Black Sheep Pt. 06

"He didn't say goodbye to me." I wasn't ready to go into the details of why that was so, so I just left it at that.

"Oh, Christopher darling...do you think Avery knows?"

"I was just about to call her."

"Please let me know as soon as you've spoken with her. I think it best that you call her immediately; immediately, darling."

"Okay, mom. Love you."

"I love you too, dear. Don't forget to call me as soon as you find out."

"I won't."

Avery sounded out of breath, as though I had caught her on one of her crazy late night runs. I swear my sister never rested. When she wasn't at the gym or jogging, she was working; when she wasn't doing one of those two things, she was going on some crazy adventure like skydiving or shark-tank diving.

"Christopher, what's up?" she greeted.

"Hey. Are you free to talk?"

"Yeah, I am. You sound kind of funny. Are you okay?"

"Yeah...um, listen Avery, Henry left again. I know he's still in New York because his permit hasn't been sorted yet, but he didn't say where he'd be. Did he by any chance tell you where he was going?"

It took a few seconds before she answered me. When she did, it was with a question. "Is everything alright, Christopher?" she said.

"Yeah," I said, feeling very uncomfortable with lying to her. "Did he tell you anything about where he might be headed?"

"Okay, if you say you're okay I'll believe you. Henry didn't say anything to me, by the way. But I know he kept in touch with a few hipsters he met back in East Africa. I think there was a guy named Tommy, or John, or Eddie, or it might have been Danny...the guy had one of those generic names. I honestly don't know where he was from, Iowa, I think, but I also think he relocated to New York a few years back. Sorry, brother, that's all I've got."

"How do you know all that stuff?"

"Because Henry told me?"

"When?"

"When he was back here? I asked him about his life and he told me. I just couldn't be bothered with all the names because seriously, Henry knows far too many people and it's very hard to keep track. Coming back to you, I'm going to ask again, Christopher, and since I'm being so helpful to you, you're going to tell the truth this time. What's going on between you two? Is everything alright?"

I thought about my answer long and hard. I couldn't say the kind of stuff I was going through over the phone. Also, I wasn't quite ready for everyone to know. I was still wallowing in my shame. I needed to get used to it first. I needed to decide if that was something I wanted my family to know. I needed to decide if I was going to forgive Ishtar. So for that moment, I decided to avoid the question.

"Thanks a lot, Avery. We'll chat later, okay."

Before she had a chance to protest, I hung up the phone.

Henry wasn't on any social media platform. I couldn't track that to see how many guys he had there named Danny or John who'd worked with the UN in Kenya at the same time he did.

The thing that would help was to use one of our private investigators, and that's exactly what I did. I needed the information within a week's window; otherwise, I risked the possibility of Henry jetting off to Nairobi. Who knew when I would see him again? And it wasn't like I could put my life on hold and follow him where he went.

I called Arthur—one of the investigators we often used on hard-to-crack cases. He was the best guy for the job. Plus, the guy was a lot like my sister in that whenever he wasn't working, he was either at the gym or down the road jogging. He picked up the phone immediately because, again, much like my sister, he was one of those people who always waited to be needed. I gave him very little information because thanks to my brother's insistence on being completely off the radar, there wasn't much to give, anyway.

Arthur didn't complain, though. The only question he asked was how urgent the job was. I suspect he asked that because he wanted to gauge whether I was worried about the person I wanted him to find—whom he knew was my brother. In his own subtle way, Arthur was trying to be nosy, and to ask whether I was alright not as his boss but as someone he might (in some odd circles) consider a friend. After I assured him I was alright, he simply said: "Sure boss," and started working, I presume.

Now that that was done, I had to figure out where I was going to live in the meantime. I wasn't sure that I could live in the same space as Ishtar and not constantly poison whatever was left of our relationship with my seething resentment of her. I couldn't simply leave the apartment, either. She'd be worried, at which point both of our families and all of our friends would know...they'd know what she did. I wasn't ready for that kind of attention—all that pity.

So the last call I made was to her. For the first time in all the time I'd known her, she answered on the first ring, as though she'd been watching her phone and waiting for me to call. See, unlike Arthur and my sister, Ishtar wasn't the kind of person who waited for the world to need her.

That was one of the reasons I fell in love with her so deeply and so fast. She had this way of making me calm by simply saying my name, or calling me babe, or asking me what I wanted to eat for supper. She was sure of herself, she knew she was already needed and therefore never felt the need to prove herself.

There was this confidence about her, this unique way that when she looked at someone (when she talked to that person) they immediately felt like the only person in the world who would ever matter to her. She somehow transferred her confidence to that other person and made them feel invincible. When she looked at you with those beautiful brown eyes and smiled, you felt like you owned the world. And she did it all without breaking a sweat, seemingly.

"Hello," she said, with a rushed voice, and as if trying to hold herself back from saying more.

"Hey."

"I woke up and you were gone. I mean...are you okay?"

"Listen, I called to let you know I'll be staying in a hotel for a few days. I didn't want you to worry. I'll come by to pick up a few things I need. Also, could you please not tell our parents what's happening right now? Well, actually, I suppose you should probably tell your mom since she spends a lot of time there. She's bound to notice that something is wrong. I don't want everyone else knowing our business until we decide what we're going to do."

She didn't answer immediately. It felt like we silently stayed on the phone for forever. The whole thing was confusing. I wanted to hang up, yet at the same time I didn't.

"I love you," she finally said.

"I love you too."

"I can be gone if you want; you know, when you're come over to get whatever you need, I can be gone if you want."

"Thanks. I'll text you before I come over."

"Okay. Do you have a place to sleep tonight?"

"I'll see what I can get."

The conversation was getting too comfortable for my liking. It was starting to feel like old times, like what she did didn't matter and I was already falling back into her pull. I know it's childish, but I needed to get out of that. We couldn't just fall back into each other's arms like nothing happened. That was something that was sure to bite us in our asses sooner or later.

"Listen, I have to go. I'll call you if...I'll call you if anything happens." With that, I hung up the phone. Now came the hard part—the part of waiting for Arthur to find Henry so I could confront my resentment of him all over again.

***

The most difficult part about moving out of the apartment was having to pretend to both my mom and Ishtar's that everything was fine. They were still visiting, and nosy as hell. Although, I suspected that Ishtar might have told her mother everything because Lakshmi wasn't as warm as she usually was with me. Moreover, not once did she ask why Henry was suddenly absent from our get-togethers. I also suspected that she might have moved back into the apartment with Ishtar (since we'd started renting her a B&B after I came back from LA).

"How is work?" asked Lakshmi, the next time we all had dinner together.

"Everything is still okay," I said. When I didn't elaborate any further, she didn't do what she always did in the past—asking me details and whether I'd given any thought to starting a free law clinic that I could run permanently. She simply let the conversation die there.

My mother tried to be extra cheerful, but I could see that Henry's sudden departure was eating her up. She smiled extra widely and laughed even when a joke wasn't funny, or when there wasn't a joke at all.

"I've been thinking of doing a bit more travelling, Henry dear," she suddenly said. "Your father and I always planned to go on safari. But alas, there is always something to be done here and there. We never went, as a result. Now is as good a time as any, I suppose."

What she didn't explicitly say, was that she was trying to find an excuse to end up in East Africa, where Henry would be.

"You want to go to Africa?" asked Lakshmi.

My mother started her response by laughing shyly. "Well, I've led such a boring life. I'm starting to feel my age. And I want to finally see where Henry works. He does spend an awful lot of time there." Her voice dropped to a whisper since as I suspected she was saying the next words more to herself than anyone else: "He loves the place. I may as well acquaint myself with his world."

Ishtar and I had made an effort to sit next to one another. We even made an extra effort to always smile at each other and be completely civil. There came a point where it started to feel genuine. But when Henry's name got mentioned, I felt her tense up and suddenly, the tension we'd worked so hard to diffuse was present again. She stuffed food into her mouth with a furious determination. She was probably making an extra effort to not talk about my brother, or not talk at all. I knew that because that was exactly what I was doing too.

Lakshmi, on the other hand, who seemed to miss Henry as much as my mother did, carried the conversation. "I will say this again, Roselyn, he's a noble young man," she said.

My mother beamed at that. At the same time, a wave of jealousy suddenly overtook me and I found myself saying things I really should have kept to myself: "He's noble when it comes to people who aren't his family."

"Christopher!" said my mother, a scandalized look on her face. What she didn't say (because Ishtar and her mother were there) was this: 'That's no way to speak of family, especially when we have company.'

I wished I could tell her what he'd done right then and there. That was the second problem with being around everyone yet at the same time, keeping my problems to myself—I couldn't even be angry with Henry because people would naturally take his side since he was still the perfect selfless one to them.

So I apologized to my mother. "I'm sorry, mother."

The rest of the dinner continued with start-stop conversations that never really went anywhere. Of all of us, my mother still went out of her way to be cheerful, Lakshmi went out of her way to be interested in everyone's life except mine, while Ishtar kept looking over at me with an apologetic look on her face.

I noticed that she'd done something different to her, and that she was wearing different make-up. She was absolutely gorgeous. For a brief moment I almost gave into that; she always knew exactly how to make me weak.

My resistance of her was going more poorly than I could have ever anticipated. Still, I persevered; such that at the end of the night when I dropped her and her mother off at the apartment, I felt comfortable enough to kiss her on the cheek. Besides, her mother was standing right there, so there was no way we were going to start making love in front of her.

"Good night, Ishtar," I told her.

"Good night," she said, smiling nervously.

As I watched her walk into our building, I had this uncomfortable feeling that from the first moment she told me what had happened between her and my brother, I was already starting to forgive her. Stubbornly enough, I didn't want that to be the case. Much like a child, I wanted to stay angry with her because I was entitled to do so for a little while longer. I wanted to make her understand the kind of pain she had caused me. I wanted her to feel it too.

Though the stuff between her and my brother happened a while back, I only found out about it a few days previously; essentially, it had just happened to me.

In that moment, while watching her perfect ass sway from side to side as she was walking away from me, I briefly forgot all of that. I wanted so badly to follow her to our bed so we could sleep in each other's arms. I missed her more than I was willing to admit even to myself. But also, right then wasn't the right time to do those things, I told myself.

***

The bad news was that I'd slept barely six hours in the previous three nights combined. The good news was that I knew the cause of it.

Ishtar used this apple-scented shampoo that smelled great. I was used to sleeping with my nose buries in her hair, with my arm around her and my body feeling the comfort of hers. Sometimes she talked in her sleep; she said the most nonsensical things, like warning a bear not to step too close to the edge of some imaginary cliff in her dream.

I hadn't realized it until I moved out but all that stuff was like white noise to me. You know how some people slept better when it rained, or if sea waves crashed on a synthetic nature-noise maker? That was exactly how it felt. I missed the apple-scented shampoo, the heat of her body, and the sound of her voice speaking nonsense in the middle of the night. Being away from Ishtar was literally messing with my life.

So when Arthur called me at six in the morning to tell me that he found my brother, instead of feeling happy and relieved, I was more than a little annoyed because I'd only (finally) fallen sleep five minutes before that. But I answered his call, anyhow.

"I've found him," said Arthur, by way of greeting.

"Good morning to you too, Arthur."

"Oh, sorry. Good morning. Did I wake you?"

"Not really," I said, yawning. The most annoying thing was that just because I wasn't able to sleep, it didn't mean that I wasn't tired. In fact, I couldn't remember ever being that exhausted in my entire life.

"I was already awake" I said to Arthur. "Did you just say you found Henry?"

"Yeah. You were right, he's still in New York, a few miles outside the city. I have his address. He's been staying with an old buddy of his."

"You're sure that he's still staying there?"

"Yeah. I drove by a couple of times. The guy I saw playing with the kids at the address looks exactly like him. Unfortunately, I couldn't get access to his progress with either the Kenyan embassy or the UN office. That kind of stuff is hard to get unless he's committed a crime or violated some kind of international treaty. I hope this is enough, boss, I thought I'd call and check that it was since you gave me a tight deadline. If it's not, I can try digging some more."

"That won't be necessary. Thank you. Do you have the address with you?"

"Yeah. I can give it to you right now."

"Please do."

A few minutes after Arthur gave me the information, I was all showered and ready to go. I called in to work to excuse myself. It wasn't like my workload was what it used to be, anyway, since I was in the process of transitioning to LA.

I drove to the house where my brother was supposedly staying. It was nice—the kind of place Ishtar wanted to raise a family. The yard wasn't that big but it was sufficient for kids to play in. I judged that given the time of the day, the kids Arthur mentioned would be either in school or day-care, depending on their age and whether their parents worked during the day.

I didn't want to cause trouble for the family; if I found them there along with my brother, I would simply ask him to step away with me to a place where we could talk privately. I hoped Henry was there because if he wasn't, I wasn't sure that I would have the guts to track him down again. I was already regretting tracking him down that time anyway, since I suddenly didn't know what I wanted to say to him.

The only thing I knew with certainty was that I was angry as hell. But if he slipped away again, I wasn't sure I could dredge up the energy to put myself in that kind of state again—where I both loved and hated him at the same time, where I hated myself for hating him even a little bit.

Luckily, when I knocked on the door he opened it. I could tell he wasn't expecting to see me because as soon as he saw who was at the door, the smile he'd carried on his face suddenly disappeared. We didn't say anything to each other. We simply starred at each other, the both of us lost for words.

Judging from the scowl I imagine was present on my face, he must have figured out that Ishtar told me everything. He must have also deduced it from the fact that I'd obviously gone to a lot of trouble to find him.

He didn't make a move to try to explain himself, which strangely drew out my anger. He just looked at me like some innocent idiot.

Then finally, he opened his mouth to say something. I had decided by that point that maybe I didn't want to hear what he had to say, after all. I punched him square in the face before he spoke. He wasn't expecting that. He nearly lost his balance and fell. When he raised his face to look at me, I saw that he was suddenly as angry as me, so he returned my punch.

I hadn't expected him to take my assault lying down, but I hadn't expected him to fight back, either. So it was my turn to lose my balance. I had to retaliate, of course, and he must have felt that he had to do the same. Pretty soon we found ourselves descending even deeper into a fist fight. Ironically, he was the one who taught me how to fight when we were kids. And later on, when I joined a taekwondo class, I taught him some of the moves I learnt there.

As a result, our fighting styles were similar and it became very clear soon enough that we were somewhat evenly matched. The exhaustion of the past three days was also crashing on me pretty hard. But at the same time I realized that I couldn't just give up. I also realized that were now in the house and quite possibly destroying his relationship with his friend, because we were bound to knock each other into the furniture and destroy some of the decorative ornaments.

Henry must have realized that too because the next time he dodged my leg, he raised his hand in surrender. "Stop!" he said, breathing heavily. "Stop, Christopher. We need to talk."

My sleep-deprivation was really biting me in the ass just then. If I could have continued to fight him by sheer will, I would have done so. But my body was simply not having any of that. So I conceded his point about needing to talk. Even though that was the case, it didn't mean that I was going to be civil about it.

I asked him, "What do you have to say for yourself?"

"Ishtar told you everything?"

"Yes," I said, nodding. "She told me everything. So don't even think about lying to me."

We were both exhausted. He was bleeding from a gash I made on his lower lip, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that the bones in my right arm might have been slightly crushed. If we had the choice, we wouldn't have chosen to be in each other's company at that moment. Since we didn't exactly have that choice, we both simply leaned against the walls, facing each other and tried to regain normal breathing. There was no need to talk since we knew what the other felt.

Something was broken between us—the kind of brotherly camaraderie we would never share with anyone else except each other, but we didn't even have that anymore. Even if, at some point in our future, I decided to forgive him for his general shittiness, there was no way our relationship was ever going to be the same again. I didn't think it was possible but that broke my heart even more than what he and Ishtar did. I had just lost my big brother; I knew it and he knew it too.