Redemption Road

33

Adrian sat in a broken-down room staring at a small fortune in gold. Half a million in the room. Another five and change still in the dirt. He thought of Elizabeth’s last words. Stay away from me. Stay away from this place.

Could he really do that?

The only feelings he’d known were fear and lonesomeness and rage. The love was for a dead man, and that had been a shadow for so long he didn’t know what to do with the feelings he had now.

Liz was real.

She mattered.

Flicking the curtain, he peered out at a fifteen-year-old Subaru he’d rolled off a dirt lot in exchange for a handful of coins. He’d been ready to leave before news of his wife broke. He was going to go west-Colorado or Mexico-but things were different now. His wife was dead, and there was this thing in Liz’s voice, a quiet desperation not every man would recognize.

“What do I do, Eli?”

He touched his lips where Liz had kissed him.

Eli didn’t answer.

The girl passed out as he carried her to a shady place beside the car. The tremble stopped, and she went limp on his shoulder, a tiny thing he could lift with a single arm. But she was a fighter, and there was clarity in the fighters.

They were more like Liz.

The eyes went deeper.

He put the girl in the grass and checked himself in the mirror. His neck was cut low, near the collarbone. He touched a bloody lump on his scalp, then pulled an old towel from the car and pressed it against his neck. The cut hurt, but he accepted the pain because he’d hurt the girl, too. It was the shock of pain and wounded pride. They drove him to needless harm, yet that was the cycle. Sin feeds sin. The spiral draws deeper and down. He studied the girl’s face, swollen and bloody, and it wasn’t the first time he’d hardened himself. Julia Strange was not an easy kill, either. He’d found her in the church, alone and on her knees. No one was supposed to be there, and even now he wondered what his life would be had he left a step sooner. But she’d heard him and turned. And when she’d looked at him with those bottomless eyes, the sight of her anguish jolted him. She’d been beaten and humbled, but the hurt ran more deeply than the swollen jaw or bloody lip. It plumbed the depths of her eyes and rendered her into something… more. The glimpse lasted but a moment, but he saw the hurt, and beneath the hurt, the innocence. She was a child again, and lost. He wanted to take away the pain; that’s how it started. But he didn’t know what he’d find in her eyes, or what the finding would do to him. Even now it was a blur: the whirl of emotion, the feel of her skin beneath his fingers. That’s where it started; she was the first. Thirteen years later, it would end with Elizabeth. It had to, so he hardened himself.

But for now there was the girl.

He was gentle as he stripped and cleaned her. He kept his thoughts chaste, as always, but wanted to be done because already it felt wrong. The altar he’d made was in the trees and was only of plywood and sawhorses. He tried to keep the frustration in check, but she didn’t look right when he roped her down and spread the linen. Too much yellow was in the light, and not enough church. He wanted the pinks and reds, the vaulted hush. He dragged a hand through his hair, trying to convince himself.

He could make it happen.

It could work.

But the girl was a mess, her face battered from the tree, a red stain where her stomach wound leaked through the linen. He was bothered because the purity mattered, as did the light, the location. Would it work like this? He pushed the question down. He was here. So was she. So he leaned close, hoping to find what he needed at the bottom of her eyes. It never happened fast. It took trial and error, his hands on the neck not once or twice, but many times.

He waited for her to wake, then choked her once so she would know it was real. “We’ll start slowly,” he said; then choked her like that so she would have no doubt. He took her to the edge of blackness and held her there. Small movements of his hands, whispers of air. “Show me the girl. Show me the child.” He let her breathe once, then rose to his toes and leaned into it as she fought and choked. “Shhh. We all suffer. We all feel pain.” He put more weight on his hands. “I want to see the real you.”

He choked her long and deep, then hard and fast. He used every trick he’d ever learned, tried a dozen times more, but knew it wouldn’t work.

The eyes were swollen shut.

He couldn’t see her.

Channing didn’t know why she was still alive. She knew pain and darkness, thought she was in the silo, then realized there was movement, too. She was back in the car. Same smell. Same tarp. She touched her face with bound hands and realized most of the darkness came from swollen eyes. She could barely see, but knew she was dressed and breathing and alive…

A strangled sound escaped her throat.

How long?

She relived his hands and the blackness, the yellow trees and his hungry face.

How long had he tried to kill her?

She swallowed, and it was like glass ripping her throat. She touched her neck and curled more tightly in the dim, blue space.

Where was he taking her?

Why was she still alive?

Those worries ate at her until a more disturbing one twisted through the tangle of her thoughts: his face beneath the trees. No hat. No glasses. He’d looked different in a way she couldn’t process; but sober now, and desperately alive, she remembered where she’d seen him.

Oh, God…

She knew exactly who he was.

The revelation terrified her because the truth of it was so perverse. How could it possibly be him?

But it was, and it wasn’t just the face. She knew the voice, too. He was making calls as the car worked from one street to the next, making calls and muttering angrily between them. He was looking for Liz and getting frustrated that he couldn’t find her. No one knew where she was; she wasn’t answering her phone. He called the police station, her mother; and once-through a crack in the tarp-Channing saw the blur of Elizabeth’s house. She recognized the shape, the trees.

The Mustang was gone.

Channing sobbed after that and couldn’t help it. She wanted to be in the car with Elizabeth, or in her house or in the dark of her bed. She wanted to be safe and unafraid, and only Liz could make that happen. So she said the name in her mind-Elizabeth-and it must have leaked through into the real world, because suddenly the car slowed to a hard, rocking stop. Channing froze, and for a long moment nothing happened. His voice, when it came, was quiet. “You love her, don’t you?” Channing squeezed into a ball. “It makes me wonder if she loves you, too. Do you think she does? I think she probably must.” He went quiet, fingers drumming on the wheel. “Do you have a phone? I’ve been trying to reach her, but she won’t pick up. I think she might answer if she saw your number.”

Channing held her breath.

“A phone.”

“No. No phone.”

“Of course not. No. I’d have seen it.”

A long silence followed, heat under the tarp. When he started driving again, Channing watched a stretch of buildings and trees, then a span of chain-link stained with rust. The car started down, and she felt the sun disappear, caught glimpses of yellow houses and pink ones, the long slide into some dim hollow. When the car stopped again, he turned off the engine and silence filled everything for another terrible minute.

“Do you believe in second chances?” he asked.

Channing smelled her own sweat, the fog of her breath.

“Second chances. Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“Will you be useful to me if I ask?”

Channing bit her lip and tried not to sob.

“Useful, damn it! Yes or no?”

“Yes. God. Please.”

“I’m going to take you out of the car and carry you inside. There’s no one around, but if you make a sound, I’ll hurt you. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

She felt the car rock and heard the hatch open. He lifted her, still in the tarp. They crossed bare dirt, went up stairs and through a door. Channing saw little until the tarp came off; then it was his face and the four walls of a dingy bath. He put her in the tub and cuffed an ankle to the radiator beside it.

“Why are you doing this?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

He stripped silver tape off a roll.

She watched it, terrified. “Please, I want to! I want to understand!”

He studied her, but she saw the doubt. It was in there with the crazy and the sadness and the grim determination. “Be still.”

But she could not. She fought as he slapped tape across her mouth and wrapped it twice around her head.

When it was done, he stood above her, looking down. She was small in the tub, and horrified, a tiny thing the color of chalk. She said she wanted to understand, and maybe she did. But no one looking in could appreciate the beauty of what he was trying to do. She’d use the same words as the cops. Serial killer. Dangerous. Deranged. Only Liz-at the end-would understand the truth that drove him, that he did these things for the noblest reason of all, the love of a precious girl.

Gideon liked the hospital because everything was clean and people were nice. The nurses smiled; the doctor called him “Sport.” He didn’t understand a lot of what was said and done, but followed parts of it. The bullet had made a small, clean hole and hit no organs or major nerves. It nicked an important artery, though, and people liked to tell him how lucky he was, that he’d made the hospital just in time and that the surgeon had stitched him just right. They liked to make him feel good, but sometimes, if he turned his head fast enough, he’d catch the whispers and strange, sideways looks. He thought that was about what he’d tried to do, because Adrian Wall was all over the television and he was the boy who’d tried to kill him. Maybe it was about his dead mother and the bodies under the church. Or maybe it was about his father.

The old man had been fine for the first day. He’d been calm and quiet, and even respectful. At some point, though, that changed. He got moody and sullen and short with the nurses. His eyes were red all the time, and Gideon woke more than once to find him staring out from under the bill of an old cap, lips moving as he stared at his son and whispered words Gideon couldn’t hear. Once, when a nurse suggested his father go home and get some sleep, he came to his feet so fast the chair scraped. There’d been a look in his eyes, too, something that scared even Gideon.

After that, none of the nurses lingered when the old man was in the room. They didn’t smile and tease out stories. But it worked out in a way. Gideon’s father stayed away most of the time. When he chose to appear, he curled on the chair or slept. At times he stayed under a hospital blanket, and only Gideon knew he had bottles under there, too. He could hear them clanking in the dark, the gurgle when his father lifted the blanket and tipped one back.

It was the pattern. And if the drinking went longer and deeper than usual, Gideon didn’t blame him. They both had reason to hate, and Gideon, too, knew the ache of failure. He didn’t pull the trigger, and that made him as weak as his father. So he tolerated the drunkenness and long stares, the time his father stumbled to the bathroom and vomited until the sun rose. And when the nurses asked Gideon about the mess, he’d said it was him; that the painkillers made him sick.

After that they gave him Tylenol and let him hurt.

He didn’t mind.

The room was kept dark, and in the gloom he saw his mother’s face, not as a photograph-flat and faded-but as it must have been when she was alive, the color of it, the animation of her smile. The memory couldn’t be real, but he played it like a favorite movie, over and over and bright in the dark. The confession caught him by surprise.

“She died because of me.”

Gideon started because he didn’t know his father was in the room. He hadn’t been for hours, but now he was by the bed, his fingers hooked on the rail, a look on his face of desperation and shame.

“Please, don’t hate me. Please, don’t die.”

Gideon wasn’t going to die. The doctors had said as much, but his father’s breakdown was complete: red eyes and swollen face, the smell from his mouth like something pickled. “Where have you been? When did you get here?”

“You don’t know how it is, son. You don’t see how it piles up-the things we do, the consequence when we love and trust and let others inside. You’re just a boy. How could you know anything about betrayal or hurt or what a man can do if he’s pushed?”

Gideon sat up straighter; felt stitches pull in his chest. “What are you talking about? No one died because of you.”

“Your mother.”

“What about her?”

Robert Strange pulled once on the rail, then rocked onto his knees as a bottle clattered from a coat pocket and slid across the floor. “It was just an argument, that’s all. Okay, wait. No. That’s a lie, and I promised no more lies. I hit her, yes, three times. But just the three, three times and done. I did that, but apologized. I swore to her son. I told her she didn’t need to leave me or go to the church. She’d done a bad thing. Yes, okay. But, I’d already forgiven her, so there was no sin to pray for, no need for God or the cross or reason to pray for me, either. All she had to do was stay with us, and I would forgive every bad thing she’d ever done, the lies and distortions and the secrets of her heart. Tell me you see it, son. So many years I’ve watched it eat you alive, to be motherless and stuck with me, alone. Tell me you forgive me, and I think maybe I could sleep without dreams. Tell me I did what any husband would do.”

“I don’t understand. You hit her?”

“It wasn’t like I planned it or enjoyed it.” Robert pulled at his hair and left it spiked. “The bad part happened so fast, my fists… that was twenty seconds, and maybe less. I never meant it. I didn’t want her to leave, didn’t think she’d die over twenty seconds. Just like that, one, two, three…”

He was moving his fingers-counting-and Gideon blinked as it all soaked in. “She went to the church because of you?”

“Her killer must have found her there.”

“She died because of you?”

The question was hard, and the father grew still, his head tilting so light caught in his eyes. “You still think she’s some kind of saint, don’t you, some perfect thing? I understand that, I do. A boy should feel that way about his mother. But she left you in that crib, son. I was angry, yes, and maybe I broke up the kitchen and smashed some things, and maybe I lied to the cops about what really happened. But she’s the one who left.”

“Only because you hurt her.”

“Not just because of that.” He slumped to the floor and hugged the bottle to his chest. “Because she loved Adrian Wall more than she loved me.”

Gideon struggled with it all: the man on the floor, the revelation. His mother loved Adrian Wall. What did that mean? Did he kill her or not?

Gideon looked again at his father. He sat with his arms around his knees, his face buried. There’d been no abduction. His mother met her killer at the church or some other place. Not in his kitchen. Not as he’d watched from the crib.

Was it Adrian?

How could Gideon know? Could she possibly love him? That question was too big. It was massive, incomprehensible.

There’d been no abduction…

The boy closed his eyes because the larger questions were coming hard and fast.

Was she leaving for good?

Was she leaving him?

She couldn’t be that flawed, that… wrong.

“She was a good woman, son, warm-spirited and loving, but as conflicted as the rest of us.”

“Reverend. Black?”

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, Gideon. It seemed like an important moment, and I didn’t want to interrupt, either.”

“You startled me. I barely recognize you.”

“It’s the beard, or the lack of it. Then there’re the clothes. I don’t always wear black, you know.” The preacher stood in the gloom at the edge of a green curtain. He smiled and stepped all the way inside. “Hello, Robert. I’m sorry to see you in such a state. Let me help you.” He extended a hand and drew Gideon’s father to his feet. “Difficult times, I’m sure. We must strive to rise above them.”

“Reverend.”

Robert dipped his head and tried to tuck the bottle out of sight. Reverend Black smiled. “Weakness is not a sin, Robert. God built us all with special flaws and left us the challenge of addressing them. Facing the things that hurt us most is the real test. If you came to church with your son, you might understand the difference.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Next Sunday, perhaps.”

“Thank you, Reverend.”

“What are you drinking?”

“Uh…” Robert scrubbed a forearm across his face and cleared his throat. “It’s just bourbon. I’m sorry… uh. What I said about Julia. Hitting her, I mean. I guess you heard that?”

“It’s not my place to judge you, Robert.”

“But, do you think I got her killed, somehow? She ran from me, and then she died. Do you understand how it could be like that?” Robert was teary-eyed, still breaking. “I’ve carried that secret for so long. Please tell me she didn’t die because of me.”

“I’ll tell you what.” The reverend put an arm around Robert’s shoulders and took the bottle, holding it up to find it almost full. “Why don’t you find someplace quiet?” The reverend walked him past the bed, toward the door. “Not home. A place close by. Take this with you, and have a nice quiet drink. Spend some time with your thoughts.”

Robert took the bottle. “I don’t understand.”

“The garden, perhaps, or the parking garage. I don’t really care.”

“But…”

“No one knows more than I about the depths of human frailty. Your own. Those of your wife. I’d like to help your son understand, if I can. In the meantime, enjoy the bottle. I give you permission.” Reverend Black pushed him into the hall and closed the door down to a crack. “Tomorrow is soon enough to contemplate the multitude of your sins.”

He closed the door the rest of the way and stood for a long time in the silence. To Gideon, he looked different, and it wasn’t just the clothes or missing beard. He seemed stiffer, narrower. When he spoke, he sounded less forgiving, too. “Your father is a weak man.”

“I know.”

“A man with no will for necessary things.”

The reverend turned from the door, and his face was all dark eyes and angles. They’d spoken often of necessary things. Sundays after church. Long prayers on difficult nights. And the prayers weren’t like Sunday sermons. The reverend had explained it more than once, but Gideon didn’t pretend to understand it all: the Old Testament versus the New, an eye for an eye as opposed to a turned cheek. What Gideon did understand was the concept of necessary things. Those were the things you felt in your heart that no one else would do for you. They were difficult things, things you kept to yourself until it was time to act. The acting is where he’d failed. “About Adrian Wall…”

“Shhh.” The reverend held up a hand, then pulled a chair beside the bed. “You did nothing wrong.”

“I didn’t pull the trigger.”

“All I ever said was to follow your heart and be unafraid to act. Adrian Wall’s fate was always in larger hands than your own.”

Gideon frowned because that’s not how he remembered it. The reverend’s talk of necessary things had not been so much about following as about acting. Always the acting.

This is the time they let prisoners out.

This is the place they go.

The best place for you to hide.

It seemed wrong coming from the reverend, but sometimes Gideon misunderstood the big concepts. God did drown the world. He did turn Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt. It all made sense when the reverend explained it. Cleansings. Punishment. Creative destruction. “I thought you’d be angry with me.”

“Of course not, Gideon. You’re a child and wounded by fate. You should also understand that necessary things are rarely easy things. If they were, then there’d be no distinction between men of will and those of low character. I’ve always believed you to be the former, and no imagined failing could dissuade me of that conviction. You’ve always had an eager soul. Your mother can see that, you know.” The reverend touched Gideon’s hand. “The question now is, if you’re still willing to help me.”

“Of course. Always.”

“Good boy. Good. This may hurt a little.” The reverend stood and stripped the needle from Gideon’s arm.

“Ow.”

“I want you to get dressed and come with me.”

“But the doctor…”

“Who do you trust more, the doctor or me?”

The preacher’s eyebrow went up, and the stare between them held, one of them unflinching and hard, the other unusually frightened. “My clothes are in the closet.”

The preacher crossed the room and found the clothing. At the bed, he offered the first real smile Gideon had seen. “Come along now. Quickly.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gideon climbed shakily from the bed. He was weak. His chest hurt. He got one leg in his pants, then the other. When he straightened, he saw the preacher’s blood. “Your neck is bleeding.” He pointed at the preacher’s neck, and when the old man touched it, his fingers came back red. Gideon saw then that the collar was bloody, too, and that a purple bruise was spreading along the side of his neck. It all felt wrong: the preacher in red flannel and bleeding, the way he’d stripped out the needle and sent Gideon’s father off to get drunk.

“How did you hurt yourself?”

“It’s like I told you, son.” The preacher tossed a shirt at the boy. “The necessary things are rarely the easy ones.”

After that nothing felt exactly right. The way he looked Gideon up and down, how he checked the hall and spoke too quietly. “Balance okay? You can walk?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then walk normally. If someone speaks to you, let me respond.”

Gideon followed him out and kept his head down. He knew it wasn’t right, what they were doing. The doctor had been clear: A week at least. Those are delicate stitches in your chest. We don’t want to knock them loose.

“I think I’m bleeding.”

They were alone in the elevator, Reverend Black watching floors tick down. “That’s normal,”

“Is it a lot?”

“It’s fine.” But, he didn’t even look. They went from the fifth floor to the second, where the elevator stopped and a nurse got on. She looked at Gideon, then at the gash on the preacher’s neck. She opened her mouth, but Reverend Black cut her off. “What are you looking at?”

The nurse shut her mouth; faced front.

Out of the elevator other people stared, too, but no one stopped them. They went through the ER and out the glass door. In the parking lot, Gideon struggled as they moved faster through the crowded lot. He felt weak. The sun was too bright.

“This is not your car.”

“It runs.”

Gideon hesitated. He’d been in the preacher’s car before, a minivan with immaculate paint and a cross on the plates. This one was small and dirty and, in places, rusted through.

“Let’s get you situated.” Reverend Black pushed Gideon into the car, then strapped him down and slid behind the wheel.

Gideon wrinkled his nose. “It smells funny in here.”

“How about some quiet while we drive?”

The reverend turned the key and drove them through town and out to the poor side of things. Air whistled through his teeth as the car moved, and Gideon thought at first they were going to the old, white church on its skinny lot. The thought comforted him because he’d always felt safe in the church. He liked the hymns and the candles, the cushions and wood and velvet hassocks. The church was little, but Gideon felt the warmth of it, too. The preacher had a deep voice, and his wife was like the perfect grandmother. Elizabeth would often drive him to Sunday service. She wouldn’t go in, but was always waiting for him when he came out, and that, too, was special. But they passed the turn for the church. He watched it fade as the preacher drove instead to the hillside road that dropped into the dim, cool shade that seemed to lie so often on Gideon’s house. “We’re going to my house?”

“I need a special favor. Will you do that, son? Grant me a special favor?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I never doubted you. Not once.”

The reverend pulled to a stop near the porch and got the front door open. His movements seemed hurried and erratic. Tripping once on the stairs. Darting eyes and color in his face. Inside, the air was stuffy, all the curtains were drawn. He got Gideon onto the sofa and sat him down.

“This favor. You need to be smart and do it right.” The reverend pushed a phone into Gideon’s hands. “Call her. Tell her you want to see her.”

Gideon felt the wrongness piling up: the eagerness and dry lips, the sudden, fierce intensity. “I don’t understand. Call who?”

“Elizabeth.” The preacher took the phone from Gideon’s fingers and dialed a number. “Tell her you need to see her. Tell her to come here.”

“Why?”

“Tell her that you miss her.”

Gideon kept his eyes on Reverend Black and waited for Elizabeth to answer the phone. It took five rings, then Gideon said what he’d been asked to say. There was a silence after his words; in the hesitation, he said, “I just miss you is all.”

He listened for ten more seconds, and when she hung up, it felt like part of the wrongness. Why he was home. Why he was calling her.

“What’d she say?”

Eager fingers took the phone, and Gideon felt a strange regret. “She said I shouldn’t be out of the hospital.”

“What about the rest of it?”

“She’s coming.”

“Now?”

“Yes, sir.”

The preacher got up and paced the room twice. He took Gideon’s arm and led him to the bathroom. “The next thing is really important.”

“What?”

He squared up the boy and put heavy hands on his shoulders. “Don’t scream.”

Gideon didn’t know the girl in the tub. Silver tape covered her mouth and was wrapped around her head two or three times. Her wrists were taped, too; but Gideon stared mostly at the swollen eyes. She was chained to the radiator, wrapped in a tarp. “Reverend…?”

The preacher put him on the toilet seat and knelt as the girl struggled. “You don’t want to do that.”

Gideon, watching, knew he’d never seen anyone so frightened in all his life. The girl was wide-eyed and grew still. He tried to understand, but it felt as if the world had changed while he slept, as if the sun had set one day and come up dark the next. “Reverend?”

“Stay here. Stay quiet.”

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

“Do you trust me, son? Do you believe I know what’s right and what’s wrong?”

“Yes, sir.” But he really didn’t. The door closed, and Gideon sat still. The girl was watching him, and that made it worse. “Does it hurt?” he whispered.

She moved her head up and down, slowly.

“I’m sorry for the reverend,” Gideon said. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”