Gate 76

by Andrew Diamond

  My mother, in her yellow Sunday dress, walks down a sidewalk in Philadelphia, carrying a bag of groceries. She is pregnant, about to burst. She stops, puts the bag on the pavement, leans against a building, and grimaces through a hard contraction. The other pedestrians pass by as if she isn’t there. When she picks up the bag again, her legs are wet with broken water. She plods on until the next contraction forces her to stop.

  Then hushed voices give instuction. Scalpel. Suction. OK. There.

  A metal instrument clangs against a metal tray, and then I fade into a darkness where there is no time.

  Fade back in. I’m in Travis’s house. The police and paramedics have left their debris: bloodstained nitrile gloves, paper wrappers, soiled gauze. Travis lies in a pool of blackening blood just inside the door. My father walks in drunk and laughing.

  “Jeez, Travis, you really tied one on, didn’t you?”

  He tears the plastic wrapping from the neck of a whiskey bottle and unscrews the cap. “This’ll get you going,” he says. He kneels down and pours the booze into Travis’s open mouth. It goes out the back of his head and warms the pool of blackened blood to a bright healthy red.

  My father pats Travis’s cheek. “Come on, buddy, drink up. What the hell’d you do to yourself? You look like shit.”

  I want to kill him. The filthy, ignorant brute. I want to kick his fucking brains out. But I can’t move. I’m pinned to the floor. The big steel pins go right through me, like an insect in a museum exhibit.

  “All right, then,” Dad says. “We’ll go to the bar.” He drags Travis out by the feet, leaving a long, thick smear of blood.

  “Goddamnit!” I yell. I try with all my strength to break free from this paralysis, and then…

  My eyes open to fluorescent lights in the ceiling of a large, quiet room. My throat hurts. “Shh…” I feel a hand on my shoulder as I try to sit up. A man’s voice says, “Not yet.” He’s a chunky, dark-haired guy in light-blue scrubs. “You’re good, buddy. Go back to…”

  The world goes black again.

  Then I’m in the office. Leon’s desk is mostly bare, and so is Bethany’s. All their personal items are gone, and the keyboards and mousepads have been straightened and cleaned, as if in preparation for some new person. The frames on the walls that held Ed’s diploma and his certificates of recognition are empty. Outside the window, traffic goes by at the normal speed, but it’s silent, as if the windows have been soundproofed.

  I sit at my desk and check my email. There are hundreds of messages, but they’re all blank. My phone is a blank white screen.

  And then Anna Brook walks in wearing a blue satin dress, like she’s going to a party. She’s back to her normal weight. She has color in her cheeks, and she looks healthy. Her hair hangs limp and slightly curled, like she hasn’t washed it since swimming in the sea. Her right hand is closed in a fist as she approaches, but she’s smiling.

  She sits in the chair beside my desk and says, “Freddy, I want you to find something.”

  “What?”

  She holds out her right hand and opens it. Inside is the pearl she dove after in the whirlpool dream, when she chose to swim downward with the current instead of struggling up against it. It glows like the moon in her palm.

  “This,” she says.

  “But you’ve already found it.”

  “I know,” she says. “But you haven’t.”

  42

  “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever.”

  I awake in a hospital bed. Pale white sunlight streams in through the window to my right, surrounding Anna in a halo. She is seated, holding my hand in hers, as she raises her head from prayer.

  It takes a few seconds to remember why I’m here. I look down to the end of the bed, to make sure both legs are still there. I wiggle my toes, to see if they work. I know exactly where I was shot, because that little bit of movement makes the swollen, oozing wounds ache. My right thigh. My right side, just below the ribs. The burning muscle above the left collarbone.

  My left hand is in a cast that extends almost to the elbow. Julia is sitting on that side, in a beige cushioned chair. I have to look twice to make sure it’s her. Did she come all the way from Virginia? How many days have I been here?

  Her posture is straight, legs crossed one knee over the other, and she’s holding a newspaper. She smiles and says, “Hello, Freddy.” I smile weakly back, then turn my head the other way. They stuck the IV needle into that sweet blue vein at the top of my right forearm. The one the junkies usually blow out first.

  Anna is looking at me with a softness in her gaze I haven’t seen before. Her face is calm, serene almost, like the face of her sister that day in DC after she had cried herself out. The trauma of the past few months is etched into her eyes in a way that will never be undone, but it doesn’t seem to rule her. I can still see in her face traces of a stoic patience and an unbroken will.

  She watches me for a few seconds before she speaks. Her voice is smooth and sure, warm and concerned.

  She asks how I’m feeling, and I tell her I feel as good as I look.

  “Do you remember what happened at the house?”

  “Yeah. Up until the cops arrived.”

  “You want to see something?” She nods to her sister. “Show him the headline.”

  Julia folds the paper back to the first page and holds it up for me to see. “Obasanjo Freed. Governor Arrested.”

  I turn back to Anna, and she says, “They got a few words out of Lomax after his surgery. Enough to figure out that he passed the bomb through Welcher’s checkpoint. They have another FBI guy in custody in DC. Mitch Rollins. If you thought this was a media circus before, you should see what’s going on now.”

  But this is small talk. She has something else on her mind. I can feel it, the way she’s looking at me. The way she’s holding back.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “It’s that…” She takes a few seconds to search for the words. “Some of those things you said at Travis’s house that night. I don’t think you really meant them.”

  “I’m sorry I called you that,” I say. “I lost my temper.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she says. “I mean the way you talked about the world. Like there’s nothing in it but evil and suffering. That it’s irredeemable. You didn’t mean that.”

  “I did,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t think you understand yourself.”

  “I manage to get by well enough,” I say, trying to shake her off.

  But she has that probing, challenging, you-can’t-avoid-me look in her eye.

  She says, “You know, I really started to doubt everything after that talk with you. I looked back on my life, and there was so much to regret. And I looked around me in that little house, and it all seemed so hopeless. And I looked forward, taking your dark view of the world, and I saw nothing worth sticking around for. I almost gave up, Freddy.

  “I almost did. But I couldn’t let you win any more than I could let Lomax win, because I knew you were wrong. I mean, there was no point going on if you were right.”

  She leans toward me and brushes the hair back from my forehead. “Answer me this, Freddy. What is it you believe so deeply that you won’t renounce it even in the face of death?”

  “I don’t know, Anna. What?”

  “That’s your religion, the belief you will not live without. And you know what that is, Freddy. You know who you are. You put your life on the line for a person you didn’t even know. Why did you take an interest in me? Why did you follow me through that airport? Did I look like someone who was worth your while?”

  “It was instinct,” I say.

  “It was none of your business, but you couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” She pauses for a second, then says, “You and I aren’t as far apart as you might think. We both want a world that’s fair and just, and we’re both pretty tuned in to the ways it’s
not. We both want people to treat each other with respect and decency. You come at it from your angle, and I come at it from mine.”

  “Why didn’t you kill Lomax when you had the chance?” I ask.

  “Why should I have?”

  “After all he did to you?”

  “After all he did to me…” She trails off and lapses into thought. I turn to look at Julia, who’s sitting with the newspaper on her knee, watching her sister think.

  “I don’t believe in an eye for an eye,” Anna says. “I don’t believe that revenge is justice. It’s just paying back one wrong with another. The only real justice is to not let injustices happen in the fir’st place.

  “I shot him because I was scared. Because I wanted to end his power over me and make sure he’d never hurt anyone again. I fully intended to kill him. And then when I saw him there on the floor, I could tell he was terrified. He was in a lot of pain, but I think the terror was worse than the physical suffering. And I thought, Ah! Now you’re down here with me. You’re in a dark and lonely place. You can’t find your way out, and no one is coming to rescue you.”

  She pauses for a moment, and I see in her eyes some of the darkness she must have felt when she hid in the crawlspace beneath the knotted floor of that broken-down shack. She looks at me and says softly, “Suffering is a kind of understanding life inflicts on you against your will, and you don’t come out of it the same person. You’re deeper, because it forces open depths you wouldn’t willingly explore. I actually pitied him there, bleeding all over the floor of that filthy little house, and part of me said, OK, Lomax. Let’s see how you deal with this. Let’s see who you really are, down there at rock bottom, without your power and your confidence and your certainty that it’ll all work out. Maybe sometime in the months between now and your execution, a conscience will emerge, and your hell will be your own regrets and the past you can’t undo. If you think enough of yourself, maybe someday you’ll get down on your knees and ask forgiveness. And when you find the person generous enough to give it to you, you’ll finally understand how much it all matters.”

  She stops again and looks at her sister, taking in the healthy, youthful face and the bright eyes unmarred by anguish and abuse.

  “You know he’ll never rape again,” Anna says. “He can’t even use the toilet like a normal person. He’s got a bag attached to him now, and he’ll be wearing it on death row while he thinks about all the people he killed.”

  “And the one he didn’t,” Julia says.

  “And the one he didn’t,” Anna says. She turns back to me and adds, “And the one who took an interest in her when he didn’t have to, because… God only knows why.” She studies my face with calm curiosity.

  It’s a funny thing when someone looks at you like that. When they see right through to the bottom of you, and you know it, and you know there’s no point in hiding or lying about anything anymore.

  “Somewhere along the line,” she says, “something taught you not to ignore a sight like me, and it must have been a hard lesson, because most people turn their backs on trouble. But you just dive right in.”

  “It’s my job,” I say.

  “It’s the job you chose. And you chose it for a reason.”

  I can see in her eyes what she’s thinking. You tipped your hand, Freddy Ferguson. You tipped it that night at Travis’s house when you blew up and called her a whore. She hit that nerve dead on, and you reacted.

  What was it she said about guys? They’re like amateur poker players. They can’t really hide what they think they’re hiding. Somehow, it all comes out between a man and a woman, doesn’t it? And it took one who’s been around a lot of guys to crack me, because when you get right down to it, only the damaged truly understand the damaged.

  She doesn’t push or prod. She doesn’t dig for more. She just says softly, “Maybe someday you can tell me about it.”

  And I want to.

  I want to tell her everything.

  Because… Well, didn’t I say it?

  Didn’t I say right from the get-go I had a premonition about her?

  acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Kristin Mehus-Roe and Ingrid Emerick of Girl Friday Productions for their help in editing this book, and to Dorian Box, author of Psycho Tropics, for his suggestions on improving a key chapter. Thanks to Meredith Tennant for proofreading, and Lindsay Heider Diamond for her cover design.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrew Diamond's novel Impala won the 24th Annual Writer's Digest Award for genre fiction and the Readers' Favorite Gold Medal for mystery. Amazon.com editors picked it as a best mystery/thriller of the month upon its release in September, 2016, and IndieReader chose it as one of the best indie novels of the year.

  If you enjoyed this book, please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, or wherever you hang out online. We indie authors have only our readers to recommend us.