Rob Thurman - Chimera

“Didn’t I tell you?” I asked, surprised. At the shake of his head I stretched out my legs and lay back on the picnic table. “Jesus, talk about your scrambled brains.” The sun was distant and its warmth nonexistent, but I closed my eyes anyway and pretended I was back in Miami soaking up the rays—or maybe in Key West. It would be in the seventies there, almost perfect. I might be the first generation out of the home country, but cold had never been a friend of mine.

“Did that happen before or after you hit your head on the car?”

“Punk-ass kid,” I said with sleepy equanimity as the light glowed red through my eyelids. “I’m trying to reach Anatoly. Our father,” I amended, opening my eyes to slide my gaze his way.

“Anatoly.” A sneakered foot sketched a triangle in the dirt, as precisely equilateral as if he’d used a ruler. “You don’t call him Dad? In the movies . . .” He stopped himself, having already learned the hard way that movies weren’t as accurate as they could be.

“When I was younger.” Much, much younger. I hadn’t exactly lived the Brady Bunch family life, particularly after the kidnapping. We had our share of dysfunction, same as anyone else. It hadn’t been too noticeable before Lukas was taken, with merely a father who worked far too much and secrets a child couldn’t penetrate. Later, I’d either become more cynically aware or Anatoly had tried less to hide his business. If my brother had still been around, I don’t think I would’ve ended up in that same business. I hadn’t cared enough to stop it from happening and my father had seen it, oddly enough, as a way of keeping me safe. In his realm, he felt he had control.

“He’s used to being in charge. I guess it’s rather like having a father who’s a general in the army. He’s a boss first and a parent second. That’s not to say he didn’t—doesn’t—love us. In fact, he thought the sun rose and set in you. The day you were born he passed out Cuban cigars as if they were candy and named you after his father.” The memory was so fresh that I could all but see the blue balloons floating, cheerfully proclaiming “It’s a Boy!” for anyone who cared to know. “It didn’t matter that you were practically a carbon copy looks-wise of Mom and her side of the family. He saw something in you, something special.”

And he hadn’t been wrong.

Lukas had been born special, but not the kind of special that Jericho embraced. His was a rare but completely natural special, a shining quality that made a father beyond proud, a mother doting, and a seven-year-old boy think his new baby brother was the best kid in the world, even if the butterball didn’t do anything but eat and poop.

“Anyway,” I forged ahead before Michael could comment on how our father loved Lukas, not him. “Anatoly’s on the run from the government. They have more indictments against him than they did Capone. But if we could find him, he knows more about going under the radar than I ever will, not to mention the money he has socked away in off-shore accounts. That kind of cash would take us far from here—far enough.” Sitting up again, I turned off the phone. “And he’ll want to see you . . . to see his son. He won’t be able to believe I found you.” Even in my imagination, I couldn’t picture that scene in my head. “He just . . . won’t believe it.”

“Why not?” The triangle disappeared beneath the erasing scuff of a sole. “Why wouldn’t he believe? Wasn’t he looking for Lukas too?”

How do you tell a boy his father had given up on him long ago? And he had. Anatoly had lost hope with a speed that had seemed shocking to a fourteen-year-old kid. It still seemed just as shocking to a twenty-four-year-old man. So, how do you tell a boy that? How do you tell him he was assumed dead by everyone but me?

You don’t.

“I think he trusted the authorities to do their job. More than I did at any rate,” I temporized. “Weird as shit, I know, considering his occupation, but the FBI did write the book on missing kids. It’s what they do. And I’m sure he had his contacts working day and night for a long time.” I didn’t remember if that had been the case or not, but it must have been. The first few weeks after Lukas had been taken were still hazy to me. Emotional trauma, I guessed, but there hadn’t been any therapists to verify my self-diagnosis. Anatoly, old-school Russian and old-school mob, didn’t believe in that kind of thing. Still, whether I remembered or not, I knew Anatoly would’ve pulled out all the stops for his missing son . . . whether he had hope or not. He loved Lukas. Criminals could love. They killed, they stole, but they were capable of love—in their way. It was a mental litany I’d repeated doggedly more than once or twice during my teenage years. Some days I had even believed it.

“But you kept looking yourself—personally. Long after a lot of people would’ve given up.” This time it was a circle he traced, as geometrically perfect as a soap bubble. “Why?”

It was a difficult question with an easy answer. I searched because he was my brother, but that wasn’t the whole truth. I also searched because I had been the one to lose Lukas, and “personally” wasn’t the word for the way I took that. “I’m smelling more Freud here, kiddo,” I dissembled as the wings of a bird beat overhead. “There’s a leather couch and two hundred bucks an hour in your future; I can see it now.”

I may as well have been talking to the wind for all the notice he took. “You blame yourself.” He may have been watching me. I didn’t know; I didn’t look. “You think it’s your fault.”

This was a topic that needed no discussion. I’d discussed the hell out of it with myself for the past ten years. Yeah, I had it down to a real art. Putting the phone in my pocket, I didn’t so much change the subject as ignore it altogether. “You finished that last book in the car, didn’t you? Find out anything that could help us out?” This time I did meet his eyes and with a gaze as bland as oatmeal and impenetrable as a vault.

He studied me for a long moment, then, to my relief, let the matter drop. I had the uneasy feeling, however, that we’d be circling back to it soon enough. “Yes, I’m done. I’m not sure it’ll be helpful or not, though.”

“We’ll never know until you spit it out.” I swung my arm in a classic director’s gesture to point at Michael. “Go.”

And go he did.

He’d learned a lot from those few books, enough that he could’ve taught an introductory course in genetics. It was something I could see with astonishing clarity. Blazer and tie, chalk dust on his hands, and an unquenchable passion for knowledge etched on his lean face, he would be a college professor who had the freshmen girls hanging their panties on his office doorknob; my brother, the intellectual stud muffin.

The more high-tech details went in one ear and out the other for all the foothold they gained in my brain, but I didn’t try to rein in Michael. Much of the miniature lecture was over my head, true, but I enjoyed his enthusiasm. Most of his inner self was so locked down that watching him cut loose, even over something as dull as science, was a kick. After tossing off esoteric terms such as polymorphism and pseudogenes with machine-gun rapidity, he finally began to slowly wind down. “It’s as we thought,” he summed up. “A customary chimera is simply a person with genes from their brother or sister intermingled with their own. No special powers. They’re ordinary people . . . like you.”

To give him credit, there wasn’t any condescension in that statement. Considering all he could do, it was rather remarkable that he didn’t consider himself more than human rather than less. If I could get him to see that he was neither . . . that in the ways that counted he was as human as anyone, I would be content. “Ordinary like me.” I shook my head sadly. “How awful for them.”