Chapter 4: Parents

One late morning – about a year after she had started working at “Eleonora’s”, although she hadn’t been keeping track of time – Jessie sat in the café enjoying a leisurely breakfast, a nice break between her night with a client and returning home. Not that she did not want to return, but it was a nice variety. She did not know the place; she wasn’t a regular anywhere, she picked it at random, as usual.

The café was half-full, a mix of soft voices merged into a constant low rumble of the city morning. And then, she saw someone who stared at her. It was nothing new; she was attractive, and she knew it, and sometimes those stares ended with them becoming her new clients, but they stared— differently. She looked back.

A couple, a man and a woman in their early forties. They stared at her with— intent? shock? confusion? —as if they recognized a ghost. And they looked strangely familiar, although she could swear she never met them before.

Jessie instinctively pulled down the hem of her dress to cover the butterfly on her hip. A reflex from another life, a flicker of self-consciousness that felt alien and unwelcome. The woman gasped, her hand flying to her mouth, her eyes wide and glistening.

Jessie felt a jolt, a sudden, sharp tremor in the placid lake of her consciousness. A ripple, a disturbance from somewhere deep below. She didn’t know who they were, but a splash, sharp and clear as a shard of glass, cut through the fog of her present.

Then they stood up and approached her, still looking into her eyes. The woman gulped, licked her lips, and asked unsurely:

“Jessie?...”

Jessie smiled and opened her eyes wide. Maybe they were among the guests at one of those sex parties! She wouldn’t mind if they ordered her again.

“I am! Hello! Do we know each other?” She kept the tone bright and cheerful, the practiced mask of the blank slate, the girl without a past. But behind the mask, the gears of her mind were whirring, trying to place their faces, to connect the name that echoed in her head to the reality in front of her.

“My God! It’s you!” The woman was crying now, tears tracing clean paths through her makeup. The man held her, his own face a canvas of confusion and something else, a dawning, horrified recognition.

“Jessie ... You ... Don’t you remember us?...” he muttered in a hoarse voice.

“Um ... Sorry ... I think we met before, but I can’t tell for sure ... But I’d be happy to know you better!” Jessie spread her arms invitingly. Her heart raced. She was an actress, but this scene was all wrong.

“We are— we’re your parents,” the man said.

Jessie stared, the word “parents” landing in her brain with the thud of a lead weight. Parents. A concept. She knew the word; she’d seen other people’s parents. She knew that she had parents too, sometimes, somewhere. She’d had her cover story ready for months, a carefully constructed tale of abusive assholes she’d escaped, the alcoholics who had beaten her, and the father who raped her. A neat little fiction for her clients who wanted to feel like saviors. But here, now, faced with the real thing, the word felt hollow, a meaningless shape in the air.

With shaking hands, the woman rummaged in her handbag and brought out a photograph. Not a shot in a phone gallery, a paper photo. Jessie looked at it.

There were they. That couple, and she between them, a bit younger, maybe thirteen, smiling happily. The family resemblance was striking. She was definitely the girl from the picture.

But that girl in the picture was not Jessie. It was someone else. She was some unknown child, a past she had no connection to. The girl who’d left on a bridge with a head full of razor blades and a heart full of static. A ghost. Jessie was the phoenix that had risen from her ashes. Or perhaps just the ashes themselves, rearranged into a new form.

She blinked away sudden tears. Oh God. Her role got out of hand. She raised her eyes.

“That’s me. And you. Really. But—” She sighed. She never told her real story to anyone outside of the salon. But now... “It’s all complicated. Shit, I don’t know where to start...”

“You’d say!” The woman— her mother— chuckled nervously. Jessie recognized her own intonations. “We thought you were dead! We thought you killed yourself!” She covered her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking with sobs.

Jessie looked away, her gaze catching the reflection of a teenage girl in the café window. A barefoot girl in a light sundress, her hair a little messy, a silver stud glinting in her navel, a silver anklet with a bell on her ankle, colored beads around her wrist. A girl who existed only in the present. She felt a surge of something fiercely protective, a primal need to defend this new self, this Jessie, from the phantom of the past.

“I— I tried,” she confessed, her voice barely a whisper. “I tried to kill myself. Then I— I changed. I got a new life.” She looked back at the man, her father. She saw the same blue eyes, the same line of the jaw. A stranger. “Shit. It’s all complicated. Please, can we sit down? I’ll tell you everything, I promise, but I don’t know...”

They sat at her table, the three of them in a tight, uncomfortable triangle. The man — her father — ordered coffee for all of them. Then, uncertainly, he put his hand over hers. Jessie smiled weakly and turned her hand to respond to his gesture. Her skin prickled. He was warm, with big, calloused fingers. Just like some of her clients, but this time it was different.