Tweedledum and Tweedledee by Willow Rose Page B

don't know anything about us."
    My mother sighed and gesticulated, resigned. "Okay. So I was gone. So I don't know much about what has been going on with you. What do you want from me? I'm trying here, Emma. I'm trying to get back in your life, but you won't let me."
    "No, you're not, Mom. You're not even trying to get to know us again. You never ask about anything. You never asked me about my divorce or how it affected Victor and Maya. You never asked about how it has been for me to have to raise a kid with several diagnoses for mental illnesses, what it has been like to run from doctor to doctor only to get more confused and have no real answers. If you're so interested in us, like you claim to be, you would at least ask me how I've been."
    My mom snorted again, then sipped her white wine with tight lips. I felt a knot in my stomach. I hated conflicts. I hated fights. My dad did too. He looked insecure and very, very uncomfortable. He was squirming in his chair and sweating heavily.
    "Now, anyone up for dessert?" he asked. "I hear they make a killer Tiramisu. I always wanted to try the real thing in a real Italian restaurant."
    I scoffed, leaned over and kissed my dad on the forehead. "Nothing for me, Dad. I need to get Victor back. Come on boys. We're leaving."
     

31
    April 2014
    I WAS EXHAUSTED FROM the fight when I got back to the upper deck. Victor had calmed down a little now and was trotting along behind me, while flipping pages in his book. I felt horrible. Especially for Christoffer, for coming into the middle of all this. Part of me wanted to go back and apologize to my mother, but the other part was happy that I had told her those things. It was, after all, the truth. It was hard for me to let her into my life again, since I was still so angry with her for leaving. It wasn't something that simply passed after a few days together. It was a deep-rooted anger that was eating me up inside.
    I called Morten from my room, while Victor and Christoffer watched a show on the TV. I walked on the balcony and talked with him for almost an hour. It helped a lot. Morten could do that. He could always make me feel better.
    "Thank you for being there," I said, when I was about to hang up.
    "No problem. Things are pretty boring around here with you guys out of town anyway, so I have all the time in the world."
    "Yeah, I wish I could say the same about this place. It's crazy. Well, I better get going. Talk to you later?"
    "Absolutely."
    I threw myself on the couch next to Victor, who was watching some strange documentary again on the History Channel. This time it was showing some forensic investigator working on a murder case. The story was quite macabre. It was all in English, but I sensed Victor understood a lot of it anyway. He did take English in school, so that was probably why.
    I found my iPad and opened Facebook. I scrolled through my friend's updates and soon concluded nothing much was happening in their lives. I opened a Danish news site and read some news updates and soon concluded that nothing much had happened there. But there was one article that made me stop and read. It was the story about the race driver Alonzo Colombo, who was now detained by the police and accused of having murdered his wife and son on a cruise ship along the Italian coast. The article went through the events as the police believed they had taken place onboard the ship. And then the things that puzzled them. For one, they hadn't found the body of the son yet. They had searched the waters at the harbor of Sorrento with divers and boats, but found nothing. They knew Alonzo Colombo had left the ship on the day of the son's disappearance and been away most of the day. Unlike the other passengers aboard, he and his wife hadn't gone on the trip to Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii. He had taken a rented limo and gone to visit friends of his who were vacationing in the town in a place up a great hill. They had searched the house and the cliffs and waters