The Reluctant Prophet

by Nancy Rue

  “I know how much it means to you to be able to take care of that kid. You don’t need me reaming you when you feel bad enough that all this stuff is blocking your way.” His face flinched. “As your friend I feel bad for you.”

  I put my hands to my mouth and closed my eyes. The chair scraped on the floor.

  “I have to get to the office,” Chief said. “Try to hang in there. This will probably all go through. Like I said, we’ve just hit a few snags. In the meantime nobody is going to come take Desmond. His mother hasn’t lost custody of him, so unless you have to get medical treatment for him or he gets in trouble with the law, you’re just babysitting, and you don’t need legal guardianship to do that.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  And I let him leave thinking my fear of losing Desmond was the only thing that made me smother my mouth with my hands until it was too late to call him back. If I hadn’t, I would have told him the whole horrible story. And then he might never call me friend again.

  I was never good at putting a good spin on an inner disaster, so I was glad only Geneveve was there when Desmond and I took the van to Sacrament House that night so that we could go out and buy a Christmas tree. Mercedes and Jasmine were at an NA meeting, and Sherry was still MIA. Mercedes would have picked up on my mood in a glance and been on me like the proverbial white on rice. It was bad enough that Desmond kept offering to talk to Chief for me, even though I didn’t say a word about the man.

  But I underestimated Geneveve. Deep in the Christmas tree lot, while Desmond was trying to charm the woman at the counter out of a free wreath, she caught shyly at my sleeve and said, “You got you some troubles, Miss Angel?”

  “It’s not about the house,” I said quickly. “I told you—nobody’s going anywhere.”

  “I know it’s not about the house.” She pressed her hand against her chest. “It’s about somethin’ in here.”

  “You can thank me now, or you can thank me later.” We turned to look at Desmond, who emerged amid the packed-in trees with a fluffy circle of evergreen over each shoulder like a pair of epaulets. “I scored us not one, but two, of these bad boys.”

  I opened my mouth, but Geneveve inserted herself neatly between us.

  “Did you steal those, boy?”

  Desmond blinked, but he recovered. “No, I did not. That lady up there give ’em to me.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I told her we wasn’t gon’ have no Christmas this year on accounta—”

  “On accounta nothin’. You take those right back up to that counter, and you tell her you were mistaken. We don’t lie at Sacrament House.”

  “I don’t live at Sacrament House.”

  Geneveve took a step forward and took her voice to a menacing low. “You live at Miss Angel house, and that is part of the Sacrament family. Now you go on and give them wreaths back.”

  Desmond’s eyes narrowed into resentful slits, but he headed through the trees, dragging the wreaths at his sides. Some small part of my core turned to jelly. Maybe I wasn’t going to need those papers after all.

  But even after we got back to Sacrament House and put up the tree and started Desmond on the decorating, I felt so low I was sure I’d have to scrape myself off the floor any minute. Unwilling to suck out any of the poorly concealed joy on Desmond’s face as he hung Harley ornaments on the tree, I slipped out to the front step. I had my head on my knees when Geneveve joined me.

  “Am I interruptin’ your prayin’, Miss Angel?” she asked.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It wasn’t doing that much good anyway.”

  She stretched her legs down the steps and rubbed her thighs against the slight chill. “I feel that way sometime.”

  “I can only imagine.”

  “When I don’t feel like God’s listenin’ to me, I usually talk to you.”

  I tried to laugh. “I am definitely no substitute for God, Geneveve.”

  “No, but you know him pretty good. Lotta times you say what he want me to hear. I know that thing, now.”

  “Well, I’m glad.”

  She seemed to ponder her feet for a minute before she said, “I ain’t no Miss Angel, but I listen pretty good. We might could figure out his answer, the two of us.”

  “What’s the question?” I said.

  “Whatever it is makin’ your eyes so scared.”

  I turned my head to look at her, to deny that I was quietly terrified, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t looking at the woman I carried on the back of my motorcycle a hundred years ago in September. This was a woman I wanted to know and trust. If I hadn’t seen her lying in an alley in her own vomit or pushed her into a shower to wash away the stench of her life, I would have confided in her.

  And then because of all those things, I wanted to.

  “You’re not the only one with a past, Gen,” I said.

  “Everybody got a story. I heard things in them NA meetings make me feel like I been Cinderella.”

  “Did any of them throw their lives away over—” I rolled my eyes. “I guess they all did or they wouldn’t be there.”

  “They have just as hard of a time tellin’ it as you,” Geneveve said. “Most times they just start at the beginning.”

  “Okay,” I said. I moved the mental rock and dragged out the first phrase. “I grew up a rich kid.”

  “I knew that. You got that kinda class. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with bein’ rich.”

  “There can be a lot wrong with it, and I think I was born knowing what that was. And when I was sixteen or so, I fell in love with somebody who knew it too. Or so I thought.”

  “He was a rich kid.”

  “Yeah. His daddy and my daddy had it all planned out over their golf games that the two of us were going to get married someday.”

  Geneveve shrugged. “You was in love anyway.”

  “Love when you’re sixteen isn’t the same as love when you’re—anyway, I was infatuated. He was just hormonal.”

  She squinted.

  “He just wanted to get me into bed.”

  “What man don’t?”

  “He was pretty sly about it, though, y’know?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “He had me convinced that he shared my dream of leaving all our privileges behind right after high-school graduation and traveling around the country with just our backpacks and a few bucks, doing good for people. He never said, ‘Come on, baby, you know you want to.’ He said, ‘I just want us to share everything—our dreams, our souls, our bodies.’”

  “You went to bed with him.”

  “Yeah.”

  Geneveve dropped her head against my arm and laughed. The deep, throaty sound of it soothed off my edge.

  “It was the most incredibly stupid thing I’ve ever done,” I said. “Two months later I found out I was pregnant.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was just before my eighteenth birthday, and about two weeks before we graduated from high school. I was scared, right?”

  “I hear that.”

  “But I thought since we were so close to being ‘adults’ and we already had a plan, it would be all right.”

  I could hear my voice getting thick.

  “But it wasn’t all right,” Geneveve said.

  “Not even a little bit. I went to Tr—the guy—and told him, and I said we would just strap the baby on my back and take him with us on our dream. I was talking about how differently our child was going to grow up from the way we did, and I watched his eyes just turn to—I don’t know—”

  “Stones.”

  “What?”

  “They look like stones. When a man show you he don’t love you like you thought, his eyes always look like stones in his head.”

  Geneveve demonstrated, eyes hard and c
old.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s it exactly. I just stood there and watched him turn into some other person while he was telling me that the whole dream thing was ridiculous and he never planned to do it to begin with. He said he thought I’d see how unrealistic it was when the time came to actually leave.” I could hear Troy’s incredulous tone as I repeated his exact words to Geneveve: “Did you really think we were going to go live like hippies? You’re insane.”

  “And I know he never talked to you like before that.”

  “No—I was talking to somebody I didn’t even know. Somebody I didn’t want to know. I remember feeling like if I didn’t get out of there, he was going to haul me away too, to wherever he’d taken the Troy Irwin I loved and killed him off.”

  “Troy? That was his name?”

  “Yeah.”

  Geneveve waited. I was sure she could see me swallowing.

  “So you ran,” she said.

  “It was the first time in my life I ever ran away from anything. I’ve pretty much been doing it ever since.”

  “You didn’t run away from us.”

  “No. I guess I didn’t.”

  “Ain’t no guessin’ to it.” She curled her fingers around my sleeve. “You coulda turned us out anytime, and you never did.”

  “That’s all God’s doing, Gen.”

  She gave the sleeve a shake. “But you do what he tells you. Back then you just wasn’t listenin’.”

  “You got that right.”

  Geneveve moved from the step to the space in front of me and, on her knees, took both of my hands. Hers were hot, as if she’d been warming them by a fire.

  “You know what I’m thinkin’ every time Miss Hank give me the communion bread?”

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m thinkin’ it’s a good thing Jesus’ body keep feedin’ me, ’cause all the bad things I done in my life was eatin’ me up before I come here. I just keep thinkin’ pretty soon, the feedin’ gon’ get ahead of the eatin’, and I’ma be able to live like I never done before.”

  I put my hands on her face and pulled it to my forehead. I could barely breathe.

  “What happened when you ran, Miss Angel?” she whispered.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Really.”

  “It ain’t gon’ hurt this time like it done before.”

  I couldn’t imagine that. The rock I’d moved was now pressing on my chest, forcing the words out. “I was crying too hard to drive, but I got in my car anyway and took off. I didn’t see him run ahead of me in the driveway until it was too late to stop….”

  “You need to say it.”

  I couldn’t. And then I did—in a voice strangled by years of holding it back. “I ran over him, Geneveve.”

  For twenty-four years I’d kept the image out of my head by never speaking it except to Sylvia in those last weeks. Even then it was just to be reassured that the part I’d asked her to play in covering it up didn’t go to her grave with her. I’d never fooled her for a moment. She’d known all along. When I finally confessed it to her all those years later, she said, “I’m just sorry I never had the satisfaction of running him over myself.”

  Somehow that had given me permission to bury it again, in a place I’d thought it would stay. Until those words came out of my mouth now—and with them the image of Troy, tossed to the edge of the gravel driveway of our secret hideaway.

  “I was screaming when I got to him,” I said, “but he wasn’t making a sound. He was just sitting there, clutching at his leg. When he reached up and grabbed my arm—it’s a blur but I know his blood soaked right into my skin. I may have screamed that I was sorry or that I would get help or that if he wouldn’t die I would do whatever he wanted me to do. I’m still not sure what I said.”

  “You was in shock, Miss Angel. Don’t nobody know what they sayin’ when they get like that.”

  “I do remember one thing, though. He put his hand on my lips to stop me, and I could taste his blood. And then he did this weird thing.”

  “What he do?”

  I closed my eyes and saw it again. “He smiled.”

  “No he didn’t.”

  “He did. And he said, ‘It’s okay. I’ll make it okay.’ I just kept shaking my head. I had all this long hair and it just kept getting in the blood. It was like being in a horror movie.” I pressed my thumbs to my temples and closed my eyes again to see. “He told me to go to a phone and call for help, and I tried to get up and go, but he pulled me back and he said, ‘Don’t give them your name. And when you’re done, go home and don’t let anybody see you until you’re cleaned up.’ It was like he’d had an hour to plan, y’know? He said to tell my nanny that I hit a tree and to make her get the car fixed before my dad saw it. He said she’d do it—he said it like I was going to ask her to get me a glass of juice.”

  “That one of them things you said was wrong with bein’ rich?”

  I shoved the back of my hand against my mouth, but it all continued to shove its way out. “I told him I couldn’t do that, but he said I had to. He said they’d never believe it was an accident and I would go to jail. ‘I’ll make up a story’—that’s what he said. ‘You never saw me today.’”

  I opened my eyes, but I could still see it. His face was gray, and his body seized every time he tried to touch his leg. But it was as if he had to, as if he were trying to keep it from dying.

  “So I did it.” I looked at Geneveve, whose eyes held every word I’d just let free. “I’ve only told one other person this, and she’s gone now.”

  “And ain’t nobody gon’ hear it from me.” She rocked back on her heels and watched me rub my hand up and down on my chest.

  “It hurts rememberin’, don’t it?” she said. “Not as bad as when it happened—but it hurts.”

  “Yeah, which is why I managed not to do it for two decades.”

  “The pain’ll stop when you got it all out.”

  I put my hand up. “That’s all I can handle right now.”

  “What happened to your baby, Miss Angel?”

  If Nita’s car hadn’t nosed up to the curb, I might have told her. I might not. The only thing I knew for sure was that the last piece of the pain I’d buried had survived the grave I made for it.

  Mercedes and Jasmine climbed out of Nita’s Hyundai, but she didn’t pull away.

  “She said she need to talk to you, Miss Angel,” Jasmine said.

  I virtually ran down the walkway, readjusting my face as I went. At least it was dark, because no amount of faking was going to account for the mascara that was surely collected under my eyes by now.

  “Everything okay?” I said when I got to Nita.

  She turned down the Trini Lopez version of “Feliz Navidad.” “Oh, yeah. Those two are a trip, aren’t they?”

  “They’re a whole journey.”

  She started the nodding that always preceded her sentences. “Well, listen, I just wanted to let you know that I am going to be out of town for the holidays. I leave tomorrow.”

  I got up enough wherewithal to ask her where she was going, but I didn’t hear the answer.

  “Anyway, I will be back in a week. They can call Leighanne or anybody else in the group if they have trouble. The holidays can be hard when you’re in recovery.” She patted my hand on the car door. “And of course they have you. You have saved their lives, you know.”

  “I think they’ve saved mine.”

  Nita squeezed my hand. “Then everybody lives,” she said. “Have a merry Christmas.”

  I was relieved to see that Mercedes and Jasmine were still on the porch with Geneveve. I really couldn’t talk anymore tonight. I needed to get to my red chair and muck through what I’d turned loose, because it was now in a bog at my feet. God, please be there waiting. Please.
/>   “You got to just put her out your mind, Geneveve,” Mercedes was saying when I got to the porch.

  “Could you put Jasmine out your mind if she was back there on the street without nobody carin’ what happened to her?”

  “I known Jasmine a long time. We like sisters now—same with you. You don’t even hardly know Sherry.”

  “Don’t matter. I just feel like the Lord is callin’ me to care. That’s all.” Geneveve looked at me and her eyes jumped, as if she’d just realized I was standing there. “I’ma go get Desmond for you,” she said. “He needs to get to bed—it’s a school night.”

  I was still watching her go when Jasmine grabbed my hand. “I know she heard the Lord and all that—I’m not sayin’ she lyin’.”

  “But the Lord ain’t the only reason she worried ’bout Sherry bein’ on the street.” Mercedes looked at the door and then back at me. “She afraid of Sherry usin’, ’cause when Sherry usin’, she do anything Sultan tell her to do. And that is a fact now.”

  “Mmm-hmm—”

  “Sultan?” I said. “Has he tried to get in touch with Geneveve? Why don’t you tell me this stuff?”

  “No—you don’t need to be gettin’ all worked up. We just know that about Sherry.”

  Jasmine nodded. “Long as Sherry was here, Geneveve didn’t have to worry ’bout Sultan findin’ her ’cause he didn’t have his spy.”

  “Is that why she came here, do you think?”

  They both shrugged.

  I pressed my whole head with my hands. “Ladies, how am I supposed to protect you if I don’t know what it is I’m protecting you from?”

  Mercedes closed her face. Jasmine crossed me out with her arms. A wall went up that I was not going to knock down tonight.

  “All right,” I said. “Promise me that you will not let Geneveve go out looking for Sherry. And if you can’t stop her, you call me. Immediately. Am I clear?”

  Mercedes grunted.

  “Not good enough, Mercedes. The future of this house depends on it being a safe place. We don’t play by street rules here. You got that?”

  “We got it,” Jasmine said. She looked hard at Mercedes. “Both of us.”