Matters of Faith (19 page)

He shut the phone off before it could start ringing and slipped it in his pocket while Ada thumped around the garden, fondling tomatoes and caressing the sunflowers. He watched her, with the sunlight filtering through the sharp-leaved oaks to scatter across her hair and face. It didn't matter that she looked like hell, she still sparkled, glowed.

A cloud passed across the sun, and when she turned to him she was in shadow, no warm halo around her, and he saw how tired she looked. He took one of her crutches, wrapping his arm around her waist, and helped her inside.

His grandmother was sitting at the dining table, watching them through the windows, a leather-bound Bible open in front of her and a glass of orange juice in her hand. She appraised them as he helped Ada in the door.

“Get ahold of your folks?” she asked.

“I talked to Mom,” Marshall said. “She wants us to come home tomorrow.”

“That all she said?”

“She said to give you her best,” Marshall said hesitantly. He wasn't sure what his mother would have said. But his grandmother nodded and turned her attention to Ada.

“And you?”

“My parents trust Marshall and his family. They're happy I'm meeting you,” Ada said. Marshall nearly believed her.

“Well,” Grandmother Tobias said. “I guess we're all right then. Why don't you two get cleaned up and we'll get to know each other.”

“Do you have any bandages?” Marshall asked. “I'd like to help Ada with her knees.”

She looked at Ada's dirty, bloodied bandages and narrowed her eyes. “There's some things under the cabinet. But you need to remember whose house you're in now. I don't know what all your daddy's taught you, but you'll behave yourselves in my home.”

Marshall was speechless, his mouth gaped open and he took a quick glance at Ada. Her face was bright red and she stared at the floor, all the light gone out of her.

“I was just going to help—” Marshall protested.

“No. I'm fine,” Ada said, raising her head and looking straight at him. “I'm fine. She's right. I can do it myself. You shouldn't be . . . touching me that closely.” She turned to Grandmother Tobias. “I respect your home.”

“No room for whores and fornicators in my house.”

Marshall gasped, but Ada reached out and put a hand on his arm. “She's right. We're in her home, and we'll respect that. She's right, Marshall, we're here for a reason. Listen to your grandmother.”

“I—” He didn't know what to say.

“Do you know Jesus, girl?” Grandmother Tobias asked, looking pleased.

“Yes, ma'am,” Ada said softly.

“Well, but you don't have to talk to her like that,” Marshall said. But his words went unheard by the two women. They gazed levelly at each other until Ada gently removed her second crutch from his grasp and made her way down the hall to the bathroom.

“Why don't you have a seat, son,” Grandmother Tobias said, closing her Bible. He looked down the hall where Ada had disappeared and then out at the garden before sitting down. “Now why don't you tell me why you're really here?”

“I just—I wanted to meet you,” he said desperately. “I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy that I have this family that I don't even know about.”

She fixed him with that look again, and he could almost feel himself wither. He'd not encountered this particular brand of faith before. He'd always found it easy to ask questions before, questions about their God, their rituals, their history. But there was something too forbidding in this big woman.

Almost every religious person he'd encountered had been so ready to talk to him, eager to explain their side, nearly frantic to prove their openness to his inquiries. He had the feeling that if he began questioning his grandmother she would, instead, want him to prove his worthiness to her.

“So you came here to get to know me,” she repeated. She looked down the hallway and seemed to make up her mind about something. “Well, that's nice. I wish your folks would come sometime. I'd like to meet that sister of yours. How is she doing? She a smart girl? Good in school like your mama was?”

Marshall's mouth dried up. Meghan was smart. She was smart enough to skip a grade, but his parents hadn't wanted her to have an even harder time than she already had. He thought about her on the boat. Before the . . . thing. She hadn't been all giggly like he'd thought. She'd been so serious. She'd been asking Ada questions, about her diet and about school.

And for the first time, she'd asked him about the things they were passing in the boat, letting him show off for Ada, letting him be a big brother. They hadn't spent much time alone together. She was always so spoiled by his parents. He'd thought that maybe she'd been too protected. They'd both been so intent on her. And he'd never seen anything that made him think she was as sick as they'd said.

They had felt like a family out there on the water.

“Yeah, she's smart,” he said. “She's, uh, she's real smart.” He finished in a whisper.

She narrowed her eyes at him again, then slapped her hand on the table, making him jump. “Your daddy was a helluva fisherman. Did he at least teach you that?”

“Yeah, I can fish.”

“Why don't you get little Squaw Broken Knees out of the bathroom, and I'll take you up to the river, see what you got.”

“I don't know—”

“Sure you do,” she said, rising. “You want to get to know me? You want to know about your daddy? Then we got to do some fishin'.”

I CHECKED on Meghan and told Cal I was going home for some clothes and other things. He asked me to pick up a few items for him, and I said that I would. We were polite now.

He would wait for Meghan to die and would walk Marshall to jail. I would wait for Meghan to open her eyes and would fight to keep our son from having his life ruined by a horrible mistake. Our sides had been chosen and declared out loud, and there was nothing left to fight about.

I drove home as quickly as I could, and was almost sorry for it when I pulled into the drive. Marshall's car was gone. I didn't know what to think. I was almost relieved, because I did not want to see Ada. I had been almost successful at putting her out of my mind throughout this.

Enough of my heart and mind were occupied with my own two children that I could barely remember what the girl looked like. And I didn't want to remember. I didn't want to see her, and, perhaps the way Cal felt about Marshall, I wouldn't know what I would do if I did.

The house was quiet. I walked through the kitchen as silently as I could, as if sneaking through my own home. A cabinet door was hanging open and I closed it, then made my way through the downstairs. As expected, nothing.

Upstairs was a different matter. Not for what I found, but for what I didn't find. The suitcase that Marshall had so cavalierly dropped on the floor was gone. Ada's, in Meghan's room, was gone. My closet had been riffled through. A tracksuit was gone, a couple of pairs of shoes.

I knew the house was empty, but I checked my studio and office on the third floor, and then went downstairs and out to Cal's workshop, where I found nothing.

They were gone.

I walked back inside and stared at the two photos on our old, noisy refrigerator. Meghan's school photo, and one of Marshall, taken right before his high school graduation. He was in a purple gown and cap, and he was grinning as if his life had just started.

“Who are you?” I whispered to it.

I waited for an answer, searching his face, but the glossy surface showed me nothing but a happy young man. I jerked my head up at a sound and strained to isolate where it was coming from. It was a car, and it was coming down our road.

“Oh, God, please,” I said out loud, my hand on my heart. I stepped out the kitchen door and waited for it to turn into our drive, but it wasn't Marshall's car. It was an unmarked police car, the darkly tinted windows obscuring the occupants. Marshall and Ada could be in there.

I didn't know whether to hope for that or not. From what Mingus had said, neither of them were in trouble unless they didn't show for a court appearance. And I didn't imagine they'd just drop them off at our home if they had been picked up.

But when the car came to a halt, the same detectives from the hospital stepped out. I backed up into my kitchen and pulled the screen door closed, slipping the hook into the eye to hold it, the silvered crosshatch of the screening like a confessional.

But I had nothing to confess. They couldn't force me to talk to them. And they couldn't come in without a warrant. I felt rather like some superstitious medieval, certain that unless I invited the vampire across my threshold, it could not hurt me. The screen door that had once represented all my unhappy thoughts about my marriage had turned into my safety.

Hernandez and Rhoades—that was how I thought of them, like a country music duo, and I'd never been a fan—squinted up the height of the house, then said things too low for me to hear before walking toward the door.

“How are you, Mrs. Tobias?” Rhoades asked. “I'm sorry we weren't able to talk at the hospital.”

Keeping the screen door closed I said, “Are you following me? I haven't done anything, and I consider that harassment.”

“No, we weren't following you. We figured you were still at the hospital with Meghan,” he said.

I didn't like his use of her name. After all the legal formality—with their and Mingus's use of Mrs. and Mr.—it felt entirely too familiar, aggressive.

“Where I am is of no concern to you,” I snapped. “Now what do you want?”

They glanced at each other, and Hernandez gave some sort of deferential nod to Rhoades.

“Marshall here, Mrs. Tobias?” he asked, taking a step up onto the porch. I stood my ground behind the screen. I shook my head.

“No.”

“Is Ada Sparks here?”

“No.”

“Do you know where they are?”

I wanted to lie and say that I did, and it would have been easy. But Mingus said they hadn't done anything illegal, and I wanted to let them know that I knew that, that I was informed and they couldn't intimidate me.

But I was intimidated. I was nearly sick to my stomach with it. Yes, at forty years old, never having done a single illegal thing in my life, I was afraid of cops. So I lied.

“They're visiting family,” I said.

They glanced at each other again and I clenched my teeth. I didn't care how long they'd been together as partners, they weren't psychic, and their little looks and raised eyebrows and carefully practiced wry smiles couldn't communicate anything to each other that I didn't recognize myself. They were cats with a mouse, so full of power that they didn't even have to make an effort at it, just a little swat here and there would keep me running in circles.

“Mrs. Tobias, we would really like to speak with Miss Sparks. Could you possibly let us know how we could get in touch with her?”

I was nonplussed. They'd already had Ada. And why were they specifically asking for her and not Marshall?

“They'll be back soon,” I said cautiously. “Why do you need to speak with her? Have you gotten ahold of her parents?”

“In a way,” Hernandez said.

“How much do you know about Ada Sparks?” Rhoades asked, overriding his partner's comment.

“I—What do you mean?”

“Did you know that both of her parents have been in the system?”

In the system? What the hell did that mean? Okay, I'd seen my share of cop shows, how could you miss them these days? TV was filled with murder and mayhem and corpses, limbs and autopsies, detectives and crime scene investigators, and all manner of violence and substitute porn. I could guess what “in the system” meant, but it irritated me that they took it for granted that I would.

I wasn't a cop. I wasn't a criminal. This wasn't my world, and I wasn't going to pretend that it was.

“I don't know what that means,” I said. “I've never met them.”

If Rhoades had been being careful of our tenuous communication so far, my professed naïveté obviously irritated him as much as their self-assurance irritated me, and he was silent for a moment before speaking in a flat, no-nonsense clip.

“Ada's mother was arrested eight years ago on suspicion of manslaughter. Her father has been incarcerated in several of our finest state pens on various fraud and theft charges and is currently wanted in New York State for grand larceny.”

My knees didn't weaken, go soft like you read about. It was my whole body that went limp, my fingertips slid down the old wood of the screen door frame, my eyes closed involuntarily, even the arches of my feet felt as though they'd lost their support.
Oh, Marshall,
I thought.
Who did you fall in love with?

Rhoades stepped up to the screen door and said softly, “Want to know more?”

Hernandez appeared behind him, and though I knew it was the wrong thing to do, yes, I did want to know more, and so I unlatched the door with my rubber fingers and it swung slightly toward them. I backed up into the kitchen and pulled a chair out from the table and dropped into it as they came into the house, the screen door catching Hernandez on his battered loafers. I waited while their eyes adjusted after the brilliant sun in our side yard.

I pushed a chair out with my foot and they both sat down at the table. Nobody spoke, and I stared at them in turn while they pulled out small notebooks and pens. Rhoades needed a haircut. Hernandez needed dental work. They both needed new shirts. I would have said something, asked something, but I was unable to form words, and was exhausted with the fact that I was, again, speechless.