The Unwanted

Chapter One

“Richard?” she called again, then, in a more threatening tone, “Is someone down there?”

She started coming down the stairs. Pressing my back to the wall, I inched out of the kitchen and into the dining room. I watched the kitchen doorway, wondering who this woman was and how she knew my father…and what was all the clanking about? When it appeared she hadn’t followed me from the kitchen to the dining room, I turned around and prepared to make a run for the front door.

She was standing right behind me.

I screamed, again. Like a girl, again. (What? She scared the hell out of me.)

She also snatched my wrist and twisted the knife out of my grasp before I remembered I was holding it. Then she put her hands on my shoulders to keep me from running headlong into her chest, which was covered in a bronze piece of armor that made her look like Xena, Warrior Princess.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said—not in a dismissive tone, the way that sort of thing is usually said (at least to me), but more in a sense of wonder, as if I were the last person she expected to see. She put a hand under my chin, gently, which I didn’t expect since she wore a sword at her waist. “You’re so…” Her voice trailed off as she took in all of me. “Short.”

Short? I’d never seen this woman before and she was calling me short? Admittedly, she looked taller than my dad, even, maybe by a couple inches. Before I could protest, she turned my chin left, then right, inspecting my face.

“You’ve been in a fight, haven’t you?” She smiled, and it seemed like a smile of admiration, like being in a fight was a good thing.

I batted her hand aside and backed away. “Who are you?”

She frowned. “Didn’t your father tell you anything about me?”

“Tell me what?”

Before she could answer, the doorbell rang. In an instant, everything about her changed. Her expression hardened as she whipped around toward the door. She’d drawn her sword without my even noticing, and now she crept toward the foyer. Her steps were so light I didn’t even hear her armor clank.

The doorbell rang again, sounding far away to me, like a dream. I started to ask her what she was doing—hadn’t she ever heard a doorbell before? Why was this clearly crazy woman in our house? And why did she know my dad? But she silenced me with a gesture.

This time, instead of the doorbell, there was a knock.

“Jamie?” It was Sarah. “Are you home?”

“Who is she?” the Xena wannabe asked.

“Who is she? Who are you?”

She lowered her sword for a moment and looked at me as if I were asking a stupid question. “He really never told you anything about me, did he?”

“Tell me what?”

Her face softened, neither stony nor angry, but sad.

“I’m your mother.”

#

I might as well tell you now that, yes, the woman in the Xena outfit was—is—my mother. Did I believe her when she told me this? Hell no. At least, not right away. This crazy woman in that getup was my mother? This crazy woman who also had a nose just like a ski slope? Whose hair was long and sandy blond and not at all like mine, which is brown and difficult, but still did that swoopy thing in the front that made us both look like we were walking into the wind?