Ring of Years

by Grant Oliphant

  There’s a minister, and outside, beyond the cemetery gate, a band of reporters and paparazzi who have come to record the hero’s grief. More media than mourners, Natalie notes sadly. She invited her father, as she told him she would, but his secretary has already called to say neither he nor his wife will be able to attend. Evidently Marti Tillotson made the inopportune decision to confess her guilt lost night live on the Max Temple Show, and he’s “tied up” dealing with the fallout from that. As for Leila, well, why would she attend?

  The service is brief but poignant. Natalie makes a few remarks, but in the end there really isn’t much to say. “I love you” and “I’m sorry” and “Goodbye” seem to sum it up pretty well. She cries, and so do the others. After the casket is lowered, she throws a handful of dirt into the hole.

  “No more ash creatures, Aunt Em,” she says softly. “No more running away. For either of us.”

  Selena, stepping out of her wheelchair, comes up beside Natalie and tugs on her dress. “Is this your sister’s grave?” she asks curiously, pointing at the patch of earth next to the open hole.

  “It is.” Natalie takes the girl’s hand. “I hope this didn’t depress you too much.”

  Selena shakes her head. “I know about people dying,” she says seriously.

  “Yes, I guess you do.”

  “My mom says I shouldn’t think about it too much, but it’s okay to think about it a little bit.”

  That strikes Natalie as wise advice. “Your mother’s a smart lady.”

  Selena points at the ground again. “Her name was Stephanie?”

  “It was.”

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  “So is Selena.”

  Natalie scoops her up in her arms and carries her down to her mother’s car. While Selena buckles herself into her seat, Natalie goes around to the trunk to help Marida load the wheelchair.

  “Thanks for bringing her.”

  Selena’s mother responds with a generous smile. “I think it was a good thing,” she says. “She’s had too much of death, but this, I think it helps her to know you need her. You really do, don’t you? Just like the angel said.”

  “Hey, Natalie!” Selena sticks her head out of the car window. “I think that’s a good name for my angel, don’t you?”

  “What’s that?” Natalie asks, momentarily confused.

  “Stephanie. Is it okay if I call my angel that?”

  The little girl’s eyes seem to sparkle in the bright sunlight. Natalie could get lost in those eyes, so full of hope in spite of everything they’ve seen. “I think that would be great,” she says, her voice suddenly thick again. “I think my sister would like it very much.”

  Selena gives her a satisfied grin and disappears back inside the car.

  “Yes, “ Natalie says, answering Marida’s question. “Just like the angel said.”

  After seeing them off. she returns to where Maureen is standing by the tarp-covered pile of dirt beside Emily’s grave. “This was a nice thing you did,” her friend tells her.

  “What’s that?”

  “Giving up your spot like this. Are you sure it’s what you want?”

  “No,” she answers honestly. She grew up here. For all those years she spent in Aunt Emily’s house, this became her home, odd as that might seem. She only ever thought of herself being here, next to her sister; if home is where your heart is, then this was home, where she belonged. But she knows that’s changed now. “I can’t live here anymore,” she explains. “It’s no longer mine.”

  Maureen gives her a long hug and they stroll silently to her car. “Call me

  later, okay?” she says before getting in.

  “Where? Will you be at the mall?”

  A strange smile crosses her friend’s face and Natalie notices her gaze flick toward the open grave. “You know, I don’t think so. It’s just a mall, Natalie. I’ll be at the office.” She laughs slightly and drives off.

  Natalie, watching her go, thinks she understands. Some things are worth fighting for; some, in the end, just aren’t. Sometimes the best thing you can do is walk away; sometimes, walking away is just another way of guaranteeing that the past will be with you forever. Life, she decides, has something to do with knowing the difference.

  * * *

  Alone, she climbs back up the hill and sits down on her sister’s grave, next to the pit with her aunt lying at the bottom. Stephanie’s marker is slightly covered in gray dirt, which she slowly brushes off, thinking as she does of Selena’s angel.

  There are so many logical explanations for what the girl saw, or thought she saw. Her bright light could have been the helicopter, as it was for Natalie, and her angel just a figment of her own imagination, a reflection of herself projected by her subconscious mind in a final bid at life. It was only natural that the angel should appear as a little girl, because Selena needed someone just like herself to tell her to live; it was her, in essence, convincing herself not to yield to death. As for the angel’s declaration that Natalie needed Selena, that also proved nothing. The girl, like so many children, is obviously sensitive to the feelings of people around her. At some level she almost certainly sensed Natalie’s neediness and simply incorporated it into her dream-state, into the story of her own survival.

  Or then again, maybe logic had nothing to do with it and what she saw really was an angel. Which still doesn’t mean it was Stephanie.

  In her heart though, Natalie hopes it was. She hopes it was her sister, looking out for her. In effect. forgiving her.

  An uncomfortable thought occurs to her, that if she allows for Selena’s angel, then perhaps she must also do the same for Ralston’s. Perhaps his angels are real, too, and not just an instrument of deception. Can she really be so sure he doesn’t see them?

  She tosses a stray clump of dirt back up onto its pile. No, she thinks. Of course not. But what difference does it make? Whatever he could tell her about Stephanie or her mother or Aunt Emily, she would take as a lie, and so it would have no worth to her, or worse, just a nagging hint of worth, a sliver of doubt to torment and slowly corrupt her. She would rather the dead remain voiceless than speak to her through him.

  If only the angel had spoken to her directly.

  Still, she lays a hand on Stephanie’s marker and silently thanks her. “I hope this is okay” she says. “I hope I’ve understood correctly.”

  She stands to go and as she does a voice startles her. “Hey,” it says. Spinning around she almost falls into the open pit but a pair of strong arms grab her and pull her upright. She finds herself looking into the startled face of Carter McKewn. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to scare you like that.”

  “Carter.” She pulls free of his grip, annoyed at the intrusion and at the same time glad for it. “Shouldn’t you be out front with the rest of the pack?”

  He smiles. “With those jackals? No way. All they want is a story.”

  “And you?”

  His expression turns serious. “I’m not here on business, Natalie. I should be, my editors would kill me for saying it, but I’m not. I really just wanted to see how you’re doing. I’ve been worried about you.”

  She studies him, sizing him up. He seems sincere enough. “I’m not having the best week.”

  His eyes smile kindly. “I gathered. Natalie. I know this is a strange time, but maybe we could have that dinner we talked about?”

  He’s right—it is a strange time. She turns away and looks down the hill toward the spot where she saw the woman sucking dirt off her fingers. That could have been her, she thinks; in effect, it was, a reflection of what she had become.

  “Do you have your mobile on you?” she asks.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Can I borrow it?”

  Looking confused, Carter pulls out his cell phone and hands it to her. “Sure.”

  Natalie searches for the pink flower the woman planted but can’t find it against the sea of fading green. That woman wasn’t eating dirt, she thinks. She was eati
ng death, sucking down the wormy grit of it, giving herself to the earth, to whomever is lying down there beneath the soil.

  She dials a number and listens patiently to the ring. A moment later a woman’s voice declares. “Mr. Ballard’s office.”

  “It’s Natalie Krill. Is he in?”

  “One moment please.”

  When Ballard gets on the line a few seconds later, his voice is cool and professional. “Natalie. What can I do for you?”

  “I really do believe Ralston was behind all of this,” she says.

  Her faith on that score is unwavering. And she recognizes it as that, a matter of faith. Just because she has gazed into the devil’s eye and seen for herself the evil it can spin doesn’t mean that she has been graced with the power to enlighten others about lt. Ballard’s right: she can’t prove she cut a deal with Ralston. She can’t even prove there was ever a deal to cut.

  “You called to tell me that?” the prosecutor asks, annoyed.

  But it doesn’t matter anymore. That’s what she finally understands—it doesn’t matter. If there really was a deal, she doesn’t have to worry about abiding by its terms, because she has violated them simply by being alive, simply by choosing to live.

  “No,” she says. “I called to tell you that I’m in. I’ll testify against him. And don’t worry, it’ll be the best damn testimony you’ve ever gotten.”

  There’s a long silence before Ballard speaks. “I thought you were afraid of him.”

  “Not any more. Call me tomorrow and we’ll set up a time to get together.”

  It’s not that she doesn’t expect Ralston to make her pay. She does. It just doesn’t frighten her as much anymore. His ring of years is real, but she has learned something through all of this: we are not slaves to it. Not mere dumb skin stretched across the frame of time, doomed to repeat patterns of failure and pain laid down over the course of millennia and years. We can change it in small but subtle and infinitely important ways. Stephanie died, but Selena didn’t. Old wounds don’t have to bind.

  She turns defiantly to Carter, who is staring at her with wide eyes. “So,” she asks him, “are you going to write about that?”

  He studies her before answering. “Not if you don’t want me too.”

  “Good.” Smiling, she hands him back his phone. “Then, yes, I think dinner would be nice.”

  Acknowledgments

  I wrote the original version of this story in late 1999. An agent in New York enthusiastically agreed to represent me and shopped my manuscript around for months, only to conclude after dozens of rejections that she would not be able to find a home for it. In a crushing moment that I still think of as soul-killing, I decided to use my writing skills only for more “productive” ends and parked the manuscript in a drawer.

  There it remained until my wife introduced me to Will Entrekin, a young man with a small publishing house and a keen devotion to writers. Will convinced me over the course of several long conversations spanning months and then years to revive Ring of Years and to give it a shot with a wider audience. Had it not been for his contagious enthusiasm and love for books—not to mention his willingness to become my editor and publisher—I might have given up on it, and on fiction writing more broadly, for good.

  As that history suggests, I am also deeply indebted to my wife Aradhna, whose faith in my writing vastly exceeds my own. More important even than connecting me with Will and insisting I follow up with him, has been her confidence in me over the years. I could not ask for a better or more supportive partner.

  This book would never have been written in the first place if my son Michael, then only a child but now grown and a writer himself, hadn’t asked me to sit with him at night as he fell asleep. That time became a container for my writing, which my daughter Lauren also embraced by asking me to read and tell her bedtime stories. I am a ridiculously proud father, but I am also grateful to my children for, among countless other things, how they fed my interest in writing and love of stories.

  I am also grateful to mom, Hendrika DeVries, who told me my first stories and has always cheerfully nudged and cajoled me to write, and to my father, Patrick Oliphant, whose ferocious creativity helped inspire in me the wish to discover that same spark inside myself.

  Finally, I am grateful to Pittsburgh, a resilient town with a courageous heart. Like other places, it has its share of shadows and dark corners. But it is also home to more than its fair share of writers, artists and poets, to activists and dreamers, to servant leaders working every day to alleviate the pain of others and to fight for a more just world. It is they who inspire me most.

  About the Author

  Since 2014, Grant Oliphant has served as president of the Heinz Endowments, a major American foundation based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Known for his strong stands on social justice and community issues, he chairs the board of the national Center for Effective Philanthropy and speaks, writes and blogs frequently about social issues and the challenges facing civil society in today’s America. Through the Endowments, he is also host of a podcast, “We Can Be,” which tells the stories of men and women working to uplift their communities.

  That’s not the likeliest platform for writing a thriller. But the work I am lucky enough to do every day is all about social change, and my writing springs from that same passion. What motivates me is a devotion to understanding how people deal with deep challenges and overcome them. For me, that’s what ‘Ring of Years’ is about—it’s a story about courage in the face of the seemingly impossible.

  Oliphant previously served as president and chief executive officer of the Pittsburgh Foundation, one of the country’s largest community foundations. In addition to his extensive background in philanthropy, he has worked both in journalism and in government. He served as press secretary to U.S. Sen. John Heinz and, before that, was founding editor of American Politics, a monthly political magazine. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and a master’s degree from Pepperdine University’s Graziado School of Business.

  Oliphant has served on numerous community and national boards, including the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance, which works to enrich children’s lives through reading, and the Communications Network, a non-profit membership organization that promotes communications as a tool for better philanthropy. Born in Adelaide, Australia, he is the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant.

  Ring of Years is his debut novel, and marks his newest title: novelist.

  A Note from the Publisher

  Exciting Press began with a simple idea: making it easier for readers to find books and for authors to publish them. As a reader, I don’t like paying more than $7 for an ebook, so I didn’t want my books to cost more than that. As an author, I wanted to keep rights, maintain control, choose a cover . . .

  My name is Will Entrekin, and in 2010, I founded Exciting Press. Since then, I’m proud to say I’ve worked with my favorite authors to publish some terrific stories. You’ve just read one. I hope you enjoyed it.

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  Copyright © 2019 by Grant Oliphant

  All rights reserved.

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/>   Except under Fair Use, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from both the author and publisher.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Exciting Press, a division of Exciting Endeavors, LLC.

  Cover image annual_rings by liga eglite.

  Cover design by Exciting Press.