Redemption Road(6)

“I did like you asked, Elizabeth. I didn’t tell a soul what really happened. I won’t. I wouldn’t.”

“I know, but…”

“Does the world go dark for you, sometimes?”

“Are you crying, Channing?”

“It goes a little gray for me.”

The voice broke, and Elizabeth could picture the girl’s bedroom in her parents’ big house across town. Six days ago Channing vanished off a city street. No witnesses. No motive beyond the obvious. Two days after that, Elizabeth led her, blinking, from the basement of an abandoned house. The men who’d taken her were dead—shot eighteen times. Now, here they were: midnight, four days later, and the girl’s room was still pink and soft and filled with all the possessions of childhood. If there was a message there, Elizabeth couldn’t find it. “I shouldn’t have called,” she said. “It was selfish of me. Go back to sleep.”

The line hissed.

“Channing?”

“They ask what happened, you know. My parents. The counselors. They ask all the time, but all I say is how you killed those men and how you saved me and how I felt joyful when they died.”

“It’s okay, Channing. You’re okay.”

“Does that make me a bad person, Elizabeth? That I was joyful? That I think eighteen bullets was not enough?”

“Of course not. They deserved it.”

But the girl was still crying. “I see them when I close my eyes. I hear the jokes they told between times. The way they planned to kill me.” Her voice broke again, and the break was deeper. “I still feel his teeth on my skin.”

“Channing…”

“I heard the same things so many times I started to believe what he said. That I deserved what they were doing to me, that I’d ask to die before they were done, and that I’d beg before they’d finally let me.”

Elizabeth’s hand went even whiter on the phone. Doctors counted nineteen bite marks, most of them through the skin; but Elizabeth knew from long discussions it was the things they’d said to her that hurt the most, the knowingness and fear, the way they’d tried to break her.

“I would have asked him to kill me,” Channing said. “If you hadn’t come when you did, I’d have begged him.”

“It’s over now.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“It is. You’re stronger than you think.”

Channing grew silent again, and in the silence Elizabeth heard the raggedness of her breath.

“Will you come see me tomorrow?”

“I’ll try,” Elizabeth said.

“Please.”

“I have to talk to the state police tomorrow. If I can make it, I will. If not, then the next day.”

“Do you promise?”

“I do,” Elizabeth said, though she knew nothing of fixing broken things.

*

When she got back in the car, Elizabeth still felt disconnected, and like other times in her life where she’d had nowhere to go and nothing to do, she ended up at her father’s church, a humble building that rose narrow and pale against the night sky. She parked beneath the high steeple, studied small houses lined like boxes in the dark, and thought for the hundredth time that she could live in a place like this. Poor as it was, people worked and raised families and helped each other. Neighborliness like that seemed rare these days, and she thought a lot of what made this place so special came from her parents. As much as she and her father disagreed on life and the living of it, he was a fine minister. If people wanted a relationship with God, his was a good path. Kindness. Community. He kept the neighborhood going, but none of it worked unless it was done his way.

Elizabeth lost that kind of trust when she was seventeen.

Following a narrow drive, she walked beneath heavy trees and ended at the parsonage where her parents lived. Like the church, it was small and plain and painted a simple white. She didn’t expect to find anyone awake, but her mother was sitting at the kitchen table. She had the same cheekbones as Elizabeth, and the same deep eyes, a beautiful woman with gray-streaked hair and skin that was still smooth in spite of long years of hard work. Elizabeth watched for a full minute, hearing dogs, a distant engine, the wail of an infant in some other far house. She’d avoided this place since the shooting.

Then why am I here?

Not for her father, she thought. Never that.

Then why?

But she knew.

Tapping on the door, Elizabeth waited as fabric whispered behind the screen, and her mother appeared. “Hello, Mom.”

“Baby girl.” The screen door swung open and her mother stepped onto the porch. Her eyes twinkled in the light, her features full of joy as she opened her arms and hugged her daughter. “You don’t call. You don’t come by.”

She was keeping it light, but Elizabeth squeezed harder. “It’s been a bad few days. I’m sorry.”

She stood Elizabeth at arm’s length and studied her face. “We’ve left messages, you know. Even your father called.”

“I can’t talk to Dad.”

“It’s really that bad?”

“Let’s just say I have enough judgment coming my way without the heavenly kind.”

It wasn’t a joke, but her mother laughed, a good laugh. “Come have a drink.” She led Elizabeth inside, put her at a small table, and fussed over ice and a half-empty bottle of Tennessee whiskey. “Do you want to talk about it?”