The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  The police car seemed to take forever to finally reach that block, to cruise cautiously past that driveway, spinning a shadow around the bush with its passing. Willow couldn’t tell if the police officer was looking for her, or just driving slowly of his own accord.

  With the tire flat again, Willow decided to abandon the bike beside a garage at the next house, pushing it in far enough that no one would see it unless they were looking for it. Then she started to jog toward the motel. She could see her shadow in front of her as she ran the final quarter of a mile.

  She reached the windbreak of trees and found Dorothy’s car missing. Desperately casting about, she saw it parked by one of the rooms on the ground floor. Willow froze. What did this mean? Was Dorothy backing out of their plan? Was there some other reason she couldn’t park by the trees?

  With no other choice, Willow sprinted to Dorothy’s car, praying no one would see her slim shadow skimming over the parking lot, her feet striking quickly but softly on the dark asphalt. She crouched by the car and found the pink piece of paper. It was heavy. She unrolled it and found the key as planned. There was something written on the paper, but Willow had no time to read it. She fumbled with the key in the unfamiliar car and finally opened the trunk. It was lined with blankets and sweaters, as Dorothy had said, with pillows stacked on one side, in preparation for Willow to lay her head. She climbed in, found a grip on the trunk lid from inside and pulled it shut, still gripping the key in her other hand.

  Within a minute, Willow fell asleep. Perhaps it was exhaustion, or simply the emotional letdown of finally reaching her goal–her goal not just for that one frantic morning, but her goal since that first time those people enticed her into the bowels of the old church. In her mind, in her spirit, Willow had left that town long ago. Her body now had its chance to follow.

  Willow awoke to the sound of the car door slamming. A painful gap opened in her stomach at a foreign notion that the person getting into the car may not be Dorothy. She lay perfectly still, breathing at only half volume as she listened for more. The doors of the back seat opened and closed two more times as she waited. She tried to assure herself that this was perfectly normal for Dorothy packing the car, and doing so alone, with no one assisting or intervening. This was good. This was the next step toward her escape.

  Finally, when the driver’s door had opened and closed a few minutes later, Willow heard a reassuring voice.

  “Are you okay back there?” Dorothy said.

  Willow released her restrained breath and almost laughed with relief. “Yes, I’m fine,” she said. Then she added, “Thank you.”

  Her gratitude, for more than the polite inquiry about her comfort, filled the trunk with Willow. She began to feel as if hope were a person and had slipped into that dark nest with her. The feeling, as if an arm had wrapped over her and protection lay all around, made her smile.

  Willow had gone to church since she was small, but only sporadically, and with little happening at home to reinforce anything positive she heard in Sunday School or children’s church. She loved to sing the little songs they taught, especially Jesus Loves Me. But, more than once, her mother told her to quiet down when she sang while playing in her room or in the yard. To the little girl called Wanda, the message was that her singing was unpleasant. She didn’t realize that it was the love of Jesus that was bothering her mother.

  The notion of a Jesus who invited little children to sit in his lap, to bless them and to protect them, sustained little Wanda through many dark and lonely nights. That was when she first noticed a presence in her room, or walking with her to school when she was alone. She assumed the friendly chaperone was Jesus.

  Not since she was seven or eight years old had she felt that presence so palpably as she did that morning in the trunk.

  Before she exited the car next to the bank, Dorothy spoke to Willow again. “I’m going to wrap up things here now. I have a meeting at nine that should be the end of this assignment. Even if it runs long, or there are things to clean up after, I shouldn’t be any later than ten thirty,” she said. Then, after a pause, she added, “It’s almost eight now.” It had occurred to Dorothy that Willow probably had no way of seeing the time in the dark trunk.

  In fact, Willow had not even brought a watch with her. She had a small alarm clock in her bag, but her watch had been broken during one of the ceremonies with the occult group, though she had not at the time been able to remember any fall or other event that would have stopped her silver watch with the white leather band. It wouldn’t have helped in the trunk anyway, since it didn’t glow in the dark.

  During the two and a half hours waiting in the trunk, Willow carefully shifted around to keep her arms and legs from falling asleep. She stayed awake the entire time, attending to every sound in the little parking lot next to the bank. At one point, a couple stopped directly next to her. They began to argue, first playfully and then more ardently, about what their tryst last night meant for their relationship at work, and for their relationships with their spouses. Willow was glad not to know who it was. She didn’t want to know such intimate, unpleasant stories about others.

  In the dark trunk, she first began to practice thinking of herself as Willow Pierce, and no longer Wanda Parker. She liked the name she had selected, feeling that it was more romantic than her given name. She felt that her new name fit her better, or at least it fit the person that she was determined to become. And in that dark little cocoon she prayed. She prayed for the safety of this dangerous endeavor, especially for Dorothy. Willow wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she were responsible for getting Dorothy into serious trouble, or even killed. Again, in response to her prayers, she felt that comforting presence with her in her little hiding place.

  This is when it first occurred to Willow that the same abilities to see things in the spiritual world, which attracted the unwanted attention of the Satan worshippers, might also be useful for more godly activities. She tried to remember anyone ever talking about actually feeling Jesus cuddled up close to them when they were afraid and alone. Nothing came to mind.

  As she thought about these things, she began to see a golden light from the back of the trunk, as if someone were slowly prying the lid open. Willow stopped breathing entirely, ready to fight and flee if necessary. But the fear she was feeling was coated over with a warm comfort that resembled that first hope she had met in the trunk that morning. Then, as clearly as if someone had inserted a View-Master into her head, Willow saw that a large man, dressed all in white, was standing outside of the car. He had long golden hair and his skin seemed to radiate light. This was the light leaking into the trunk.

  Then she knew that it wasn’t a man at all. It was an angel. And she remembered a ceremony that the cult leaders used to perform each time Willow arrived at the church, or at some barn where some other ceremony had been prepared. The leader would say some kind of incantation blocking her guardian angel from having any say in what happened to her there that night. This ritual had disappeared in the last year or so. Willow had assumed that they had grown bored with it. But now she wondered if it had actually become unnecessary, because her angel had abandoned her, just like everyone else.

  She began to shiver there in the trunk, though she didn’t feel particularly cold, at least no colder than she had been a few minutes before. And the shivering turned into a pulsing, like electricity flowing through her body, from head to toe and back. For a moment, she felt as if she were naked in her dark nest, as if the only thing touching her skin was this therapeutic electricity.

  Not until many years later did Willow understand what was happening to her there in the midst of her escape–her escape which constituted her grasping hold of control over her own life. In that act of adult responsibility for herself, she welcomed back the divine protection of angels, and the presence of the Jesus who still loved her as much as he did when she was a little girl, innocently playing with dolls and singing. She knew, however, even as a teenager, that she
would never be able to return to that childish innocence.

  A New Life Begun

  Drifting into a twilight just short of sleep, Willow was startled again by voices beside the car. After taking a second to focus, she knew that one of the voices was Dorothy. The next realization was that Dorothy was nervous.

  “Sure, it’s no problem, since I’m headed that way,” Dorothy said. Willow was thinking that a good listener would have realized that it was a problem, at least an inconvenience, based on Dorothy’s tight, tinny voice. Willow had never heard Dorothy speak in that tone. That alone was enough to alert her. Perhaps the people at the bank were used to that tense voice, maybe that’s how she talked around her clients, the people who held power over her employment.

  “Thanks,” said a male voice, a man much younger than Dorothy. “This helps me a lot. I couldn’t find a mechanic here in town that could do the work, so you dropping me in Salina to pick it up is a big help,” he said, as he waited to climb into the passenger seat.

  Willow could hear a bit of shuffling of luggage, as Dorothy adjusted to having a passenger. With her trunk unavailable, she had stuffed more into the seats than she normally would have.

  “Want me to help you fit some of this stuff in the trunk?” said the passenger, in the midst of the shuffling.

  Here, Dorothy’s nervous voice almost hit panicky. “Oh, no. This’ll be fine. The trunk is full already. And I want to have some of this stuff handy.”

  Willow prayed again.

  “Okay, that’s no problem, I can hold this,” said the passenger.

  “No, I can fit it just right in here.” Dorothy’s voice turned a bit hoarse as she strained to stuff something into the back seat. Willow could even feel the back seat bow slightly into the trunk. She breathed sparsely and kept praying.

  The journey to Omaha, interrupted by one nerve-racking stop in Salina, Kansas, was uneventful. Outside of Salina, Dorothy pulled into a gas station, away from the eyes of the transitory population there, and helped Willow climb out of the trunk. They hugged and laughed, breathing relief at having escaped this far. Once Dorothy learned about Willow’s ordeal, she began to loathe that little town and longed for leaving it in her past just as Willow had. And, where Dorothy had lacked the intensity of Willow’s actual experience of abuse, she added her imagination to the story Willow told. She nurtured a hate for what had happened to Willow, just as she hated what had happened to her cousin many years before.

  The hardest part of that journey, for Dorothy, was arriving in Omaha, where Willow asked to be dropped at the train station, downtown. For Willow, this had to be a clean break. No matter how unfair it felt, Dorothy was a link to her past. Willow had to leave even her savior behind, in order to find her new life, to find refuge from her past.

  “I’m changing my name, of course,” Willow said, as they sat in Dorothy’s car along the curb. It was late in the afternoon. They both faced the train station, which looked as if its image belonged on the back of a coin. “But I can’t tell you my new name.” She paused with the pain she knew this would cause Dorothy, a woman about whom she knew very little, beyond how tender her heart was. “That will help you be safe, in case anyone traces me, and asks you where I went and under what name. You won’t have to lie, because you won’t know.”

  Dorothy said little and cried much. When she finally drove away, Willow waited for Dorothy to get out of sight, before she started walking to the bus station, a mile away. The torture of her old life had implanted fear so deeply, that she strove to eliminate any chance of failure. In their last tearful moment together, Dorothy had slipped a little packet of folded twenty dollar bills into the left side pocket of Willow’s denim jacket. Willow knew she had bus fare to Chicago; now she actually had train fare. But she felt that the bus was more anonymous and that Dorothy would have expected her to take a train. As much as Willow trusted Dorothy, she carried a breathless awe at the depravity of her former oppressors and the possible ends to which their desperation might drive them. With Willow out from under their power, she might dare to tell the authorities outside that town what that group had been doing under the cover of darkness.

  Willow, however, planned to do no such thing. The power of fear living in her insisted that she break all connections, that she seek refuge and nothing else, not revenge, not even deliverance for others still under the wicked hand of those twisted people. That’s how she felt. That’s how she thought. That’s how she would act.

  In downtown Chicago, the next day, the beneficiary of a cancellation on the daily bus going to that city, Willow stood and breathed in the automotive exhaust and the odors of a hundred restaurants, all driven by a steady breeze from the west. That breeze brought one of the first spring-like days to The Windy City, and it seemed to have also blown in a seventeen-year-old girl who would need to become a woman all of a sudden. That transformation would be necessary for Willow to remain free from others who would see her and have their own plans for her, like so many teenage runaways every year.

  Though she took the bus to avoid anyone looking for her at the train station in Chicago, she stepped out of the bus station and realized she was just across the street from the trains arriving from Omaha. Willow turned and followed the wind toward the lake and away from the trains, shaking her head at how little she knew, and even less she controlled. She would need help. She knew that. So she prayed again.

  She had arrived in the transition time between rush hour and the spin up of the clubs, bars and restaurants for which Chicago has long been justifiably famous. She had over three hundred dollars in her possession, including the money from Dorothy. That meant she wouldn’t starve. But it also meant she could be robbed. And it meant that she didn’t have enough to stay anywhere very long. Willow was thinking about this as she walked along Wabash Avenue, heading north. She knew that wandering would only make her exhausted and lead her into danger as likely as lead her to help and shelter. She prayed specifically, “God, please show me where to go, if you really do want to save me now.”

  Treading as if she had a purpose and a destination, in the deep shade of the tall buildings to her left, Willow noticed a man dressed in white walking in front of her. She shook her head unconsciously. Was that man there before? Why did she suddenly notice him? Though he wore what appeared to be normal clothing for someone who worked in a restaurant, perhaps, or maybe in a hospital, his clothes seemed to glow. Maybe that was just an optical illusion in the dimness of the city, an unfamiliar environment for the girl from small-town Kansas. Whatever the case, and with no rational way to defend her choice, Willow determined to follow the man in white.

  They crossed Lake Street and then Whacker Drive and the river. Willow felt as if she had a traveling companion, even if the dark-haired man didn’t know she was following him. Though the street ran straight, and she didn’t remember turning a corner, Willow suddenly realized that she was now on Rush Street, which meant nothing to her, really. She picked up her pace a bit to stay with the man in white. Finally, he stopped, looked back and stepped into a little sandwich shop. When Willow reached the door of that shop she realized how hungry she was. She caught a whiff of Italian spices which woke her hunger further, like a spotlight on an already illuminated street. She followed the stranger into the shop.

  Once inside, Willow could see no sign of the man anywhere. But her hunger kept her there. She ordered an Italian submarine sandwich, once she saw someone else unwrap theirs at a small table near the counter.

  Seated at a once-glossy, white table for two by the front window, Willow ate slowly, not knowing where to go next, now that her guide had disappeared. She wondered if he worked in the back of the little restaurant, thinking of his white pants, shirt and jacket. That didn’t seem very likely, given the small visible staff of the little shop.

  Willow finished half of the sandwich and wrapped the other half carefully in its four layers of two different kinds of paper, and slipped it into her backpack. She remembered the previous day
, stuffing her bicycle pump into that pack. She almost laughed at the wonder of getting this far away from the only home she had ever known. Just as she was standing up to leave, the man in the white clothes strode from the back of the dining room toward the door. Willow, of course, followed.

  By now it was dark. Night time had fallen on Rush Street. In 1986, Rush Street in Chicago was not a good place for a young woman to be wandering alone. That’s why a group of young people, from a church in Uptown, had arrived there that night. They regularly showed up along the busy strip of nightspots, to try to talk to weary and needy people about Jesus.

  Two blocks from the sandwich shop, the man in white suddenly turned down a dark and narrow alley cut between buildings. Willow stopped. She looked after him, thinking she should see his clothes glowing. But she saw no more of her mysterious guide. As she looked into that foreboding darkness, behind her an old school bus spilled its passengers onto the sidewalk. If it had been 1968 instead of 1986, a stranger would have called them hippies. None seemed to be older than twenty-five, none well-dressed, and none particularly familiar with haircuts, or with the popular grooming standards of the 1980s.

  Willow turned around. She was surrounded. To get out of the pocket of young people with big smiles and shining eyes, she would have to push past someone. But she didn’t want to. Her flight instinct, which had been both overtly and covertly driving her for two days now, suddenly disappeared. Willow felt as if she had landed in the answer to her prayers.

  A rosy-cheeked girl with dark eyebrows and wavy brown hair stepped up to Willow.