Justin
Wednesday was Family Dinner Night around my place. There was no excuse to miss family dinner night. Never. No friends or business calls were to be accepted. That included Dad's. I'd never found an excuse worthy of missing dinner. Well, at least one that I could tell Dad about. It was really annoying when I was a kid, but now, it was almost cool. I mean, it was only one night a week, and we could all catch up on each other's lives.
It was my turn to cook, and I was getting dinner ready while the twins helped. Things had been going pretty good recently. Brit had finally gotten bored with teasing me about my "girlfriend" and was on to other things. The hottest topic was Dad ditching the woman he had been dating. We all breathed a sigh of relief at that. It wasn't that I minded Dad going out with a woman; I thought it was great. But when she started acting like a stepmother, we worried. If you've been in the situation, you know exactly what I mean. It's like she's trying to get us to fall in love with her so that Dad will see she's a great mother to his children and should be with her forever.
At least it got the main conversation off of Jhondie. It was funny how six weeks before I didn't know her, and now we were together five nights a week usually. For the most part it was business. We had a lot of research to do, and it was a major perk to have a partner that didn't require sleep. We'd been doing research on Brent Lake's sudden disappearance after he'd been exposed shooting Harper. And so what if it wasn't all business?
Jhondie and I had spent quite a few nights just hanging out and talking. I knew I was the only person other than her parents that knew about her past. I suppose it made it a lot easier for her to talk to me about stuff since she didn't need to hide anything. It wasn't like anything was happening between us. We were good friends. Dad and the twins could think what they wanted, but I knew nothing was going on there, and eventually they got used to the idea that I had a female for a friend.
Dad got home a little after five, and dinner was just about ready. I'm not a bad cook as long as it's simple. Anyways, the night seemed like all omens were good. Brittany had decided to not be a brat that day, and Bryan had actually set the table without breaking or spilling anything. I didn't burn anything, and Dad was home on time. We sat down and started to enjoy dinner together.
The phone rang. We all froze. Whoever it was for was going to get the lecture on the importance of Family Dinner Night. If it was for Dad, he'd get a lecture on why he should also keep the rules he set because he had to set an example for the twins. Dad answered the phone. He shot me a piercing glance. Who was calling me? It better not be Dink again.
"Yes, but he's having dinner now," Dad said coolly. "I'll have him call…" his words trailed off and he looked more concerned than angry. "Oh. Okay, here he is." He handed me the phone. "It's Jhondie," he said.
"Hey there," I said into the phone. Dad could see from my face there was something seriously wrong as Jhondie told me what had happened. I couldn't believe it. Dr. Harris? I had no idea what to say to her. For me to run out of words, that was a big deal.
"I know this is your family night and everything," she was saying, "but Mom and Kayla are out of it and I don't think I should drive and I really don't want to and if you can't I understand…"
"I'll be there in a few minutes," I said cutting her off. She was upset, but still very in control of herself. She didn't sound like she was crying. That worried me.
She thanked me and hung up. I looked at Dad. "Jhondie's father was killed tonight," I said giving a sideways glance to the twins to let Dad know there were details I'd rather not say in front of them. "They're at the hospital, and Jhondie needs me to…"
"Call me when you can," Dad interrupted. I nodded and was out the door in a flash.
"Your mom asleep?" I asked Jhondie a couple of hours later. She had just come downstairs and I was a waiting in their living room. I had helped get them into the car and then into the house. Jhondie had taken care of getting her mom into bed, and I carried Kayla upstairs. Mrs. Harris still had that real glassy-eyed look of the well medicated, and Kayla was gone to the world. Poor kid. I knew how she felt. It isn't easy loosing a parent suddenly. I had called Dad while Jhondie was taking care of her mom and let him know what had happened, and that I would be home real late if I did come home. He said to tell him if there was anything that he could do.
"Yeah," Jhondie replied. She was so calm. At the hospital you would have thought she was a employee there directing everyone rather than someone who just lost a loved one. It's funny how I could tell when she was back in Manticore, even when she was pretending that she wasn't. She definitely was then. "Thanks for picking us up and everything. I know it's late, and you're probably tired and everything. They're going to be out all night, and I'll be fine, so you don't have to hang around, we'll all be fine."
Liar. I was fifteen when my mother died. A drunk driver killed her in a car accident. When I found out she was gone, I started to run. I didn't want anyone around me. I ended up running the nine miles back home. I don't remember most of it, just the feel of my feet hitting pavement, and this long scream echoing in my head. When I got home, I ran up to my parent's room, and she wasn't there. I fell onto their bed and started to cry.
Mom's best friend came over from next door, and she stayed with me until Dad got home. I learned a very important lesson, even if it didn't sink in right away. When something like this happens, the last thing a person, even a genetically engineered solider, needs is to be alone. Jhondie was my friend, and I wasn't about to leave her to deal with it by herself.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said firmly. She was standing with her back to me, arms crossed, staring out the front window. I could see her reflection in the window, and when I spoke, her eyes closed, and there was a look of physical pain on her face for a moment.
I wasn't sure really what to do. We were friends, but we'd never been physically affectionate in any way. The most contact, outside of a fight when we first met, was one of us grabbing the other's arm. Heck with it, she needed someone. I walked up behind her, and put my arms around her. She tensed for a moment, and I was pretty sure she was going to throw me across the room.
"Please go," she said in a high voice. "I'll be fine."
"Jhondie, I know what this is like, remember?" I had told her about losing my mother. I really knew what she was going through. Some idiot, who had no business breathing the same air as a person as good as her father, had casually taken his life. He didn't care. He was doing what he wanted and who cared about anyone else. The only difference was that the driver that killed Mom was also killed in the accident. He paid the price for his action.
"I want to be alone," she yelled, turning around suddenly. I almost let go. If she didn't want me, she could physically throw me out. It's not really shameful to say that a girl is stronger than you when she was engineered to be stronger than any regular man. Not to mention trained in hand-to-hand combat. Instead she let me hold her and started to cry. She pulled tighter against me and sobbed hard enough to make her entire body shake. I didn't let go, even if I could, and just kept telling her it's ok, that it was going to be all right. I wasn't sure that it would ever be all right, but I had to say something.
"I killed him," she choked out suddenly. "It's my fault."
I pulled back enough to look in her face. "You didn't fail at anything," I said firmly. "You couldn't have stopped it. We can't know everything going on in this city, no matter how good we are."
"You don't understand," she sniffed. "It's my fault we moved to LA. If they'd never adopted me, they'd still be in Vegas, and Dad wouldn't have been shot by some stupid gangbangers."
I pulled her close again. Guilt was a part of grief. I'd learned that long ago. When someone dies, you find a reason to blame yourself. I told myself that if Mom hadn't hemmed my pants that afternoon, she wouldn't have been on the road at that moment, and she would have missed the drunk by half an hour. "Then he would have been killed in a car accident, or a Vegas gang, or a meteor falling on the house, or something," I said to the top of her head. "When it's your time, it's your time, no matter what."
She cried some more, but not as intensely. I could feel her starting to get tense, and then she pulled away from me, and started to pace the room. She was suddenly furious. I mean, in a killing rage furious. There had only been a couple of times that she reminded me in her actions that she was trained to kill, and this was one of them.
"I'm going to find him," she said cold enough to make me shiver. "I'm going to find who killed him and I'm going to show him a few things Lydecker taught us." She stopped pacing and looked at me with a smile that was flat out terrifying. "I wonder if he can take pain as well as we could." It was pretty rare that she mentioned things that had happened to her at Manticore, but when she did, it didn't paint a pretty picture. I could get the hint as to what she had planned for her father's killer.
"We'll find him," I said carefully. She stopped pacing. I took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. They were losing some of that coldness. "We can find who did this, and he'll pay the right way. I promise you we'll find him," I continued. Putting someone in jail I could do, torturing them to death, that just wasn't me. It wasn't Jhondie either, but she wasn't thinking clearly.
Her face crumbled. "My daddy died," she said in a strange voice, and for a second she looked younger than Kayla. She fell into my arms, and started to cry again. I got us to the couch, and let her stretch out so that she was still against my chest. She cried for a while, and then her breathing got more regular, and I realized that she was asleep. It was the first time I'd seen that phenomenon. Actually, I don't think I'd ever even seen her tired before. Now was more mental exhaustion than physical, but she needed some down time to heal.
I thought about taking her to her bed, but I wanted to be with her in case she woke up. I figured her mother would be much cooler about seeing her daughter on the couch with a friend than in her bed with a male friend. It's not like anything would have happened at all, but it was better where we were. I grabbed a pillow and leaned back some. She didn't even flinch when I readjusted her. I watched TV for a while and she didn't move. At some point I ended up falling asleep on the couch with her still curled against me.