Chapter 12
Streetlights glared painfully into Sharon’s eyes as she drove her Honda Civic north on Moon Road back to Sycamore Park. Laif’s car was still parked there from earlier that Saturday morning.
She felt hot with irritation. “What good is your talent if you can’t use it on good people?”
“They have to choose that direction. Self-determination is essential. I can’t make them see the truth.”
She shook her head. She rolled her window halfway down, which hurled cold air inside with sounds of flapping flags.
Laif continued, “They have to embrace the truth themselves. Besides, Cindy is still innocent, only ten. She is on the road to becoming, probably a good person, but we don’t know.”
“What do you mean?” she shot back.
The car engine sputtered and died. She looked at the instrument panel and saw the fuel gauge on empty. Something like a groan-growl-sigh escaped her. “This is perfect.” She coasted to the side of the road and tried to restart the engine, but with no success. Paying attention to the fuel level had been the last thing on her mind today.
He asked, “Do you have roadside assistance?”
She glared at him.
“There’s a gas station two blocks from here. We can walk.”
She got out of the Honda and pulled on her brown, wool jacket that she had stored in the back. Her exposed legs and feet were still cold though. “What else could go wrong?”
He folded his arms together. “Come on. It’ll be warmer when we start walking.”
As they made their way down the sidewalk, she noticed rundown houses on both sides of Moon Road. When they had been speeding along in the car, the neighborhood seemed safer. Ahead in the distance, she could see the blue and white lights of a Mobil gas station.
“The young have choices,” he instructed, “good or bad directions. They can make certain mistakes as children, but as they grow older, their direction hardens.” He waved his hands as he talked, like an annoying teacher that she wanted to smack. “Young adults become responsible for their paths, their actions, and for the care of others.”
“Are you trying to say that sweet, innocent Cindy could be headed for a life of evil?”
On their right was a house with windows broken out, paint peeling, and a couple of Asian teenagers in baggy pants standing on the front porch, looking about quickly like they didn’t want to get caught for some wrongdoing. Sharon was a little frightened and was glad a paladin for goodness walked beside her.
“It’s possible,” answered Laif with sadness.
“How could you presume that? She’s wonderful. A child of truth you said.”
“As we all do, she chooses her own path.”
“I don’t understand. I could never picture that girl hurting another person. Ever.” Her legs began warming as they progressed.
“Perhaps. But could you see her hurting herself? Could you picture her hurting a beautiful, talented, innocent, lovely person such as herself?”
“You mean suicide?”
“Or a culmination of smaller self-destructive behaviors. Cutting on her arms as a teenager, getting lost in drugs, hooking up with boys who treat her poorly. Just because you don’t hurt others doesn’t make you good. You have to keep everyone’s feelings in mind, including your own. It’s not an easy road.”
“I’m not sure I understand.” She always thought bad people hurt other people. If anything, bad people cared only about their own feelings.
Laif looked ahead as he talked. “She has a lot of good she is supposed to do. If she doesn’t take care of herself, that goodness won’t exist. Others won’t benefit. She will have essentially taken away the help she was supposed to offer. That is not good.”
“But she’s just a child.”
“Right now, yes. She is on the path of becoming. Don’t forget her parents were once just children too. Innocent, lovely children—perhaps emotionally distraught from their parents’ abuse, but nevertheless children.”
Her head felt like it was spinning. She wished she had coffee to help her concentrate. Just one more block separated them from the gas station. She would get coffee there first, before anything else. And she was really craving her MP3 player right now with Johnny Cash’s Walk the Line, but that wouldn’t be at the gas station.
Suddenly he stopped.
She turned around. He was staring earnestly at the house to the side of them. It was about eleven at night, and all the lights were out, except for the sputtering blue colors of a television from one of the rooms on the first floor. “What is it?” she asked.
“Evil.”
Before she could say anything, he began sprinting across the front lawn. Oh God, she thought, where’s he going? But she found herself following.
It was a narrow two-story house. A trellis rose from the bottom to the second floor. Laif’s eyes fixed on a window of the second floor. “In that room.”
“What’s in that room?”
He began climbing the trellis. It didn’t look very stable. She warned, “Be careful. I’ll stay down here so we don’t bust it.” But she didn’t think that he expected her to go up with him anyways.
He didn’t even seem to hear her as he climbed. The window was about a foot above the trellis. When he reached it, he let go of the last board of the trellis with one hand and placed his fingers on the glass, peering inside.
With her neck craned back, she whispered, “What do you see?”
He didn’t say anything. Barely balancing on the trellis with his feet, he put his other hand on the window as well, light growing from his palms, brightening the room. From her position, all she could see was the room’s ceiling.
A girl screamed. Sharon could hear her yelling to her parents about a peeping-Tom. Dogs began barking from neighboring houses.
“Dammit!” he exclaimed.
“What? What’s going on?”
An alarm rang inside the girl’s house, and outside sirens blared in Sharon’s ears. The front porch light and several other lights spotlighted the front yard, illuminating her. Laif began scurrying down. She heard cracking and realized that the trellis was breaking away from the house. She jumped out of its path and turned to watch him looking behind his shoulders, falling backwards, releasing a quiet moan. Before the wooden structure clattered against the ground, he sprang away from it and landed in some bushes.
Sharon was shaking all over. She rushed to him.
Winded, he breathed, “I’m all right.”
“Thank God. Let’s get out of here.”
A man burst out of the front door with a rifle. He didn’t appear to notice her and Laif in the bushes. Luckily the outside lights didn’t illuminate that area of the yard. She could hear police sirens in the distance.
A pit bull bolted out of the open front door, sprinting as fast as its stubby, muscular body could, growling, salivating, and spitting.
She grabbed Laif by the arm and pulled him up, and when she looked back at the resident, he had already walked out into the middle of the yard and spotted them. “Hey,” he yelled, “stop right there!”
They ran with a primal survival instinct guiding them, heading for the neighbor’s fence, the pit bull snarling behind them, closer each step, Sharon almost feeling it's hot breath at her ankles, but not willing to look back and risk tripping. They leaped up onto the wooden fence and climbed, jumped into the other yard and scuttled through, and with the sound of a dozen angry cats, sprinklers hissed on, showering them as they headed for the street.
Another animal began mewling, and she noticed Laif slowing and swatting the air with his hands, but then she realized the animal was Laif, his cries tormented as any she had ever heard. She fell back and grabbed one of his spastic arms, dragging him forward through the artificial rain to the sidewalk, where they kept running in the direction of the gas station.
After passing several houses, he fell to the ground and shook violently, slapping his pants and T-shirt, squeezing his sleeves to wring the small amount of water they contained, pulling at his jeans.
“What’s going on? Are you hurt?”
But he just sat there on the sidewalk in his fit for half a minute.
“Laif, talk to me.”
A police cruiser screeched around the corner and passed them, heading toward the house they had left in a mess.
She asked, “Can you stand? If you’re okay, we better leave now.”
He nodded, got up, and they jogged the rest of the way to the gas station.
Laif was more than winded. He went into the bathroom and stayed there for twenty minutes. When he came out, she already had finished a cup a coffee and purchased a red plastic container filled with gas. His white T-shirt and blue jeans were almost dry. She could see a mound of damp paper towels overflowing the small trash receptacle as the bathroom door closed. He had told her not to ask about his fit again when he first locked himself in the bathroom. So she didn’t. She figured he would talk about it when he was ready. Besides, she had other pressing questions.
“Were you able to save the girl?”
His head sunk. “I failed. She was swallowing a bottle of pills. For some reason, I can’t affect suicides. It might have something to do with the victim and perpetrator being the same person. We interrupted her, but she’ll try again another night.
“Is that why you couldn’t show Cindy’s parents the truth? Are they suicidal?”
“No. Together, they’re too strong in denial.” He took the gas container from her to carry.
As they headed back to the car, taking a longer route to avoid the scene at the broken-trellis house, Sharon found herself in a bewildered daze. Everything the last twenty-four hours seemed to be hitting her at once, overwhelming her. She hadn’t felt like this since getting separated at the carnival at age nine from her drunken mother and Marlene. Encountering scary clowns, high stilted men, and smelling cotton candy and popcorn for thirty minutes, she walked around in a dizzy numb state, her world ending, believing she would never see Mom and Marlene again. And now with Laif, he felt like a complete stranger walking beside her.
She asked, “Who are you?”
A park packed with trees and brush was on the opposite side of the road. The crickets sounded especially thick, overlapping their chirps as one continuous song. The air smelled of musky licorice.
He didn’t answer.
“You have to work, right? What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a secretary at an art gallery.”
“A secretary?” She laughed. “Where did you get the money for a Mercedes?”
He didn’t answer.
She kiddingly socked him on the shoulder. “Tell me. Come on, I’m sorry I laughed.”
He looked at her.
“You have to admit, it’s odd having all your talent and working just as a secretary.”
“Not all my adventures fail like tonight’s.” He said this, his voice weighed with sorrow, making Sharon feel worse, desire rising inside her to hold and comfort him. “The daughter of a wealthy businessman found me chasing off her molester. The father was grateful beyond words. A few other people have also felt a need to repay me, despite my protests.”
“We didn’t fail.” She took his hand in hers and held it tightly. They walked in silence to her car.