AU: Mark Carter arrives in Colorado Springs unexpectantly. He wants answers to questions and he's not going anywhere until he gets them.
Chapter 24: Secrets
Tuesday, 22nd June 2004 – Midday – Colorado Springs – Mark Carter
The address on the crinkled piece of paper had smudged and faded through sheer overuse. I had lost count how many times in the last four days I had scrunched and tossed it in the trash, then retrieved and flattened it out, only to repeat the process again. It had taken my wife three days to convince me to get on a plane and come and find out for myself, though she was adamant that Pete must have been mistaken. In the end my incessant habit of pacing and talking to myself almost drove her to insanity.
The address was in a different part of Colorado Springs from the house I had visited only once before. It was further out, bordering a state forest almost at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain. As a lover of all things technological, a woman who loved spending time at the library, I was surprised to find that she had chosen to move into a neighbourhood so far from any of those places.
I knew I should get out of the car, walk over and knock on the door but stalking her just felt wrong. What if this woman was not my sister? Pete had seemed so fixated but then again, he hadn't gotten to know her because she hadn't given him the time of day. She had rebuffed his every attempt at connecting with her even though apparently, she was the one to initiate contact by calling him. I had tried calling him a few times over the last three months, but he never answered his phone or called back, until one day his phone was weirdly disconnected. I figured my indignant insistence that Sam was dead during our last phone call had been enough for him to put me on his ignore list.
Figuring that sooner or later, she would have to go out for something, or maybe check her mail, I waited. It would give me the opportunity to see her from afar before I made a fool out of myself by knocking on her door. Reaching into the inner pocket of my sports jacket, I withdrew two photos, one of Sam – my sister – with the short blonde hair, wide smile, and bright blue eyes which contrasted with the black jacket she was wearing. The other photo – taken at range by Pete – of the woman he called Samantha with the chin-length blonde hair, similar face shape and a little girl. Holding them side by side, I looked at them both again. I must have done this at least a hundred times since Friday.
"What are you doing here, Mark?" I murmured the question into the empty space of my car, hoping for an answer from someone somewhere other than the repetitious echo of Alejandro and Juanita's persistent voices that this was some kind of divine intervention. That this woman was Sam and not some lookalike pretending to be Sam. The ticking sound of my cars engine cooling down along with the excited screams of a child skipping up the street was the only answer I received. Looking up, I found the source of the cheerful chittering. A little girl holding the hand of a tall man – barely visible due to the overhead orientation of the sun beating down through my windscreen – as she skipped – no, galloped – up the street.
"C'mon. Just like this!" She instructed, then showed the man how to place his feet on the ground before she skipped, "Then do it again with your feet the other way. Look!" She said, then skipped three times. Looking from the girl and the man to the photo, I realised I was looking at the same little girl, and for a second, my heart skipped a beat because she looked so much like… I looked at the man as he got closer. The greying brown hair above his ears and noticeable bald patch.
"Dad?" I said shocked, then scrambled to get out of the car. "Dad!" I called receiving his immediate attention. The little girl looked at me before immediately returning to my father's side almost as if she had been coached to do so. Like we used to do when we were young, and someone called out to our father.
"Mark? What are you doing here?" Dad asked, stationary on the other side of the street. Looking both ways, I crossed over and stood several feet from him. The little girl was standing beside him gripping the bottom of his jacket, scrutinising me with her rich brown eyes. Everything except her hair and eye colour screamed Carter.
"I'm… ah…"
"Who is this, Grandpa?" The girl asked looking from me to him and back to me.
"Me?" I pointed to myself, "I'm… I'm… wait…" I started to answer the girl's question then looked back at Dad, "Grandpa?" I asked them both. Dad smiled faintly, then reached for the girl's hand.
"Yes, Mark. This is Grace. Your niece." He responded easily and without hesitation. He looked at the girl. "Grace, this is your Uncle Mark."
She took in a breath, "Really? I have another Uncle! Yay!" She squealed, bounding over and wrapped her little arms as far around my waist as she could. Without even thinking about it, I bent down a little and returned the hug as stinging warm tears sprung to my eyes. I had a niece. It was a different feeling to becoming a father, but just heart warming.
"But… but… why didn't…" I scrunched my eyes to stop from embarrassing myself. "She's…"
"Four." Dad replied to my unasked question. "And it's a long story. Perhaps you had better come inside." The little girl let me go and bounded after my father, wrapping her small hand around his much larger one. At length, Dad turned and looked over his shoulder at my stationery form. "You coming?" He prompted, making me realise I had not moved from my spot on the footpath.
"Ahh… yeah… yeah." I replied shakily and took my first step towards the craftsman style house that Dad seemed so comfortable approaching. A million questions vied for attention in my brain.
How long had Dad known?
Was her death a mistake, or worse faked?
Why would she fake her death?
Why did she have a daughter that I knew nothing about?
Why didn't she tell me?
The list was endless as each question opened up more potential questions, half of which I started answering on my own rather unhelpfully, since every answer led me back to this whole situation somehow being the fault of the Air Force.
The door opened and we entered.
The house was warm and inviting. The sun coming through the full pane windows bathed the sunken lounge and combined dining kitchen with a welcoming brightness that was accentuated perfectly by the stone fireplace, hard wood floors and matching furniture in the adjoining room. Dad immediately moved into the kitchen and went about arranging lunch for the little girl – Grace. It didn't escape me that she had our mother's middle name. Watching him move around with such ease – finding plates, toasting some bread, getting her a drink – filled me with unease since he had never appeared so relaxed when visiting our house.
"The lounge is that way, Mark. I'll make us a coffee and then give Sammie the heads up." He said clearly and pointed toward the sunbathed room. Give her the heads up! What about me? I screamed in my head but wisely didn't say out loud knowing it would do nothing but draw him into a fight.
"OK." I muttered, unable to expunge the anger from my tone entirely. He heard it and gave me the look that said, 'Not here!' before focusing back on his charge.
Rather than taking a seat, I chose to walk around taking in everything I could. There were certificates and awards from the USAF for a Jonathan O'Neill, photos of four people in olive drab fatigues, one of them the sister I remembered so fondly, the other three men were those who attended her funeral. I remembered the grey-haired man with the O'Neill name tag – my sisters commanding officer – almost losing his stoic countenance as he presented me her folded flag. This was his house. The next photo was of two men wearing their dress blue uniform sharing a joke, one of those men was my father, the other a younger O'Neill. Something grasped in my mind making me purposely check every photo. Brown hair. Brown eyes. The girl! Grace was his! But that… that was… my eyes fell on two photos side by side, one of O'Neill with another woman and a boy beside another of him laughing, his arms wrapped around my sister.
My sister with long hair. In a wedding dress.
Seizing the photo, I walked over to the one of Sam with her team and held it up to compare. They were same but different. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something was not right. It was as if the woman in the wedding photo was a different kind of happy. The picture of Sam with her team had her half looking at the camera and half looking at him. The smile was different. Happy but not happy. There was a hardness that simply did not show in the wedding photo.
Dad announced himself by loudly stepping down the two steps before carefully placing down two cups of coffee, taking the time to retrieve and arrange two coasters rather than place the cups directly onto the polished wooden table.
"Coffee?" I motioned to the second cup remembering how he had apparently given it up.
"Yeah, figured I'd need it for this conversation." He countered then stood tall and placed his hands on his hips, eying the two photos in my hands. Looking down, I found my calm through the smouldering anger that continually taunted me with the notion that my sister somehow faked her death so she could marry her commanding officer and have his child, because I knew there was more to this. The kid was four, the wedding photo showed two people younger than they were in the team photo. Sam died five months ago. She had short hair, and a solid career that didn't align with having a family. Besides she had told me that having a family was not her priority.
It didn't add up.
"What's going on Dad? This…" I held up the wedding photo, "…it doesn't make sense." I faltered my question with a heavy swallow. "She would have told me."
"Would she? Are you sure about that Mark?" He queried, hands still on his hips and eyes boring into mine. Did I know? Sure, we had been kind of estranged for years. I had been trying to set her up with Pete ever since she left Jonas. I had asked about her love life in an attempt to gauge her receptiveness to my friend, but she had always waved it off with the story that her job wasn't conducive to relationships. The one time we had visited Colorado Springs, my wife had insisted there was something between her and the man in these photos, but I refused to listen because he was her CO and that was illegal. The Air Force said so. The Air Force. It all came back to the Air Force.
Still, it didn't make sense. Unless she was a con artist seeking to capitalise from our grief. It was not unheard of.
"Hey Dad, is that you?" I heard the voice of the woman, who was supposedly my deceased sister, echo down the hallway. It sounded so much like her while being so very different. Previous experience with Sam had shown that she never called out down a hallway, preferring to move silently into a room, scanning its audience before making herself known. Her voice had been more direct, harder, more wary even though we were family. Dad didn't answer immediately, instead casting his eyes to me and taking a breath.
"Yes, Sammie. We're in here." He called after his moment of hesitation, his eyes still on mine. The ease in his voice, the acceptance that this woman was who she claimed to be ratcheted up the anger concealed below the surface. The pounding steps of whoever this woman was were too loud, too pronounced, lacking the careful tactics I knew she would possess if she were Sam.
"Do you know where Grace put her…" The woman stopped her question on the top step, took in a deep breath and held it before breathing out. "Mark?" Her voice was timid and hesitant. Even though Alejandro and Juanita insisted the woman in the photo was Sam, I still respectfully disagreed. Her hair was too long, eyes sharp, but not sharp enough, body too… she turned slightly to take the two small steps carefully, her pregnancy on full display. My fists clenched and my face reddened. Keeping one child a secret was one thing, but a second one?
She had to be an imposter.
"Who the hell are you?" I demanded angrily, brandishing the photo in her direction. Her eyes widened almost comically if not a little bit shocked at my sudden appearance before changing into something more familiar than I was prepared to acknowledge.
"Who the hell am I?" She retorted, anger brimming in her voice. Like she had any reason to be angry at me. "Like it's ever mattered to you who I am!" She growled back, suddenly sounding an awful look like Sam from the old days, when she was new to the Air Force, still wearing her hair long and seething at my continued denigration of the institution that took everything from us.
"I know who you're not. You're not her." I gestured with the picture of my sister with her team. "What, did you honestly think that you could appear after she died and slot in as if nothing happened?" I accused with a shake of my head. "You may have sucked the old man in, but not me… I know you aren't my sister."
"Mark." Dad warned, but didn't really get involved, probably because he had seen one too many of our standoffs. No, not 'our' standoffs. She was not Sam.
"No, Dad." I barked back at him regardless, because this was beyond any other disagreement. "She is a no-good lying imposter playing on your grief."
"How dare you come into my house and accuse me of…"
"Your house? This isn't your house. This is his house. I don't see I single thing of my sisters in here. Where are the certificates, the awards, the medals." I carried on listing everything I had seen in Sam's house that were strangely not here. Sam was far too proud of her involvement in the Air Force for it all to just disappear. "If you're going to pretend to be someone, you should get the little things right." I accused.
"I don't have to get anything right, Mark. I know who I am." She fired back.
"You two." Dad interrupted sternly in his warning tone, a voice we knew so well that both of us turned to him with a simultaneously barked 'What?' in response as if neither of us were adults. We stared from him back to each other the way we had done as teenagers. "How about we sit down and talk about this calmly." He cajoled. I wanted to. I really did, but something in me screamed that this was wrong, that this woman was not Sam. It was that impulse that overrode every good intention in my brain to spit vitriol onto the already raging fire.
"So, what did you do, sis… get drunk, screw your CO and get knocked up? Married him on the sly just so you could keep on fucking him. I see that's paid off nicely." I bit off waving the photo toward her growing stomach. She looked at me sullenly, took in a hiccupping breath and burst into tears.
"That's enough Mark!" Dad bellowed angrily, then ordered, "Sit down!" His eyes aflame as he snatched the photo out of my hand and placed it back on the mantle. Slowly he walked to the woman who was not Sam and folded her into his arms before guiding her to the sofa.
She sat down stiffly and started running her hands up and down her upper thighs in a show of nervousness that I recognised from my sister. I was far too anxious and angry to sit – calmly or otherwise – so I remained standing while Dad sat beside the fake Sam who seemed to be using a calm down method that I had seen in the real Sam fairly regularly. The periodic table or atomic weights, sometimes the F-16 pre-flight checks only there was no way this woman had ever flown a fighter jet. The only way she was my sister was if she was from some alternate reality where my sister was vastly different to the sister I knew and loved. The sister I had lost. The sister that the Air Force had taken from me just like it had taken my mother, and my father before his cancer remission. In fact, it had been Sam that brought us back together. Sam who had brought him to my door. Sam who had made us talk. We did more grieving that day than we had in all the years since we lost our mother. How dare she come here and try to be her!
"I'm going to tell him, Sammie." Dad said while he ran his hand through her hair, massaging just above her ear just the same way he did when we were children.
"You can't Dad, he's not cleared. The General will never…" She murmured as she turned her head into his fingers accepting the comfort he was offering.
"You leave the General to me. OK. He deserves to know, and you deserve a brother like him rather than the one you had." Dad explained. She rolled her eyes and shook her head.
"He'll never believe us." She muttered lowly, but not low enough before flicking her eyes to me, then back to him. Dad gave her his 'trust me, I know what I am doing' look. At length she nodded her acquiesce to whatever secret it was she didn't think I would believe. My brain unhelpfully supplied a range of new questions that I could not answer and didn't feel comfortable asking because they were far too out there to even consider. An almost eerie silence stretched out between us.
He looked at me, looked at her, then walked over and picked up the photo of Sam with her team. "This photo was taken approximately nine months ago." He said, his eyes fixed on the photograph. "I took the photo. It was the second last time I saw her before it happened."
"Before what happened?" I prompted. Dad looked at me with a weariness I hadn't seen in years.
"Before I watched the man that loved her unconditionally try desperately to stop her bleeding out." He explained while looking at the grey-haired man in the photo. Her commanding officer. "It didn't work, and I had to pry her cooling body out of his arms so that we could bring her home."
I looked over to the woman on the sofa. She was crying again. There was a story here, perhaps several and I had no intention of leaving until I knew everything. Taking a seat on the chair by the fireplace with its back to the window, I looked between the 'fake Sam' and my father with a look of defiance that telegraphed my intention to not leave this house until I knew everything. Dad looked at me and nodded once, then took a seat on the next chair.