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“Gentle. Juniper, go slow,” Cypress all but yelled. It was Christmas Eve and we were moving our completed gingerbread architecture from the living room to the dining table.
“This way. One foot backwards, Junie. Easy now. Cypress, no...no, to the right.” Lila guided us with hand signals like an aircraft marshaller. After dinner, she had helped put finishing touches on the gingerbread model of St. Petersburg and now she was bossing us around, as always.
Cypress and I lowered it on the table with a thump and twin gasps of relief. As we eased our fingers out from under the structure, a tiny hail of crumbs and icing landed on the table, which Cypress instantly set out to clean.
“We did it.” I high-fived Cypress and he nodded in pride.
Our cookies and confection St. Petersburg stood three feet high, the thick gingerbread held by royal icing and decorated with gumdrops, candy canes and tinted chocolate. Every year, we upped our gingerbread game and this time we had outdone ourselves, driven by my guilt for spending recent weekends with Kyle.
“You guys have mad sugar skills.” Lila took a succession of photos of us. “Twinsies show me some love.”
Cypress blushed and beamed at her. “Thank you.”
Aww. My brother’s crush on Lila never seemed to dim.
“Why thank you? Lila is family. She’d better, or else.” Clutching her by the shoulders, I dragged her to us. “Get in here with us. Selfie time.”
We took silly photos and made faces at each other until I drew away from them and went to the kitchen. Mom was putting away all the leftovers and I smiled at her. It was good to see her up from the couch for once. Pulling out a drawer, I laughed. I approached the dining table waving a silver butcher knife. “Time to eat this thing. Chop. Chop.”
Horrified, Cypress stopped cleaning up the crumbs. “What did you say? Why, Juniper?”
“This is dessert, you know. Do you want to do the honors?” I tried handing him the blade.
He shook his head like a lost puppy in the wind. “No, no, no. We’re not eating this thing. What’s wrong with you, Junie? That would be like an artist eating his own oil painting.”
“It’ll taste better than linseed oil.” Putting down the knife, I laughed.
Cypress caught on. “You are my evil twin,” he said. He picked up the crumbs that he had collected in a towel and threw it on me. Crumbs and royal icing flecks settled on my hair and shoulders.
“Hey.” I shook my hair.
“Cuddle Attack time.” Cypress winked at Lila and grabbed me roughly. Despite my shrieks of protest, they squeezed and tickled me until I screamed bloody murder and threatened to smash us all into the gingerbread St. Petersburg.
“Alright, settle down, you savages,” said Mom from the kitchen.
“Presents. Present time,” Lila yelled.
Grabbing us both by the wrists, she led us to the small white Christmas tree in the living room. Mom watched with a polite smile from the couch as we ripped apart each other’s gifts and cried out in over-the-top delight at every mundane gift.
Our little party came to an end when Cypress zoned back into his digital world to try out the new PC games Lila had given him. Lately, Cypress was always holed up in his room web chatting with the mysterious Sofia Felipe. I had asked him to invite her on Christmas Eve, but he had flushed and refused. Baby steps, baby steps.
When Mother started watching TV, Lila and I escaped to my room. She shut the door, lips curved in a sassy smile. “Well, how was it? The honeymoon at the treehouse.”
I lay down in bed, eyes fixed on the popcorn ceiling. “Oh my God. I can’t describe it...Kyle is amazing.”
“I need more deets than amazing.” She plopped down on the bed across from me and I was reminded of the countless hours we had spent in my room venting our teenage angst.
“I don’t know, Lila. I’ve never been happier. I feel complete with him.”
“I already know how you feel. Sickeningly in L-O-V-E. I need a play-by-play of the action.”
I gave her a rundown of my weekend at the treehouse and she listened slack-jawed, hooting at some of the sexy details.
“It’s like we belong, you know,” I said, when I was done.
She raised an eyebrow. “But you don’t really belong, do you? I mean he wants to end it, which is real bizarre when he obviously cares. I don’t get it. Did you say that there is a specific date he wants to end it?”
I sat up and propped myself against the headboard, flushing a bit. “I don’t get it, either...I know it has something to do with his girlfriend. She died a long time ago and he has not been in a relationship since then. I don’t think he even knows how to have a relationship. Which makes us just right for each other.”
“Huh...”
Before she could get an actual word out, I said, “He called me his girlfriend this weekend, which is weird and way too early. And tomorrow I’m meeting his family. Do you think that seems too intimate?”
“Well, that’s a good thing. Not too intimate considering what he expects from you.” Judging from the way she was tapping her nail on the footboard, I saw an oceanic lecture coming about how men should treat women and how women should demand and enforce it, using her fiancé Sam as a fitting model.
Trying to divert her attention, I jumped up. “Lila, I have something to show you.”
“What? Another present?”
I locked the bedroom door, propped a stool by the bookshelf and tugged out the file Kyle had given me. I put it down on the bed. “You’re not going to believe what this is.”
“Please tell me Kyle’s not some kind of kooky kinky sadist? Or a serial killer.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Just to say I told you so.”
“Yes, I would. What is in the file?”
I took a deep breath. “Kyle found my father.”
“Shut the front door!”
“No, for real.”
“How? Who is it? Does Cindy know? Does Cypress? Did you contact him?”
“No. No. No.” I told her that I had not looked through the file yet and was sure Cypress or Mom could not handle it. “Will you please open this file with me? If I faint or something you can resuscitate me.”
“Junie, just open it.”
With bated breath, I opened it and took out the pieces of paper I had been waiting for all my life. My heart beat loud in my eardrums, as I pulled out copies of his driver’s license, social security card, bank transcripts, tax returns, addresses, phone numbers, and a full biographical report by Kyle’s security detail. With trembling fingers, I picked up the driver’s license copy.
His name was Raymond Smoke.
Attached to the paper was a photo of my alleged father. And when I saw him, my heart went very still. I threw the photo away with such force, it slipped under the bed. Lila retrieved it. She looked at it and her hands flew to her mouth. “Oh my God. This is like Cypress twenty years from now.”
My shoulders shook and I closed the file. “I can’t do this.”
Watching me, she said, “Come on. You can do this.”
“No. I can’t. I can’t. Just...just take the file and...and shred it.”
After a few minutes of gentle persuasion and a few random examples of oddball parenting failures she had seen in the hospital, she convinced me to look at it again.
I held up the photo and inhaled hard.
Raymond Smoke was indubitably my father.
This was Cypress’ older doppelganger. He had the same sandy crinkled hair as Cypress, the same golden brown skin, the same warm brown eyes—and I was sure—the same twin dimples in the same spots as his son. His son.
What about me? There were undeclared parts of myself I found in his face—things I could not pinpoint but felt, for there was a haunting familiarity in his expression and the bones of his face. Through a haze of tears, I traced the photo with my finger. He had a kind, gentle face...a face I saw over my bed waking me up when I was a little girl. In a flash, I imagined a succession of such moments—my birth, my toddler years, my first day of school, prom night, college graduation—in which I was this man’s beloved, spoiled daughter.
I put down his photo; it hurt to look at his face. “Now I get it.”
“What?” Lila tipped her head, her long black hair tumbling in a mass of teased curls.
“All my life, when Mom would look at Cypress, she’d tear up. I always thought it was because of his condition...but I guess it was because he reminded her of my father.”
“Junie, we don’t know if this is really your father,” Lila said in a medical professional’s voice.
“You'd have to be blind not to see this is Cypress's dad. And Cypress is my twin. So he’s my dad.”
“We can do a DNA test.”
“Don’t need one. My eyesight works.”
“He looks nice.” Lila picked up the photo. “He is exactly the type of plaid-wearing rugged handsome guy I imagined Cindy would fall in love with.”
Tearing up again, I leaned over the spilled papers on my bed and hugged her. “Thanks for always being there for us.”
“Hey, what’s this?” She wiped my tears away with a finger. “You’re never going to cry on my watch.”
“Love you, Lila.”
“Love you too.”
I flipped through the file, in awe that Kyle’s security had dug up this person’s entire galaxy of existence in such a short time. Raymond Smoke grew up in Silver Falls, a rural town in Wisconsin, and his property records showed he owned a nursery and a lot of land there. Currently, he lived in downtown Chicago, where he was a landscape architect. Though he was a stranger to me, my heart burst with pride at his accomplishments.
“Oh wow. It says he worked on the landscape architecture design of Millennium Park.”
“Aha. No wonder you and Cypress can turn gingerbread into fantabulous things. I can’t even take an Oreo apart.”
My heart sank when I saw that Raymond was married and had two teenage kids. There was no need for us to reach out to him. He had a full life, a picture-perfect family. I gathered from the information available in the documents that he was a happy, settled, and fulfilled family man.
Seeing me upset again, Lila swept up the papers, put them back into the file and shut it. “Pace yourself. Doctor’s order.”
Instantly, I flipped open my laptop and Lila watched in anxious silence—she knew from my clenched teeth I would brook no argument. There was only one other Raymond Smoke in America, so my father’s Facebook page was easy to identify. A lump grew in my throat as I flicked through years of photos and a lifetime of memories in a few minutes.
Raymond was obsessed with his family. He only posted photographs of his wife, his children, their vacations, their two rambunctious terriers, and the fun parties they threw. His beautiful and cultured wife ran a theatre company in downtown Chicago and his children did a lot of sports. The girl was in college and the boy was a senior in high school.
And this...could have been my life.
Did he know he had four children? Not two. Two lived the ideal American dream life and two the total American reality. Welcome to the American dream and good luck if you are poor, sick, a single mom, or have special needs and do not belong to the tippy-top of the hierarchical triangle. Taking a sharp breath, I tried to let go of my bitterness and envy built on years and years of long nights on this saggy twin bed awake and aching for a father.
In the “About” section, I found out Raymond was a green advocate and on the board of a national forest nonprofit. I clicked on a few links and discovered he wrote a blog, Silver Leaf, dedicated to the trees around Silver Falls and the topographical history of American forests. I skimmed though a few blog posts, smiling at the humor of his musings about his travels, the environment, and the classification of Midwestern trees.
The classification of trees.
My eyes began to leak again.
I had finally solved the mystery of why Cypress and I had been named after trees!
My mother must have lived with him in Silver Falls. She must have stared out at the hundreds of juniper trees classified in the cypress family. I wondered if she had ever told him about us. Maybe she had not.
Maybe she just ran away.
Or maybe he knew and had left her...
“What are you going to do?” Lila asked, disrupting my thoughts. She was tapping my laptop loud and hard. “Are you going to talk to him? Confront your mom? Call him?”
I shook my head. “No. I want to go check him out first. Just see him, without him knowing that I’m there.”
“You mean stalk him?” Lila was thrilled and outraged at the same time. “Yes. Yes. I’ve always wanted to go on a stakeout. Can I go with you?”
“We could go to Chicago. And then...maybe...I can casually introduce myself...as a potential client. I want to get to know him first.” My voice broke.
“You okay?”
“I don’t know. Lila. It’s like a scab is off and I’m bleeding again.”
She smiled. “You’re in luck. I’m a blood expert. Lemme look.”
I did not smile and nestled my chin on my propped up knees. “Some long buried things should not surface. I was super mad at Kyle about doing this, but I know he meant well.”
“Juniper, it’s a gift. Though I’m not Kyle’s biggest fan, I’ll admit this was well played.” Lila got up and started stretching her legs. “Geez. Holidays turn the hospital into a zoo. I’m so tired. Okay, when are we stalking your dad? I’ll set my rotation accordingly.”
I leaned back in bed. “He’s my biological father, not my dad. I don’t want to think about him till after New Year’s. Right now I’m freaking out about meeting Kyle’s family. I’ve got Paxton fish to fry.”
“You’ll do fine.” Doing hamstring stretches, Lila was bouncing around the room on one leg. Noticing a box sticking out from under my bed, she pointed to it. “Hey, what is that?”
I explained the package was delivered yesterday from San Francisco. “I’m sure Kyle sent me a designer dress. I’m sick of him trying to doll me up.”
Lila’s eyes gleamed in excitement. “I’m sure he just wants you to fit in, Debbie Downer.”
“You his legal counsel now?”
Lila picked up the black box with elegant white ribbons and shook it, her lips in a moue of delight. She had a doctor’s brain and a fashionista’s heart. She shook it. “What’s in it?”
“Haven’t opened it yet. Just to piss Kyle off I wanna go wearing boots, torn jeans and my ugly holiday sweater.”
She frowned. “Don’t humiliate the guy.”
I folded my arms. “You think I humiliate him?”
“Chill out. Why’re you so militant these days? Can I open it?”
I nodded and she set the box on the bed and ripped off the ribbons and tissue paper with eager violence. Nestled in black tissue was a cream envelope. I grabbed it, before she could.
“Oooh. A love letter from Mr. Smexy,” she cried out. “‘Juniper, fly to me. I cannot live without you. San Francisco is dark with rain. The fog eats my brain. Please fly to me.’ Signed, poor he.”
“Stick to your day job, poetry slam.” I ripped open the envelope and read the card. To my disappointment, it was not from Kyle. “It’s from Evan, Kyle's adopted-bro-slash-assistant.” I read it to myself.
Dear Juniper,
Kyle told me that you did not appreciate him trying to truss you up like a turkey. I hear you. He needs to let go of his remote control. I hope you will forgive me for imposing this dress on you but Kyle does not know. Please wear it for me to his father’s house. I know you will rock this look. Consider it my peace offering for the way I treated you on Thanksgiving. Have a great holiday.
Yours,
Evan
Lila ripped the tissue into shreds and lifted out a dusky maroon dress. “Wow. Gorgeous.” She gasped. “Junie, this is a real Alexander McQueen dress.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s from their fall collection. Off the runway. Put it on. Put it on.”
“How beautiful.” The sleeveless dress was scrolled with black jacquard and had a full tea-length skirt. I traced the thick scrolling—the archaic design was a nod to Victorian Gothic and suited my brooding, prudish nature. Evan and I were going to be good friends.
Lila shrieked when she threw down the box and suede black heels fell out. “Shut the front door. Those are Giuseppe Zanotti shoes.”
I giggled. “Sounds like a biscotti brand.”
“You are such an ungrateful savage. I can come if you need a doctor handy, tomorrow. Kyle might have a myocardial infarction when he sees you.”
Frightened moths fluttered in my belly as I imagined what Kyle would think of me in this getup. I jumped off the bed, draped the dress on me and twirled around. “Take off your MD hat and give me a makeup tutorial, please.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
The enormous black Escalade pulled up to my apartment complex, heavy duty tires chewing up the snow and spitting it into gullies. The moment I saw the car, I hurtled out of the lobby, for I did not want Kyle to come in and insist on meeting my family. Shivering as my legs met the icy air, I braced myself for the frightful weather outside. I teetered on my heels, poking holes in the pillowy drifts as I made my way to the driveway. Kyle jumped out of the car and strode towards me. A foot away, he stopped to give me the once over, his face brightening. His grin was infectious, and I gave him a shy smile.
He dropped a kiss on my head. “Hey, beautiful. Happy Holidays.”
“Merry Christmas, Kyle.”
“Come.” He grabbed my hand and towed me to the backseat of the Escalade.
Settled with a small throw rug on my legs, I turned to see him watching me in disbelief—as if I was a spoonful of crushed pixies and powdered Smurfs. “I’m real, you know.”
“I just can’t believe you’re mine.”
He lifted my hand and pressed firm kisses on my knuckles. As his lips moved to mine, my body burst into tiny flames and I closed my eyes. I gave into the hunger of his kisses and was thirsting for more when I remembered the driver and drew away from Kyle, much to his irritation. In a sharp formal suit with his groomed dark stubble and slicked hair, Kyle was more handsome and intimidating than I recalled. I felt a sudden rush of unfamiliarity. Seeing him in person, the scale of my feelings frightened me. This was all so new and dangerous. I fell deeper in love with Kyle when I was with him and ached for him every moment we were apart.
“I missed you,” I said.
“And I you.” Kyle flicked on his phone and I was worried that he would zone off into Kyle-land so soon after meeting me, but instead he turned on the light and glided it across my face and my coat. His arm tightened around my waist. “You look especially beautiful tonight. What’s the occasion, ma’am?”
“I’m having a long distance affair with this man who likes to see me trussed up like a holiday ham. Tonight I’m meeting his family.”
“Do you want to please them? Or please him?”
“No one. The Boudica atoms in me say I please no man.”
“Your atoms turn to electrons in this man’s presence so I beg to differ.” To prove his point Kyle’s hand drifted over my throat and jaw and when I trembled he arched a cocky brow. He pulled me against him and I snuggled on his shoulder.
On the ride we giggled and flirted like asinine teenagers who had never met the opposite sex. The past few days, Kyle and I had cultivated a phone friendship and every night we talked for hours—talking the way lovers do— every night we talked for hours—the way lovers do, our conversations intimate, drifting, with no ends or goodbyes.
When we entered a private road that led to his father’s estate, he said, “By the way, I was thinking you and I could take a little vacation. Next week on New Year’s. I have a few days off. What do you think?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Are you kidding me? It is a freaking awesome idea. I have a friend who owns this island in Turks and Caicos. Isolated beaches, lots of outdoor activities. It’ll be warm, toasty and tropical. Just you and me, babe, getting brown as bugs. Say yes, June-Bug.” Kyle’s thick black eyebrows slanted up in hope.
I pictured Cypress in his room, slumped over his digital gaming galaxy with a shot of guilt. “What about your business? Aren’t you going to run it into the ground? Stop spending so much time with me.”
“Nope. It runs like clockwork. Evan runs it better than I can. It’ll still be there when I get back. Plus, we close for New Year’s. And if memory serves me right, there was a girl who went crazy at a California beach. Imagine what she’d do at a private tropical beach. Ah, the possibilities. Say yes.”
The idea of escaping with Kyle to our own tropical paradise won me over. “I guess a week is too much...how about five days?”
“I’ll take that. If you had said no, I’d have put you over my shoulders, thrown you in my car, blindfolded you, and stuck you on a jet,” he said with a slow grin.
“Could you be less original, Mr. Caveman?”
“Could you be less reductive? Labels don’t bother me.”
The car stopped and Kyle got out and opened my door. Holding his hand, I stepped out and caught my breath. I had been expecting grandeur but the Paxton residence was the biggest, most badass house I had seen in my life—an MTV Crib on crack.
The colonial mansion had two wings and was a marble and brick creation all wrapped up with lavish holiday lights. The driveway circled a limestone fountain of mermaids riding dolphins, ready to spout water in better weather. Draped in snow, the wintry shrubs, hedges and trees on the estate winked with thousands of string lights. It was all...too much.
Instincts on shy alert, I shrank closer to Kyle, wondering if it was too late to run back to my cozy room, change into my pajamas, chomp candy canes, and watch a rerun of It’s a Wonderful Life with Cypress. As we walked on the granite slabs winding to the front door, I half-hid behind him.
Smiling at me, he propelled me to his side. “Don’t worry. I’m with you.”
“I’m not worried,” I lied.
“Oh yeah? You look like a rabbit facing a gun barrel.”
I cleared my throat. “I’m fine.” But I wasn’t. I walked real slow, swaying on my heels like a newborn doe.
Half concerned and half amused, my benevolent lover crushed my fingers. “They’re going to love you.”
The irony was not lost on me that Kyle thought his family would love me but had never uttered those words to me.
Well, what do you expect, Dimbulb?
He doesn’t even believe in this dumb, schmucky thing called love.
