Redemption Road(21)

*

The police cruiser was in the shade at the back of the lot. Elizabeth kept her chin down and her eyes sideways as she cleared the hood and circled to the rear door. She saw the top of Adrian’s head first; and he was looking down, so deathly still she had the wild thought he was actually dead, that he’d drifted off, alone in the back of the car. Then he showed a scarred face, and eyes that were utterly unchanged. For that second the entire world shrank to a black hole that stripped away all the years of her adulthood. She saw how he’d saved her life and never known it, his gentle manner as he’d stopped on a chill day to ask if she was all right. In that second Elizabeth was seventeen again, alone at the edge of a two-hundred-foot drop, a child looking for the courage to take one more step.

Are you okay, miss?

His shoulders were square, the badge on his belt bright gold. She hadn’t heard him, hadn’t seen him.

I just … She wore tall shoes that laced above her ankles, a secondhand dress that flapped against her skin. Her gaze settled on the thirty acres of black water that filled the quarry below. I was just counting.

It was a stupid thing to say, but he didn’t act as if it were. Counting what?

The seconds it would take to fall, she thought, but said nothing.

Are you sure you’re okay?

She stared at the badge on his belt and couldn’t look away. His fingers, beside it, were still.

Are your parents here?

Down the trail, she lied.

What’s your name?

She offered it in a broken voice, and he studied the trailhead at the edge of the woods. It was late and cold and almost dark. The water beneath them looked as hard as metal.

Parents tend to worry about children up here, especially with dark coming on.

His gesture took in the mountaintop, the quarry below. She looked at the sucking blackness of all that water, then at the strip of stone at her feet. His face, when she finally looked at it, was beautiful.

You’re sure they’re waiting?

Yes, sir.

Off you go, then.

He smiled a final time, and she left on legs that were cold and weak and shaking. He didn’t follow, but was watching when she glanced back, his eyes lost in the fading light. She waited until trees surrounded her, then ran as she’d never run before. She ran until her body burned and her breath was gone, then she curled up in dry leaves and wondered if God had sent the policeman to pull her back from the thing she’d meant to do. Her father would say yes, that God is in all things; but God could no longer be trusted, not God or her father or boys who said, Trust me. That’s what she thought as she lay in the leaves, shaking: that the world was bad, but maybe not all of it. That maybe she’d try to live another day. That maybe she could.

Elizabeth didn’t believe in God anymore, but looking at Adrian through patrol-car glass, she thought that fate might be real. She’d almost died the day they first met, and here he was again. She wasn’t suicidal, but still …

“Hello, Adrian.”

“Liz.”

The door pressed against her hip, but she had no memory of opening it. The world seemed to be his voice, his eyes, the unexpected thumping in her chest. The scars on his face were pale and thin, a half diamond on one cheek and a six-inch line that ran top to bottom beside his left eye. Even with Beckett’s warning, the starkness of the scars surprised her, as did the thinness that made the bones of his face sharper than she remembered. He was older and hard, with an animal stillness that disconcerted her. She’d expected something else, furtiveness maybe, or shame.

“May I?”

She gestured at the seat, and he shifted sideways to make room for her to sit. She slipped into the car, felt his warmth in the leather. She studied his face and did not look away when his hand moved to cover the worst of the scars.

“It’s only skin,” she said.

“On the outside, maybe.”

“How about the rest of you?”

“Tell me about Gideon.”

It surprised her that he knew Gideon’s name. “You recognized him?”

“How many fourteen-year-old boys want me dead?”

“So, he did try to hurt you.”

“Just tell me if he’s okay.”

Elizabeth leaned against the door and didn’t speak for long seconds. “Why do you care?”

“How can you ask me that?”

“I can ask you that because he came here to kill you, and because people are not normally so concerned about those intent on doing that kind of harm. I can ask you that because he was fifteen months old the last time you saw him, because he’s not your family or your friend. I can ask that because he’s an innocent kid who’s never hurt a fly in all the days of his life, because he weighs a hundred and fifteen pounds and has a bullet where no bullet should ever be. I can ask you that because I more or less raised him, and because he looks just like the woman you were convicted of killing. So, until I know for sure you’re not the one who shot him, we’ll do this my way.”

Her voice was loud by the time she finished, and both of them were surprised by the outburst of emotion. Elizabeth couldn’t hide her feelings when it came to the boy. She was overprotective, and Adrian saw it.

“I just want to know he’s okay. That’s all. He lost his mother and thinks it’s my fault. I just want to know he’s alive, that he hasn’t lost everything.”