Providence
He did not know how long he had been sitting there, looking at his bloodstained fingers, but not seeing them at all. So absorbed was he in his turmoil that he noticed the presence of the other person only when she laid a soft, reassuring hand on his shoulder. He looked up slowly.
“Ms. Desea?” he whispered, standing up. “What brings you here?”
Ms. Desea was his chemistry teacher of four years, and Will was one of her favourite students. She had always been kind to him; clarifying his doubts, egging him on to solve another difficult problem, while most of his classmates gave up and stared into space. Quite a few times, she’d discovered Will sitting under a lonely tree with bloodshot eyes, and asked him what the matter was. He rarely told her, though; he was too practiced at hiding the struggles of life from the prying, judgmental, and indifferent eyes of the world. Yet he always noted the gesture, and silently appreciated her for it. She was also the only member of staff who knew of his pact with John.
“I just came to know what happened. I’m so, so sorry.” Her eyes, which were so like Will’s big, blue ones, were moist. “I wish there was some way I could help.”
“Well, if you could get me four grand within two weeks, yeah, that would be a great help.” Will laughed humourlessly. He threw back his head and ran a red hand through the curls. His face creased up in a frown and darkened. “I — I can’t begin to imagine how I got myself into this mess, Ms. Desea. It’s all my fault. All mine. If I hadn’t been so foolhardy and — ”
“It wasn’t your fault, Will,” Ms. Desea cut him off. “Any boy would have done exactly what you did, and more, if someone had so brutally insulted the closest thing they had to a mother. With her in such a helpless condition, and you so shattered…examination pressure…frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t knock the head off Derek. I told the headmaster as much. I begged him for an hour to revoke the suspension, but, ah, let’s just say that blood is thicker than both water and common sense.”
Will tensed. “What does that mean?”
“Derek’s father is the Head’s second cousin. And a magistrate, apparently. He wanted to have you expelled, regardless of what his oaf of a son had said, but the Head talked him into a suspension. Whatever you would have told them would have gone in vain.”
“Wow.” Will said bitterly. “So I’m the victim of a family conspiracy. That’s a new one.” He bent down and started picking up his clothes, pens, and notebooks and stuffing them with much more force than necessary in an old rucksack. It was his thirteenth birthday present, another relic of Jennifer and all she had done for him.
“What are you doing?”
“Packing up, of course. What am I supposed to do other than leave this place?” He paused, a shirt in his hands, and looked at Ms. Desea. “Is there anything you can do?” he asked tentatively, not daring to hope.
“I think…there’s one thing we could do. It might lead to nothing at all. Then again, it might make you question your identity and your entire life. But it will solve your problem for good.”
Will raised his eyebrows. “Could you please elaborate?”
She raised her blue eyes and looked directly at his. “Are you sure you want to hear this? You may not like it.”
“If it’s a question of saving my career and my life from being derailed forever, then yes, I want to hear it. Whatever it takes.” He looked determined, resolute, yet close to tears.
Ms. Desea took a deep breath. “Very well. Get ready. We’re going to have a DNA test done on you.”
Will looked even more confused. “Why?”
She was already striding away from him, one hand on the steel door handle. She turned back, her curly hair rippling behind her head. “Because,” she said slowly, “I think you might be my brother.”
A hundred thoughts were running through Will’s mind. He tried not to dwell too much on them. Instead, he listened to Ms. Desea talk.
“I’d thought about it the first day I saw you in my class. You had a natural aptitude for the subject. Chemistry has a certain magic to it, which makes it elusive even to the grasp of many talented students. Yet you understood it perfectly, without any prior training. It reminded me of the first time I had found a chemistry textbook. I could make sense of nearly everything in that book, even though I was only seven. Father had never been so proud of me. He’d been a chemistry researcher himself, you see.”
Will snorted in derision. “So, you’re basing my ancestry on a shared aptitude for a random field of study. Nice. Is that all you’ve got behind this crazy idea?”
“No. Look at yourself in a mirror, then look at me. Blue eyes. Curly brown hair. Pointed nose. One ear slightly lopsided. Slender hands. We’re almost of a height. I’m twenty-six, you’re seventeen. My suspicions grew stronger each year as you grew up and resembled me more and more.”
“Yet you never told me all this before?”
“It was just a hunch. Also, I could have been completely wrong and made a massive fool of myself. I saw no reason to turn your world upside down when your life was going on smoothly. Well, the bullying was bad, I agree, but it was nothing compared to having your entire identity torn from you. Besides, I have a motive now, a concrete reason, to do what I am doing now, that I did not, barely four days ago.”
“And what might that be, Ms. Desea?”
They were at the hospital now. Ms. Desea expertly parked the car into an empty slot, and climbed out into the blazing sunlight. Will followed her.
“I’ll tell you when the time is right. But first, the test, Will.” She started off towards the giant glass doors of the hospital. Will couldn’t help but notice that even her stride was very similar to his own. Maybe there was some point to this futile exercise.
Tears flowed down Ms. Desea’s face as she held the thick white envelope in her fingers., a single printed sheet on her lap. She turned her head slowly with an effort, it seemed, but the smile she gave Will was nothing short of radiant. “So. Welcome to the Desea family… little brother!”
Will unclasped his hands and stared open-mouthed at his teacher. “Is it…is it really true, Ms. Desea? I — ”
“Call me Rebecca. It’s hardly in fashion to call your own sister by her surname!”
A wide, yet still slightly confused, grin split Will’s face. He stood up suddenly and tightly hugged Rebecca for several long moments before breaking apart. Family. How sweet the word sounded in his head. Few days in Will’s seventeen years of life had seemed as sunny, as breezy, or as scenic as they walked back to the car, shoulder to shoulder.
“And now’s the time for the reason behind forcing a brand-new bossy sister upon you, I guess. I’m surprised you’re not jumping at me with the question already.”
“I thought it would be very impolite indeed,” Will returned with a shrug as they climbed into the car. Rebecca revved the engine and the car started purring along at a leisurely pace. “Nevertheless, carry on.”
“My — sorry, our father, Dinerito Desea, was a chemist, as I’d told you. He was brilliant at it, and a more motivated man I’ve never seen in my whole life. He was the lead scientist at Athena Labs. After many years of getting nowhere with his research, he was finally able to create a vaccine for a very rare and deadly disease. That too, when Athena was in a spot of bother with their financing. Rumours were afloat that the company would close down if nothing monumental happened soon.
“Well, when the vaccine came out, Father was over the moon about it. Initial results looked promising. In one stroke, he revived Athena Labs; profits were soaring, the media was at his office, on the street outside our mansion, and he was flooded with offers. Things came to such a pass that he was unable to decide whether to join the American Association of Medicine or the World Health Organization.”
Will whistled. “That’s cool.”
Rebecca’s face darkened suddenly. “Then the coin flipped. Many of the patients who were being given the vaccine began to develop severe reactions in a few months. Some of them lost their eyesight. A few became paralysed for life. The lawsuits came in torrents. Death threats soon followed. Father was under such pressure that finally he fled, taking me and Mother to a desolate town. You were only five months old then, but under the deluge of threats the family was getting, your existence was a closely guarded secret. There, at the town, after three days, Father disappeared again, leaving no note, no trace. It was the last time we ever saw him.
“Even then we weren’t left alone. A week later, one night, as I was in the attic of our cottage, three men broke into the house downstairs. Mother had gone outside for buying a few things and you were sleeping in the living room. They rummaged through every room and every cupboard, took anything of value, and destroyed the rest. Somehow, I slept through it all. Mother returned five minutes later to see the house ransacked and you missing. I woke up only when she ran upstairs to check on me. Mother, though shattered by grief, did not blame me in the least for your disappearance, yet I spent a good six months dwelling upon that night and what could have gone differently if I had been awake.”
“You were nine, and outnumbered three to one. If you’d intervened, they’d probably have kidnapped or killed you.”
“That makes sense now. Then…it was the wishful thinking of a child, wanting to imitate the superheroes she’d read about in her fairy tales.” There was still a slight hint of regret in her voice.
“Anyway. So, after that misadventure, Mother and I left that house for good and spent our remaining savings, bit by bit, on renting rooms, always far away from both that cottage and our old mansion. None of our relatives knew where we lived at any point of time. We did not dare jeopardize our safety by reach out to them for help. This went on for a few years until very recently — last October, to be precise. Mother’s Uncle Alvaro managed to trace her somehow. He was a well-connected, well-to-do businessman, and Mother had always been his favourite niece. He told us that all the hue and cry had subsided now and we could finally come out of hiding. This car was one of the many gifts he bestowed upon us when we finally met after years of living like fugitive beggars.”
“Was?” Will had not missed the use of the past tense.
“Yes. And that’s why they say one person’s loss is another’s gain. Uncle Alvaro was one of the few who knew about you. He left a note in his will saying that if you were ever to be found, you would straightaway inherit ninety grand from his personal fortune.” She paused and took a moment to steady herself. “He died last Saturday.”
