TABOO TALES(erotica)

“My family are here, and I know who they are!” she almost shouted, lowering her voice to tell him, “I don’t want to talk about it, Corey; I just want to have dinner!”

Corey nodded assent and rejoined the two men in the living room.

“She’s a little shaken by all this just now, let me have some time with her, I’m sure I’ll be able to get her to come round.”

The two men agreed, and left their cards with him. As they were leaving, Special Agent Davison added one thing.

“Mrs. Warren’s younger sister is the one who finally helped us track her down; she put the final pieces together, she’s been looking for her older sister for years; you might want to let your wife know that there are others in this who are hurting as well, who want to see her again, perhaps it may help her see things differently.”

Corey came back into the kitchen to find Bethany sitting at the breakfast bar with tears in her eyes, the photograph of Anh on the counter in front of her.

“Why did I have to find out, Corey, why now? I only just got over losing her, now I have another one, when does this end, who else am I supposed to lose before it stops hurting and just becomes normal? How many mother’s do you have to lose?”

Corey hugged her, understanding what she was saying, but his eyes kept being drawn back to the photograph on the counter. The woman in it was definitely Bethany’s birth mother, there was no doubt about that, the resemblance was startling, with even the same quirk in her smile.

Bethany noticed the direction of his gaze, and grimaced.

“I know, and I accept she’s my real mother, but if I accept that, then what about my mom, where’s she supposed to fit in all this? She was my real mom too, and I loved her, no-one’s going to replace her!”

Corey soothed her as she began to cry.

“It’s all right, it’s OK to feel like that, mom brought you up, not this woman, but she’s also hurting. You were stolen away from her, she didn’t give you away, and she’s been hoping and waiting for her girl to come back as well. You have a sister, did I tell you? She’s the one who found you, and she wants to meet you, just to know her sister is alive and well I suppose. How much could it hurt to meet this girl, your kid sister?”

Bethany stopped crying to look levelly at him.

“I have a kid sister? Really?”

Corey nodded.

“That’s what the FBI said. She’s the one who’s been digging around the world, looking for you, trying to trace you; are you sure you want to tell her to go away? Whether you accept her or not, she’s committed herself to finding you; you owe her something for that at least!”

++++

I woke in the middle of the night, thinking Nia had called me, but she was fast asleep, her breathing slow and deep, so I dismissed it as a dream. As I drifted, Nia suddenly spoke, but she wasn’t speaking to me; she was dreaming, and talking in Ting Viet, or so I assumed for a second, then years of listening to mum kicked in, and I realised it wasn’t Vietnamese, it was some other language. I’d heard something like it once before, and I struggled to think where, then an image of Nia kneeling, hands clasped in prayer popped into my mind, and I knew where I’d heard this before. It was Cham, the Vietnamese Latin, and Nia had told me she didn’t speak it, she only knew the prayers. Now she was having a conversation in her dreams, and she was speaking Cham like a native tongue, having a long and involved discourse with… someone.

Whatever this conversation was, it was beginning to have an effect on her; she was speaking faster, almost desperately, and her head began whipping from side to side. I switched on my bedside lamp, and reached over to touch her, and her eyes snapped open, staring at me, but they weren’t her eyes. Gone were her sapphire blue doll’s eyes, now her eyes in the muted golden light from the lamp seemed to flash light smoky amber, golden and sharp. Her eyes narrowed, and she said something to me, still in Cham, then she smiled, and closed her eyes, her face relaxing as she dropped back into deep sleep.

I the morning, I asked her casually if she’d had a good night. She looked at me and pursed her lips, debating whether or not to share with me.

“Jamie, I had the strangest dream. I dreamed of Hu’e, but that’s not her name; her name’s … I can’t remember. In my dream, she had a husband, and a little girl, and maybe a boy. She lived… somewhere with lots of wires overhead, I could see them in shadows on her face. She looked just like mum! She asked me for my bracelet, and I gave it to her, and she gave me a little coin in return, a red coin with a golden… thing on it, then I was in the Linh Son Temple in Upper Norwood with mum, and I was looking at the big statue of Hu Ye, and he spoke to me; he said ‘You must go to her, now she is ready’. And I asked him where I was supposed to go, and he said ‘You will know when you know'” and I woke up. I tell you, when I have weird dreams, I have world-class ones! I suppose I’m just lucky it wasn’t carrots with teeth and an overwhelming fear of boots!”

I looked at her, relieved she wasn’t reading portents and omens and God knows what into it. She accepted it was just the usual type of hugely significant dream that means so much while you’re having it, and fades to nothing after you waken.

“You were talking in your sleep last night, which is a first, you were gabbling away in Cham, long involved and noisy!” I grinned, and she grinned back.

“Bullshit, I don’t speak Cham, and neither do you. It was just garbled dream nonsense! What are we doing today?”

We spent the morning poking around various markets and little shops, not finding anything particularly unavailable in London, but Nia’s addicted to street markets, so we poked and prodded and rummaged, looking through ‘genuine’ Native American handicrafts with the ‘Made in China’ printing still just visible, wobbly Mexican pottery from Taiwan, and bootleg CD’s by the box-load.This is the property of Nô-velDrama.Org.

When we finally got back to the hotel at lunchtime, Nia’s appetite for pawing through cheap tat finally sated, there was a message asking us to call Louis at Toronto Police HQ.

When I’d finished speaking to him, Nia looked at me questioningly, so I grinned at her.

“Let’s get packed, we’re going to San Francisco!”

Nia squealed and jumped on me, then calmed down as we started to work out the logistics of this. I had a date and a place to meet this woman, Bethany Warren; Friday, May 14th, at the FBI building on Golden Gate Avenue. We were meeting Agent Davison, and a policeman, Detective Harry Regan of the Special Victims Unit, at three p. m. that day. I had the front desk arrange our booking for the Radisson Hotel on Fisherman’s Wharf, not a million miles from Golden Gate Avenue, and asked them to arrange flights for us for that afternoon or early evening to San Francisco. They had our card details, and there was a knock at the door before we’d even finished packing, a Customer Assistant with our flight details for later that afternoon and ticket claim checks.

We arrived at the hotel at seven p. m. to be met by Detective Regan, a pleasant man in his mid-thirties, who briefed us on what the meeting was about.

“Bethany Warren was not too happy about this meet,” he explained, “she grew up the daughter of a family from Pleasanton, in the East bay, Alameda County, so she was understandably more than a little shocked to hear what we had to tell her. I showed her the picture of her birth mother, and I have to say, the resemblance is startling, as it is with you, Miss Morrison; there’s no doubt in my mind that you and she are siblings, the resemblance is extraordinary!”

Nia wanted to know if Bethany would be amenable or hostile, and Detective Regan shrugged.

“I… think she’ll be… approachable. This is all a great shock to her, but she’s handling it as well as could be expected; just don’t get your hopes up that she’ll run into your arms; she’s still not comfortable about how this has all come about.”

We had a quiet dinner at a superb place on Fisherman’s Wharf, just a few minutes’ walk from the hotel, and watched the seals basking in the last of the evening sun as we chatted about what the next day would bring. Nia was excited but pragmatic. I thought she’d had some unrealistic expectations from the start, but Detective Regan telling us that this Bethany wasn’t exactly straining at the leash to meet us had wound Nia down several notches.

After a restless night, Nia finally fell asleep in the early hours, waking again with a start at nine o’clock, jittery and unable to relax. She paced, twiddled, chewed her lip and whistled tunelessly until I could take it no longer. As we had several hours to kill, and we were in San Francisco, I decided that we might as well do some touristy things, so we rode a cable car and a Muni train, took pictures of the city from Marin Headlands, strolled back across the Golden Gate Bridge and took pictures of the double-decked Bay Bridge. We wandered down Market Street for Nia to buy something for mum and dad, and by then it was time to go to our meeting.

At 2. 45 p. m. we were waiting in the lobby of the FBI building for Special Agent Davison and Detective Regan. We’d been given to understand that Regan was here at the request of Bethany, which seemed odd, but it was her choice.