The Judas Child (53 page)

And now the half-deafened child watched the bits of a man’s skull, his hair and flesh fly away from the back of his head. Gwen felt oddly detached, hardly noticing the spray of blood from the last bullet.

It was unreal.

“Sadie?”

The whole world had gone utterly silent. With all the strength she had left, Gwen tried to stand, but her body only rolled to one side, and now her face was half buried in the dirt, one eye in darkness and one turned to the light.

Two men were rushing through the door. One had great sad eyes, and the tails of his long coat flapped like black wings as he ran toward her. The other man with the brown jacket and dark red hair was first to reach her side.

She could hear now—a pounding of more feet on the stairs, and then she saw the pant legs of other people running into the cellar. Their voices and their footsteps blended into the chatter and static of radios; all the sounds seemed to come from a great distance. Though she lay still, Gwen had the sensation of moving away from these people, away from the light, gliding along on black water. She knew this river, but what was its name?

Back to the world again—cold, so cold. Strong arms were rolling her dead weight, and her face was turned out of the dirt and toward the bright lights of the ceiling. The man with the dark red hair was lifting her up from the ground and holding her close, bringing her inside the sheepskin jacket, warming her with his fleece and the heat of his body.

All the while, the other man’s voice was crying, “Ali, Jesus, Ali!”

But what of Sadie?

Gwen knew nothing anymore but the darkness of her passage through delirium and the lightness of floating on the black river. As the current gently rocked her in a warm fleece-lined boat upon the water, she slowly turned to face the other child, small and solemn, left behind on the receding shore—left
behind
.

Ali Cray had lost her paper slippers, and
the belt on her hospital robe came undone as she ran barefoot down the corridor of the pediatric wing, racing toward the room of the screaming child.

The doctors had encouraged her to walk on the day after surgery, but now, more than two weeks later, the short run down the hall had exhausted her. She leaned against the door frame, catching her breath as she watched the spectacle of two adults terrorizing a little girl who could not even walk yet. Half of Ali’s sympathy went to the terrorists, for the parents meant well.

Marsha Hubble was hovering over her child. “We talked about this, Gwen. I know you—”

“Don’t say it!” Gwen put her hands over her ears, yelling, “No! Don’t you say it
again
!”

“Oh, honey, please,” her father was begging. And now they both fluttered around the little girl, trying to calm her with soft words and helpless gestures, reaching out to touch her. Gwen batted their hands away, then covered her ears again, screaming to block out their words. The parents would seem like monsters to this ten-year-old; their speech would be the ramblings of lunatics. Even as the Hubbles were professing their love, they were trying to stab the child in the heart with their own vision of what had happened in that cellar.

And now the Hubbles had noticed Ali. The moment might have been comic if the child were not so distressed. The parents froze in position, then their hands slowly dropped as they backed away from the child’s bed. Did they look a little sheepish? Yes, they did.
Good
. Healing was a long process. A young body recovered quickly; the mind must take its own time.

“This is not what we agreed on.” Ali waved in the general direction of the door to say that the parents must leave the room, and right now. “I’ll speak to you in a few minutes.”
After I clean up the damage.

Marsha Hubble made no protest, for Ali had fought her and beaten her down. The woman quietly followed her husband into the corridor. Ali closed the door, shutting them out to protect Gwen from any more assaults by good intention, from pain in a child’s best interests.

“Hello, baby.” Ali pulled a chair up to the bed and smiled at the dazed little girl. “I came to say goodbye. I’m going home today. Another doctor will be stopping by to see you this afternoon. I think you’ll like her.” But the parents would not. The child psychiatrist Ali had selected was known for siding with children against parents.

The girl’s small hand curled around her own. “Before you go—”

“I’ll talk to them, Gwen.” The concept of a child’s autonomy was always a difficult sell. Eventually, the parents would come to understand the child’s right to own her faith in Sadie Green. “They make mistakes sometimes, but they love you, Gwen—more than anything in the world.”

“I know. But they want me to change so I can see it their way. My way is better.”

“I think so too.” And Ali believed this, though it shattered the fundamentals of her profession. She sat back for a moment and regarded this young girl who lent credence to the rumor that all of St. Ursula’s children were a bit strange. There was certainly more to Gwen than her parents supposed. They had defined her as perpetually frightened, but Ali strongly disagreed. Reading psyche was an art, and with an artist’s eye, she had come to admire Gwen. The child had more presence in the world than most adults—and the courage of conviction.

“Now I’m going to go out in the hall and yell at your parents. I’ll get them back in line, all right?”

Gwen nodded, but she would not let go of Ali’s hand. “You were there. You know what happened. You saw.”

“No, baby, I wish I had.” Her own eyes had been fixed on the monster—or as Sadie would say, The Fly, the insect. Over all the long days of healing, Ali had also learned a lot from the late Sadie Green, and she agreed with that valiant child’s estimation of Myles Penny: he had been less of a man than the poor brutalized dog lying under the oak trees.

Ali had not seen the miracle in the cellar, yet she could not shake the images that Gwen had put into her mind. The pictures were so vivid that, as years passed by, Ali would become less clear about the events of that Christmas night.

 

There was not much to pack, for this space had always been austere, without photographs or any personal objects to humanize it. The guard stood behind him, waiting to take the priest to the warden’s office to sign more papers before the final walk through the prison gates. A white-haired trustee in prison garb was dunking a mop in the soapy water of a bucket, appearing anxious to get on with the job of cleaning out Paul Marie’s cell.

The iron doors in this older section of the prison were not automated. They opened and closed with conventional locks. The guard was idly swinging this one on its hinges. “You should’ve sued the bastards.”

The old trustee nodded in agreement with the guard as he pushed the mop around the stone floor.

Paul Marie shook his head. He would rather be freed this morning than wait a year for a new trial. That had been the deal he agreed to, bad as it was: a governor’s full pardon for a promise not to litigate the matter of fifteen years’ false imprisonment. Over his head they hung old charges of assaults on other prisoners—no matter that each bit of violence had been in self-defense.

The guard opened the iron door and beckoned the priest to follow him. When they were both standing in the corridor, the door slammed shut behind them with the authority of a loud clang, but then it swung open again. “Well, that never happened before,” said the guard, opening the door wide to better examine the hinge and the lock. He closed it once more to complete a solid wall of bars.

The trustee in the cell was done mopping the floors. He had quickly stripped the sheets from the bed and was about to turn the mattress over. In an accidental, inadvertent test of faith, Paul Marie glanced back through the bars as the mattress was raised. Now he could see through the bed’s iron framework to the floor below.

His old companion was gone—no shadow, only soap and water and morning light.

An hour later, when he left the prison’s main building, he was dressed in a priest’s cassock and the same shoes he had worn fifteen years ago. He did not raise his eyes until he was beyond the tall gates. He had long anticipated the first glimpse of sky that was not bounded by walls and covered with nets of woven metal. When he did look up, instead of being overwhelmed by infinite space, he saw low cloud cover and pearl gray light. This fell far short of his imagined scenario of freedom.

Father Domina was there to greet him with a gentle smile, as though the younger priest had only been gone for a few hours of a single day. Paul Marie’s body became lighter and lighter. At each step in his old shoes, he felt the bulk of his muscles falling away from him as he walked toward the elderly man, the faithful keeper of his old life and ordinary destiny.

The old man recited a litany of attendant chores and parish calls—the small details of a simple cleric’s life as they rolled toward the village in a hired car. The prison receded to a small gray dot on a flat landscape of vast open fields. The overcast heavens had disappointed him, but the earth did not—so much space, an endless horizon.

But something was missing, something was lost.

Father Domina patted his hand and smiled, taking the younger man’s silence for unspeakable joy, missing all the signs of a broken mind—the idiot’s grin, the fixed and staring eyes, the rolling tears.

Paul Marie slowly shook his head, dismissing the idea that the shadow beneath his bed had been killed by the light. He decided that it had gone elsewhere while the cell door was open.

 

Arnie Pyle entered the hospital room before she had finished dressing. He smiled, hoping that Ali would turn around to catch him eyeing her like a peep-show client. And she did. Her blouse hung open, revealing the dark thickened flesh of a crooked suture line. It was not the neatest embroidery job ever done on human skin, but considering the large caliber of the gun and the close range of the shot, he had seen worse. She wasn’t angry to find him staring at her breast, and she did nothing to hide the new scar.

He whistled the traditional three notes of appreciation for half-dressed women with bullet wounds. “Well, that’s fascinating, Ali. From now on, only wear low cleavage. Advertise it.”

“Degenerate.” She lowered her face to the work of buttoning her blouse and covering the wound. “Ugly, isn’t it?”

“The bullet hole? No, Ali. That’s chump change compared to your face.”

Perverse woman—she laughed; he knew she would laugh.

“I love your face.” He caressed her cheek on the damaged side. “It’s not symmetrical, but you can’t have everything.”

“Still curious about it, Arnie?”

“Always.” He touched her twisted mouth with the tips of his fingers. “If you’re smart you’ll never tell me how it happened. Just keep me enslaved for the rest of my life, going quietly nuts.”

She didn’t pull back or brush his hand away this time. Finally, he was teaching her to trust him again. One day, he would get the right words out, perhaps today. Within his circle of intimates, she was one of the few who didn’t know how much he cared for her. There were lampposts and bartenders from coast to coast who knew of his capacity for the love of Ali Cray.

She was finishing the last few buttons on her blouse, and in a perplexing sense of embarrassment, or inexplicable chivalry, he turned to the window to give her privacy from his eyes. “So, how’s the Hubble kid doing? She’s got her leg in one piece?”

“Yes. She’s going home in another week. No complications with her surgery.”

“But?” He knew Ali well enough to fill in the words she left out. He turned to find her sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, high heels dangling a foot off the floor. What sorrowful eyes. “So the kid is still totally nuts, right?”

“She only needs some time to heal.” Ali made a game attempt at a smile. “Have you seen Rouge Kendall yet?”

“Yeah, he picked me up at the airport. He’s waiting in the hospital coffee shop with an armload of roses—long stems, all for you. Must be at least two dozen.”

“I wish he hadn’t done that.”

“So do I. It makes me look bad.” But with all that recovered ransom money, Rouge could afford mutant roses with even longer stems. “Want me to get him?”

“Not yet. I’m going to tell you how my face was scarred.”

“You don’t have to do that.” And why, after all this time, did he suddenly not wish to know?

Her smile was wry. “You think you’ve guessed, right?”

“How couldI—”

“I always know when you’re lying, even before you open your mouth.” She patted the mattress as an invitation to sit down beside her. “My own parents don’t know this story.”

So now he would have the secret, but some instinct made him worry that it might cost him the lady. It was the tone of her voice he was reading, that touch of trepidation. And then he realized that they shared this same fear. He sat on the edge of the high hospital bed, his legs swinging free, feet pacing on thin air.

“I was the invisible child,” she began. “You have to know that before you can understand how it happened. My parents dropped me off at the church on their way to the airport. They were going out to the Midwest for a few days. Dad had a job interview in Nebraska. I was told to go to Uncle Mortimer’s house after choir practice. But the Dodds—my uncle’s housekeeper and valet—they didn’t know I was expected. My uncle forgot to mention me, or maybe he thought it wasn’t necessary.

“Uncle Mortimer came home late that night, after the Dodds had gone to bed. The next day, he left early for an appointment in the city. I suppose he assumed the Dodds were taking care of me—or he just never gave me a thought. He stayed at his club in Manhattan that night, and the following afternoon he got a call from his valet. My parents were at the house to collect me, and where was I? Well, my uncle had no idea. And where would you even
begin
to look for an invisible child?”