Believers Never Die Pt. 1

My mother is crying. She sits on the edge of the bed, a cigarette in her hand. My father towers over her. The room is dim, and the sun barely seems to peek through the thick curtains in their room. My father tries to stay calm, tries to talk, but my mother won't have it. She snaps at him, bitter. Her voice was as sharp as knives. "Dominique, you know that's not true--" he began to say, but she snarled and cut him off.

"IT IS TRUE," she screamed. "These fucking kids ruined my life!" She stood up, shoving my father out of the way. She pushed past the door, almost right past me, but she stopped. She saw me standing there, and she glared at me. "What are you looking at?" she sneered. I didn't answer her, I just stared. She turned around, hair flowing with her every motion. As she began to leave, I could smell Chanel No. 5, but I also heard her mutter the words "worthless brat."

That is my earliest memory. I think I was three.

My mother was never happy that she was pregnant. According to my father, her reaction was to sit in her room and cry. His reaction was to drink like a fish and smoke like a chimney. Her first pregnancy was twins. Twin boys. My brother and I. Evander and Maxim Chastain. My mother gave birth to me at a German hospital. They had been staying at their estate in Bonn at the time. The main home was a gated property in Laguna Beach.. After we were born, they went back there. But they didn't take us with them.

Instead, they left Evander and i with a nanny. Her name was Ingrid, and she was an absolute angel. We didn't have our real family, so our family really became the live-in staff. We had Ingrid, our "oma," and then we also had Viktor, the butler. One of my favorites was Margot. She was our chef. She cooked the best scrambled eggs I had ever tasted in my life, and the best chocolate cake in the world. There was Christoph, the driver. He was always a pleasant guy. He listened to a lot of classical music on car rides. He once explained to me that I should enjoy classical music. It would make me more "cultured." I never what he meant, so I just nodded and went along with it. We also had Annemarie, our laundress. I'm sure there were others, but those are the only ones who stuck out to me. They were the ones who took care of me. They made me feel important.

There were a lot of lonely nights in that mansion. It just always seemed so big. Nothing ever seemed wrong about the way I lived at the time. It's only looking back that I realize it wasn't normal. Running up and down hallways with my brother was always the most fun. There were tons of places to go in that house, and it ended up being the perfect place to play hide and seek. There was a hill out back I remember sliding down on paper bags. We had a swing set, and we had a pool. It felt like I had the perfect life, until I would turn on the tv and watch television shows full of kids with loving parents and dogs and cats and goldfish. It was then that I would look at my life and think that something was missing. But it wasn't the dog. We had one of those. His name was Glenn. He was a German shepherd that liked to watch TV and climb all over me when I sat on the floor. He was my best friend, aside from my brother, and I was completely fine with that.

If it wasn't for being two kids alone in a mansion, I'm not sure that Evan and I ever would have bonded the way that we did. Our parents could have split us up if they wanted to. They had two other daughters back home in Los Angeles by the time Evan and I were three. The youngest one, they named Brooklyn. The older daughter was named Carolina. We never met or heard from them. That was always something I used to regret. But I had my brother, and that was okay with me.

We were generally well-behaved kids, other than being somewhat devilish. We liked to cause a little bit of mayhem. We would put salt in Christoph's coffee in the morning. Sometimes we would hide the eggs from Margot. I remember specifically hiding in our laundry hampers once so we could jump out and scare Annemarie. We never tricked Ingrid though. Ingrid was like our mother. We would do anything for her. I mean anything. We loved her more than our biological mother. To us, Dominique Chastain may as well have been dead, save for a few visits, and like idiots, we always went running back to her. We ran right back into her arms, thinking she would finally stay this time. She never did, and every time, we were crushed.

I remember one particular evening, I couldn't sleep. The idea that she was leaving again had upset me so bad that I couldn't sleep, but I wouldn't dare wake Ingrid. She worked too hard for me to wake her up in the middle of the night. Instead, I quietly stepped out of my bedroom, tip-toeing down the hall to Evan's room. I opened the door just a crack and stepped in. Glenn had followed me in. In silence, I stepped across the carpet, moving towards the bed. Evan was sleeping soundly. I leaned toward him. "Psssssst. Evan? Are you awake?" I asked in a whisper. I saw one of his eyes open. He nodded.

"I am now."

"I can't sleep," I explained, shrugging, hands clutching the stuffed rabbit in my hands.

Evan moved over, tugging the sheets down. "Okay, come on," he said, still groggy and half-asleep. I smiled faintly and crawled into the bed with him. I pulled the sheets on top of me and rolled onto my side, trying to go back to sleep, but I couldn't.

"Hey, Evan?" I asked.

"Yeah, Max?"

"Do you think Mommy will ever come back?"

Evan shrugged. "Probably. She usually does."

I nodded. "I wish she'd come home more."

"Me too." Evan paused. "I wish she loved us more than her job."

I rolled onto my back, and I looked at Evan. "What?"

Evan shrugged his shoulders. "She's always talking about her job. That's why she left, remember?"

I furrowed my eyebrows. "She does love us." I rolled back onto my side. "She has to," I muttered.

Yet in that same moment, I realized that Evan was right. She didn't love us. She never would.