by C. S. Lakin
Cynthia hated to admit it, but she was scared. In all her nineteen years, she had never even gone camping in the Sierras. The forest seemed friendly enough during a day hike, but the night changed the woods into a dreaded fairy tale haunt. She prayed that there were no wild animals lurking behind the trees. That game of wolves had set her imagination running. If only the clouds would part so the moon could shine through.
Cynthia stopped to rest; she needed a minute to get her bearings. She had gone down to the beach, and to the flagpole to look for footprints, but the rain and wind blown debris made it impossible to decipher anything. She shuddered when she thought of those people chasing after Davis. She cursed Lila under her breath. Lila purposely got them drunk and used it to her own sick advantage. Her world was falling apart and it was Lila’s fault. Surely, Davis never meant to behave the way he had. Lila just seemed to bring out the worst in everyone.
Cynthia stood. She heard someone. “Davis, is that you?” Her voice came out a whimper. She startled when she heard a branch crack. The wind kicked up and pulled at her scarf. Despite her determination to remain strong, tears welled up. She pressed on but couldn’t find a clear trail through the woods. The pines grew thick, and ferns and shrubs poked at her. She thought she had retraced her steps back toward the beach, but instead found herself in a small wooded clearing, entirely unfamiliar.
Don’t panic. She remembered that when you got lost, you were supposed to stop, not continue on. People got lost in woods all the time—and died yards from safety. But how could she just stop and wait? The rain and wind pounded her. And Davis was in danger.
Quickly, she squeezed through the easiest opening between the trees, looking for signs of a trail, for anything familiar. She blinked back tears. Oh, Davis! Where are you?
The pounding grew louder. “This is the most damnable headache I’ve ever had,” Lila said. “It feels like my brain is about to cave in, which would serve me right.” Lila tugged at the down comforter and then sat up in the dark. As she looked out the turret windows, she could barely make out the ocean in all that blackness. The wind kept up a persistent moaning. Lila felt like moaning along with it. The pounding started again.
“Lila, it’s me, Peter. We need to talk.”
“Go away.”
The door opened. “I’m coming in.”
“If you must.” She patted the chair next to her bed and lit the oil lamp. It cast a dull glow on the stone walls of the octagonal tower room. “Come in, my cohort in treachery, have a seat.”
Peter strode toward her. “That’s just what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Lila grunted. “I’ll bet. So, all the little birdies have flown the coop, right?”
Peter’s expression told her all she needed to know. He was displeased with her. But what the hell did she care? What did she care about anything, anymore?
“Since we’re having trouble sleeping, let me tell you a bedtime story.”
“Oh, spare me, Li.”
“Here.” She reached for a bottle of Courvoisier and poured two drinks. She handed him the brandy snifter filled to the top. “Relax. Have a nightcap.”
Peter took the glass from her hand. He waited, watching for her next move.
Lila cleared her throat and assumed a dramatic voice. “Once upon a time . . .”
“Lila, I don’t need a bedtime story. We need to talk—”
“Avon,” she snapped, then reined her temper in. “Peter, my love, bear with me. Believe me, you’ll feel better when you hear my story. Well, at least I’ll feel better. So shut up and listen.”
Peter sipped his brandy while the wind droned on. Lila eyed him curiously.
“You know why you and I get along so well? We’ve very much alike.” She ignored Peter’s expression of disagreement. “We don’t fit in; we don’t play by the rules. We’re lone wolves, you and me.”
“I think I’ve had enough of your wolves for one night, thank you . . .”
“Shut up and listen. You’ll love it. Trust me.”
Lila took a long sip from her glass and settled back against the pillows. “I’m going to tell you a story that has everything. Pain, tears, thrills, and chills. The whole ball of wax.
“Once upon a time there was a man who talked to God . . .”
Chapter 22
At the age of twelve, George Carmichael had his formal introduction to Jesus while sitting in an outhouse in rural Arkansas. Sweating in the stifling heat, he nearly slipped into the chasm below when the Lord and Savior called out his name. Over the years, Carmichael recounted this experience innumerable times in tent revivalist meetings as he traveled the dusty roads. Throughout the years, he told his faithful, holy-rolling flocks of his awesome, intimate moment with Christ, the bright light that nearly blinded him, and his overwhelming humility in being chosen at such a young age, and in such an embarrassing and humbling circumstance.
Before he received yet another vision in a dream that commanded him to found the Church of the Holy Light, Carmichael spent most of his years in Dark Corners, Arkansas. And dark it was, Carmichael often reflected, spiritually dark. Even when he returned as a grown man to visit his father’s grave, only one road led into Dark Corners. The small one-room post office next to the wood-paneled church with the fake stained-glass windows looked even more dilapidated than he remembered. And the cotton fields still stretched as far as he could see.
George was a pudgy, clumsy boy, who grew into an awkward, gangly man, his religious fervor making up for whatever physical stature he lacked. His mother had died shortly after his birth from hemorrhaging, so he grew up under his father’s cold, impersonal hand; a hand that showed no compunction for beating George when the mood took him.
Power and fire grew behind George’s eyes, and when they set sight on Darla Jenkins of Little Rock in behind a row of pews, they burned with desire; desire Carmichael misread as infusion of holy spirit. He had never noticed the dark-haired, withdrawn girl on the other visits to her congregation until he spotted her midway through his sermon on marriage. With the words of the apostle Paul on his lips—better they should marry than burn with passion—his eyes met hers for a brief instant before she blushed and turned away. Darla had seen how the available church-going girls flocked around him when he came to give talks at her church. She found his charisma extraordinary.
After the lecture, he approached Darla with unwavering aplomb, leaving her breathless at God’s revelation that she was chosen to be the wife of the good Reverend. She immediately said yes, then went out behind the bushes and threw up her breakfast. It wasn’t from disgust; rather, she was so surprised that anyone would have her, an old maid at twenty. After asking her name, he gazed into her eyes, the windows of the soul, and knew. Never mind the aching in his groin, the aching he had repressed for ten years by distracting his adolescent fever with marathon Bible research.
Darla had never even held hands with a boy, let alone imagined what God meant when he said the two will be yoked together. Unlike many of the local rural families who raised and bred farm animals, Darla’s father owned a small grocery. As far as she knew, babies were something that appeared miraculously, like the infant Jesus.
On their wedding night, George transformed into a guttural, snarling animal, letting loose a painfully dammed-up flood. Darla bit her lip, drawing blood to keep from screaming out, praying fervently for strength to endure her suffering. Over the years, his ardor, though tempered, was never replaced by finesse. He satisfied himself, never understanding her needs. Her pain subsided to mere discomfort. She assumed sex was part of her wifely duty. And it certainly wasn’t anything she could discuss with her husband—or the Good Lord, for that matter. She endured George’s passions as a test of faith, assuring herself that God knew what he was doing in arranging this physical uniting of bodies, although the thought of it continued to sicken her.
So, years later, when she found herself pregnant with Delilah, relief washed over her. Now there was no more need for thi
s joining of flesh. They had been blessed with the desired result—the procreation of life. But George didn’t let up. He reached for her, even in her pregnant, bloated state. He found her swollen body irresistible. It excited him to know his first-born son was growing inside her. A son to carry the torch of the Lord. Darla, on the other hand, grew rueful at her lack of reprieve, remaining sullen and joyless.
When Delilah was born, Darla suffered complications and had to have an emergency hysterectomy. George grew bitter; his hopes for fathering a son were dashed. He knew God was punishing him somehow, testing his faith like Job. He bucked up under the trial, determined to make Delilah a shining example of his own faith. Even Darla’s insistence on that heretical name drove home God’s will that he suffer.
“We can’t name our daughter after that woman.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” Darla said, stroking the infant’s red curls.
“Delilah betrayed Sampson. Sold him to the Philistines for one thousand pieces of silver.”
“We’ll call her Lila.”
“She was a traitor to Israel. Sampson was blinded and kept a prisoner because of her sin.”
“Come now, Father, look at this little angel. How could she cause anyone harm or heartache? Little Lila.”
George acquiesced. For some reason he bowed to this lone instance of Darla’s strength of will, but he knew he was cursed. Lila became his cross to bear, and like Jepthah and his vow, he consecrated her to God, without asking Lila her opinion on the matter.
Ten-year-old Lila clasped her hands before her. The smell from the roast beef and mashed potatoes made her stomach churn, but she kept her head down and waited for her father to finish.
“Thank you, oh Lord, for the food of which we are about to partake. Please forgive us our sins and look with compassion upon our unrepentant daughter. For, although she is lazy and stubborn, we know you can soften her heart, oh Lord. In the name of Jesus, amen.”
Lila looked up, avoiding her father’s glare. She was painfully skinny and already starting to develop breasts. Her mother dressed her in loose, dark smocks that fell to her ankles; dresses that her mother had worn as a child and which caused Lila great embarrassment in school, but she knew better than to ask for something stylish and colorful. Her red, frizzy hair, tightly braided and pinned up on her head, gave her constant headaches.
This was to be her first meal of the day. Her punishment for disobedience and poor study habits was enforced fasting. That morning she’d had to recite the twelve tribes of Israel and she got confused. Her father screamed at her over the porridge.
“How many times do I have to tell you? There is no tribe for Joseph. Yes, he was a son of Israel, but God took his two sons and made them into two tribes. Now, tell me, who are Joseph’s sons?”
“Ephraim and Manasseh,” Lila muttered, taking the protective tone she learned early to use with her father. Her mother sat silently across the table, her head covered with a scarf as always. Waiting.
Lila looked at her father, careful to form her words just right. “Now, may I eat my breakfast?”
Reverend Carmichael removed her bowl with a brisk sweep of his hand and set it on the counter. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll remember.”
It didn’t serve Lila to cry even though her hunger was ferocious. Once, on a similar occasion, George caught Darla slipping her daughter a piece of fruit. He wailed into his wife with a string of curses that made her cringe. Lila watched her mother cower before his anger. Darla never betrayed her husband again, even though it pained her to see her own daughter go hungry. The equation became fixed in Darla’s mind. She would pay for her sins with unwanted sex, her daughter with unappeased hunger.
So, for Lila, sneaking food became a polished skill—digging through the cupboards or the trash can for an almost empty box of crackers or discarded scraps when no one was looking. She didn’t dare touch anything else. Her father counted every can and jar in the house. She plunged headlong through her guilt, knowing that God’s eyes were riveted on her; yet, if she didn’t eat, she was sure she’d faint or die.
At school Lila lied, saying she forgot her lunch sack. How could she tell her classmates her parents refused to feed her? When other children discarded the detritus of their lunches, she would surreptitiously dig the leftovers out of the trash barrels. Sometimes kids shared bites of sandwiches and fruit. She had no real friends. They smelled a pariah and kept away. No one ever wanted to come to her house to play, though every school year, she found some other loser like herself, and took a chance once again. The result was always the same. The Reverend was almost always home, sitting hunched over his desk preparing sermons. Lila would tiptoe past him, a potential friend in hand, but invariably he’d give them both a verbal lashing for one reason or another. Or hover over them and talk gospel at them. Her friends never came back.
In later years, on that rare occasion, she was allowed to go to someone’s house to play. Lila was astonished. She found homes filled with warmth. Kittens sleeping on a rug, brothers and sisters singing, playing games—even climbing trees. She felt delightfully sinful when she joined the other children, but when she returned home she pasted on her serious expression and hid the fact that she had a good time. Her father would grill her about each family, although he knew them all from church. His questions searched for unspiritual attitudes or behavior. If found, he banished Lila from playing there again.
That particular evening, Lila was reprieved. Her father’s sermon finished, without another word the plates heaped with food were passed to her. She waited for punishment, but her parents’ heads were bowed with eating, and her plate stayed in front of her. She stuffed herself, not knowing whether this stroke of luck would ever be repeated, but her shrunken stomach prevented her from eating much.
Lila didn’t understand why most of her prayers went ignored. She feared her father was right—she was a disobedient, sinful child, and God turned a deaf ear on her. And yet, all her friends were nowhere near as disciplined and studious as she, and they went through life happy and unpunished. Maybe because her father was a preacher, Lila had to be better, work harder. It was all so confusing, as if happiness was out there, just within reach, but denied her.
Where school was a chore and prison for most children, it became Lila’s escape. She earned excellent grades, despite her father’s criticisms, and immersed herself in crafts projects and math workbooks. Her saving grace was her wry sense of humor; she turned every bad experience into a joke. Even if she wasn’t invited over to her classmates’ homes, as time went on, the children played with her in the school yard because she laughed with them at her own expense. She was an anomaly, and she kept them entertained. So, Lila’s humor grew from desperation, a desperation to be liked and accepted. Her humor became her salvation.
In fifth grade, a miracle occurred. Her teacher asked if she’d like to play Mary in the Christmas play, to perform on stage, in front of the school and all the parents. Each year the fifth and sixth grades put on the holiday show, but Lila never imagined she might be chosen. And not for such an important part.
That night, she heard her parents arguing in the den. Her mother insisted it would be a wonderful opportunity for Lila. Her father refused. Lila would make a laughing stock of herself. Did Jesus participate in the theater? Did the apostles act on stage? But, this was a show to glorify the birth of Jesus, a holy purpose, Darla argued. You know Mrs. Harding. She’s a wonderful, devoted Christian. She’ll make sure the children do a fine job. If you’d only gone to the other performances, you would see . . .
George acquiesced, and Lila was allowed to play Mary. She remembered the experience as the best thing, maybe the only good thing that happened in her entire childhood. Of course, her father wouldn’t deign to attend. But her mother sat in the front row and applauded loudly, along with an auditorium full of other parents. Lila took her bows and never forgot the feeling—the giddy, proud feeling—that welled up inside her. Standing on the rickety wooden stage, under
a weak spotlight, she secretly yearned to be an actress, a yearning that, from that day forward, never left her.
Throughout her teenage years, when she could slip away, Lila sneaked into the matinees at the local movie house. The dilapidated building was an old, smelly place that played an odd assortment of musicals, comedies, foreign films, and experimental animated movies during the day. At night, the current movie releases were shown, which Lila was never allowed to attend. Her father warned that at dark, Satan and his cohorts came out and tempted young men and women. Lila became a movie buff, seeing the early shows over and over, quietly mouthing the lines. A whiz at memorization, she learned entire scenarios by heart. When the kids at school realized she could flawlessly reenact the famous “Who’s on first?” routine by Abbott and Costello, catching all the nuances and expressions of the actors, they begged her to do it again and again. In her desperation for friendship, she discovered her ticket to meager popularity. So, Lila built a huge repertoire of comedy routines, her favorites drawn from old Lucille Ball shows, who she could imitate with her matching red hair and expressive facial contortions.
As years went by, making jokes came easier than holding a “normal” conversation with someone. She and her parents provided the fodder for her humor, and she hardly needed exaggerate to get a laugh. Gradually, her view of life changed, so that by the time she neared high school graduation, her fantasy world seemed more real than the one at home.
She had rewritten her past and present, now all she needed was the strength to write her own future.
Chapter 23
Davis edged his way down the face of granite rock. His fingers, caked with mud, ached from the cold. Why the hell hadn’t he brought his gloves?
His gut wrenched in pain. As he trudged through the woods working up a sweat, visions plagued his mind—of Lila taking over his firm, his money. He wanted to believe she was bluffing, but he smelled the truth. Lila had ruined him. Or, at least, she planned to. She was one obsessed, sick broad. If he could just get away and distance himself he’d be better armed. A cool head and his lawyer at his side—that’s what he needed.
