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Looking at the World through New Eyes




Jane, my dead therapist and not my risen from the dead mother, told me that dreams aren’t always reliable when it comes to memories. That even though it’s possible that many of the things I had been dreaming were memories, many of them could have just been figments of my imagination or events that have happened but in the wrong place or time. In a nutshell what she was telling me was not to totally believe the things I was dreaming because most likely things didn’t really happen in that same exact way.

Jane was right.

After Max got out of prison, my parents panicked and they changed their names one more time. This is how my father and mother became Bob and Jane Carter. When I was born just a month later, they named me Andrew. They didn’t think that Max or anyone else would ever find us in Tampa of all places especially using Max’s own name as their surname. They were right, for a while anyway. Things were great. Max was nowhere to be found, the Bed and Breakfast was starting to do good business and the four of us were living a normal life. I wish I had an accurate memory of all of this. I would have loved to know I had an older brother.

This was one of the things that got all messed up in my brain. The memories of Nickolas making me laugh, that was at the B&B with my parents, not in the other place with the Russians.

When I asked him about that, he had no clue what I meant. Turns out whenever he was talking about my mother back when we had him tied to that chair, he meant Jane and not Nicole.

The next big question I had was about that picture that Max had given me of Nicole, my dad and I. If we weren’t really a family how the hell did they explain that one? My father then took out the picture in question. I was surprised to see it because after our room was broken into, it was one of the things that was stolen. I didn’t realize that it was them that broke into my room. Chris supposedly did the breaking and entering. Makes sense now, as much as any of this can make sense I guess.

My dad then showed me little cracks along the picture when looking at it through a magnifying glass. He said with all the technology at Max’s hands, it was easy to take three separate pictures and superimpose them in one. Chances are that’s what he did because according to my father, he and Nicole never had any real contact. It was probably just a clever way to try to convince me that she was my mother and that he was really my uncle. We already had a lot of similarities in the looks department which helped.

I have to say it worked.

“If he wanted to go through that much trouble chances are he never meant to really hurt you.” Dad had told me. “I don’t think he was going to try to kill you back at the dumpster Nick. I think he was going to use that as a golden opportunity to finally take you back to his family.”

Back to his family, yes this is the part we’ve all been waiting for. What exactly happened that landed me in their house so long ago?

While my family was blissfully happy with their lives in Tampa, they were also blissfully unaware that Max had indeed found them. What no one knew was that Nicole had been pregnant at the time of the big raid. Even though she didn’t technically do anything wrong, she had been held in prison for a little while before being released. In that time she had a miscarriage and apparently lost her mind. Her husband went MIA. He was the real monster in my dreams, but we’ll talk about him later.

Anyway, this became Max’s driving force for revenge. He felt like the only fair thing to do would be to take me back to his sister, so that’s what he did. One evening, when my parents decided to have a date night and left me in the care of one of the workers at the Bed and Breakfast, he made his move. Nickolas wasn’t home that night either, or he might have ended up with me. He was staying over at a friend’s house.

Max strolled in and up the stairs. I guess I was in my room playing at the time. No one really was able to tell me exactly what happened because they weren’t there, but surprisingly I was able to fill in the blanks from my own memory. I said he picked me up and brought me down the stairs, just like he had done in my dreams. Only I thought he had saved my life from a fire. No, my memory was actually my abduction. He set the Bed and Breakfast on fire. Something my family never told me until now.

My parents said when they returned home, the lady left in charge of me was dead, the place was on fire. They knew at that moment that Max had taken me.

That’s when the story switched to how long they had been looking for me. The FBI was brought into the case and everyone whoever worked with my father was looking for me pretty much around the clock. My parents decided to send Nickolas to stay at one of the safe houses run by a close friend of our family, since they had small children of their own at the time. This is where things get even weirder. Turns out those friends were the Richardsons.

Yeah, I know….I’ll give you a second to digest that one!

Gerald owned a safe house that the CIA used to use on occasion. They would make a call to the Richardson’s and let them know when someone was coming to stay for a brief period of time. It was on the same property as their house so both Anne and Gerald would run errands for anyone who was living there so they could keep a low profile. My father was one of those people a long time before I was born and Kevin was just a tiny little thing. My dad was escorting a guy who was going to be entering witness protection and he ended up staying in that safe house for about three weeks. The two of them became fast friends and had remained that up until Gerald’s death.

Both Anne and Gerald managed to keep this part of their lives a secret from the rest of their family, until now.

It was kind of nice to see Kevin looking as surprised and weirded out as I was. “Do you remember any of that?” I asked him during dinner that night. “Nickolas coming to live with you or ever seeing my father before, any of that ring a bell?” He shook his head leaving his meal as untouched as I had left mine. It’s pretty hard to have an appetite when you are suddenly looking at the world through new eyes. Across the table from me was the brother I never knew I had, the mother who had been dead for years and a father that’s been a stranger to me all my life.

Nickolas didn’t remember staying at Kevin’s either although he did remember staying somewhere ‘unfun’ as he put it. He remembered being away from home because of something that had happened to me, but he had no idea it was Kevin who he was staying with.

Small world? Doubtful, but there was no time to ask questions about the two of us being thrown together in a band and the level of coincidence attached to it, not now anyway. Those questions would come later after we had our other band mates back safely.

After dinner, talk resumed about this horrific ordeal my family went through while I was missing. Turns out I was gone for almost one entire year of my life. How does one not have any recollection of something like that? Granted I was very young, but even still you would think that I would remember something about that time, that didn’t come to me in the form of a nightmare at least.

Just when my dad was about to give up all hope, they got a tip from someone. They claimed they saw a child matching my description being pushed in a stroller by someone that matched Nicole’s. Both of my parents immediately flew out to where that was, Los Angeles.

After casing the place, they soon figured out it was in fact Max’s family and came up with a plan to get me back home. My father insisted that my mother just stay behind and he would let her know how things were going, but of course after he left with his team, she decided to follow.

They broke into the house sometime in the afternoon.

Apparently, they wanted to wait until no one was home except for me and Nicole, but that didn’t happen. Turns out that Max and some other ‘security’ types were there as well as the main figure in my nightmares, Nicole’s husband and main target of the CIA, Roger. He eluded capture during the first raid by jumping out of a window allowing his wife and her brother to be caught. Not caring that she was pregnant at the time and not caring that she had a small child with her now. He opened gunfire once my father broke the door down.

When Nicole heard the door being broken down and the shots being fired, she ran up the stairs and brought me into the nursery and that’s where we both hid until my mother found us.

I guess there was lots of gunfire between my father’s team and the Russians. During that time, my mother who had followed my father to the house, managed to sneak in and up the stairs, looking for me. I was her one and only goal. That should have made me warm and fuzzy but for some reason it had the opposite effect on me.

When she told me this part, the look on her face was almost hypnotic, like she was telling me from a trance of some kind. She said she opened the door and I was in Nicole’s hands. I guess when she saw my mother she panicked and just about dropped me on the floor and that’s when I went and crawled underneath the desk.

My mother said she didn’t have any intention at all of hurting anyone but when she saw this crazy woman holding her child, something clicked inside of her and next thing she knew, Nicole was dead on the floor, while the gun smoked in her hands.

She had a deep look of hurt on her face when she said the next part as if the way I reacted was intentionally to hurt her. She said that when she went to pull me out from under the desk, I started crying and screaming for help. I didn’t want to go with her and instead I kept asking for my mommy. At this point, I guess my father had made his way up the stairs and found my mother and me standing in the hallway, ready to go down the steps and out the door.

That’s when Max showed up again.

There was a struggle of some kind; the end result was me falling down the entire flight of stairs and being knocked unconscious. The attention shifted at that point from Max to me. Both of my parents went running to my aide and I guess that’s when Max and everyone else escaped.

I was in the hospital for almost a month. The doctors weren’t sure if I’d ever wake up and if I did, they were almost certain I’d have brain damage. I could actually hear AJ’s voice in my head at this point, saying with a huge sarcastic grin on his face, “That explains so much!”

Anyway, one miraculous day, I opened my eyes and asked for my mother and father. The doctors said I beat the odds and a week after I woke up, I was released from the hospital and we all went back home as a family.

I had no recollection of anything that happened to me and the doctors told my parents, I most likely never would.

By the time my parents finished telling me this part of the story, it was already almost midnight. I could tell that they were done purging when my questions were once again being pushed to the side. “We’ll tell you more in the morning.” My mother said as she stood up and stretched, “For now it’s time for you to get some much needed sleep.”

Like I’d be able to sleep after digesting all of that information?

My mother vanished long enough to come back with a pile of blankets, sheets and pillows. “I’m sorry you all have to sleep in the living room. This apartment was only built for three people at the most.” She then came over to me and handed me all of the blankets and kissed my cheek. “I love you honey.”

I didn’t say anything back. I couldn’t, not yet anyway. In my mind she was still dead and for all I knew this was some kind of elaborate dream. The jury was still out on whether or not I wanted it to be.

My father stood up and walked over to me, “I’m so sorry, son. I never wanted you to find out about any of this.”

There was still so much I needed to know, “Why did you just disappear after our phone conversation?” I asked just as he grabbed me in a hug, “I thought something had happened to you. If all you were doing was hiding, why couldn’t you just tell me that?”

He pulled away from me, “There’s more to the story kiddo, I’m just too mentally exhausted to continue tonight. I promise I’ll fill you in on the rest tomorrow.”

“How can you sleep knowing that the guys are probably in danger? Shouldn’t we be working on getting them away from Max?”

“Nick, I’m sure they are okay.”

“But you said they could be used as a bargaining chip!”

“Yes, but they wouldn’t even be aware of that. You have to see it from Max’s eyes. They came back to him which kind of told him that they still do trust him. He won’t do anything right now to make them think otherwise.”

“I’m sure right now he’s doing a bang up job portraying me as a bad guy.” Nickolas added from the couch where he had just plopped down, ready to crash for the night.

“So, no immediate danger then?” Kevin asked.

My father shook his head, “I think right now they are under the impression that they are in good hands.”

That made me feel a little better but I still knew sleep wouldn’t be in my agenda tonight. “Get some sleep boys and we’ll talk more in the morning.” My dad then walked over to me and kissed me on the forehead. “Okay?” I nodded at him. He glanced over at Nickolas and then put his hand on Kevin’s shoulder. “Night boys.” He said as he walked out leaving the three of us in the living room staring at each other.

Kevin looked over at me, “You want the other couch or the floor?”

I was surprised I was even given a choice. “I’ll take the floor. I know I won’t be sleeping anyway.” I slid myself onto the floor and he threw me some covers and pillows.

“I don’t think I’ll be sleeping much either.” He answered.

“Same here.” Was the reply from the other couch.

Maybe we’d have a night of brotherly bonding. I was sure maybe Nickolas could fill in some of the gaps that my father left wide open.
Chapter End Notes:
No cliffhanger! :O) Merry Christmas lol

Just letting you know there probably will not be a new chapter until after Christmas. I might be able to get some writing done shortly before the holiday but definitely not by next weekend. Thanks for reading and reviewing!