Desperate Paths

by E. C. Diskin

  The social worker offered a lot of information, and yet Brooklyn left her office without learning anything. She’d received a large folder filled with pamphlets—about hip breaks, dementia, making the decision between nursing home care and other options, how to care for an elderly patient, how to find in-home care, where to look for financial assistance. Lots of phone numbers and websites. Brooklyn wasn’t sure which questions to ask, and she didn’t have any answers when the social worker asked her own questions. She needed Ginny.

  When she returned to her dad’s room, he was asleep, but she pulled up a chair, determined to wait patiently and finally get some answers. After the nurse brought in some food and woke him, Brooklyn tried to make conversation, but he grumbled, scoffed at the soft food, and soon fell back asleep. After another hour, she finally asked Wanda if he seemed okay. Wanda just patted Brooklyn’s shoulder. Therapy was exhausting, she explained, for the body and the brain. Sleep was the best thing for him.

  At six o’clock, Brooklyn finally went home, determined to find answers with or without Ginny or her dad. She stood in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom—the one room that felt like their private domain. The bed was made, and the nightstands on both sides of the bed were loaded with magazines, water glasses, readers, as if two people still shared the space.

  She didn’t know where to begin or what she was looking for. She got on the floor, lifted the bed ruffle, and spotted Dad’s shotgun. He was like every other gun nut in town. He’d offered to take Brooklyn to the range every year since she was nine, but she never wanted to go. He said handling a gun was a survival skill, like swimming, pointing out that he’d even taught Bonnie to shoot back when they first married, and that Ginny knew all about guns too. She’d been able to take out a coyote since she was fourteen, he boasted. Brooklyn always refused.

  She’d been at a friend’s house once—she was six or seven at the time, she couldn’t remember—but they were using chalk to draw flowers on the porch floorboards when the girl’s dad suddenly came outside, rifle in hand, and told the girls not to move. Before they’d even had time to react, he’d pointed the gun toward the woods’ edge. Brooklyn and her friend had followed the barrel of the gun to see a deer grazing in the distance as the shot exploded. The deer fell slowly, its front legs buckling, then its back, as it collapsed to the ground. The girl’s dad had yelled triumphantly. Brooklyn was stunned to silence, but her friend screamed and began bawling as she ran into the house. He’d looked at Brooklyn and said, “They’re a menace. Eatin’ all my brambles.” Brooklyn didn’t know what that meant but didn’t ask. She just knew it scared her to death and she never wanted to be around guns or people with guns and was grateful that her dad confined his firing habits to the range.

  At one point, Dad had told Brooklyn she couldn’t drive if she didn’t learn to handle a gun. It was one of the few times his rules brought her to tears.

  “You wouldn’t do that,” she said, eyes pleading.

  “We keep a gun in the glove box of the truck and Mom’s car—it’s just good safety—you need to know.”

  “Just take it out of Mom’s car. I’ll never drive the truck.”

  “Seems a little unnecessary, John,” Mom had said in her defense. “I’ve never needed it.”

  “I’ve got pepper spray,” Brooklyn had added with a smile. “Picked it up at the store.”

  He’d huffed but let it go.

  Now she got off the floor and sat on the bed, facing the open closet. Her dad had made no effort to clear out any of her mom’s things. It had to be tough for him to face it every day, and besides, Mom had practically made a career of organizing clothing drives at the church. It was time.

  After piling all the clothes on the bed, separating the few items that she’d keep, she stepped back into the closet. Shoeboxes lined the floor, and the first several she opened revealed shoes that had probably not been worn in thirty years. A few were so outdated, they might even be a good donation to the vintage shop down the street from her New York apartment. But the last box in the closet felt light. She opened it to find a mess of newspaper clippings.

  Brooklyn sat on the closet floor and pulled out the first article. It was from the Eden Journal, dated May 13, 1999: LOCAL DOCTOR IN HOSPITAL AFTER SHOOTING. Another clipping, a Washington Post article, dated just a few days later, was headlined SHOOTING AT ILLINOIS WOMEN’S CLINIC SPARKS OUTRAGE. She read on. Abortion-rights activists are concerned by the uptick in deadly attacks against abortion providers in the Midwest . . . The photograph of the clinic included its address on Hummingbird Boulevard in the neighboring town. She knew that address, but it was the location of a Walmart and some outlet shops.

  And then Brooklyn’s breath caught as she read another clipped article from the local paper. An unnamed local teen had been extensively questioned but had been cleared as a suspect after several community leaders came forward in her defense. Her. The suspect was a girl. An eyewitness had described a car leaving the scene that matched the teen’s car, she’d been absent from school on the morning in question, and the teen had been involved in several protests at the clinic since its opening a year earlier. According to the article, the leaders of the First Hope Baptist Church had provided an alibi, clearing the girl of all suspicion. No other “persons of interest” had been revealed by the FBI, which was running the investigation.

  Brooklyn’s church. She recalled a sermon her senior year, during which the pastor had outrageously compared abortion doctors to Hitler. But when she’d looked at her mom in that moment, her mom’s eyes were closed, her head nodding at the pastor’s words. She knew her mom was strongly pro-life—Brooklyn had spent her entire childhood playing among the six rosebushes planted in memory of her mom’s unborn children in the backyard.

  She’d asked her mom once if she’d ever tried fertility treatments, but her mom had scoffed. “Only God opens and closes the womb,” she’d said, “and he certainly doesn’t believe in monkeying around inside a woman’s body.” But Brooklyn knew how much her mom loved children, how much she’d longed for a house full of them. She’d volunteered in the NICU at Burns Memorial for as long as Brooklyn could remember, sitting for hours, cradling the tiny babies whose biggest need beyond the hospital’s technology was for human touch. Her mom always said that everything happened for a reason, and if she’d had a house full of children, maybe she wouldn’t have been able to go on mission trips for all those years, helping others; maybe she wouldn’t have been able to adopt Brooklyn. “And you have been such a gift,” she’d say with a broad smile. It was hard for Brooklyn to find fault in that. Her mother had a huge heart.

  Abortion was a gray topic for Brooklyn, despite being adopted. She always felt like those decisions were personal and couldn’t imagine getting mixed up in those debates, but Ginny had been the leader of that teen group. They were the young voices of the church’s strong antiabortion beliefs. Even when Brooklyn was in high school, she knew those youth group kids got vocal about elections—whether local or national—promoting and protesting candidates and picketing businesses that offended the church’s sensibilities.

  Was it possible that Ginny had been involved in that shooting? May 1999. Ginny was a senior. What if the suspicion cast in her direction was enough to derail her college plans? Could she have actually shot a man?

  It had to be her. Why else would their mom have these articles? Did that mean the church leaders lied to protect Ginny? Or, an even worse thought, what if the church leaders had put her up to it? It was so outlandish, so impossible to imagine that any church might condone such violence, that she shook off the thought as simply her flair for melodrama creeping forward again.

  But something her dad had once said made her linger on the idea. It was summer, right after Brooklyn’s junior year, and she’d remarked at dinner about the horrifying Orlando shooting that had happened the week before, marveling aloud about how anyone could commit a crime like murder without a second thought for the innocent victims. Her dad
found none of it surprising. He’d said when someone’s ideology was under attack, when that person believes in the righteousness of his actions, and his entire belief system supports it, it doesn’t matter what the law says. To that person, it’s a moral war, and every war has casualties.

  “I just think that unless you’re a psychopath, it would be impossible to live with what you’d done. It’s probably why so many shooters kill themselves.”

  “Nonsense. They kill themselves to avoid prosecution. Simple. Not everyone suffers over the violence they’ve committed. Look at me. I received the highest military honor for blowing up an entire platoon.”

  It was a shocking admission, delivered so casually. Her dad never talked about Vietnam, and though she’d seen his Medal of Honor and she’d heard adults in town refer to him as a war hero, it was hard to think of him as being capable of killing someone. She looked at his permanently raised eyebrow, frozen from the nerve damage caused by shrapnel, wondering if she would be capable of killing without regret or torment, given the right circumstances. “Did you ever have nightmares? I’ve heard that a lot of vets have PTSD.”

  He shook his head and offered a reassuring smile. “First of all, it’s been more than forty years. Besides, I am a man of God. I’ve never acted without justification, and I’m okay with what I’ve done. I sleep just fine.”

  “And thanks to men like your father, we can all sleep a little easier,” her mother offered. Brooklyn thought that was a stretch. She didn’t know much about Vietnam, but nothing about the world of 2016 made her feel safe.

  Brooklyn leaned back against the doorjamb, still sitting on that closet floor, and thought again of the possibilities. Her church was extremely pro-life, that had always been clear. Ginny had led the youth group that staged multiple protests at this clinic, and the doctor had been shot by a teen.

  Maybe that was why Ginny fell apart. She watched a man fall to the ground, realizing in that moment that she might have killed another person. What if she’d struggled with what she’d done . . . protected by her parents and her church from the consequences, but never able to live with herself? It could have led to drinking, to her failure to go off to school as planned.

  Her dad’s comments that first night in the hospital when he thought Brooklyn was Ginny replayed in her head. He’d said he forgave her. “And I always protect my family.” Was that the secret? And if so, what was it about Sunday night that would have brought all that up?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER FAILURE. GINNY had sat at the kitchen table after the sheriff left, drinking until the wine was swimming in her blood. He’d managed to derail her hopes of a better day with that one comment: “. . . feels a little familiar, doesn’t it?” That May morning of twenty years before rushed forward like a speeding train, and suddenly every detail of that day—and all the days that followed—plowed over her in crushing detail. Sitting in that empty clinic parking lot five miles outside town, having slid down in the driver’s seat so no one could see her, her plans and dreams suddenly suspended in midair. She’d wondered if everything was about to fall apart.

  And of course, everything did.

  By ten o’clock that night, Simon still wasn’t home, so Ginny finally put the food she’d plated for him back in the fridge, turned off the lights, and headed upstairs with an empty glass and a near-empty bottle of wine, pausing every few feet to examine the photographs on the wall. The kids’ beautiful freckled faces were everywhere, their smiles lighting her way. She and Simon were only featured above the first step—their wedding day. She never wanted to be in pictures. It was too difficult to look at herself.

  She looked in on the kids, their blissfully unaware faces. Maybe Sheriff Wilson’s test of Simon’s gun would end his suspicions. Maybe if Darius survived, he’d give up on this movie project. Maybe this would all just go away.

  “Mama,” Lyla whispered, her eyes suddenly open and looking at Ginny in the doorway.

  “Hey, baby,” Ginny whispered, stepping closer. “Back to sleep. It’s late.”

  “Where’s Daddy?” she asked.

  “He’s not home yet. He’ll kiss you when he gets here.”

  Lyla closed her eyes, satisfied. “Love you, Mama,” she whispered.

  “You too, baby,” Ginny replied, leaning over and kissing her forehead. “Night, night.”

  She walked down the long hall lined with the kids’ artwork—her favorite pieces from every year in school—and got undressed for bed.

  Pouring the remaining wine in her glass, she put the empty bottle in her drawer, another attempt to hide evidence.

  But the truth was coming, like a storm she couldn’t outrun. Brooklyn was trying too hard to understand what happened. She’d even texted earlier about Dad’s missing gun. Ginny’s fingers had hovered over the phone screen, desperate to craft a reply that would end the inquiry, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. John was muttering about forgiveness and protecting his family. Sheriff Wilson was already suspicious, and he was going to read that screenplay. What if Brooklyn said something to Sheriff Wilson about the gun? Ginny needed to put it back without Brooklyn hovering, watching every move. But she didn’t trust Ginny, and why would she?

  Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll have to make Brooklyn see that I’m not the enemy.

  Ginny crawled into bed and loaded Facebook on her phone. When Simon first learned that she’d signed up for the social site, he’d accused her of cheating. He didn’t approve of social media, and the stories he heard backed up his concerns. The only way to end his sermons had been to pretend she quit. Instead, she just deleted the app after each use. The information never went anywhere—hovering in some abyss she never understood.

  After the Facebook app had loaded, she found her password in the back of her notebook among the long list of passwords she could never keep straight, signed on, and saw a new message. It was from Darius. She couldn’t breathe.

  Hey, I don’t know if you heard, but I’m in the hospital. Burns Mem. I’m okay. Guess Eden isn’t as safe as it used to be. Hoping you might come by and see me. I’m really curious about your reaction to the screenplay.

  Her stomach churned painfully. Acid began to rise, but she swallowed hard. She didn’t deserve to feel better.

  Darius, though, was well enough to be on his phone, joking like his old self, downplaying his near-fatal shooting. Which meant he was probably well enough to talk to Sheriff Wilson.

  He was going to survive. And he was going to make his movie. She scanned the trail of messages between them.

  That first contact on Facebook, back in 2012, had been such a harmless reconnection. Just a simple hello. He said it looked like she had a beautiful family, and he was glad to see she’d become a nurse, as she’d always planned. She said nothing about quitting and instead replied that he, too, seemed to be following his dream and doing well. She wished him continued success, and neither followed up. She just watched from afar as his star rose from magazine covers to the Oscars.

  But last week he wrote again. And the words on the screen wiped out thirteen sober years in a flash.

  I wrote a screenplay . . . Finally, I got the green light . . . I don’t want to cause any trouble for you, but it’s kind of impossible to talk about my life there without talking about everything that happened. I’ve changed names. It’s not going to be marketed as a “true story”—will only be “inspired by . . .” so please don’t worry. It has been 20 years at this point, so . . . anyway, I’ve attached a copy. Thought you might want to read it. I’ll be arriving in town on Saturday. If you’d like to see me and talk, I’d be glad to.

  She’d read the script now too many times to count. Every mistake, secret, lie, and regret . . . it was all there. He had no idea that he’d written something with the power of a grenade that could destroy two homes.

  She thought about her children, soundly asleep down the hall, oblivious to the lies that filled their home, secure and happy despite the secrets inside t
hese walls. And it would all end.

  Everyone would learn the truth. Simon would never forgive her. He’d abandon them. Then she really would have failed everyone she’d ever loved.

  Her thoughts returned to a day thirteen years earlier when Simon told her to go to church and pray. She should have paid more attention to the darkening sky, the warning in the strong spring winds that whipped her hair into her eyes.

  She’d just wanted to keep her husband. But she was going to lose him, that much had been obvious. He’d sought a young bride to fill his house with children. She’d wanted them too. Babies would fill her up with love and push out the dark things she’d done. But she couldn’t hold on to a pregnancy—just like her mother. Three miscarriages in the first two and a half years of marriage. She was sure they were punishment for what she’d done at seventeen. Simon began pulling away. He probably felt his own biological clock ticking as he neared forty, impatient to get what he wanted.

  He’d said God would make it happen if she was worthy. But something compelled a stop to that liquor store first, ending her four years of sobriety in an instant. Only after she’d numbed the pain did she follow Simon’s instructions.

  She’d been sitting in a pew, crying in the middle of the day, wondering if she should let him go. Maybe she was being selfish. She’d always been selfish—if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have made the choices, told the lies, kept the secrets she had. Simon had no idea what kind of girl he’d married. She was silently begging for guidance when Pastor Gary appeared.

  Seeing him walking toward her in church that day was almost like a dream. Or a nightmare. She wasn’t in Eden. She’d moved to Harrisburg years before and avoided ever setting foot inside First Hope after high school. She’d never wanted to see him again. But he was standing at the end of her pew, smiling like an old friend.