Chapter 13
When Joachim came home from the movies with Olivia, he heard voices in the living room, and thought his mother had fallen asleep in front of the television. It was late for her to be up, and he walked in to gently get her to her bedroom and stopped in his tracks. She was wide awake, sitting on the couch, and Javier was sitting across from her. His left upper arm was wrapped in a towel soaked with blood, and there was a gun lying on the coffee table in front of him. He grabbed it and stood up the minute he saw Joachim walk in. He pointed the gun at Joachim’s heart, and their mother’s voice rang out strong and clear.
“If you hurt so much as a hair on his head, Javier, I swear I’ll kill you myself. Put the gun down. You don’t shoot your own brother. You’re in my home. Have some respect. You come here after twenty-five years, with a gun? What’s happened to you?” But she could see what had happened. He was an entirely different person. There was nothing left, no morals, no compassion, no humanity. There was nothing he cared about. It was Cain and Abel in the end.
“What are you doing here?” Joachim asked him, walking into the room slowly, not wanting to startle him. Javier’s eyes were wild, with the pain of his wound, and probably because he was on drugs. “I’d been told you were in Colombia,” Joachim said calmly, and sat down next to his mother on the couch. Her eyes were steady as she looked at Javier, but her hand was shaking in Joachim’s. It was deeply emotional for her to see Javier again, and for Joachim too.
“What are you doing here?” Javier spat back at his twin. They still looked exactly alike, one filthy, one clean, same face. “I thought you were a servant in England,” Javier said in a mocking tone. Joachim had no idea how he knew about that, since he had gone to London long after Javier had cut off communications with them. But news traveled both ways. It surprised Joachim that his twin had made inquiries about them. Maybe he was human after all, but he didn’t look it, with his hair a matted mess, a heavy beard, and his arm bleeding in the towel. It was his left arm, and Javier was left-handed, so it would make him a less accurate shot if he fired at either of them, and Joachim didn’t want it to be their mother.
“Why don’t you put the gun away. I don’t think you need it to defend yourself against Mama.” The irony wasn’t lost on Javier, and he shrugged and put it in his belt. If Javier shot anyone, it would be his twin brother, not their mother. “Why are you here?” It was a cruel way to meet after twenty-five years.
“I have business here. It’s a new market for us.”
“Are you married? Do you have children?” Liese asked him, struggling for normalcy. She wanted to reach out and touch her son, but she didn’t dare. He looked like a wild animal ready to strike. Joachim was deceptively calm, watching his every move.
“No, Mama,” Javier answered her, sounding like her son again. “I don’t have kids, or a wife.” It was an absurd question in the circumstances, but she wanted to know. A long, long time ago, he had been her baby, and would be until the day he died. “Do you have whiskey?” he asked Joachim in a rougher tone. Joachim decided not to argue with him, walked away, fished a bottle out of the cupboard, and handed it to him. Javier turned the cap with his teeth to open it, let the blood-soaked towel fall, and poured whiskey over the bullet wound in his arm. It was nasty looking and Liese cringed. He wrapped it in the blood-soaked towel again.
“One of your new business associates must have gotten pissed off at you,” Joachim surmised. “That looks ugly.”
“I can’t go to a hospital,” he said roughly.
“No, you can’t,” Joachim agreed.
“We have doctors. I can see one tomorrow if I need to.”
“You can’t stay here, Javier. It’s too dangerous for Mama, if someone finds you here. Whoever did that will try again.” Whoever did it had been aiming for his heart. Joachim wasn’t afraid of his twin, he was soaking up the look of him. As it always had been, it was like looking in the mirror, except there was something missing. As his own mother had said about him, no heart. He didn’t look happy to see them, or moved by their mother, who was an old woman now. She had been middle-aged, in her fifties, the last time he saw her. Now she was eighty-one, but the fire in her eyes was the same, and her spirit was just as strong.