Earth Angel (31 page)

I leaned against the counter without saying anything.

“She’s been locked in a motel room, naked, with no food or water. Her older sister was a Girl Scout once and told her about
drinking her own urine, which is exactly what she did. At some point, she was bound, gagged, and blindfolded with duct tape
and thrown into a shower where she was scalded with hot water. She’s got burns all
down her back. Then she was tied to a chair and given forced enemas, some burning hot, some ice cold. She doesn’t remember
how many.” Lt. Trump went to the refrigerator, took a can of Dr Pepper Life, and drank. “She’s in sixth grade, never been
on a date. I’d hate to be the first boy she goes out with.”

Neither of us spoke for a few minutes.

Then she looked at her watch. “You’ve got about five minutes, Doctor. After that, everybody loses.”

“What makes you think I can help? That I wouldn’t have if I could have?”

She looked over at me, a softness in her eyes I hadn’t seen before. As if we were longtime girlfriends leaning up against
a building, watching boys go by. “Because your life is so fucked up I don’t think you’re thinking straight. I checked around,
flight schedules and such. Chicago police. Guy named Daryl St. James. A man up in San Francisco named Gordon Moore. You’re
on some crazy crusade.” She shook her head. “What’s the matter with you, you never read
Catcher in the Rye?
”

“In high school. I don’t remember the part where his fiancée commits mass murder of his friends and then is gunned down by
the police.”

“Page thirty-seven.”

I laughed. “Don’t make me laugh, I’ll mistake you for human.”

“The feeling will pass.” She looked at her watch. “In about two minutes.”

“You really would arrest him?”

“I’d throw my own mother in jail to catch this guy. Of course, I’d throw her in jail just for the fun of it.” She finished
her can of soda, then picked up my can. “You mind?”

I shook my head and she drained the rest of my can.

“You know something, don’t you?” she said. “About those notes we showed you. Something clicked.”

I thought for a moment. What should I do? What if there
were drugs in that safe? What if Josh was a drug dealer? Should I even bother saving him? Didn’t he deserve punishment? I
rubbed my temples, my head throbbing from the pressure. Christ, I was just there to give him a goddamn car, not bring judgment.
This was one of the reasons I’d first told Lt. Trump I didn’t understand the notes. I didn’t want to be pulled into a situation
with a criminal crazy. It reminded me too much of what happened with Tim. My failure there caused lives to be lost. My own
among them. My corpse just hadn’t fallen yet.

“Yes,” I said, “something clicked.”

“What did you do?” Rachel asked after the cops had all gone.

She and I were in the kitchen heating a couple cans of matzoh ball soup. I stirred the soup, absently knocking the dumplings
around as if they were croquet balls, while Rachel readied the proper plates and silverware.

“I just talked to them,” I said. “Girl talk.”

“What did you say? After Lieutenant Trump told the men to leave the safe alone, you and she were in the backyard for over
an hour.”

“She wanted to smoke, I wouldn’t let her do it in the house.”

“C’mon, Grace, you must have said something to make them go away.”

“Nothing much. Just reasoned with them. They didn’t want a lawsuit on their hands.”

Josh entered the kitchen. He’d taken a shower and his hair was wet and combed straight back. “Give it up, Rachel. She’s not
going to tell you.”

“What’s in the safe, Josh?” I asked.

He shot me a fierce look. “Fuck you, that’s what’s in the safe.”

“Josh!” Rachel scolded. “Stop being a jerk. Grace saved your worthless butt.”

“I didn’t ask her to.”

“God, you’re such a baby sometimes. You think you’re so damn cool, you and your friends. But you sound like a whiny little
brat telling his parents ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’ Big goddamn insight.”

“Thanks for the sermon, rabbi, but I gave at Auschwitz.”

Rachel looked sad. “Why do you say evil things like that, Josh? That’s not like you.”

“I said it, so it must be like me.” He started to leave the room. “I’m going to Vernon’s, in case the cops want to find me.”

I wanted to smack him on the back of the head with the pot I was holding. Watch him pitch forward into the wall, grasping
his chipped skull, yowling with pain. I closed my eyes and focused on washing that image from my mind. What would follow?
Me walking into a clinic and shooting everybody? “Don’t you think you should wait for David?” I said.

Josh didn’t answer. A minute later I head the front door open and close and he was gone.

“Don’t mind him,” Rachel said. “He’s been moody lately. He’s going to graduate next year and I think he’s scared. David’s
great, but Josh misses Mom and Dad. I mean, with them we had a home that we knew would always be there, even when we left.
But it wouldn’t be fair to David to expect him to treat us like his own kids for the rest of his life. Once we leave here
we’re pretty much on our own forever.”

I hadn’t thought about that. My parents provided a permanent home. There was comfort in knowing it was always there for me
to avoid. I had purpose in life, even if it was only to earn enough money not to have to be taken in by them. It was like
being good because you knew there was a hell. Hell was a small blue house with eclectic furnishings and surreal paintings
my mother painted after taking a community college class on Salvador Dalí. Inspired by
Dalí’s melting clocks and crucifixion, Mom had painted melting fire hydrants and a crucified cow—in one painting. People asked
her what it meant and she would smile mysteriously and say, “Whatever you want it to mean.” I could’ve hit her with a pot
then, too.

But if the house wasn’t there, if my parents weren’t sitting in it every night, watching TV and speaking to each other in
German, I would feel lost.

“I don’t think David sees this as a temporary job, Rachel,” I said. “He thinks of himself as your parent, and he wants that
to be a lifetime commitment.”

“I know that. He’s great, really. But parents aren’t that easily replaced. I don’t know why. In some ways, I know David better
than I knew Mom and Dad, I guess because I’ve known him while I was older.”

I felt uncomfortable, fidgety. Until she’d said that, I hadn’t realized that I’d been sensing the same thing. That in some
ways I knew David better than I’d known Tim. But I had no excuse. I’d been an adult woman for a while now. I turned the flame
off under the soup and sat down, quietly catching my breath.

Rachel sat down beside me, placed a hand on my back. “You okay?”

I nodded. “Tired.”

“You were great with the cops, thanks.”

I looked at her. “What’s in Josh’s safe, Rachel?”

She shook her head. “I can’t tell you.”

“Do you know?”

“That’s between Josh and David.” She went to the counter and returned with a blue book. She opened it from the back since
it was in Hebrew and Hebrew is read from right to left instead of left to right. “Want to hear some prayers in Hebrew? I’ve
been practicing.”

“Sure.”

She read one. A prayer for fruit. I remembered it from Hebrew school. “Why do we pray over fruit?” I’d asked
the rabbi back then. “The fruit doesn’t mind,” he said, “and God gets a kick out of it.”

Rachel’s reading was terrible, each word mangled and choked beyond recognition. When she finished she looked over at me, embarrassed.
“Not so good, huh?”

“God would hear what’s in your heart, not what’s on your lips.”

“True. But you don’t believe in God.”

“Don’t go by me. I’m still not convinced the earth is round.” I nodded at her. “Why’d you decide to become Jewish, Rachel?”

“I dunno. My parents weren’t anything and David is everything. I mean, Mom and Dad didn’t really practice anything. They didn’t
run religion down, but they didn’t buy into it. And David thinks they’re all equally valid because they help people to think
about what’s important. But that’s not the same as believing.” She laughed. “I don’t think I’m answering your question. Why’d
you become a dentist?”

“An aptitude test.”

“Really? That’s the only reason?”

“Well, one other thing. I read about a physician named Sir James Barry. When he died at the age of seventy-three, his valet
discovered Sir James Barry was a woman. Because the medical profession wasn’t open to women at that time, she’d pretended
to be a man and became the first female physician in the military and the first female surgeon general. She’d been in the
army for fifty-seven years, and no one knew. I couldn’t imagine anybody wanting anything that badly to endure all the agony
of that masquerade. I admired her passion for medicine.”

“But you became a dentist. Why didn’t you become a doctor?”

I didn’t answer. I was trapped in my own masquerade. “Money,” I said. “I couldn’t afford med school.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Rachel leafed through the Hebrew book. “You were Jewish once, weren’t you?”

“Not really. No more than dressing like a man makes you a man.” Or treating symptoms makes you a doctor. Or being pregnant
makes you a mother. Or being engaged makes you a lover.

I looked at Rachel as she looked blankly at each page and turned it. Tiny tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.

“God made a covenant with the Jews. They obey his laws and he takes care of them. I like that arrangement. I prefer a God
who is up front about what he wants and doesn’t pretend to love you anyway, even though you’re going to hell because you screwed
up. Love is never unconditional, even with God.”

I covered Rachel’s hand with my own. She was trembling, crying inside without showing on the outside. With my fingers on her
cheek, I turned her face toward mine. We looked at each other and I felt a rush of her anguish crush my heart. “Rachel,” I
said, “are you pregnant?”

Her hand jumped in mine like a captured frog. She looked over at me, panicked. “Do I show?”

D
AVID HAD JUST RETURNED, EXHAUSTED AND LOADED DOWN WITH
camera equipment, when Rachel flew to the front door and rapidly told him everything that had happened. Except the bargain
I’d made with Lt. Trump (which she didn’t know about). And the part about her being pregnant (which she didn’t want him to
know about).

David set his equipment down, turned to Rachel and quietly said, “Go call your brother and tell him to come home now.” His
face and voice were impassive, as if he’d just reminded her to pick up a carton of milk at the store.

“Okay,” Rachel said and ran to the kitchen phone.

David started up the stairs and I fell in step behind him, waiting for him to say the first word. He didn’t. At the top of
the stairs he waited for me to catch up and we entered Josh’s room together. “Some excitement while I was gone, huh?” he finally
said.

“Some.”

“And you got rid of the cops.”

“You know what a sweet-talker I am.”

He stared at the safe for a long while, then looked over
at me and smiled. “I appreciate you coming over and filling in for me. Above and beyond the call of duty.”

“No problem.”

He sat crosslegged on the floor in front of the safe, just staring at it. “What did it cost you?”

“Cost me?”

“What did it cost you to get rid of the cops? This can’t all be a coincidence. Same cop who wanted your help comes over here
to bust Josh. Then you show up and she goes away. Lieutenant Trump must have checked up on Rachel, Josh, and me, trying to
dig something up she could use. Which she did, I guess, concerning our little Joshua. She must have also found out I go out
of town a lot to film, and waited until I was gone to come over here. She also must have figured Rachel would call you or
she planted the idea in Rachel’s mind.” He stared at me with a grim expression. “What the fuck is going on, Grace?”

I walked across the room and sat on Josh’s bed. “Those early notes from the kidnapper Lieutenant Trump showed me the other
day. I knew a little bit more about them than I’d let on. Trump’s determined to ride this case to a promotion and she’s willing
to do anything.”

He nodded somberly, staring at the safe.

“I’m sorry, David, I didn’t think they would involve you or your family.”

He waved a dismissing hand. “Actually, it’s kind of flattering that they did. Trump must have seen in your eyes what I’ve
been telling you all along: You’re crazy about me.”

I laughed. “The word crazy is definitely involved somewhere in this situation.”

“She gave you a new note, right?” he said. “A new note from the kidnapper? That’s why the sudden full-court press.”

“Yes. Another puzzle.”

He nodded again, eyes still fixed on the safe.

Rachel ran in breathless. “Josh is on his way. He’s riding his bike.”

“Thanks, sweetheart,” David said. “You mind sending him up when he gets here?”

She looked over at me, asking with her eyebrows whether or not I would tell David that she was pregnant. I responded with
my eyebrows that I would not. She left.

“What was that about?” David asked.

“What?” I said.

“All those facial tics between you two.”

He hadn’t even been looking at us, just sitting on the floor staring at the safe. “That’s spooky. You practicing some kind
of tribal voodoo, mind-reading or something?”

He pointed to the mirror above Josh’s dresser. “I saw your reflection.”

“It was nothing. She just doesn’t want you being too hard on Josh.”

He turned toward me, shifting his body so he faced me. “Why didn’t you help the cops in the first place? Why did you deny
understanding the notes? You weren’t in any danger.”

“First of all, I didn’t ‘understand’ the notes, okay? I recognized the movie references, that’s all. You know what the notes
said? One said: ‘Of this I never tire of saying, “I need cash!’” That’s from a movie called
Sitting Ducks
by an obscure filmmaker named Henry Jaglom. A comedy about two nebbish guys who steal money from the mob and run away to
Florida. They stash the money in the rim of the tire and end up wrestling over it in the middle of the night, with one of
them shouting, ‘I need
cash!
’ Ever hear of it?”