by Lee Thompson
She draped her arm over the child’s shoulder and opened the door for her and found Aiden and his father and Mitch at the center of a body of stars. All of them seemed to glow from their encounter with the miracle. She knew all of them well enough, and had never seen a one appear even remotely close to how they did now. The pastor was the most animated. She couldn’t blame him; devoting your life to a belief that never offered you anything but a promise, was not an easy road to stumble down. And when he’d gotten cancer, there were many not of the faith who had snickered and believed that he had it coming. It was cruel, not that she was unused to cruelty or harshness, but it said more about the people who found joy in his misery than it did about Pastor Clement or whatever God he chose to worship.
But he had brothers and sisters now, blue collar men and women with scars as deep as they were wide, with hopes they had put on hold because it was difficult to pursue those desires when what little energy they had was spent just getting by. They looked at him and even more so at Aiden as if they were part of a greater plan, one they were being offered a glimpse of, a part of, and their gratefulness was palpable.
Mitch had his back to her and was questioning Aiden but the boy stared at him blankly, and at first Aria thought he had been struck dumb by the incident, or that his mind had been wiped clean, the soul plucked out of him, possibly its essence the source of the light as it had fled his body. But then Aiden shook his head to the question. Aria hadn’t heard it. Others were asking questions as well; there was a murderous tide of voices.
Jessica’s hand was small in Aria’s. She made her way through the crowd, thinking that she wanted to see the young girl speak again as badly as Mitch did. Two months prior, when Rebecca had fallen asleep at the wheel and hit the tree and died, the young girl had been with her. Jessica had sat in the back seat for twelve hours with her mother’s corpse, the scent of her blood, all the unanswered questions, before someone had found them.
She had not spoken since, and one of her eyes was always too large, as if extremely focused on the world she was stuck in, while the other was squinted, as if to peer into the distance of eternity, hoping to catch a glimpse of her mother’s face.
The doctors had been no help: some said she might speak again, others said she might not. There was no definitive answer. None of them as of yet knew what was wrong with her eyes. Mitch had refused to let them open his baby’s skull if it came to that. And here, in this room, was his greatest hope.
By the aggressive way he sat, by the excitement in his voice, she knew that whatever Aiden had done, Mitch would find a way to make him do it again, just one more time, for his little girl. He was so much his father’s son. And Mickey, before his first heart attack, had been just as strong, just as vital. It was strange to her, how much sons took from their fathers, whether by imitation or force. Mickey was in no shape to stand up to anyone anymore, and if his competition discovered that fact, it’d all go up in a puff of smoke. She had her doubts, though, about Mitch. He could not be as cruel as his father. Unlike Mickey, his son enjoyed being a dad. Jessica—her safety, her happiness—meant more to him than the O’Connell legacy. She loved that about the boy, his love for his daughter.
She’d been the apple of his eye since her birth, built lean like him and her disposition warm like her mother’s had been until the accident. But Jessica didn’t smile anymore, and since she didn’t, Mitch refused to as well. There were no light-hearted, laugh-away-the-tension, moments for him. Yet it boggled her mind that he did not acknowledge the hand of karma at work in his life.
He turned as if he sensed them behind him. Tears filled his eyes when he looked at his daughter. He waved her forward and she went to him slowly, and Aria followed, her hands clasped in front of her. He held Jessica in his lap and stroked her shoulders. He said to Aiden, “Can you do it again?”
The boy shook his head and appeared baffled. He looked at all the awed faces surrounding him, frightened by their fervor, and then gazed pleadingly at his father to get him out of there. Jack was slightly taller in his wheelchair than his son was at the table and he looked down on him, his face an unreadable mask. He cleared his throat and said, “I need to get my son to a hospital. Whatever happened, it’s over. The bar is closed. Everybody go home, you hear me?”
No one moved. Aria was unsure if they were waiting for Aiden to dismiss them, but she could tell that he was in shock, unable to communicate verbally, and his hands sat dead in his lap, the light in his eyes opaque. Elroy, Emmy, and Connor moved up beside him. Connor touched his shoulder and Aiden jumped. His cousin said, “It’s just me, bud. We’re going to help you to your dad’s van. Do you think you can walk?”
Elroy said, “Can you hear us?”
Aiden looked at his father again.
Aria, without thinking, said, “He would have healed you if you’d stayed out here with the rest of us, Jack.”
He looked at her with such hate. She had the sudden urge to apologize to him for being in his life at all, and for her moment of weakness, and the result of what she assumed Mitch’s family’s honor. But she had never apologized to anyone, couldn’t even to begin to form the word on her tongue, and she tried for a second, and then surrendered to the silence, which felt more comfortable.
Jack’s hands tightened around the wheels of his chair and he turned it around, pointed himself toward the door, and said, “Connor, start my van, warm it up, park it close to the door.”
The boy nodded, then looked at Mitch. He said, “Sir?”
Mitch stroked his daughter’s hair but his gaze had not left Aiden.
Connor said, “My uncle said everybody has to leave, they aren’t going to listen to him, but they’ll listen to you.”
Jack glanced back over his shoulder. Other people stared at Mitch. He said, “Everybody go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow this will all seem like it was a dream.”
Pastor Clement said, “We have to share his gift with the world. Think of all the lives it could change.”
“I don’t care about that right now,” Mitch said.
“Aiden?”
The boy looked back at the pastor. Clement said, “You have a gift that you cannot refuse to share with people who need it.”
“He’s tired,” Mitch said, “look at him.”
Several people said they wanted to know what had happened. They flocked around the pastor who recited scripture so suddenly, and with such certainty, Aria wanted to believe they were all on the ground floor of the Second Coming.
But there was a part of her that had her own questions forming. She decided to talk to Mickey. He would be able to make sense of it all. Many in town thought his shrewd mind best fashioned for business, but it was his intuition combined with his logic that had not only made him the most powerful man in the county, but also the reason he’d won her heart. She thought of his impotence and cringed inside, not yet able to accept her own lusts, the needs that did not come and go, but would forever abide until her womb was as dry and barren as the Mojave. She thought, if anybody, Mickey, being the physical man he’d always been, would understand her hunger for physical release with someone safe, someone she could trust. And now, with the cardiologist’s orders for him to take it easy, to avoid confrontation, to eat better, to exercise—all things that went against the grain of the man she’d married—she knew she had to think of herself and her future once he was gone, because he sure as hell would go on living the way he always had, and the next heart attack could kill him.
She turned her mind from her justifications as Mitch stood and held his daughter in his arms. He said to Jack, “We’re going with you.”
Holding his daughter, Mitch turned back to Aiden and said in a gentle voice, one he used often with Pine when a certain gleam entered his eyes, “She’s going to stay in your room with you for as long as it takes. We’ll recreate whatever you were doing before the spell hit you, but you’re going to do it again. I’ll pay whatever you want. But you’re going to make it happen. Do
you hear me, Aiden?”
Elroy said, “Don’t bully him, he’s had a weird night.”
“Go home with Aria and let Dad know where I’m at and what’s going on.”
Connor said, “Is there anything I can do?”
Jack said, “Go warm up my van and pull it up here.” He looked at Mitch and said, “You’re not welcome at my house, neither is your little girl. You step a foot on my property and I swear to God I’ll kill you in front of her.”
Mitch took a step towards him but he realized his arms were full and Aria grasped his elbow and said, “Settle down. Elroy is right. It’s been a weird night for everybody.”
“We’re coming to your house and camping out,” Mitch said. “Nothing will stop that, just be happy that I’ll give you whatever you want in exchange for what your son can give my daughter.”
“My son seems a little at loss for words, just like your little girl. And whatever happened here, it might never happen again, or, if it does, it might put my son’s life at risk, and I can’t abide that.”
Pastor Clement said, “It’s raining now. It looks strange through the neon lights. If the battle has started, we must chose to stand on the side of the light, all of us, none of you should perish, not a one.”
Someone else murmured about the rain against the glass and several of them nodded.
Aria looked at the front window, and she had to agree. The rain filtering through the red light of the open sign looked like blood. She turned back to Mitch. If there was some higher power involved, and she did not want to accept that there was, because if she was to be held accountable for her sins, which were many, a door waited for her, a dark, heavy door to a small room that burned forever, those flames fed by the kindling and logs of her sins.
There was no sense in bullying the one God had chosen to demonstrate his power; the consequences were unthinkable. She said, “You should give the kid space, Mitch. He doesn’t know what he did or how he did it, that’s apparent, isn’t it? Let him go home and rest, or let his father take him to the hospital.”
Jessica was standing in front of Mitch, both of them facing her. He rubbed her shoulders gently and leaned over and kissed the top of her head. When he looked up, he said, “Go home, everybody. Don’t spread the word about what happened. Nobody else is going to believe it without having seen it.”
Elroy said, “Connor has it recorded.”
Mitch looked at Connor and said, “Don’t share it.”
Connor swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed hard. He said, “I already posted it to Youtube. People are already watching it.”
Aria sighed. She wiped her face and her hand trembled. She was sweating profusely, and she noticed they all were, and she could feel the flames that awaited them. She said to Jack, “Get your son home, and love on your wife, before the shitstorm hits.”
He said, “That’s the only good piece of advice I ever heard from your clan.”
Mitch tapped Connor on the shoulder. “Grab your uncle’s van, pull it around and warm it up.”
Someone said, “What about the rest of us?”
“I’ll call Pine up here to handle anybody that sticks around,” Mitch said. “You stay if you want.”
People looked at each other nervously. Even for Aria, hearing Mitch threaten them with his younger brother seemed to be sacrilege on such a day as this, when miracles were large and everyone noticed them. But she had no course of action with which to deal with him when he was like this. All there was in the world for him was Jessica and Aiden, and it would remain that way until Mitch didn’t need the boy anymore. It was probably that way for everybody.
The wounded would come to him and they would demand he give them comfort, hundreds of people, then thousands, and then millions, with no way for the child or his crippled father, or his sad mother to turn them away. Armies wouldn’t be able to do it once the world knew of his gift.
She was surprised by her empathy for him, and surprised too that such a gift was given to one who seemed so unfit to handle it. A Benjamin Franklin, or Howard Hughes, or Alexander The Great, this kid was not. And he was still drained, recovering, Emmy and Elroy leading him toward the door as the patrons and Pastor Clement tried begging he stay among them and teach them the meaning of life.
Aria followed, thinking, Poor kid, you didn’t get a blessing, you gained a curse.
• • •
Mickey had always taught Mitch that might makes right, no matter the circumstances. And as they packed into the van, with Jack watching him angrily from the wheelchair lift, the rain wetting his face and making it appear carved of stone, Mitch showed him the pistol he had tucked tight to his left hipbone. Mitch said, “You’ll get paid, and maybe, if you’re smart, you’ll be there when he does it again. Then you can come after me and Pine and we won’t mind a bit.”
Jack said, “Your dad never gave you permission to do what you did to me, did he?” Then he smiled in a knowing way and added, “How long have you loved her?”
“Roll your broken body into the van and don’t do anything stupid. Watch your mouth around my daughter, too. Do you understand me?”
“I warned you,” Jack said. “Just remember that.”
“Get in the fucking van already.”
Jack rolled in and Mitch closed the lift and door. He had Jessica sit in back with Aiden. Elroy, Emmy, Connor, and Aria were close by, standing in the rain as if they’d been frozen there, and Mitch wondered if she’d heard Jack guessing at why Mitch had him crucified. It didn’t matter anymore though, whether she knew or not. His dad had known for a while, despite Mitch’s trying his best to conceal his feelings, but old Mickey didn’t give a damn, he was of the mind that if his son or anyone else could take his woman from him then she was not as strong as he believed her to be.
He watched Jack lock his wheelchair in behind the wheel, flick the wipers, turn his head and stare at him. Mitch said, “Drive. You put us in a ditch and we’ll leave you there, and I’ll take our kids to the closest house to hole up until the storm is over.”
“You’re a sonofabitch, I’ve always known that, but I’d never guessed how much of one. Your dad must be real proud. You’ll fill his shoes better than anyone would have guessed except maybe Aria. You expecting her to be there to guide you on your course? Do you wonder what it was like for me and her? Do you wonder if it was worth the pain you and that degenerate Pine inflicted on me?”
“Shut up and get moving.”
“You’ll be lucky if my wife doesn’t stick a butcher knife in your back.”
“Do you know where I live?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Drive there.”
“Burn in hell. We’re going home. You want to walk back to your house in the snow and freezing rain, be my guest, but I’d advise you to leave my vehicle now to avoid the hassle.”
Mitch eased a shell into the chamber of the pistol. He didn’t feel much but a definite coldness seeping through him, and as he pointed the gun at Jack’s midsection he couldn’t see much but that hard, damp face, the older man’s eyes burning hot in his face.
Jack said, “You going to use that?”
“I will if you try to rob my daughter of what she needs.”
“You better shoot me then, and then go ahead and shoot my son. You’re nothing but scum, you ask me. A coward who relies on his psychotic brother to do what he can’t. I don’t think you can pull the trigger. In fact, I dare you to. Come on. Think Aria will love you then? It won’t erase what me and her did, what you could never do, and probably never will. I wish I could say I feel sorry for you but I don’t. Many men will have her again and that hot, wet pocket will be dried up before you ever get the chance to slide into it.”
Mitch sat there, uncertain what he should do. Jack had offered less resistance in the woods. But then again, the man had months to relive that night in his dreams and every time he looked at a tree or a nail or a dirty piece of rope. Hell, every time he had to touch the wheels of his chair
or sit in it or feel his bladder release into the bag that was attached to his side.
Mitch chewed on his lip and put the gun away. He glanced back at Aiden, whose wide eyes were too white in the gloom and he almost expected that calm, soothing light to shoot from the boy’s scared face. But it didn’t. And Jessica, so small next to him, reached out and held his hand as she looked at her father. Mitch nodded to them.
He turned back to Jack and said, “You’re right, and I’m sorry, but we have to stay with Aiden until it happens again. I have over a hundred grand in a safe at home. Drive by there and I’ll get it, and give all of it to you, right now, and then we crash at your place. Let your son heal my little girl. She needs it. You need it too and then we can kill each other if that’s what you have in mind. But let him heal her first, heal you, like he did everybody else in your bar. You don’t have to like me, and you don’t have to rub it in my face about Aria. Jealousy is a stupid thing, I know, and I know I overreacted, with what we did to you. All right?”
“It’s not all right,” Jack said. He cranked his neck around and looked back at his son and Mitch’s daughter and said, “I hope you two never become like your fathers. We’re bad men. Hateful, stupid men.”
Aiden had tears in his eyes. Jessica squeezed his hand and he looked at her and his tears went away just like that and he opened his mouth and tried to say: It will be okay, but the kid just shook her head and Aiden looked back at Mitch, and at his father, and Mitch wasn’t sure what he could say, so he said nothing because now wasn’t the time to get all weepy over the bad choices he’d made.
He wanted to be in Jack’s house, drinking hot coffee, watching Aiden and Jessica, waiting for that moment when the light came.
He pulled the pocket watch his dad had given him and looked at it. The gold was tarnished, the fine detail work rubbed smooth in places from his father’s thumb when he’d been overthinking one problem or another. And how many times had he rubbed that watch, thinking of Aria and what they had, and how it might end?
