and gave it to her. Teagan looked closely, and although a vague sense of familiarity brushed over her, she couldn’t place a name with the face in the photo. This seemed to infuriate her friend, causing Cali to shove the wrinkled photo closer to her face.
Teagan pushed it away again. “Seriously? Shoving it in my face won’t make me remember someone I’ve never met before.” A little disgusted by her friend’s behavior, Teagan brushed it off and chalked it up to being the left over alcohol in her system. Still, she moved away from her friend. “Who is he anyway?”
“Never mind,” Cali said. “I was hoping he looked familiar to you.”
“Nope.”
Teagan turned and pointed at the bed. “What is all this, Cali. I’m gonna need you to tell me the truth.”
Cali looked down but started speaking.
“I think it’s a secret society.” Teagan looked at her skeptically. “Just hear me out, okay? Ten years ago, my dad disappeared, like yours. We had a great relationship. In fact, I was his whole world. He loved me; I know he did. Then one day I came home from school to find our house completely empty. Not even a damn sock was left, it was so clean. He was gone. Vanished. No note, no nothing, just gone.” Cali looked like she was about to cry, causing some of the annoyance to leave Teagan.
“Why do you have a picture of my father and Colin in this pile?” Teagan asked.
“I was getting to that. I told you about the face I couldn’t keep out of my mind? Well, when I found it on that database, something stood out to me. This symbol.” Cali stepped forward and pointed to a tattoo on the man’s arm. “I knew I’d seen it somewhere before, so I started searching for the symbol.”
Cali rushed over to the bed and pulled a huge wad of crumpled newspaper clippings from under her pillow and thrust them at Teagan.
“I wasn’t going to show you these, but here’s my proof. Dating back almost two hundred years, I found pictures of that symbol.” She seemed excited now, but Teagan didn’t know what to do with the information she held in her hands. Cali picked through the papers Teagan was holding. “Here, look!”
Teagan looked closely. “Okay,” she said not following. She’d seen this photo in the pile of pictures on the bed but had no idea what that meant, if anything.
“Look closer,” Cali’s finger poked the paper. “At the date.”
“1827.” Explained why it was black and off-white-ish, like old parchment.
Cali pulled the picture of the man out of the pile on the bed and brought it to her. “Look.”
Teagan did. “So it’s the same man. Cali, are you okay? This doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Teagan, the date on this photo is 2007.”
The news did cause Teagan to look closer at the photos in a side-by-side comparison. She couldn’t deny it, they did look like the same person. “Maybe it’s an ancestor. We hear about that kind of thing happening all the time.” Teagan offered.
Cali groaned loudly. “I thought at least you would believe me.”
“Hey,” she said defensively, “I didn’t say I don’t believe you.”
“But you didn’t say you did either. Do you at least see the same symbol in both photos?”
Teagan brought the newer photo closer, and when she looked she could just make out the edge of the man’s tattoo under his shirt sleeve. From what she could see of it, they were an exact match.
“Now that I do see.” Teagan admitted. “All these men have this tattoo? Even Colin?”
Cali nodded. “That’s not all. When I was searching for the symbol, I didn’t just find it in tattoo form. Look.”
She thrust another paper, this one ripped, into Teagan’s hands, making it hard for her to hold onto all of the papers. This one was a flyer for an Inn in Ireland, and sure enough, the symbol that was a tattoo on the men in the other photos was a symbol on the sign in front of the Inn. The sign read O’Tool’s Cottage, Bed & Breakfast. When Teagan turned the well worn paper over, there was an address scrawled in pencil.
“What does my father have to do with this, Cali?”
“I don’t know yet, but he had the tattoo.”
“I don’t believe you; show me. I would’ve remembered something like that.”
Her friend rummaged around inside the ratty bag and finally pulled out a tiny piece of paper folded over on itself many times. Cali handed it to her without a word.
“What’s this?” she asked, but really, she was stalling. Teagan didn’t want to open the paper. She had a bad feeling about all of this.
“Just open it,” Cali said and swallowed hard.
Teagan took her time unfolding the paper. When the final shape of the paper unfolded in her hands, she knew it was the ripped piece from the flyer. Taking a moment to examine it, she found the smiling face of her father staring back up at her, his arm wrapped around an older woman with curly hair and a kind face. The very bottom corner of the paper was stamped with a date approximately one year ago. Teagan squeezed her eyes shut.
“I found it in a newspaper.”
“You’ve known who he was? My father, you’ve known where he was for a year?” Cali didn’t answer her. Teagan started to back away from Cali toward the door to her friend’s bedroom. She couldn’t be here right now. “You... You manipulated me into being your friend, so you could find out more about these men? What was I, a game? Your charity case? Oh look, a girl that has it worse than me? Let’s pretend to be her friend to get more info. Are you even crazy, or did you just pretend that too, Cali?” Teagan threw up her hand to stop Cali from answering. “You know what, I don’t even want to know. I can’t hear more of your lies.”
Teagan spun on her heel and stormed out the door. She stomped down the hall, stopping two doors away and entered her own room, making sure to slam the door as hard as she could behind her.
“I hate you!” she yelled as loud as she could, hoping that her words stung the girl she’d called her best friend just as much as Cali’s actions had stung her.
“Quiet down!” She heard the house warden yell.
Teagan threw herself on the bed, it squeaked as she bounced several times then came to a jerking stop. Brushing an unwanted tear from her eye, she realized the paper with the picture of the Inn was still in her hand. She laid it down on her bed and added the ripped corner with the picture of her dad to it, then smoothed them both out for good measure.
“Is this where you are dad?” She asked quietly and swiped at another tear.
A loud banging on her door made her jump, and she instinctively crumpled the papers and jammed them into the pocket of her tight blue-jeans.
“Lights out! You want me to write you up? It’s after ten.” Another pound on the door. Teagan figured the warden did it as a scare tactic, and it worked. She cut off her beside light and flopped over on her back on the uncomfortable bed. Trying to let her eyes adjust to the darkness of the night, she stared at the ceiling. If she tried really hard, she could just barely make out the sporadic shape of the water stain above her bed, or maybe it was that she knew it was there and only imagined she could see the outline. A shuddering breath left her body.
“Dad?” she whispered with another shudder.