The Girl Who Chases the Wind

Chapter 14: Together

It wasn’t even a contest. Mari led me to a small gym at the other end of the rear hall. She explained it was an employee thing but cozier than the other facilities. She brought me over to a punching bag hanging on a metal chain. It didn’t take long for both of us to put gloves on. With a gesture, Mari invited me to take the first swing. It was a feeble strike that barely made it move.

My next one was a little better. I could feel the pressure of the bag fighting back against me. I pushed harder until I got a regular rhythm going. Clenching my teeth, I slammed the bag and bashed it with my leg. It still didn’t really do much.

Mari raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were just holding back on the track…” I gave her a quick stink-eye and she raised her hands in answer before continuing, “Anyway, it helps sometimes…when nothing else does.” I plopped on a mat to the side, out of breath, and a little achy.

She took her turn at the bag. She started one-two, whipping the bag back and forth like it was a toy. It quivered and yanked on the chain, threatening to break. Then she slammed her legs on either side of it and bashed her foot across the front till it flipped over its chains and tangled up in them. She wasn’t panting or sweating.

After disentangling the bag, she came to sit with me. I noted, “Those are a better pair of legs than earlier.” She glanced down at them and flexed out a foot.

“I guess so. Sometimes, they give me a weaker, breakaway pair so I stop at just destroying limbs.” She slapped at her thigh and sighed to herself.

Silence passed between us. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go another round, but I knew it would be even more embarrassing. So, I tried for words. “He said that Aura Feldon died.”

Mari clenched her jaw and said sharply, but without anger, “I was there.”

I kept my eyes on her and added, “You look just like her.”

Slowly, Mari pulled her legs up to her stomach. “I know.”

“Why is that?”

She shook her head. “Because I’m an old fool who said ‘yes’.”

I shifted my legs but couldn’t find a comfortable spot that didn’t ache. “So, you’re…a synthetic copy of her then?”

With a little snort through her nose, Mari remarked, “If only it were that simple. I’m her grandfather, Michael Raymer.” She gestured to herself casually before letting her hands drop. Her eyes calmly searched me.

I sat there quietly. A young girl who looked like a teenager said that. A young girl with brightly-shimmering mint-green hair hanging off her neck. A young girl with a hyper-athletic body which tore like taffy but barely cleared five feet in height. A young girl with eyes I should’ve recognized immediately, and which loomed as unnaturally as Lily’s. I cleared my throat and gave her a look. She widened her eyes in return.

I glanced down, resisted freaking out, and mentioned, “He said you two were close.”

Mari brushed a hand up and down her legs. “Yeah…”

I kept quiet to invite her next words. She looked uncomfortable, but eventually sighed and stated, “Well, shit…I don’t know how much he’s told you, but I should say…Umm…Soon after the attack, Liz, my wife…your…err…well, Aura’s grandmother. Well…she loved everyone. and the loss was just too much…Feldon probably doesn’t like to talk about that. I don’t either…But there’s not a day I don’t think about her.”

She cleared her throat and smacked her legs a little before adding, “I always…connected with the women in my life so much more than with any of my brothers or my father. So…”

Without hint or permission, I wrapped my arms completely around Mari in a sudden hug. It still felt odd, like when I held her before, but I ignored that. I never call myself the hugging type. I found myself discriminating between perfunctory and fake ones with family. But that moment felt right.

As I let go, I could sense Mari trembling in my grasp. Looking at her, I could see the shifting of a fair blush across her cheeks. Her eyes twitched like mine, but with the same sensation that crying was just a moment away, as I saw with Lily’s ‘tears’.

She gave a quick, breathless, “Sorry…” before noting, “Crying isn’t really something they’ve figured out yet.”
     
I assured her, “It’s okay.”

Touching her face, she cleared her throat and said, her lips wavering between words, “So…yeah, I was close to Aura. I was close to Liz too. So very close. And May. And Dalya. So close. But I didn’t cry then. Not when I found out what happened. I couldn’t. It was just too much, like a part of yourself has been ripped from your body but no one can see it on the outside. The empty cavity is there, and it just keeps filling with blood…with your life. I didn’t want to do anything. I’d sleep endlessly. I’d wander in a daze. If I’d been different around her perhaps Liz wo….but there’s no point wondering now.”

I set a hand on Mari/Michael’s shoulder. Still, it was easier to think of her as Greenie more than any other name. I could relate with the emptiness along with the confusion of being dumped into a situation I barely understood and told I had relatives I never imagined before, only they were broken and lost. I felt naturally sad, but fuller emotions were difficult, along with words that didn’t feel hollow or helpless.

We were both sinking, so I decided to flip things. I told her, “Aura sounds amazing.” I just had fragments, but it was clear from Feldon’s tone that he was proud of her.

A measure of somberness melted from Greenie. She didn’t hold her legs quite so tight. “I’m alive because of her. I lived longer and better than I could’ve hoped for because of her. She got me out of bed.”

We heard a knock on the door. Greenie called out and jumped to her feet. It was Feldon, with his hands folded behind him. His eyes found me first. I jumped up and wandered away from the door.

Feldon looked to Mari with a quick nod and cleared his throat to address me, “I apologize. I simply wanted you to understand. I didn’t mean for you to get upset.”

I placed my back against the wall and addressed both of them, “Think about it from my perspective. I have a family which I’ve known all my life. Then, suddenly, out of the blue I get a job to interview someone and that someone throws mysteries around me and starts leading me on that I’m actually…related to them. With all the deception, with all the half-truths and silence to questions…do you really think I’d jump onboard?”

Both of them winced a little at that and Feldon admitted, “Some of that is because…quite honestly, I am as incredulous as you. After all these decades of nothing, my doubts are still many. There is only one way to put a rest to it…”

I had a sense of where he was going. I thought back and noted, “The tissue sample you took from me.”

Feldon gave a passive shake of his head as he said, “It would verify everything. Each of our children was DNA tested at birth for medical concerns. Rachel’s DNA was unique to the point a simple test should show enough. But we will run further tests to alleviate any doubt.”

I took a breath and said, “Of course, all I can be sure of is my own DNA. I can’t be sure your record isn’t just a copy of mine….can I?” In truth, I wasn’t even sure of my own DNA. My parents never opted to get me tested and had to pay higher insurance fees when I was growing up. They cited strange reasons, but I always wondered about it. With the implication my DNA would be ‘unique’, I wondered even more. I had considered testing myself when I started living on my own, but I never got around to it.

Feldon folded his hands and told me, “We also had her DNA filed with the government here and in Ukraine. Unfortunately, the documents in Ukraine were lost at some point during the upheaval of the civil war. But the government has Rachel Feldon on record and filed away back when she was born. That record is only accessible with a matching, live DNA sample provided. You give your DNA to them, they check it and they will allow you to see the record and everything which was sealed for you alone. Is that proof enough?”

He had me there. I’d done a bit of research on DNA records to try to counter my parents and their skepticism. I almost got around to writing a story. Once a DNA sample was sealed in government records it might as well be etched on a monument. People could spoof SSNs with the right knowledge of death records and a sob story. But only your own individual key could open the vault of government DNA samples. Whether this was good or not had been argued a long time by privacy advocates.

I conceded to Feldon, especially if everything was tested and handled by me, this would be enough. Really though, the proof still felt like it was right before me, but it was lost in emotion. If I wanted to stand on something solid, then I needed this.

My compromise to Feldon’s proposal of testing my DNA was this, “I’ll give a fresh sample and make sure it gets sent where it needs to go. If it turns out I’m not a match for Rachel then….well….that’ll be that. But, if it is a match, then I will accept what you’ve said to me…about my parents and everything…is true. Deal?”

Swiftly, Feldon agreed, “Of course.”

It would take longer than something at the clinic, but I knew a place near where I lived that did simple procedures just for this kind of government verification. If I left soon, then they could get the sample processed, and I’d have an answer by evening.

What to do in the meanwhile with all these questions? That was the tough part.

As I was mulling this, Greenie took a step towards me and said, “I’ll go with you.”

I gave her a look and then glanced over at Feldon. He wore a small furrow of what appeared to be concern. She looked to Feldon as well and told him, “I should be fine for a few hours at least…out and about.”

Feldon’s expression didn’t relax, but he did offer, “Should be. Hopefully.”

Greenie gave a tap of her foot. “That’s settled then. You came in a car, right?”

I felt like I was being swept up by a wave, but I had no objections to Greenie coming with me. Before I knew it, we were standing over my car as I opened it. I apologized, with my head down, for the mess. Greenie noticed. She looked at it with narrowed eyes and a skeptical slant to her mouth. The clouds, which loomed at the edges of the sky before, now spread across it. An indifferent wind curled around us with a promise of raindrops.

With a little work, I was able to clear things enough that she had her choice of the passenger seat or the rear. She wound up sprawling across the entire backseat with her arms behind her head and a lap belt splitting her.

As I gave the destination to the car, she commented, “I never liked self-driving. Aura kinda liked it, but she wanted a hand-controlled car someday, a real fast one.”

I swiveled around to better talk to Greenie as the car pulled itself out of the lot. “It’s gotten pretty universal. Now it’s a luxury to actually drive.”

She brushed back some of her hair and noted, staring through the side window, “I know. I read. I go online. I keep up on stuff even though I’m usually around the ranch.”

I turned my chair a bit more and asked, “Is it because of your synthetic body?”

Greenie flashed me a look, as she noted, “I never told you my body was synthetic or not. But I do have issues that require a lot of checkups to make sure nothing is going wrong.”

Leaning forward, I had to ask, “You aren’t going to keel over all of a sudden, are you?”

She gave a faint snort. “No. I’m not that weak. But I’m…I’m not the final version...so sometimes, there are problems…”

I flopped my head against the chair. “Still more secrets to keep?”

We passed a rough patch of gravel and she adjusted herself. “You call them secrets. I call them endless threads of explanation. I’ve found it’s better to just keep quiet, say only what I have to, and let people decide what they want to think on their own.”

Stating the obvious, I remarked, “You don’t really have many people you’re close to.”

Finally, she seemed to discover a position that suited her. “I’ve told you about that. But yeah, especially now. There’s just the nurses, Feldon most days, and Lily.”

Raising an eyebrow, I couldn’t let that last bit go unquestioned. “Lily? We haven’t really resolved where she fits in all this…”

Tipping her head back, Greenie muttered, “Complicated. Let’s just say ‘family’ and we can fill in the details later.”

I suspected as much and accepted that. Likely in the same or a similar situation to Greenie. With little crackles to start, rain began to splatter the window. The car switched on all the wipers at slow but steady intervals and made other adjustments.

I asked, “So since you don’t get out of the ranch much…is there anywhere you’d like to visit? My place…a special restaurant…a clothing store…” I watched Greenie very carefully as I spoke. Yeah, I was baiting her but just out of curiosity.

With my proposal, she began on a calm expression which drifted into a sense of thoughtful ease. At ‘my place’, her body arched up a little, even though she still lay spread out. With ‘restaurant’, she settled. Hard to read that. But the last bit, ‘clothing’, left ripples in her demeanor as she shifted, as though something uncomfortable had been suddenly placed beneath her.

As she gave her answer, she looked out the window and tried to resist physical tells. “Up to you. Your car and your time. Your place probably... looks about like your car, doesn’t it?”

She had me there but at least the places where I worked and relaxed were organized enough. I let her have a shrug and offered, “Place to eat then?”

Greenie sighed. “Don’t bother.”

The rain now came in waves, like the undulation of a wind-urged curtain of water. Gradually, the car slowed. It was a feature. Adverse weather conditions rarely did anything to impair auto-drive (if it did, then the car would definitely tell me), but it was human nature to feel more comfortable with driving slower in rain.

How Greenie was stretched out on the backseat didn’t look all that comfortable. In fact, it looked intentionally uncomfortable. Still, she showed no outward signs of discomfort. She’d suggested that, along with other things, she didn’t feel pain like a normal person. Naturally, I asked, “So, you don’t need to eat then?”

She was dipping back into Greenie mode from yesterday with her answer, “You could say that.”

I rested my head on a hand and pointed out, “Lily eats.”

Greenie rocked her head with the car over the rising and dipping waves of the road. “That she does.” Her emphasis made me think Lily was the prolific confection aficionado I imagined.

So, I managed to get to the next question, “Is it possible for you to eat without trouble?”

She confirmed this clearly with a nod and a quick, “Yes.”

And finally, “Sooo…would you like to go eat somewhere with me this afternoon?”

I got a look back from her, which dipped into annoyance. “I told you not to bother. If *you* need to stop somewhere though, I can wait in the car.”

Eyeballing Greenie, I gave her back my own measure of annoyance. I could see the old man in there a little better. Not that it dissuaded me. “I can’t leave you in the car. I refuse to. That’s it. So, you’re going to have a meal with me and you’re going shopping.”

She locked eyes with me and inquired, “So…I have no choice in this?”

“You owe it to me for being mean up till now and, if it turns out we’re related, you owe me time with my grandfather.”

Pausing as the rain became distorted, hot static against all of the windows, Greenie answered, “Fair enough. Don’t expect much.”

I nodded to that and listened for a while to the sounds of the storm. They were turbulent, pushed against the surface of the car, but still chaotically enjoyable. I asked her about the storm.

“We randomly get a lot out here. Sometimes, I’ll purposely go running in it all the way up past the tree line till I get over the next hill. I once wound up falling and sheering off a leg. I was able to hop back.”

Leaning back, I offered, “I never go running. It’s probably obvious…”

Before I could say more, Greenie affirmed, “It is.”