Revenge17 min read
I Have Two Fathers, One Promise
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I have two fathers.
"My mother doesn't even know who my real father is," I said once, and someone laughed like it was a joke.
"She's been bought," I tell people now, and they look away.
My mother, Silvia Sherman, was brought to our mountain valley as if she were cargo. Since before I can remember, both of my fathers—Gerardo Fisher and Basilio Schneider—kept her chained in a broken room with a rusted iron link biting into her neck.
"Big Father likes to beat me," I said to no one, when I was small.
"Small Father likes to shout," my hands would say as they dried the bowls.
I feared both men. I ran to the shack and told my mother things children are never meant to know.
She glared at me like I had betrayed her. Sometimes I thought she wanted to scrape me off the earth with her teeth.
"Don't bite me," I said once, and she lunged anyway.
Her teeth had been pulled with pliers long ago. She would bite, but it didn't hurt.
"Mom," I whispered, pushing away as she tried to clamp her useless mouth on my arm. "Mom, please don't bite me."
She screamed and thrashed and I thought, stupidly, that if she killed me then the men would kill her. Maybe that would set her free. Maybe death would be a cleaner kindness than the chain.
1
"Did your mother do it again?"
I looked up. He was there as if he'd always been there—Finley Karlsson, who looked like the best face in our range of hills.
"Mind your business," I answered.
"Why are you wearing his old scarf?" Finley asked, eyeing the rag around the chain at my mother's neck.
"Because it stops the chain from tearing her," I said. "Because the chain cuts."
He sat beside me by the river and watched his reflection tilt in the water.
"You see that house?" he asked after a moment. "New goods arrived."
"New goods," I echoed, silent with the way we had learned to speak of women. The phrase had teeth in it.
We stood behind a tree and watched a car slow by. A woman was dragged out, hair matted, skin scratched. She looked like a thing stolen from the city. She screamed in a way that wasn't language; it was wind and torn fabric.
Her eyes scanned the crowd and landed on us. For a second they were young, and terrified, and human. She looked like she might be from where my mother once was, where they speak a different tone.
Finley didn't say anything the way boys like him don't. He just watched the woman. I felt something move inside me like something I'd lost.
"She sounded like Mom," I said, surprising myself.
Finley didn't smile. He gripped my hand before I pulled away and dragged me to the village head's courtyard.
"Why are we here?" I hissed as we crouched in the shadow, watching men trade like they were bartering animals.
He pointed. "He's the one who runs the routes. Coen Hanson."
Coen Hanson was the village head. He had a face like a man used to pushing others. Tonight he told a story on the phone that made the men around him nod.
"Boss is pleased," they said into their palms like priests promising offerings.
They were talking about sending women further on, to a place where prettier ones fetched higher prices.
"You're the one that helps, aren't you?" Finley said, quietly.
"I'm the one who does as I'm told," I answered. I had learned that survival meant small lies.
2
My small father had a plan: make me the one to wash the woman, to clean her and dress her pretty before she was taken. He wanted the boss to like what he sold. He saw me like a bag to be filled with worth.
"You're not scared to get bitten?" he asked me, grinning.
"I can be careful," I told him.
At the woman's door she snarled like a wild animal. She struck and snapped but when she saw me she stopped. Her eyes uncoiled into something like recognition, then blank.
"I am here to help," I whispered, because it was what I had been told to say.
She didn't bite. She allowed me to wash her, because Finley had promised the men he would bring her along. He had that way of looking at someone as if he'd promised the world.
"Thank you," I wanted to say to Finley then, but the words fell like stones.
When she left, Coen Hanson smiled like a clock that had been wound up right. "Good work," he said to my father. "You did well."
3
They took me to the county the next day.
The city was loud and bright. The buildings rose like new continents, the cars flowed in rivers, and there were shops with spices and sauces we had only ever seen in lottery pictures. Small Father bought me a jar of Lao Gan Ma and a dress that smelled like dizziness.
I took the jar home and handed it to my mother. She snatched it like a gift from a memory and shoved chilli into her mouth until she was crying with the heat and something else. She ate until she sobbed, and for the first time in my life, I saw her break open into grief that was not violent. She tasted a world she had been forbidden, and it broke her.
"I'll buy you more," I said like a child promising the moon.
She only nodded and put her face into her hands. She told me later, coughing, a name—my mother's name—Chen Xia. "Tell Chen Zhengyi," she said once, rapid like she was catching breath. "Tell him. Tell him I'm here."
4
Coen Hanson had no mercy for me. When we were called to his yard with the others, he kicked me to the dust like a stray thing.
"Filth!" he spat. He raised his hand to strike again, and it was Finley who moved like a boulder, stepping in front of me and catching the second blow.
"My father, don't hit her," Finley said.
Coen stopped, jaw hard. He heard the voice of his own pride—his own town—and though Finley was still his son, in his eyes Finley had stepped out of the small box Coen had made for him.
"You think you're something?" Coen asked, but his hand faltered.
Later Finley told me why he stepped forward. He said, "She's mine. I'll marry her one day."
I did not know how to believe the warmth in his eyes.
5
There were dreams after.
I dreamed of my mother eating the Lao Gan Ma and crying endlessly. I dreamed of that first woman who had bit and cursed me, hair loose and mad, banging on a boarded window and demanding I die. Their faces braided together into one face that hated me.
And yet I dreamed of Finley too, a steady presence, half-boy, half-something older. He said little, but when he did it was like the ground choosing to hold me.
"Run," he told me once, standing by my door. "I'll help you leave."
I laughed because I had laughed for so long. "What do you know about leaving?"
He was silent. He looked like a child older than his age, shoulders carrying secret loads.
"The men were back," he murmured once. "They're talking to my father again."
6
I almost ran that night. I had a knife beneath my pillow—an absurd thing in a small girl's hand—but it made my palms sweat.
My youngest sister, only eight years old and wild, followed us into the dark woods when Finley and I tried. She begged to come, hands dirty and bright.
"Take me," she said.
"No," I said.
Finley squeezed my fingers. "We can't," he said. "We have nothing but a hope."
I went back. The village took things from you and left holes.
7
Time passed and death waited. The woman Finley and I had once helped—Lila Ricci—died somewhere far. That death saved me by stopping the men from moving for a while. Yet the quiet stretched on like a wire ready to snap.
Then came a day when the boss actually came to our village.
Gunner Zaytsev appeared like a storm—tall, young-looking, and with eyes that took measure of things like a judge.
"Old Coen," he said, putting a hand on the elder's shoulder. "We need new faces. We need speed."
My fathers moved like dogs at the hint of profit. They pushed forward, grinning, pride brassier than sense. But it was Finley who walked up into the yard and hit them with a wooden stick as if killing might be polite.
"Are you blind?" Finley yelled, and when the men turned to strike him, he hit back. He smashed a brick across my big father's head until blood carved lines down his face.
The crowd cheered as if it were a show. Gunner's brow lifted. "Now that's the kind of resolve I need," he said.
Finley, as if he had prepared months for this moment, stepped forward to offer himself.
"Give me the job," he said. "And take her with me."
Gunner considered. Coen hesitated. In the end the deal was made and I didn't understand why Finley risked so much. Later I learned: he had arranged it all to get me out.
8
We left the valley. The bus was cramped, the road endless. I clutched Finley's arm until my knuckles were white.
"What are you doing?" I whispered.
"I'm getting you away," he said. "I'm stealing you out."
When we reached the place where the boss needed new faces, I felt like I had been pulled tight and was about to snap. The woman they pointed to had a softness in her eyes, a history in her hands. I realized then the cruel truth: I would be pushed to push others.
I could not do it.
"I won't," I told Finley, and he looked at me like someone folding a map with care.
"There's a police office two streets over," he said. "Run for them."
I almost did. I almost ran for two streets of hope. But there was the thought of my family back home. What would happen to them if I fled? If I ran with the police, they'd be left to the wolves. The men who had taken everything would strike back. The debt of blood hung heavy.
I stopped at the line. Finley looked at me and did something I will never forget.
"Wait," he said, and his voice lowered. "Don't drink. Don't move. Let me manage who drinks."
9
We worked for the boss. We were under his eye. He watched me with a kind of calculating hunger and used compliments like hooks.
"Such a pretty thing," Gunner would murmur, stepping too close.
"Don't touch her," Finley would say, quietly, under a clatter of cups, and the boss would glance away with a small laugh, but there was a coldness behind his eyes.
One night the boss arranged a feast in Coen Hanson's yard to secure loyalties. It was full of men with hands that had taken too many things. They sat around a long table and drank in the open air while lanterns swung above like tired moons.
I sat there like a moth with no fuel. I had bought a small sack of rat poison once at the market in a stupid, desperate thought: if they would always only be locked up for a few years, what would stop them from doing it again? If I couldn't live knowing they would return, then perhaps there was a way to make sure they never did. It was a sick, childish plan meant to mark time with finality.
But I had not put it in the wine. I could not bring myself to do it.
10
The feast began with laughter. Coen Hanson made a show of humility. "To prosperity," he said, raising his cup.
Gunner leaned close to me, one hand on my jaw. "You are my favorite," he slurred.
I smiled because my mouth had learned to smile even when everything inside it screamed. I thought about how little I had left.
Finley sat next to me and squeezed my leg under the table. His hand trembled but he kept his face like stone.
"Do not drink," he whispered. "Not from them."
"Why?" I mouthed.
"It is me who will drink with them," he answered, and there was nothing light in his voice.
11
The air turned thick with wine. Men who had never considered consequence drank and sang. Coen told a story that made the whole yard laugh.
Then the boss stood. He looked at me as if anything could be taken and he'd have the right to take it.
He reached out and smoothed my hair. "You have a pretty scar," he said, and slapped my cheek the way a man might pinch a child.
A shock cracked through the room. The slap silenced the light chatter like a cold wind clearing fields.
"Did you think to call?" Gunner asked, his drunk eyes narrowing. "You and your friend were in a toilet making calls. Maybe making plans."
"Boss," Coen muttered, but there was a chill now under the laughter.
Gunner smirked, then laughed and slapped my face again. "Just a joke," he said. "You girls are jumpy. We'll make you comfortable."
12
The sound of a slap fell like a bell. Then the world changed.
"Why are you breathing like that?" someone asked, mid-sip. The man's hand froze with the cup halfway to his mouth.
Coen's face went first from amusement to puzzlement, then to the pale purple of a bruise forming under skin.
He tried to swallow and coughed, but it wasn't a choke. It was wet, violent. He leaned over the table and vomited blood into his lap. The sound was mechanical, a pump that had suddenly seized.
"What's wrong with him?" a woman screamed.
Gunner's fork clattered. The boss—Gunner Zaytsev—looked at Coen, and then the warmth left his face. He tried to stand and his legs refused. He doubled over and screamed.
"It's poison!" someone cried.
"No, can't be—" Gunner's voice broke like a twig. He reached for his throat and spat blood. "Get help. Get water!"
One by one the men began to choke, their faces twisting. The wine congealed into a nightmare. They threw their cups, only to clutch at their chests and howl.
I watched, paralyzed at first. The people who had made my life a long cruelty were falling like puppets whose strings had been cut.
I saw my large father—Gerardo—lurch. He had been the closest to us, leaning forward, mouth open with a blurted oath, when his body betrayed him. He fell, hands clawing at the table.
"Poison!" someone shouted, and yet their lungs scrubbed for air.
13
The punishment was sudden and terrible.
At first, the crowd gaped at the spectacle. Then horror filled their faces like a bruise.
"He's laughing at us?" Big Father rasped, blood spilling from the corner of his mouth. "This is—who did this?"
"No!" Coen coughed, trying to gather himself, to order people to action as if ordering cattle. "Someone—"
Gunner rose on shaking knees. "You think I would let—" His sentence turned into a choking gurgle.
The men around them were no different. They started with confusion; their eyes darted to friends to see if the same thing was happening. Then denial: "This can't be happening." Then panic. The shifts of expression were like a cruel clock.
Around us, people fell over one another, rolling off benches, clutching stomachs. Some tried to vomit. Others clawed at their throats and collapsed to the ground.
"Call a doctor!" someone screamed. "Get a blanket! Someone—"
The courtyard became a writhing image of red and white. Men who had laughed the loudest before lay on their backs, their faces contorted. One of them tried to shout but instead gushed blood.
I had never been in a spectacle of this degree. The men who had collected me and my mother and my sisters like harvest had been toppled by a single glass.
"Why are they doing this?" a child cried, clutching at his mother's skirt. "Why do they look like that?"
14
There were people who filmed with their phones. The newness of the phone camera did not stop the scene from becoming monstrous. Screens lit up with blood-smeared faces. Someone posted and the post spread like wet paper into flame.
I watched as the boss—the man who had touched me—stretched his hand and tried to say something that might be forgiveness or plea. His mouth moved and sprayed blood like a broken fountain. His eyes widened with a slow horror.
"Please," he whispered, and the scene shifted as the crowd heard that one syllable of plea. It was absurd to hear begging from such a man.
Big Father tried to crawl toward me between heaving coughs, lips blue with a blood that was not his alone. His expression moved from rage to panic, from bravado to something small and terrified. He reached for me, as if to clutch at a child he had meant to sell, but his hand slipped and he thudded to the dirt.
I had aimed for killing them in some impossible dream once, but I had never pictured the exactness of this: one's worst tormentors thrashing, convulsing, and dying in the same yard that had cheered them.
"You're all going to hell!" someone screamed. "You monster!" A woman spat on the boss as he convulsed.
Others stood with their mouths open, eyes wide. Some cried, some filmed. A child rubbed at his ears and kept looking like he might vomit.
The men who had been part of this ring reacted differently. Some screamed, some tried to run. One of them tried to call for help and then froze as their mouth filled. He laughed with a wild, hysterical sound, and then he too was on the ground.
Gunner's face paled, then reddened, then purpled. He tried to pull up his collar, to find his throat, whispering "who—who did this?" in a voice that had been meant to be a command.
People's voices rose and clashed. "Arrest them!" some demanded. "Call the police!" others said. A group of women who had been sold wandered toward the scene like moths that could not resist the heat, their hands covering their mouths. They pointed at the men who had used them, shouting names as if naming could bring the men to answer.
Meanwhile, a woman—one of the captives who had been taken before—stood at the edge with a face drained of something, and she simply said, "It is done." Her voice was not loud, but it cut across the shouts like a blade.
15
I was not the one who set the wine. The iron weight in my pocket—the rat poison—I had meant to use, but I could not. It sat behind a fold of cloth like a confession.
Finley had seen me at the market when I bought the poison. He had watched me hide it, his eyes narrowing. Something in his look warned me I would not be the only hand at play.
When the first man fell, Finley let out a sound that I will never forget. He moved across the courtyard like a plain animal. He grabbed cups, smashed bottles, and tipped out chalices. He reached for the wine and poured it like a man undoing a curse.
"I did this," he said to me, bloody tears gliding down his own face, his hands stained. "I put it in the cups. It is done."
I wanted to scream. I wanted to pull him and say, "Why?" But his eyes were full of a terrible peace.
"It had to be done," he said. "If they lived, they'd hurt others. If they lived, they'd come for you again. I couldn't let it pass."
I remembered his earlier promise—his hand over mine—when he said he would protect me. This was his protection. He had given himself the only way he thought he could repay what his family had done. He had spread death over those who had fed on the lives of others.
The men who had once ruled our valley convulsed and then, one by one, grew still.
16
The crowd had grown silent except for the sound of hacking breath. Around us the scene turned into a courtroom without judges—people pointed, accused, cursed, and then put their hands over their faces when they looked at the bodies.
Police sirens wailed in the distance as some man somehow had a head clearer than the rest. Finley collapsed beside me, his lips stained, eyes wide with the kind of grief that isn't for someone else but for the world he had to touch to protect me.
"Why?" I asked him, voice thin and small.
He smiled like a knife with the smile of someone who knew consequence. "Because you didn't want to kill them," he said. "And because we could not wait for the law that would let them out again."
People came to the yard now with faces split between horror and triumph. Some women—those who had been used and sold—stamped their feet and cried, "Good!" They spat at the bodies of the men who had harmed them, as if spitting could dissolve the memory.
Others stood and silently filmed the dead. The village children had been led away by mothers; the small ones would keep nightmares for the rest of their lives.
17
Gunner Zaytsev's death had an echo.
When the ambulance arrived, it smelled like antiseptic and promise. Later, the investigators came. Phones and videos were confiscated. People tried to give testimonies, which were half-sobbed and half-ranting. They pointed their fingers at one another; they turned their faces toward Finley and then away as if a man who had killed could also be a hero.
"You did this on purpose," my big father gurgled before the end, blood painting his teeth. "You—"
The last word was a spit. Then he went silent.
I wanted to hate Finley then and the part of me that did hated the method. I wanted to say it was cruel. But when he put his face into his hands and sobbed, I felt something else: the weight of debt paid in the only currency the valley understood.
"Everyone will remember tonight," someone said. "They will write it down. They will say it happened."
18
In the white room later, I held Finley as machines beeped. He had been poisoned too—the sacrifice was symmetrical. He had drunk from the same cup as the others, a betrayal of hope done to ensure reprieve.
"Why did you drink?" I asked him, straight through tears.
He smiled in a way that cut through panic. "Because I am a product of this place," he said. "I have two hands that have hurt as well as helped. I could not keep you safe and survive when the cost might be their lives later."
He closed his eyes and then opened them again. "Take my name and make it yours," he murmured. "Find my parents. Tell them I'm sorry. Tell them I'm home."
I didn't know if he was speaking then to give me a task or to comfort himself. I gripped his hand like a promise.
19
They arrested the surviving ring members. Others were dead. The village was a different place. The police moved like slow winter wind, dragging files and questions and the seizure of assets.
My mother woke in a hospital bed with a face scrubbed clean of years. She looked like a woman born again from soil. She said my name like she had been learning the alphabet.
"Estrella," she whispered once.
We found my grandfather—Nikolai Simon—and grandmother—Ulrika Berry. They had kept a number like a relic on a shelf and had never stopped dialing. They came: old and shaking and holding hands as if time could be uncoiled.
They cried when they saw my mother. "We thought she'd been taken," they said. "We prayed."
"You found her," I answered as if I had been the one to cross lands and lift the weight.
My mother sat in her wheelchair and looked like someone tasting the sun for the first time.
20
Finley did not die right away. For days we held his hand and listened to the machines. He whispered names and small directions. He asked me to find his parents.
The police found them after some probing. They came in a small car, faces wet with old fears. When they met their son, both they and he cried in a creek of apology and grief.
"Son," his mother said, burying her face in his hair. "You were never ours shipping... we protected you badly."
Finley coughed. "No," he said. "You held me when I could not hold myself."
When the time came cradled between the lights, Finley closed his eyes and left with a sigh like the taking down of a curtain.
I screamed. I held his hand until they forced me to let go. I wanted to rip the sky and take him back.
21
Weeks later, the valley was quieter. The men who ran caravans and bossed the market had been taken to jail or had been claimed by their own greed. The story spread beyond our hills because people with phones had recorded the blood and posted it and lawyers bloomed like weeds. Prosecutors arrived. The court did its slow work.
My mother recovered. The old scar around her neck was now softened by a scarf I had tied there—the one that stopped the chain from rubbing her skin raw. We had learned again how to laugh in small increments.
One afternoon, as I fed her a bowl of congee—the first plain bowl she'd eaten in a decade—she looked at me and said, "Go."
"Go where?" I asked.
"Find Chen Zhengyi," she said. "Find him. Tell him I am..." She stopped and smiled in a way that broke me. "Tell him I'm his daughter."
22
I kept Finley's last words in my pocket like a coin. I went to look for his parents when I could step outside the hospital room. I took them to see Finley's mother, who had sat by his bed with a hand always on his head even as the world had been breaking.
They forgave each other in ways that were simpler and harsher than I expected.
At the police station, I told everything I knew. I told them about how the boss arranged the rings, about the men who took the women. I told them about my mother's number and how she had not stopped dialing. The investigators wrote it all down.
23
People say Finley was a killer. People say he was a savior. I don't have words big enough to fit both.
At night, when it's quiet and the valley tastes like iron and common soil, I sit by the window and listen to the jar of Lao Gan Ma sit on the table. It looks absurd and holy at once. Sometimes I take the jar in my hands and turn it, watching the label, and I think of the first time my mother ate it and cried.
The chain that had bound my mother is gone. In its place I looped a scarf once given by a stranger, and it rests soft against her neck.
24
We held a small memorial for Finley. People came even from far-off towns because the story traveled. They left flowers and soft notes and small folded paper cranes. When they spoke of him they said, "He saved her. He died to make sure she lived."
I think of the night in Coen Hanson's courtyard and the way the lanterns swung above the blood, and I think of the woman who had banged at the window and shouted so long and hard. She came to the memorial too—ragged, eyes hollow but lucid—and she hugged me and said, "Thank you for not being like them."
"Who are you?" I asked.
She smiled. "Call me who you want. I'm here because he did what he had to."
25
In the end I did what Finley had asked. I found his parents and told them of his last breath. I told my mother I would take her home. I sat at a kitchen table with my grandfather Nikolai and grandmother Ulrika and taught them the ways to make congee like the city. They gave me a small wooden box with a flap. Inside was a photograph of a woman smiling under a willow.
"Your grandmother," Nikolai said. "For your mother."
I put the photo into my pocket.
26
The valley changed slowly. The men who had survived were dragged into court and fined and jailed. The angry ones called for retribution. The women who had been bought and used set up a small co-op to sell vegetables. We planted small things to eat and larger things to hold onto.
Sometimes the jar of Lao Gan Ma sits on our table like a small, defiant trophy.
At night I go to the hospital and feed my mother. I watch the scar at her neck and smooth the scarf over it. She stares at me sometimes and says, "Estrella, you look like the sky when I first saw it again."
I smile. My life is not fixed. It is still a series of stitches—some crude, some tender—but they hold.
27
Once, when the police asked me to recount what had happened the night of the feast, I told them every detail I could. I told them about Finley's hands and his way of laughing when he was proud and how he smashed a bottle to be sure no one else drank.
"Did you want revenge?" a woman in the witness room asked me.
I thought of my mother with a jar of chili, of Finley's blood on my hand, of men who had never had to bear the weight of their cruelty. "No," I said. "I wanted them to stop."
She looked at me as if I had said something both small and vast.
28
There are nights when I dream of Finley like a warm lamp, and other nights when I dream of the woman at the window—hair loose and mad—and I think, terribly, that their faces are the same sometimes.
But the jar sits on the shelf and the scarf around my mother's neck is soft, and sometimes in the small hours she says, "Go, go see the city. Live."
So I will.
And when I look at the scarf now, I remember the iron chain that once bit her throat and the night when the courtyard became a place of judgment. I remember Finley smiling, blood on his lips, eyes steady as if he had read something that no one else could see.
"Take care," he said before he closed his eyes. "Make it mean something."
I hold that as if it were the only thing I can promise him.
The End
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