by Lee Thompson
“What does it hurt to believe that God cares? What does it hurt to believe that He has sent one of His hosts to tend your broken heart in its time of need? Can you say with all certainty that your Santana and his Santana are not one and the same? Can you prove that he is anything other than a spiritual guardian who feels the loss of her as much as you do?”
Father Ross leaned forward and placed his fingers in front of his lips and spoke quietly. “I am very sorry for your loss, Jacob, but don’t discount that the hand of God is in this, and that you will learn how to be a better man from the experience. Our judgment is always clouded after a powerful blow, all we can feel is our present pain and it’s all too easy to believe that our situation will never improve. And it is a sad fact that things could always be worse.”
“How could my situation have been any worse?”
“What if she had killed herself and you had never seen it coming? You’d have more anger directed at yourself, wouldn’t you, than just not bringing her to her hometown before she died? It sounds like you loved each other very much, embrace it for what it was, and that in some way or another she will always be with you.”
“I feel like she’s still with me,” he said, “but not often, and it’s not easy when I have that feeling. It’s like I’m walking into a lake in the dark and I know that she’s just out of my reach and no matter how deeply I go into the water, I’ll never be able to bring her back to shore with me.”
Father Ross rubbed his hands together. If it had been anyone else, Jacob would have considered it a non-verbal cue that the man was done talking about the matter, but he waited for a minute to see if the priest had anything else to say.
He asked Jacob, “Is this the first time in your life you’ve felt completely lonely?”
“Yes.”
“Have you considered taking your own life?”
“Are you suggesting it?”
Father Ross laughed. “Lord, no. It’s just that I get that sense from you, but I see that you’re trying to fight it, at least until you can bury her ashes. But what about after your mission is complete? Do you think you’re going to go through with it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“You can come back here and visit me again after you find her old home. I’d love to hear about the experience.”
“Thank you,” Jacob said. “I mean that.”
The priest patted his shoulder and said, “I know you do. Would you like to pray?”
“Maybe when I visit again.”
“I’ll be here,” the priest said, and then he stood and offered his hand and they shook again. A moment later the priest disappeared through a door somewhere in the back, as silent as a ghost. Jacob sat for a while longer on the pew he’d slept in, trying to wrap his head around what the priest had said to him.
When he walked out into the early morning light he heard traffic speeding in the distance, and it took him a second to notice the man sitting on the concrete steps. He was facing the pot-holed road and he wore a white T-shirt, black jeans, black and red Nikes. He was stick-thin, and his arms were heavily tattooed and Jacob instantly thought of someone who struggled with drug addiction, and thought of the scene in The Crow where Eric Draven made the drugs runs back out of Darla’s veins and drip from her forearm, but he didn’t know why the man reminded him of that. He stepped closer, meaning to walk around him and down the steps and back out to the street, but up close he could see that the tattoos on his arms were each a name and they crowded each other so closely that they made his entire arms appear almost black.
The man, who had seemed lost in thought looked up at him, and Jacob felt himself spiraling back into what he thought another hallucination. He thought that if Father Ross were right, and Sebastian had been a heavenly host helping itself and Jacob find closure, then the man who looked identical to Sebastian, sitting on the steps in front of him, was the angel’s evil counterpart. He found that he couldn’t move his legs. He sat heavily, the concrete hurting his tailbone and all the air fled his lungs. The man said, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost again. I see her sometimes, too. It’s like she’s still with us.”
“Who are you?”
“I freaked you out a bit on the porch, didn’t I? I apologize if I did.”
“What do you want?”
“There’s so much you don’t know about her,” Sebastian said. He stroked the tattoos on his arm and Jacob looked at the names and he saw Santana’s near the top of the man’s wrist. Jacob asked him what all the names were supposed to mean. Sebastian said, “They were my charges.”
“And what does that mean?”
He glanced at more names Heather, Lucy, Nina, Jesse, Tanya, Beverly, Elizabeth, on and on, thousands of tags that made no sense to the eye. Jacob wiped his face and said, “You’re her ex-boyfriend or something.”
“I already told you what I was.”
“Her guardian.”
Sebastian nodded.
“You didn’t do a very good job.”
Sebastian said, “I’m getting old and I’ve been slipping these past twenty years. And if you want the truth, I could never save her from myself.”
“What do you know about her that I don’t know?”
“I know everything about her.”
“Tell me something.”
“What do you want to know?”
Jacob was at a loss for words. He had no idea what to ask. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He jerked his thumb at the doors behind them and said, “Somebody in there thinks you’re supernatural.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I’m having a breakdown, that I’ve been having one for the last week, and when I reach the end of it, I reach the end of life as I know it.”
“You’re not very optimistic. Are you going to visit him again after you bury her ashes, like you promised? Or are you a liar, Mr. Elder?”
“Why are you really spying on me?”
“Do I look like a spy?”
“You act like one.”
“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and acts like a duck.”
“But you’re the stork.”
“I brought her to her parents, sure. I’ve brought many children to their parents. And every child I’ve delivered, at some point in their lives, faces something no human should have to face. It’s my black wings, I’ve already told you that.”
“Maybe you should have held them to your white chest.”
“I don’t know how,” Sebastian said, “but I’ll keep trying.”
“You still want to answer a question for me?”
“Where did she live?”
“Yes.”
“You already know, don’t you? Hasn’t she told you countless times over your few short years together? Part of me hates you, do you know that? Because you’re like other men who have taken the children I wish I could love and you lead them toward destruction. Part of me is also tempted to let you suffer a fate far greater than what’s in store for you.”
Jacob nodded, confused by why he felt like laughing and crying at the same time. He said, “I was a horrible husband.”
“You won’t get any argument here.”
“How is this supposed to help me?”
“I have a lot planned for you.”
“Like what?”
“You see this name,” Sebastian said, pointing at his forearm. Jacob read Nina, and then Sebastian traced his finger up his arm to another name that was written in a broken script on his bicep, almost jaggedly, as if the tattoo artist had been drunk or stoned. The second name he pointed at was Robin. Sebastian said, “Get ready to pull your weight, all right?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” He thought he heard the door open behind him and jumped a little bit, afraid that Father Ross would see him talking to himself.
When he looked up, there wasn’t anyone at the door, or anyone sitting on the steps.
5
The
reporter knocked on the Kunis’s door an hour later. Nina opened it and invited her inside. Caitlin Reno was slim but moved with purpose the way that Victor did, and as Nina noticed and acknowledged that she inwardly cringed. She led Caitlin into the kitchen and they sat at the table. The reporter carried a black leather satchel and slid it off her arm, flipped the flap open and removed a legal pad and digital recorder and set it between them.
Nina’s eyes widened and she wondered if it was smart to talk to this woman without either her mother or stepfather there to provide some type of moderation. She enjoyed the fact that she was intelligent and observant, but she knew how much she didn’t know, and how easily she could misconstrue someone else’s intentions, but she leaned back in the chair away from the recorder, eyeing it suspiciously.
“Does it bother you?” Caitlin said, wearing a smile that Nina was sure the older woman had practiced in a mirror, harvesting just the right amount of concern to disarm her victim, yet that smile was mixed with a bit of a challenge to make people raise their hackles, because people who went on the defensive offered more information than someone who didn’t feel threatened.
She answered her honestly, not falling into the trap, and nodded.
“We don’t have to use the recorder,” Caitlin said, “and I won’t print anything that you don’t give me permission to print, okay?” She smiled. It was a perfect smile, a tad more friendlily than the opening one, and although Nina thought it was something like a combination punch, a planned and rehearsed sequence, she felt herself soften beneath it, and lean forward, and hate herself all in the same moment.
She said, “You’re going to let me proofread whatever article you’re turning in or something?”
“Not exactly.”
“Meaning?” She wanted to lean forward more and trust her but she couldn’t. She knew about broken promises, thinking of her biological father and all the proclamations he had made and never followed through with.
“Meaning that I’ll let you see anything I’ve quoted you on, but everyone else’s business is their business.”
Nina nodded, and sighed, resting her elbows on the kitchen table. “I’m curious why you want to talk to me though. I didn’t even see anything when Robin was taken.”
“I’m to understand there is an unknown quantity here,” Caitlin said, her pen poised over the yellow legal pad. The color of the paper reflecting off her skin made the knife edge of her hand look jaundiced. Before Nina could ask what she meant, the woman said, “You talked to some transient, correct?”
Nina noticed that there were about a dozen names already written on the paper. They were hard to read upside down but she could tell that they were all girls’ names, and their ages, most of them between four and seven years old, and then following each was a street address, then a slash separating it from another location. She said, “What do those names mean?”
“Nothing,” Caitlin said, and smiled again, warmer this time. “You’re an observant girl.”
She shrugged. “I guess. Are they all missing kids?”
Caitlin leaned back and set her pen down. “Why do you say that?”
“The number following each name is their age, right? So they’re all really young.” She squinted at her, trying to unearth the meaning of Ms. Reno’s expression. It was an odd mixture of respect, possibly, and annoyance. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Let’s talk about the man you spoke to in the park first.”
“No,” Nina said. “I see what you’re doing.”
Caitlin smiled again. “And what do you think I’m doing?”
“There have been other girls taken, right? And you think that one guy has been doing it, or most of it. Like they always do in the shows and movies.”
“It’s not that farfetched. But let me ask you something about the man in the park…”
“Jacob?”
“Is that his name?” she said, writing it down. When she looked up for an affirmation and Nina nodded again, she said, “Did he offer a last name?”
“No.” Her chest grew tight. She said defensively, “He’s not a bad guy. What are the locations behind those girls’ names?”
“I think you could figure that out if you really tried. Seriously. I forget sometimes how intelligent and aware kids can be, I was a lot like you when I was younger.” She brushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear and waited for Nina to deduce the meaning of the two locations.
Nina frowned. “It’s the street where they lived, the first one, right?”
Caitlin nodded.
“And the second location is where their bodies were found?”
Her voice sounded strange to her. She worried for a second, almost embarrassed by the sound of it, but it passed quickly. She sat straighter and scratched a spot above her knee. “You think Robin is doomed already, don’t you?”
“Honestly?”
“Yes,” Nina said.
“I do, and I wish I had a different feeling about it, but if she’s not found in the next twenty-four hours they won’t find her alive.”
“Huh,” Nina said, not wanting to imagine what some sicko was doing to the Stark girl at that very minute while all the other kids were in school, while Nina and this reporter talked about the child as if she were already gone. She swallowed, her mouth dry, then got up and poured a glass of water. She asked the reporter if she wanted anything to drink.
Caitlin smiled and shook her head. It was a gorgeous smile like Clint’s smile, she thought. She wondered why some people were so blessed and other people, like her, her mom, Rick, all had nervous or sad smiles. She shook her head again and then sat very still before looking up at Nina as she sat back down. “Why do you think he’s not a bad guy?”
“Jacob?” Nina asked. She hadn’t really thought about it. She cleared her throat and tried to sound as confident as she felt deep down inside sometimes, “It’s a vibe, you know?”
“No,” Caitlin said. “Explain it, please. It’ll help me be accurate.”
She gripped the seat of the chair and straightened up. She hated exposing how she felt sometimes, and she loved doing it too when someone else, an adult usually, like a teacher, told her that she was a perceptive child. She said, “It’s a vibe. Like, you can look in someone’s eyes and see they’re hurt and way too sad to hurt anyone else, because they know how it feels to hurt, you know? And Jacob has that. And,” she said, shrugging, “he has honest eyes. There isn’t any guile in them. He didn’t have any reason to lie to me about anything because I couldn’t do anything to him either way, you know? I think he was just hurting. I think he ran away from something that really messed him up. I don’t think he had anything to do with Robin Stark getting taken, you know?”
Caitlin jotted notes. When she finished she said, “I don’t mean to sound condescending, and this won’t go into my article, but do you think you’re giving this guy too much credit? Girl to girl, seriously. You don’t know him, right? You talked to him once? Or was it more?”
“You can get a really good feel talking to somebody once.”
She stared the reporter down, not liking her.
“Okay.”
“It’s not okay,” she said. “You’re already deciding Jacob is the one who took Robin Stark, and probably all the other girls on that list, and you haven’t even spoken to him.” She crossed her arms over her chest and said, “It’s a really stupid assumption.”
Caitlin leaned back. She didn’t explode like Nina expected her to, like some adults would to show a child that they were in control and the child was not. She set her pen on the legal pad and Nina could smell the clean, fresh smell of her shampoo, the soap still clinging to her skin. She was too perfect, Nina thought. And she hated her a little for it, the way she hated some of the most popular girls in her school; girls in her class who the older boys and older girls readily accepted and sometimes even championed, raising them beyond a level the rest of them could even dream of.
The reporter toyed with her hair.
Nina said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
“No,” she said. “You have something to say, say it.”
Caitlin rolled her pen back and forth across the notepad. “Tell me about the guy that is hunting this Jacob character. The one that toyed with two police officers.”
“Victor? He did more than toy with them,” she said. “What about him?”
“Well, it’s funny that Jacob—if that’s his real name, and even you should question that—comes down here and then Robin Stark is abducted, right? And then there is this dangerous guy that’s a walking mountain who is looking for him.” Caitlin eyed her, squinting a little, and said, “I understand it’s hard for you to understand, you feel bad for Jacob, but this guy hunting him, Victor, he’s not hunting him just for something to do. Nobody follows somebody eight hundred miles to just say, Hey, I’m worried about you, do they?”
“I don’t know,” Nina said, feeling very, very small and slightly stupid and it made her angry. She wanted to order Ms. Reno to leave like she figured her mother would do if she was awake, but she didn’t have it in her, and part of her knew that to exclude the points the reporter was making, this woman a professional who made her living from gathering facts, would be to her own detriment.
She said, “I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
The reporter leaned forward and tapped the tip of her pen against the pad. “This guy Victor is bad news, right?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s hunting this guy you feel sorry for…”
“So?”
“So, there’s a reason he’s come all the way down here. And I know you don’t want my take on it, I get that, I was a young girl once,” she said, looking inside herself, Nina thought, “not too long ago, in fact, and I can tell you this: men lie all the time.”
“And what, you don’t?”
“Sure, I lie when it gets me what I want. But you’re taking a stranger and making him some kind of saint, aren’t you? And why is that?”
“I’m not making him a saint.”
“You are. He’s beyond reproach and you don’t even know him.”
