The Girl Who Chases the Wind

Chapter 13: Wounds

Gently, Dr. Feldon’s fingers caressed the image of Aura and Rachel Feldon as he spoke with a starkly quiet voice. He repeated what I knew from Lily about the other children. “May shielded them all. Only two bullets got through. One inside Dalya. The other tore through my wife and stuck Aura’s spinal cord. C6 injury. They got her to a hospital in time to save her life…”

It was conspicuous what he was avoiding. I had to ask, “And what about Rachel?”

He flipped back to a single image of her. I looked away from her gaze and listened to Feldon.

“They didn’t find her. Sometime later, the police informed us that several children were kidnapped by rebel fighters. They tried to track them down but without success. It was a chaotic time. The rebels were notorious for trafficking in children. They sold them to the highest bidders to work in factories, homes of the elite, and…brothels. They told us that a girl Rachel’s age was more likely to be sold through a third-party to an adoption service where someone rich, desperate…or both would buy her.”

This was so heartbreaking to hear to the point that taking notes was the last thing on my mind. At the same time, I felt a lump in my throat made of what tasted like bile and apprehension. Feldon had a reason for telling me all this. I drained my water.

He brushed his hair back as he continued, “Naturally, we continued to press the police but, over there, one little lost girl was just a single statistic in a war full of them. I stayed there for May, because she thought that we both could do some good. Soon after the shooting, after I’d buried my love according to her wishes in a small cemetery where the aroma of the Black Sea always lingered, I left for the last time.”

I bowed my head as he flipped through some old photos of what I assumed was that area. He set his hands on his knees. “Eventually, they did catch the rebels, but they’d destroyed all their records to escape justice. Rachel’s case was essentially closed. Many of the adoption agencies didn’t exist anymore. Digging through the files, whatever was left behind and managed by the provisional government was incredibly slow. And, despite my hopes, my mind told me that she was gone. Lost amongst the billions in this world or lost to life. I focused on Aura…”

The photos shifted to an older Aura seated in a wheelchair. Her hand leaned against a stick control. The twinkle in her eyes from the younger snapshots diminished. The images showed birthdays. Her head leaned back with the jagged curl of a smile. Nurses lingered beside her in many of them.

Feldon had plenty of joys to share about his daughter, “Still active, no matter what. Always gripping her chair. Always finding ways to move what her body would let her. She’d cry, take a breath, and then fight for the next inch. Her progress was such, that it was almost like a lower-level injury. She pushed and pushed. There were surgeries. Painful ones all through her childhood. It was too dangerous to remove the bullet fragments.”

It almost seemed too much to bear. I couldn’t imagine living such a life and still being able to smile. However, somehow, the wincing smiles vanished from the photos. She smiled genuine smiles. Relaxed smiles. And I noticed something as she got older.

When I was young, I asked to see the family photo albums. My parents pulled them up on the computer. Plenty of when my parents were dating. A few they had to scroll through quickly, which drew blushes of embarrassment. Their wedding. A lot of the good times beneath yelled words and conflict. A conspicuous blank existed in my photos. No pictures of me as a newborn. No pregnancy photos of mom either. My pictures only emerged in the album when I was walking around. They stuffed me into the most abysmal pink dresses. Even then, I loathed them and would rip them any chance I got.

But I remember those photos well. I remembered my face. Looking at pictures of Aura, I felt uncomfortable because it was like someone had taken a photo of my face, shifted a few of the details with an editing program, and planted it on a paralyzed body. Her hair was different from mine, but it was the same shade. Her nose was a little longer. Her brow cropped a little lower. No…it was bizarre, but it wasn’t enough to trigger the next step. It wasn’t enough for me to assume anything bigger than an odd feeling.

Then, Feldon clicked to a new set of pictures. Aura was older, and she'd dyed her hair. It was a brilliant color of green, close to lime, with shades of her original hair showing through. Click by click, year by year, Aura was developing into someone I knew. Someone I’d seen this morning with her legs broken under her. She looked just like Mari.

I smacked my hands against the table, which drew Feldon’s calm attention. I cleared my throat and declared, “I’m sorry. I….restroom?”

He frowned lightly but gestured the way for me with some quick directions. Once out of the conference room, I took a huge, slow, deep breath and tried to keep my knees from buckling. I went right to the men's and dabbed my face with a moistened paper towel. I ran the hand dryers a bit. I tested the no-rinse soap. It burned but that felt strangely relaxing right then. In the mirror, I looked into my eyes.

I saw those same eyes as in those photos. Almost like silver, almost starkly blue. With a touch of Lily’s tea-like eyes instead of her dreams of chocolate. I resisted looking away. I tried the same smile as Aura. I tried the same smile as the rest.

After the same design.

I stared in the face of one looming, impossible notion which I put aside like a note in my notebook. I left it there in case I was going mad…or perhaps as proof I was. I had no idea. I stopped holding my breath and left the restroom.

Once I was outside, I slowly started to breathe again with each step. With that, I also started to question. My parents have fought. My parents have had dark times. My parents have left me with enough issues to fill a book I never get around to writing. But they also have eyes like mine and dark hair. I’m about the size of my mother when she was my age. My dad’s face always makes me think of what I’d like mine to look like. They have loved me for three decades.

Adoption never came up. I have no other siblings and that’s the way my parents wanted it to be. They were happy with me. And they definitely weren’t rich enough to secret a random baby, which just happened to resemble them, from Europe through the criminal underworld. It was absolutely ridiculous!

My head rose, and I strode confidently back to the conference room, reassured in myself. On the screen, Feldon had a chart with dates, names, and other information. I snapped a quick picture of it and settled back in my seat. He asked me if I was fine and I waved a relaxed hand.

Feldon clicked back to Aura at her most Mari-like and continued, “What you just saw there was decades of detective work. But we’ll get to that. First, I want to talk a little more about Aura…”

I jumped in quickly, “I apologize, but you brought me here with lies and misleading statements for what goal? What’s the purpose of all this?”

Feldon looked momentarily flustered before he cleared his throat and told me, “I am getting to that. If you want to know, then you need to understand what’s come before. I didn’t want for it to be this way. But I made the choice and yes, I misled you and withheld information. I want you to see why, right here…please…”

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I had every right to jump up and leave without a word, his plans dashed to pieces. But I stayed because I was still curious about Mari and where she fit. I leaned back in my chair as a show of momentary concession and Feldon began again.

“She wanted to get into the Vienna Paralympics. She even got classification but missed out on the team. That was an exhausting year for all of us since my father-in-law developed a severe form of palsy. He made the best of it. He would sit with Aura, and she would smile with him. They would have little races. She had so many dreams. She wanted to write about all sorts of things…typing diligently by mouth stick. And I wanted, more than anything, for her not to have to struggle so much…”

I bowed my head and noted, “So, that’s where Mantlemay comes in.”

He cast his eyes downwards. “Mantlemay, certain prototypes, and the ranch had been around for some time. Not as nice as it is now, but our efforts were already making a difference in the world. I thought I might also make a difference in my daughter’s life. She responded well at first to Memetic Crystalline in an earlier form. But we were still figuring out spinal cord injuries with it. We still are. Everyone is a little different.”

Clenching his fists, he continued, “Four years ago, it was a cool April morning and she was over for a physical. I stopped by to say hello. She was smiling, chatting, thinking aloud about what movie she might see with her grandfather over the weekend. Then....she went quiet. I’d glanced over at her chart. I figured she was just lost in thought. Then the nurse yelled her name and started to shake her. We had an excellent cardiologist who happened to be visiting. She should’ve survived. But she never woke up again…”

Feldon leaned back and said, not even really talking to me anymore, “It’s funny. I read the literature about mortality in those with spinal cord neurological injuries over time. I weighed each with a doctor’s mind knowing some could come at any age but, as a father, I felt it was impossible we could ever lose her. She…fought…for every day…she fought. She lived every single day. She survived what killed her mother, sister, and twenty others just going about their day. She survived….and then she died. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be…”

He clenched his jaw. “I was angry. I was so…so angry. Fuck...whatever or whoever decided that was how her life would go. She didn’t fucking deserve it. I…ME…I was already an old man. I’d done what I wanted. I’d buried my wife and my daughter and feared every moment for another. My last child…if I could take…”

Feldon was trembling, all the clinical decorum passed away. He hacked up the words. He paused over his chest like he intended to tear his heart from it.

“…If I could take every day to come for me and give them to her...I would’ve keeled over right there to know she would live to now and beyond…” The passion and the fury passed, leaving his body limp and drained as he added, “But I could do nothing.”

It was hard to keep my arms folded and my body tense. Feldon stood before me, in agony, with his past laid bare like a scraped wound still throbbing. However, the questions still loomed. Nothing so far had resolved them but for a vague notion I didn’t like thinking about.

He returned to, “Four years. And despite all those years before…I didn’t stop looking for little Rachel. I went through so many old FOIA papers of adoption agencies that had been prosecuted for criminal activity. The papers from Odessa and the papers from here seemed so far apart. Those were dark times. Not just for me but for my whole family. But the light finally came.”

One click. Just one click. I didn’t know what I was seeing at first. Two pages spread across the screen with all the fine detail photocopied. One side was a blue-and-white birth certificate covered in Cyrillic script I couldn’t read, with a photograph at the top. The other side was my own birth certificate. The same photo was attached to both files. My photo. Rachel’s photo.

Folding his hands, Feldon read the names. “Anna Melnyk, born in Reni….Leslie Perkins, born in Oxnard.”

I bolted from my chair. He wasn’t the first person to get my name before, my actual name. But this time was just an accent on top of a heap of impossible things. We regarded each other eye to eye and I asked him, trying to keep as much panic out of my voice as possible, “What is this?”

He gestured to the screen. “This…is the culmination of years…decades of tedious work to connect buried records. This…and dozens of documents like it show how Rachel Feldon became Anna Melnyk to criminal and corrupt organizations and how Anna became Leslie to Nancy and Roger Perkins of Ventura, three decades ago.”

My back bristled as he named my parents. I pressed a hand against the table. On one level, what he was saying made sense to me. I knew documents could be forged, especially in the current era, but the faces loomed above them. They told me the story even before he did. I could doubt them too, but I just couldn’t comprehend the reason for such a massive pattern of deception.

I tried to look at Feldon and see something of my face. Not that I studied my face. But I didn’t see it. All I could think of was my dad, Roger. The curious looks I often traced after. The studious furrow of his brow. Folded arms. Skepticism. All the rest…

I responded sharply, “Bullshit…and how dare you….how fucking dare you do all this…for what?” I let my voice creep up the way it naturally did when I wasn’t trying to make it manly.

Feldon clenched his jaw and brushed at his hair. He looked away from me. “I know…there is much to process. I assure you this is not some game to find someone, anyone to fill a hole in my life. This is my life. This stands here as certain as anything I have done.”

I pressed the table and pushed off. He didn’t follow me as I left the room. I bubbled up with my feet mashing into the floor. My thoughts flew like a swarm of birds striking one another. Slamming my fist into the nearest bare wall was so feeble beside my feelings. I wanted blast rays and telekinesis and other destructive powers that could only be imagined. I wanted to rip everything apart, tear it all down in one swoop.

I stomped and swore and undulated through the hallway. If anyone noticed me then I didn’t know it until Mari stood right in front of me.

She wore clothes similar to earlier and her legs were mended as though nothing had happened to them. Her eyes bent up with a flash of surprise. I held back my scowl and asked her, “What?”

Mari tipped her head and gave a little grimace, as she took a step back. “Uh…I was summoned for…something.”

I offered, “By Feldon?”

Her eyes narrowed again as she remarked, “Something like that. What’s up with you?”

“He told me about Aura Feldon.”

All I needed to say. Mari seemed to go limp. She looked me in the eye but with an expression somewhere between bitterness and resignation. Who she meant those feelings for, I wasn’t sure.

After a pause, she said, “So, that’s why….You wanna talk or you wanna beat something up?”