Matters of Faith (14 page)

He packed everything in the trunk, then grabbed a wheeled cooler from his father's workroom and filled it with food. He walked through the house, glancing around, looking for anything they might need, grabbed some magazines, the blankets off his bed, a fishing rod from the workroom.

The car was stuffed, and he stood staring at it for a moment before mixing a little mud from the dirt beneath his mother's gardenia and splattering it across the license plate. He didn't know what else to do.

The bank in the mall was open until eight and it was his last stop, before the bail bond place, and then, at last, the jail. When they finally released Ada, limping heavily on her crutches, her face pale and frightened, he knew he'd made the right decision. He shook his head at her while the paperwork was completed so she wouldn't talk, and it wasn't until they were outside and had concluded their business with the bail bondsman that he allowed her one brief embrace.

“We have to get out of here,” he whispered in her ear. She hesitated for a moment, but then pulled back and looked into his eyes. When she nodded he felt anointed, when she pressed her lips to his he felt as if a minister had just declared them man and wife, and when she placed her hand in his he became responsible for them both.

As they drove out of town, she asked, hesitantly, if they should pray. He reached across the front seat and grasped her hand, and they prayed. It cleared the frantic silence, and though he didn't slow their speed, it did seem as if things were back on an even keel between them.

Ada put her window down, and as the stars came out she turned the radio on low, and finally they were able to speak.

“Do you know where we're going?” she asked.

He nodded. “My grandmother's place is about five hours away. I figured we could stay there for a few days, figure out what we're going to do, maybe she'd give us some more money, and then we'll leave the state.”

“Won't they think to look there?”

“No way. That's exactly why we're going. They don't even know I know about her, and any hotel these days is going to want a credit card. They'd be able to track us that way.”

“Well, how do you know about her?”

“She writes to me sometimes. I found out about her when I was, like, sixteen. My dad threw out a letter from her, and she sounded, I don't know, sort of cool. I kept the envelope so I had her address, and wrote to her when I got to college. We've been writing back and forth, I don't know, maybe every few months, ever since. My parents don't know. My grandfather was a minister, you know?”

She shook her head, wide-eyed. He'd been afraid to tell her before, afraid of what she'd think about their backwoods ways, afraid she would think him more of a dilettante than she already did. But everything about their relationship had changed, and now he was the one in control, and she watched him, waiting for him to continue.

“It was real old-fashioned stuff, I think they even used to handle snakes, stuff like that. But he died a long time ago, before I was born. My dad never got into any of it, and I guess there was some kind of fight. She writes to them, but they never write back that I know of. Anyway, we never go to see her. She told me I could come anytime.”

“You've never met her?”

“I guess we went there when I was a baby. I don't remember it.”

“Does she know we're coming?”

“No.”

“Marshall, what are we doing?”

“I—I'm not sure. But, I felt like we had to leave. Did you?”

She nodded solemnly, her eyes wide, and again he felt that wide open space in his chest, the feeling he recognized now, and though he'd already felt it on the steps of the jail he thought he should make it formal.

“Ada, I love you. Maybe this happened for a reason. Maybe we're meant to do something with our lives that this is leading us to. Whatever it is, I feel like we're supposed to be together. Do you?”

She nodded again, rapidly, clutching his hand.

“Marshall, we could go to Nebraska. We could go back to my family.”

He shook his head. “We can't go there. They'll definitely look for us there.”

“They won't let them find us,” she said matter-of-factly.

“What do you mean?”

“They've done it before. They'd take care of us.”

“They've done what before? What are you saying?”

“A couple of years ago there was . . . a problem. One of the families in North Carolina, this girl, she led one of the ministers on, and then she said he raped her. She just said it because she got pregnant and had to say something. Then she got her friend to say he raped her too. It was totally bogus, like
The Crucible
or something, but they arrested him, so they sent him to us and we got him out of the country. He's doing God's work in Brazil, helping build houses.”

His wide-open feeling plummeted for a moment. A test, it was a test. Girls were raped all the time, but sometimes they did lie. He recalled the cases he'd read about in the paper. It did happen. And what about the people's lives they ruined? Even though they were innocent. It would taint them forever. He took a deep breath. If Ada believed, then he believed.

The thought of having not just family, but an entire community support them, believe in them, and help them on their journey, compared with his own family's response, was the most beautifully hopeful feeling. His father was ready to do him physical harm, or at least anxious to cut him out. His mother didn't know what she thought except she wanted him taken care of, shut away for a while so she didn't have to think about anything but Meghan.

Here was another crossroads; they were coming at him fast. He glanced at Ada, then stared straight out the windshield at the winding black length of Route 29 stretching before them.

“Let's do it,” he said and hit the gas.

CAL was pulled up next to Meghan's bed when I returned, curled as close to her as he could get, the bed rail pressed into his side. It looked like it hurt, and it should have touched me. He was talking to her, as I had been, entreating her to open her eyes, stroking her hair away from her forehead as if its weight might be keeping her lids from finally lifting. I should have been filled with enough compassion to want to stand there quietly for a moment and take in this sight of pure, fatherly love and pain.

But instead I quickly walked over and placed my hand on his shoulder and said: “Be careful, you're pulling on the sheet.”

He pulled himself sharply away from me, and I could have eased it then, I could have softened my hold, slid my hand down to rub his back, leaned down to kiss him softly, somewhere, his forehead, his cheek, his lips. But I could not bring myself to do it.

“What happened?” he said.

I wanted that chair back. But there was no way to lay claim to it without coming off as completely irrational. He wasn't sitting in the chair to bother me, I knew that. But I had been there earlier, and had gotten used to the view, used to that particular angle on Meghan's face, used to being close enough to reach out and touch her when I wanted.

I put my purse down on the floor next to the chair and remained standing.

“Well, I met the lawyer, we went to the initial appearance, and then I bailed him out. He's at home now, he's got an appointment with the lawyer tomorrow.”

“How much?”

“What?”

“How much was the bail? How much is the lawyer going to be?”

“Bail was six thousand dollars. Marshall says he can pay for the lawyer.”

“Oh, really? With what?”

I shrugged.

“What happens next?” he asked

“I told you. He has an appointment with the lawyer tomorrow.”

“What is going on here, Chloe? Why do I have to drag this out of you? Would you just tell me what's going on?”

“I don't know. And maybe if you wanted to find out, you should have been there. I was not privy to their conversation because of
attorney-client privilege
.”

“So we're just supposed to sit back and wait for him to tell us what's happening?”

I shrugged. “I don't know what else we're supposed to do, Cal. I asked; he wouldn't tell me anything except that he had an appointment.”

“Did he at least ask about Meghan?”

I wanted to be able to say yes. “I told him what was happening,” I said carefully.

“What about Ada? Her parents arrive to bail her out? They'd better not show up here, I'll tell you that.”

I wondered what scenario he had worked out in his imagination. I'd worked out a spectacular few myself. I'd seen myself confronting Ada, confronting her parents, interrogating them about what kind of parenting had produced a child who could do this, who could so cavalierly take another child's life. And about what kind of faith had so little respect for others.

But it wasn't just their child, was it? It had been mine too. And what would I say when asked about what kind of parenting could produce a child like Marshall? Would I counter that Ada was a Jezebel, a siren that Marshall couldn't refuse? What would I say when asked about Marshall's faith? That he had none, or that he'd had them all and it had still come to this?

“I didn't see Ada,” I responded, and finally admitted defeat and sank down into the other chair. “Mingus told me—”

“Mingus?” Cal asked.

“Charles Mingus is Marshall's lawyer.”

“You mean like the musician?”

“Yep.” I pulled the lawyer's card out of my back pocket and handed it to him. He read it and rolled his eyes before tucking it in his wallet and flashing me a grin. I couldn't help but smile back, but the moment was quickly past.

“So, he told you what?”

“He said that she hadn't called anyone. That's it. Frankly, I don't care. I don't want to know. Let her parents deal with her.”

“We'll have to deal with it sooner or later if they go to trial.”

“You think this will get that far?”

“They don't press charges unless they're serious, Chloe. What do you think will happen? You know we'll have to testify, don't you?”

I stared at him. No. I hadn't thought about that. And who would we be testifying for? Against? Weren't there laws against having to testify against family members?

“And if—if . . . things don't go well,” he said, gesturing toward Meghan, “the charges could be upgraded.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, unwilling to allow my mind to even approach the possibility of what he was intimating. “What is going on? Are you just making this stuff up or do you actually know something you're not telling me?”

“If I tell you—”

“If you tell me?
If
you tell—How dare you
not
tell me anything! How, exactly, do you think not telling me something you know about this situation is an option?”

“I talked to the doctor.”

It rang no warning bells in me. The doctor. Which doctor? We'd talked to doctor after doctor. The neurologist had been in several times a day, the specialists, the interns, the therapists. One doctor we'd never seen before had come in the previous day, ordered blood tests, disappeared, and nobody had any idea who he was.

“And?” I asked impatiently.

“The doctor from the emergency room.”

I still wasn't getting it, and then, just as I was about to lay into him, I realized who he meant.
The
doctor. The one who called the police to report a crime. The one responsible for our son going to jail. The unnamed emergency room doctor who'd doubled our family emergency with one call, as if he hadn't even considered what the combination would do to us, as if he didn't care. First do no harm, right? I sank back down into the chair.

“When?”

“When you were gone.”

Of course he had come when I was gone. I had to wonder if he'd watched, waited until I left before coming to see what he'd wrought, unable to face the hysterical mother.

“Who is he? What did he say?”

“
She
said she was sorry she missed you.”

It shouldn't have mattered. But somehow it did. The mental image of a hard-eyed man in scrubs was replaced by one of the woman, in white, hair pulled back, no makeup, single, no children. Straight-ahead career, no place for family, no consideration of others' families.

“Why did you let her in here?”

“I didn't know it was her. She just came in and started checking Meghan out. She asked if you'd be back soon. I think she wanted to talk to you rather—”

“Well, what did she have to say? Did you tell her I was off bailing our son out?”

He nodded. “She said she was sorry. She wanted—”

“She's
sorry
? Really?”

“If you'll stop interrupting me—”

It wasn't me that time. Two nurses entered and stood at the door, looking back and forth between us. I wondered how long they'd been outside the door and what they'd heard. They must have thought we were horrible. Talking about this in front of Meghan. It was a common enough theory that patients in a coma might be able to hear what's going on around them, but we'd been reminded, with varying degrees of certainty, of that by almost every nurse and most of the doctors. Which meant that it was possible that Meghan had heard our entire conversation.

“Dr. Vaughn found a room on the fourth floor that he'd like Meghan moved to,” Delia said, the nurse who'd written her name on the dry-erase board next to Meghan's bed. This was the third day in a row she'd been with us through the day shift. It was astonishing how quickly I'd grown attached to her. There was something nearly primal about my need for the nurses to like me. They had so much power here.