Eden's Echo

at when you died. Even when I’m forty, you will still be a sixteen-year-old girl living inside me. That’s never going to change, you will always be younger than me mentally from here on out. You have the reasoning of a freshly turned sixteen-year-old, and a rebellious one at that. I’m a full year past that physically, but mentally, I am much older than you, and you know it. Part of that is because I had you with me all these years like an older sibling, but now—now I am the older one, the more mature one. For me, you've never been like a mother, but more like a big sister. No offense.”
I grabbed a change of clothes from my dresser, and again there was silence, but this time, it was not accompanied by the undeniable bitterness, and brooding Echo had felt before. I knew she was trying to think of a comeback. I felt it in her calculating mood. It irked me that she could hear my every thought, but I could only hear the thoughts she felt like sharing. It hardly seemed fair that she was afforded the luxury of privacy. At least the feeling of emotions went both ways, so even if I couldn’t hear what Echo was thinking, I could feel the emotions behind whatever her thoughts were.
Well, sisters are cooler than moms anyway. I’m glad we have this kind of relationship.
She had a happy cadence to her thoughts, but she wasn’t fooling me. There was no hiding the real emotions underlying her comment, and they were anything but happy. She had no one to blame but herself. There’d been a time when I’d put Echo’s wants before my own, and it landed me in trouble more times than I cared to think about. I needed to live my life, my way, except for one thing—taking medicine. It was part of having “Dissociative Identity Disorder.” The only problem was that the medication made it hard for me to connect with Echo. I didn’t know why—it just did. As much as Echo sometimes annoyed me, her voice was not one I was willing to live without. So, as a result, I’d been faking taking my meds for years. As I walked down the hall toward the bathroom, I decided to appeal to Echo again about my birth father.
“Echo, I know you don’t like talking about it, but can you tell me anything at all about my father, please? I need to know something, anything! He’s half of who I am.”
Echo sighed, and I felt the turmoil over the decision she was trying to make. The acceptance and rejection of her options see-sawed up and down as the contemplation continued, and I waited patiently for her to decide which way she’d go.
He was gorgeous and sinfully sexy.
Her description made me cringe.
“Okay, Echo, let me just stop you right there. While I do want to know about him, can you try to tone down the lustful references, this is my father we’re talking about. I don’t want THAT kind of picture of him in my head.”
 My cheeks were on fire as Echo’s giggle reverberated through my mind. She found the whole thing funny.
We’ll just say he was incredibly handsome, tall, fit, successful, and—older. He was eight years older, to be exact.
Letting loose a shocked gasp, I said, “Wait, what! He was an adult, Echo? Like a, ‘hey I can buy alcohol,’ adult? Damn, no wonder you didn’t tell anyone! If Dad knew, he would have killed him, just for looking at you. And I don’t want to think about what Papa would have done.”
Exactly, and while your grandfather would have been upset, it was Daryl, I would have had to worry about. So, now you start to see my dilemma—anyway, your father showed me things no boy my age could fathom, and I was head over heels in love with him. He came from a wealthy family that carried a lot of weight in the political world, but that wasn’t his calling. He’d chosen a different path when it came to his professional life. So, he was already on their crap list for not following in his parent's footsteps. Family meant everything to him, and since he was already walking a thin line with his, we had to keep our love a secret. They would have flipped out over how young I was. The fact that I was half black and half Native American would have caused a problem with them as well. His entire family was French, originally from Louisiana, and extremely racist.
Her voice, which was dreamy when her tale had begun, turned frigid. I’d set the showerhead to spray, letting the hot water run over my skin. Thinking about what Echo said made me realize something I’d never even considered before because of my lack of information. I’d never known exactly what the other half of my lineage was until now. I always assumed I was mixed because I’d always been lighter-skinned than the rest of my family, but now I knew why—I was half white. Excitement over the prospect of having a reason to research a new culture filled me with instant wonder and curiosity. I wanted to know everything there was to know about this newfound French side of me.
“So now I know he was all these things, but come on Echo pass over the deets. You know, like what he looked like and how much I do or don’t look like him.”
My answer was one long breathy sigh—she’d had it bad for my father. She was reminiscing silently, and I felt the emotions that came with those memories. They were intense, unrelenting, and left me breathless. I’d never felt anything like it. If what I felt radiating from her was love, I definitely wanted it someday. It was beyond intoxicating. I could tell, there was nothing that Echo wouldn’t have done for—then all the feelings materialized a single word, “Danny.”
“Woah, was that his name? Was my father’s name, Danny?”
The light-hearted, in love feelings, vanished. Anger and blame replaced them, but those emotions weren’t directed at me.