by E. C. Diskin
After Brooklyn rushed out of Ginny’s house with the gun, she was tempted to call Sheriff Wilson. But there was so much she didn’t know. She felt certain the screenplay held the answers. She went back to the house.
Dropping into a chair in the kitchen, she set the gun in its plastic bag on the table and pulled Darius’s screenplay up on her phone.
It was called Surviving Eden. A narrator introduced the story as the camera panned across a rural landscape before following the path of an old Buick as it drove into the quiet town of Eden.
I remember the day Dad and I came to Eden. It was summer of 1993, I was twelve years old, and I sat with my back turned toward the road behind us as Dad headed south down the expressway and I watched the Chicago skyline fade into the distance. I’d never been outside the city limits before. I was terrified. But excited too. I would never again worry about gangs, drug lords, violence, or gunfire. He went on to describe the fresh start he hoped for after his mother’s death.
The Chicago streets had killed her, but here in Eden, we’d be safe. That twelve-year-old kid could never have guessed that six years later, he’d be staring down the barrel of a gun and the only way to be safe would be to leave and never look back.
The story then jumped forward a few years while the scenes showed Darius’s character, Anthony, as a boy who hadn’t yet had a growth spurt and didn’t fit in at the high school. The scenes showed how Anthony rarely opened his mouth, making him a target for bullies who chose verbal abuse. He never had the one-line quips or other ability to fight with words, and he was not going to throw a punch and get kicked out of school. Brooklyn was immediately drawn to the character, an outsider in this small town, just like her.
I tried to stay outta trouble, the narrator added. But sometimes trouble finds you.
The next scene jumped forward to the boy’s sophomore year, showing that he’d grown several inches, his voice had lowered, and his build had broadened. He looked like an athlete. His English teacher, impressed by his reading in class, suggested that he look into the drama department. He had no interest in sports and nothing else to do, so he went to drama club and fell in love. The words, the scenes, the freedom . . . a chance to be more than he’d been pegged to be. Brooklyn was beaming. It felt like her story.
The next scene jumped forward a year. Anthony was at rehearsal when the director announced that the youth group from a local church was there to talk to the cast, hoping to collaborate on a community service project. But the story took a dark turn when Anthony went to the pastor’s office a few days later and walked in without knocking, finding the pastor on top of a petite blonde named Margaret Carr.
Brooklyn had just finished reading the scene—horrified—about how Anthony rescued Margaret from the office of the pastor—Pastor Ed, he was called—when the crunch of gravel under tires wafted into the house through the open living room window. Brooklyn darted to the kitchen’s side door. It was Ginny.
“Brooklyn!” Ginny said as she barreled through the front door.
Brooklyn quietly moved through the kitchen as her heart raced. She wasn’t afraid, exactly, but she didn’t know or understand Ginny at all. She’d lied about so much. It was impossible to know what this woman was capable of. She watched from the kitchen doorway as Ginny frantically checked the living room and yelled up the stairs.
She disappeared around the corner, entering the study. Brooklyn followed.
Ginny was standing at the bookshelves, peering into the empty gun safe.
“Are you looking for this?” Brooklyn asked.
Ginny spun around. Brooklyn held Dad’s gun in her hand.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“WHAT THE HECK IS GOING on?” Brooklyn said, holding up the gun, still inside the Ziploc bag. “Why were you hiding it?”
Ginny looked out the window before returning her gaze to Brooklyn. She took a slow, cleansing breath and stepped toward her.
“Stop,” Brooklyn shouted.
Ginny froze. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You did it, didn’t you?”
“What?”
“You shot Darius Woods.”
“No! Is that what Sheriff Wilson told you? Why would I do that?”
“Because of this!” Brooklyn said, raising the phone in her other hand. “His screenplay.”
She held her ground, prepared to run if Ginny rushed her, but Ginny simply looked at the small screen and deflated into the chair in the corner. Brooklyn stepped into the room, keeping her distance. She leaned against the wall.
Ginny didn’t look at her. She was staring straight ahead, her gaze at the window. “Have you read it?”
“Not all of it, but it’s obvious you don’t want the world to know what’s in here. Darius knew about the shooting at the clinic, didn’t he?”
Ginny looked at her then, as if processing just how much Brooklyn had figured out. “It’s not what you think.”
“You lied. You said you barely knew him. But he sent you the script. He asked you to come by and talk about it. His dad told me you went to his hospital room on Thursday. Same day you shooed me out of town.”
“I didn’t shoot Darius! You have it all wrong. He wrote about that shooting at the clinic, but he knew I didn’t do it. I saw who did it.”
Finally, she was getting some answers. Brooklyn’s tone softened. “You were there?”
Ginny nodded. She stared at her hands in her lap.
“Were you an accomplice?”
Ginny shook her head.
“Then what? I know you were a protester, Ginny. You and all those youth group kids.”
She shook her head again, but she wouldn’t look at Brooklyn. “I couldn’t risk having anyone see me go in or come out, so I’d gone early before it opened and was waiting in the car. I wanted to be the first in and get to school before anyone would know.” Finally, Ginny lifted her chin, looking at Brooklyn, but as soon as their eyes met, she shifted focus and looked out the window.
“What are you saying?”
Ginny took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, one long, measured flow of air. “I was pregnant.”
Brooklyn felt her breath catch in her throat.
“It didn’t seem real. I just had this stomachache that wouldn’t go away. I drove all the way to the Walmart in Marion to get a test. I took it in a filthy gas station bathroom on the way back. Just buying the test felt like a failure of everything I’d ever learned. I can still remember the smell of urine in that bathroom. It felt like my legs were going to buckle.”
“But you were in that group. I heard about the chastity pledges . . .”
“Yeah, what a joke, right?”
Brooklyn didn’t know what to say.
“I had to know how far along. I’d never had regular periods. I never paid attention. It only happened a couple of times, and we’d been careful. I couldn’t tell anyone. I certainly couldn’t talk to Mom and Dad. They would have lost their minds.”
Brooklyn thought of the scene she’d just read, the pastor and the girl. And that mission picture she’d found at Ginny’s house—the pastor’s hands on Ginny’s shoulders. He was the one Mom said Ginny loved.
“The screenplay . . . are you Margaret? The girl Darius found in the pastor’s office?”
Ginny nodded. Streams of tears riddled her cheeks. Sitting in that big chair in the corner, she looked like a young girl, a frail, broken shell. “You have no idea what a mess I’ve made of everyone’s life.”
Brooklyn dropped the gun on the desk and went to the chair. She knelt in front of her sister, taking Ginny’s hands in her own. She couldn’t imagine anything so awful. “You’re not to blame for whatever happened with him, Ginny.”
Ginny stared at their hands twined together. Brooklyn looked at them too.
“You don’t understand. He started hitting on me during junior year. I had such a crush on him back then. We all thought he was—he was everything. He knew it.” There was an eerie calm in her voice, as thoug
h she were resigned to telling the story. She sounded almost as though she was in a trance.
“It’s not your fault, Ginny. You were a kid.”
Ginny took a deep breath. “After the shooting at the clinic, they thought it was me, and Dad got Pastor Gary to provide an alibi for me. Mom and Dad both thought he was a saint. I wasn’t showing. I felt fine. I figured I’d leave town before anyone found out about the pregnancy. I’d be at Columbia in New York and deal with it there.”
“What were you going to do?”
“Give it up.” She shook her head, punctuating the point. “They passed a Baby Moses law in Texas that year. It was big news, and lots of states were following. Girls could just drop the babies at hospitals or fire stations, no questions asked. No one would ever have to know.”
“But you didn’t go to school.”
“Mom and Dad went to the Dominican Republic for a mission trip. I was supposed to go, but I couldn’t be in the same room as Pastor Gary by then. I’d avoided him for months. I convinced Mom and Dad that I needed to start packing up for school. They figured I could stay back and tend to the store.”
“Did the pastor know about the pregnancy?”
“You don’t understand—I put the pregnancy entirely out of my mind. I couldn’t think about it. I just had to hold on a couple of months. Just get through summer and get out of here. All I knew was that I was about to move to New York and start a new life.”
Brooklyn didn’t get it. Ginny was pregnant. And someone shot that doctor.
“I got really sick. It was the day of Mom and Dad’s return. I was alone at the store. I went to the bathroom and had these terrible cramps. I . . . God, Brooklyn. You don’t understand. I didn’t know what was happening. I was so scared.”
“A miscarriage?” Brooklyn asked.
Ginny shook her head. She began sobbing, pulled her hands from Brooklyn’s, and cupped them together. “It was so tiny. Too tiny. It didn’t even make a sound at first. It didn’t look right. Its eyes never opened—it couldn’t have been more than a few pounds. I cut the cord with some scissors and wrapped it in a towel. I didn’t even know if it was breathing. I didn’t know what to do.”
Brooklyn covered her mouth.
“I drove to the hospital,” Ginny continued. “I walked into the ER, handed the bundle to the nurse behind the counter, and ran out the door. She called out to me, begging me to stop, but I couldn’t even look back.”
Brooklyn let out the air she’d been holding, suspended in her throat.
“I went home. The rest is such a blur. I guess I passed out.”
“Where?”
“Here. I woke up in the hospital. Mom and Dad had returned home and found me unconscious on the living room floor. There was blood all over my jeans.” Ginny pressed her fingers against her eyes, as if she could dam the flood of tears.
Brooklyn got off her knees and scooched beside her on the chair, putting her arm around Ginny’s shoulders.
Ginny couldn’t stop crying. She’d obviously been tormented all these years.
“You were just a teenager. You did nothing wrong. Did you ever tell Mom and Dad?”
Ginny shook her head, wiped her tears, and got up from the chair, like she wanted to get away from Brooklyn, and went to the window. “You don’t get it,” she said, raising her voice, keeping her focus outside. “As soon as the doctor examined me, he knew I’d just given birth. It wasn’t long before they found the abandoned baby in the maternity wing.”
“So that’s what this was all about? What Dad forgave you for? The chastity stuff? For getting pregnant? Having a baby and giving it up?”
“Listen to me!” Ginny shouted, finally turning back to face her. “They wouldn’t let me give it up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Turned out, Illinois had not passed a Baby Moses law at that point. They said I could be charged with child endangerment, that I had to take responsibility.”
“Was that true?”
“I didn’t know,” she said. “But it’s what they said. I was in the hospital bed, and John came at me, enraged, his face in mine, screaming, ‘Who did this to you?’ He was terrifying. Pastor Gary was standing there, in the room. He’d been with them when they found me and drove them to the hospital. He stepped forward, getting between Dad and the bed, like he would rescue me. He said it wasn’t important how it happened. It was like an unspoken signal. So I didn’t speak. Mom acted as if the question was irrelevant. Nothing mattered except that little baby that was fighting for its life.”
Brooklyn marveled at Pastor Gary’s ability to remain blameless as he stood in that room.
Ginny continued. “It would be in the NICU for weeks, but Mom said as soon as the doctors made sure it was okay, we’d bring it home. It was only like twenty-nine weeks. It had pneumonia. No one was sure it would survive. But Mom said she’d help me, that we’d raise the baby together. I’d go to school locally. She said it was God’s plan and that perhaps the unexpected gift was the reason she’d never had more kids.”
“It didn’t make it . . ,” Brooklyn said, trying to understand.
Ginny rushed back to the chair, kneeling on the floor in front of her. “Don’t you get it? Think about it. Twenty years ago, Mom and Dad brought home a baby. You weren’t adopted from the Dominican Republic.” She put her hand on Brooklyn’s.
The words burned Brooklyn’s skin, like acid eating away at everything she’d ever known about herself. She held her breath, finally understanding what Ginny would say next, but she couldn’t move.
“You’re not my sister.”
Brooklyn shook her head and closed her eyes. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. She looked down at their hands, at Ginny’s fair skin against Brooklyn’s. “That’s crazy. Look at you. I’m . . .”
“I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you. I did. I tried once years ago, but John wouldn’t let me. He said it would ruin everything.”
Brooklyn stood and paced the room. It didn’t make sense. She knew where she came from. She’d looked into Eimy’s eyes in that photo for as long as she could remember. They had a connection, even beyond the grave. She had never belonged in Eden. “Why are you doing this? You’re not my mother! You want me to believe my father is some pastor who assaulted you?” Every fantasy she’d entertained about her birth parents was being shattered in an instant. She was from the Caribbean. “This is crazy.” She could barely get out the words.
“No, Brooklyn, you don’t understand. That’s not what happened. This is not about the pastor!”
Brooklyn stopped and turned back to Ginny.
“I’m so sorry, Brooklyn. I fell apart. I wasn’t ready to be a mother. I lost everything. I knew the future I’d planned was over. I barely ate for a month. I didn’t pick you up. I was in shock. I never had anything to do with you, because it was all too difficult. Looking at you just reminded me of what I’d done.”
Brooklyn walked to the door. She had to get away from this nonsense. But she looked down at the phone still in her hand. She had proof. She searched the pictures and finally turned back, holding up the screen to Ginny. “This is my mom! Eimy! Look at me. You’re acting crazy.”
Ginny shook her head. “It was all a lie. She’s not your mother. Eimy was the daughter of the woman that ran the orphanage. We’d known her for years. She was just another pregnant teen. She didn’t die either.”
Brooklyn lowered the phone.
“Brooklyn, please. Just listen. Mom got worried about me. She finally said that no one needed to know. That she’d be happy to raise you as her daughter. That she’d always wanted more children. She loved you so much. Instantly. Brooklyn, I was a pathetic mother, but our mom—she was incredible. She came up with the story about the mission trip and the teen mother who’d died to explain the new baby in the house, and Dad went along. He’d do anything Mom asked of him. She told me to go off to Columbia as planned. She and John told everyone at church about Eimy. It was just a story.”
&nbs
p; Brooklyn leaned against the wall. She wanted to be as far as possible but couldn’t leave until something made sense. “But you didn’t go.”
“I couldn’t. They didn’t understand. No one spoke of your father after that day in the hospital. No one asked. They acted as if someone had violated me. But it wasn’t like that, Brooklyn. We were in love. And when Mom said I had to bring the baby home, I knew it would all be over with him.”
“Who?”
“None of this was his doing,” she said, standing, stepping forward as the tears continued. “And he’d already left town by then. No one knew we were going to be together. No one, except a couple kids at school, even knew we were dating. He knew I was pregnant. We planned to give you up for adoption.” She wiped her face, smearing mascara across her puffy face. “I’m so sorry. I was young, Brooklyn. I wasn’t ready for any of it. All I knew was that I was going to go to New York with my boyfriend, where we’d be accepted.”
“What do you mean?” But then Brooklyn understood. A reality beyond her wildest imagination.
“He was the love of my life, Brooklyn. It started as friendship. He saved me from Pastor Gary—at least, he thought he did.”
Brooklyn’s heart began racing, the heat rising, Ginny’s face blurred in front of her. She could hardly imagine that it was real. “Darius Woods.” She slid down the wall to the floor. The world was spinning. She put her head between her knees.
Ginny joined her on the floor. “I had joined crew and started hanging out with all the theater kids. He was so talented. He dreamed of New York, and after a while, it became my dream too. We wanted to be together. I applied to school there. No one would have ever known. It’s not like Mom and Dad would ever go to visit me in that city.”
Brooklyn thought of the poster in her bedroom—formerly Ginny’s bedroom—of the New York skyline. “The Brooklyn Bridge,” she said.
Ginny smiled. “Darius gave me that poster.”
Brooklyn couldn’t speak.
