The Prophet

8

CHELSEA CALLED AROUND noon.

“I just heard,” she said, no preamble, no questions about why Adam hadn’t returned to her in the night, why he was not at the office now, Saturday mornings traditionally being busy.

“From who?”

“Police. Came to get the file on her. There wasn’t much to it. They had a little trouble believing that.”

“They’re hopeful. I don’t blame them. I wish there was more in it, too. I wish…” He couldn’t continue, and he hoped she thought he was drunk. Somehow, that seemed better. Safer, less vulnerable. Adam? He’s not broken, he’s just drunk. Worthy of your scorn, sure, but don’t waste pity or sympathy on him, please.

“Where are you?” she said. Her voice very soft.

“Home.”

“Your home.”

“Only one I’ve got.”

“Yeah?”

He was silent. He’d spent maybe thirty nights in a row at her place. Maybe forty.

“We’re holding paper on three after this morning,” she said. “That’s probably all we will see today. The Friday night drunks are out. I’m closing up. Somebody needs us, they can call.”

“Sure, whatever.”

“Let me see you, Adam. Please?”

“All right.”

They hadn’t talked much in the years after high school. Ten of them passed without contact at all. She’d been in Cleveland for a time, and then she’d been back, and she’d been married. Travis Leonard. Ex-Army, dishonorable discharge. The first bust he took in Chambers was for selling stolen goods. She came to Adam for the bond, checkbook in hand, and he’d been angry with her, furious, because she was so much better than that guy, that life.

“This is where you ended up?” he said. “Really?”

She closed the checkbook, tilted her head, and looked around the dingy office.

“This is where you ended up, Adam? Really?”

They finished the paperwork in silence. Travis Leonard hit the streets, then promptly missed his court date. Adam came around. Travis was gone, Chelsea was home.

“You’re better off waiting inside,” she said, and that was the first time. Well, second time. First time in a decade. She kissed Adam full on the mouth as she slid off him in the predawn, then kissed her husband on the cheek as Adam slid him into the back of the Jeep two hours later when he finally came home.

There were no phone calls for a few days. He didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to see any more of what she’d become, or for her to see what he’d become. Nobody needed that.

Then one night he was on her porch. She opened the door again. And so it went.

Her house was his favorite hated place. Hated because the title was in her husband’s name but she paid the mortgage and the taxes while his dumb ass sat in county lockup; hated because it was filled with the dickhead’s snakes—he bred pythons, had sixty or seventy of them in the house at any given time, and Adam had always loathed snakes; hated because he wanted so badly to be there, always. Hated because she deserved so much better, and Adam was part of that collapse from the start.

And favorite because she was there. That part was simple, clean. The only thing that was.

It was not her fault that she carried memories. That didn’t wipe them clean, though, didn’t stop him from feeling sick with himself every time he pulled into the driveway, didn’t stop him from sometimes squeezing his eyes shut when she touched him.

She’d been seventeen when they met, a transfer from Cleveland’s West Technical High School. Her father had taken a bust and she’d left the Clark Avenue house they’d rented to move in with an aunt in Chambers. Chelsea and her mother and three sisters. Word about her had spread through the halls and the boy’s bathrooms in under an hour on the first day of school, hormonal kids tearing neck muscles to get a second glance. Winner of a genetic lottery on both sides, with an Italian mother and a Puerto Rican father, Chelsea had a different look from most of the girls in Chambers. Had a different look from most of the girls anywhere. And she had command, too, bored by childish attentions but able to lock you down and melt you with one long, amused exchange of eye contact.

She was the only distraction from football that year. Girls always were some level of distraction, but in such a small school most of the top-flight talent was paired off with somebody by senior year—all those photographs to worry about, homecoming and prom and graduation, being a single senior was a real bitch for the yearbook—but this was different, this was the new girl, and she neither carried baggage nor knew who else did, so everyone could imagine they had a shot.

Adam won.

Took a few weeks, too. Longer than he’d have liked. Longer than he was used to. The only surefire Division 1 prospect on the team, standing six-four and 215 pounds of ripcord muscle, dark hair and dark blue eyes and an easy smile, Adam was not used to the chase. He’d had to chase her, though, and at first that was part of the fun, it was a competition and Adam loved to compete. Then he got to know her, and saw all there was beyond honey skin and radiant hair and a body that promised all of the things he’d imagined since puberty. And be damned if he didn’t actually love this girl, awfully fast. Fast in the way it can go only when you’re eighteen years old.

That was the fall of 1989.

He’d been after her since mid-August, but it was September before he got the first date, a week later the first kiss—he was no stranger to girls then, but his legs trembled when he kissed her, the way they did after running the bleachers, muscle gone liquid, and he reached up and cupped the back of her head with his right palm to steady himself. She remembered that; later she told him that she thought it was a sign of his gentleman’s expertise, but he’d never told her the real reason for it, which was that he didn’t want her to feel him shaking when they kissed.

What followed was hardly so elegant. Heated make-out sessions and groping, backseats and picnic tables. They talked about having sex. He was no virgin, she’d had a bad attempt at it two years earlier and that was that.

No pressure, he joked, but when a girl kept you awake at night, when she made concentration an impossible thing, you’d better believe there was pressure. He was not Adam Austin the Ohio State recruit with Chelsea Salinas; he was a kid whose legs shook when he kissed.

Then came October 2, 1989. The Cardinals practiced late, and the daylight faded and the lights came on and everything smelled of leaves and wood smoke and autumn, everything smelled of football, the bullshit summer drills a faded memory, the real season under way, Adam’s last, and before Chelsea appeared, it was a perfect night. They were playing clean and fast and hitting hard and Coach Ward was pleased.

Then she was there. Ward called for a water break, looked at Adam, and said, “Get your girl away from my field before you start tripping over your hormones, Austin.”

Adam jogged over and said what’s up, excited because she never came to watch him practice, and he was feeling fast that day, the savage kind of fast, a wolf in snow, a shark in dark waters.

She laid her hand over his on the fence and said, “I need to see you,” and that was the first time in his adrenaline-fueled excitement that he saw the tears glittering against her eyes.

“What?”

“I’m going back to Cleveland.”

“What?”

“You have practice. Finish it. I’ll explain. I’ll wait at your car?”

All he could do was nod.

She walked away and he put his helmet on and jogged back to the field, the same autumn breeze that had seemed so perfect ten minutes ago now feeling chill and hostile.

They’d gotten through the practice, though he didn’t recall much of it, just that it had gone on too long and he was cursing Coach Ward under his breath for every extra rep. Then finally it was done, they broke for the showers, and he was rushing, toweling off his chest with one hand and pulling his pants on with the other when Kent showed up. Only a freshman but already the backup quarterback, everyone seeing the promise there, half the town ready to ditch their starter for the kid, even though their starter had lost only one game. If it were up to Adam, any of the standard big brother attitude, the wait-your-turn, don’t-steal-my-thunder posturing would be damned, too, and Kent would be under center. He was that good. Put Kent out there leading the offense and let Adam slaughter on defense, and state was guaranteed. But Coach Ward did not bench seniors for freshmen. Ever.

“Marie’s waiting,” Kent told him.

Adam was actually puzzled—no, Chelsea was waiting, and how in the hell did his little brother know?—but then he got it. Yes, Marie was also waiting. Marie had cross-country practice and Adam had the car and thus the responsibility of getting her home.

“Can’t do it,” he said.

“Huh? They got done an hour ago, man. She’s been waiting.”

“I just said I can’t do it,” Kent said, anger showing itself, except it wasn’t really anger, it was fear, it was no, no, Chelsea’s wrong, she’s not leaving, she can’t be leaving.

“Well, I’ve got to stay with the coaches. They want me watching tape. You knew this. I can’t walk her home.”

And then came the words that still woke Adam in the night two decades later, the words that on three occasions had led him to go so far as tasting the barrel of a gun, cold steel and oil on his tongue:

“It’s five fucking blocks, Franchise. She’ll make it.”

He left then. Jogged out of the locker room and into the night to meet the most important thing in his eighteen-year-old life.

Marie was walking away from the school when Adam drove out of the parking lot with Chelsea. He passed her in the dark, her head down, backpack on, walking through the chill night toward a car that no longer waited, and he thought that he would deal with that problem in the morning. She’d be angry, but he could always joke his little sister out of anger fast enough, could always raise a smile even when she desperately wanted to refuse him one. His dad was tougher, but that, too, could be dealt with, and what really mattered right now was the fact that Chelsea was being taken from him.

You had to prioritize.

He drove Chelsea to the pier. Put his letter jacket around her slim shoulders and held her when she told him that her father was going to be released in November and that meant she was gone. They’d go back to Cleveland, and they’d stay there. The city was an hour’s drive away, but that night, the idea of it was a world apart. They were standing in silence at the edge of the pier, water slapping on the pylons below, when she pulled her face away from his neck, looked into his eyes, and said, “Can we go somewhere?”

He had two blankets in the trunk of his Ford Taurus. There was a county park not far from the pier, up on the bluffs where you could see out to the lake, popular for summertime barbecues and sunsets but empty on this night, the first cold evening of autumn, with that menacing wind pushing down from Canada. They had no trouble with the cold, though. Two eighteen-year-olds, first time together? No, cold was not an issue. Snow could have been flying and they wouldn’t have cared. There was a moment, as they lay on their sides, her back to him, his hand tracing her breast, side, hip, that he knew it was going to be a night that lingered, something they would talk about when they were old, because the first time with the right one, the one that lasted? There was nothing else like it on this earth. Tonight would linger with him, always. He was sure of it.

He made it home by eleven.

The first of the police cars was in the driveway.

Twenty-two years later, as he drove to her husband’s house through a light rain, he remembered the police questions, the look in his father’s eyes, his mother leaving the room.

The last five hours, you’ve been where?

The pier and the park.

Doing what?

Talking, man, hanging out.

You just forgot to give your sister a ride, is that it?

Well, no, my brother reminded me. But it was kind of an emergency.

Marie was still gone at three, and then at six, and then any half-hearted hope that she might have gone to a friend’s house and fallen asleep or broken an ankle or, hell, even run off with a boy to do the same damn thing Adam had done was gone. The questions grew more pointed, the truth more painful.

Yes, I was supposed to take her home.

No, I did not.

I got in the car with Chelsea Salinas and drove away. We were at the pier, then the park. We had sex on a blanket.

No, I did not call to tell my parents I’d left Marie to walk home alone.

Yes, I passed her heading out of the parking lot.

No, I did not stop to speak to her.

No, I did not see her on the street when I came home.

But he felt that he had. In fact, he felt that she was still there, that on the right night, with the right half-moon rising behind charcoal clouds above the lake, walking into the right cold breeze, he might find her heading into the parking lot in search of the car he’d driven away from her. Felt that if he hit all of those elements just perfectly, he’d see her marching through the dark and toward the lights of the football field, backpack on, and she’d turn and look at his slowing car and flash the cautious smile before remembering that the braces were gone and then finally letting the smile go wide and radiant. She would slide into the passenger seat, call him a jerk, and he’d get her home. Back to her bedroom, where the sign warned away trespassers. It was still possible, somehow, it had to be, because if it wasn’t? Well, fuck this world, then.

He was sitting with his head on the steering wheel, his eyes dry but closed, when Chelsea opened the driver’s door and laid a cool hand on the back of his neck. He eased out a slow breath, kept it from shuddering with an effort, but left his forehead on the wheel and his eyes closed.

“It was five blocks,” he said.

She rubbed his neck, silent.

“Half a mile,” he said.

Her fingers found a knot, kneaded it.

“Rachel Bond was seventeen,” he said. “Did I know that? No. Should I have seen it? Yes. You would have. If you’d been there, if anyone but me had been there…”

She stopped kneading, let her fingertip rest on the knot, gentle but steady pressure, like a doctor trying to draw infected blood. Something faded from him and into the touch, but not the right thing, or not enough of it.

“Seventeen,” he said again.

“Come inside,” she told him, and moved her hand away from his neck.

He shut off the Jeep’s engine, climbed out, and followed her up the steps and through the door to see the snakes.