“Go,” he ordered. “We’ll finish this soon enough, but for now get some sleep.” Still stunned I remained stock still, but when I realized I had been given a get out of jail free card, literally, I didn’t waste any time getting the hell out of there. As I strode to the trailer that I shared with Gabriel, I half expected Pa to change his mind and come back for me.
He didn’t.
The outdoor light of the trailer was illuminated. Brown-spotted moths swirled around the light like planets orbiting the sun. I tugged the door open. As usual all the overhead lights, just light bulbs suspended from cords, were burning bright. Gabriel was scared of the dark. As far as I could remember he had never fallen asleep without a night light.
His tiny form was snuggled in the bed with a thin sheet covering him. Tufts of his white blonde hair sprouted like shafts of wheat above the sheet that obscured most of his head. A table fan oscillated back and forth, barely cooling the trailer. It felt like it was near ninety-degrees inside.
Though it was cool outside, the tiny windows opened on an angle and didn’t come even close to allowing enough fresh air in to reduce the temperature. Our cots for sleeping, that were folded up for the day, made the already cramped space even tighter. The half-moon particle board table where we ate our meals, was clipped to the wall to make space. The folding chairs were also collapsed and against the wall next to the bar-sized fridge, that made gurgling sounds all night and day. Though the trailer was our home for the better part of the year, the walls were bare and other than the twenty-inch color television bolted to a table in the corner, there was little to say it was ours.
I quietly got undressed, the smell of sex still clung to me, reminding me how the whole night had gone to hell right after I had been with Charity. I wanted to imagine that I could have predicted that things were going to go south, but if I was being truthful there was no way I could have. Sometimes shit just happened, and you were taken along for a ride whether you were willing or not. It would definitely be a story to tell Dave. I wondered what had happened between him and Patricia. I kind of hoped he hadn’t gotten lucky. Patricia seemed nice, and we were in town for roughly forty-eight hours. There was no future for the two; she would have ended up getting hurt.
I didn’t know why I cared so much about her. She was as much a stranger to me as Charity was, and I’d had absolutely no qualms about taking what I wanted from her. But somehow sex with Charity didn’t feel the same, because she wasn’t innocent or a virgin. Patricia it seemed was both of those things. It bothered me that if Dave had his way with Patricia, both of those qualities would be stripped from her. The thought of that happening left a bad taste in my mouth.
“Hey Ransom,” Gabriel said, bringing me out of my thoughts.
“Gab, dude, sorry I woke you up…”
He sat up in bed, his blue eyes were rimmed in red and purplish smudges were evident beneath them. It didn’t look like he had slept all night.
“You didn’t wake me, I was waiting for you.”
Now stripped to just my boxers, I moved to his cot. He propped himself up on the flimsy excuse for a bed that nobody, especially not someone with severe arthritis, should have had to sleep on.
“You should be sleeping, you have a show in a few hours man,” I said.
Gabriel shot me a sleepy smile. His eyes remained lidded as if he was too tired to hold them open all the way.
“I don’t need much sleep,” he said with a huge yawn. He cut his eyes to the aluminum door of the trailer then back to me.
“Did you get in much trouble with Pa?” he asked. His voice was so hushed that it was difficult to hear him.
“What do you mean?” I asked, wary.
I wasn’t about to let Gabriel know about anything that had happened. I never told anybody what Pa did to me, but definitely not Gabriel. He had more than enough to deal with, without adding my name to the list. So far, I had managed to keep a lid on things, so Gabriel was mostly in the dark.
Gab grimaced. “You know what I mean,” he said.
He locked his gaze on mine, resolutely. There was something in his stare that had me wondering exactly what he did know.
I shook my head a bit more vigorously than I needed to.
“Naw Gab, I really don’t. I mean I went out with Dave and you know…” I trailed off because there was no way I was going to detail my escapades of the evening with Gabriel. He was innocent, and I wanted to keep him that way, as long as possible.
“Really?” Gab said.
There was a touch of bitterness in his tone and it threw me completely off guard.
I squinted at him, then cocked my head to the side. There was no doubt he was fishing, but for what I wasn’t sure.
Gabriel drew himself up a little straighter, pressing his back against the cream-colored vinyl wall of the trailer.
“You don’t have to protect me all the time Ransom. I’m going to be sixteen in a couple of months. I know more than you think I do.”
I gave him a coy smile because I already knew that he had intel that normal people didn’t have. From the time he had been three, Gabriel had seemed to know things about stuff that he just had no business knowing. More times than I wanted to admit he had predicted that stuff was going to happen in the future. Somehow Gabriel could tap into some kind of bank that allowed him to glean information that he just shouldn’t have been able to know.
“I never said you didn’t know stuff Gab, I….” I started to say. He threw his hand up to stop me.
“I told Pa that you were in trouble, and that he needed to go get you and…”
“You told Pa,” I said with a note of incredulity in my tone.
I couldn’t understand why he had ratted me out like that. I trusted Gabriel to have my back more than I trusted myself, and now he had…
Gab gave a sharp nod of his head. His eyes flashed with uncharacteristic anger. I wasn’t sure how to process it.
“I told Pa that only he could get you out of the trouble you were in, and that if he laid a hand on you I would cancel the show.”
Gab held my eyes in a stare that showed more strength than I had ever given him credit for.
“What do you mean?” I said.
I already knew exactly what Gab was saying, but I couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around how he seemed to already know everything that I had gone to great lengths to hide.
Gabriel released a mirthless laugh.
“Come on Ransom I’ve known for too long what Pa is like and how he…”
He swallowed a few times and his eyes glazed with tears. I wanted to make them go away because he wasn’t supposed to know the truth. I wanted to keep what little bit of innocence that remained in him, preserved and safe. If Gabriel didn’t know about the ugliness of life and our father, then it somehow felt less real. Gabriel’s ignorance meant I could compartmentalize my life. Whatever went on behind closed doors didn’t need to tarnish everything else in my world.
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I said, clinging to my denial, the only thread holding the fabric of my lies together.
“Ransom, it’s okay, I’m going to make sure he never hurts you again. I just wish I’d had the courage to stand up to him before now,” Gab said.
A single tear trailed down his pale cheek. It was almost too much for me to take.
Then it came, sudden, cresting over me like a shockwave of fury that was propelled by gut-wrenching fear. I couldn’t allow Gabriel to protect me. It was my job to keep him safe. I needed him to see that, before he ended up getting hurt.
“You can’t protect me,” I hollered.
Even as the words burst from my lips, I regretted them. I had never raised my voice to Gabriel, ever. From the way he shrank away from me he was as surprised by my outburst as I was.
But as quickly as he had drawn in on himself, he straightened his spine and met my eyes with pure defiance. Once again I was thrown at this shift in his behavior.
“I’m not scared of you, or P
a either. I’m going to do what’s right.”
His eyes narrowed to slits.
“Don’t even try to pretend that you wouldn’t do the same for me Ransom. I know how you protect me, take care of me. I know how to do it because you taught me how. I don’t care what you say or do. I’m going to let Pa know that I’m not going to allow it to happen anymore. I may be Gabriel Sanders the boy wonder, but I’m also Gab your brother, and there’s nothing I won’t do to make sure Pa never hurts you again. I’m not going to let him make you go away like he did Mama.”
It killed me that he still believed that Ma was alive, a lie that Pa had forced me to tell him. But worse than that, was how he still thought she was somewhere out there in the world, and would someday come back to us even though he believed that she had abandoned us years before.
And there it was, the pain that had gouged strips from my heart but that I had managed to hold inside was sliced wide open all over again. It felt like my throat had been cut and I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to think about her, I couldn’t think about how she had died. Left us with a monster. I jumped to my feet without a word, tugging on my t-shirt and jeans in seconds.
Then I was outside, barefoot and running. I stared up at the moon, once again wondering how anything could be beautiful when everything in my life had gone to shit. I had done everything in my power to keep Gab safe and under the radar. But now that he had decided to stir up a hornets nest, there was no way he wasn’t going to get stung.
Part 2
One Year Later….
7. LEXIE
Before I left Trinity’s car I listened to Mom’s final voice mail again; a ritual that had me playing the recording at least twenty times a day, sometimes more. “You’ve got to stop doing this Lexie,” Trinity said. She was sitting beside me in the drivers seat of the bug. Her face was pinched with disapproval, something I had seen more times in the months since Mom had died than in all the time I had known her.
I slipped my phone back into my pocket, and gave her a blank look as if I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Doing what?” I asked, my tone flat.
Trinity released an exaggerated sigh then shook her head. The pony beads she had braided in her hair, rattled with the act. A week before Trinity, stating she needed a change, had had her entire head braided and beaded into dread locks. Today she had finished her look with a fuchsia broomstick skirt and a cream colored peasant blouse. She was rocking the hippy look, with a splash of the Caribbean.
“The psychics, the fortune tellers, the mediums, the tea cup readers, the witches the warlocks, anybody who says that they can tell the future or whatever other bullshit they’re feeding you. Damn it Lexie, it has to stop, you can’t keep going on like this. It’s not normal to be this obsessed with contacting your mother, not to mention the amount of money you’ve spent on it all, or that you’ve put your whole life on hold.”
She slammed her open palms on the polished leather of the steering wheel then skewered me with her stare. I was stunned into silence. I had never seen her this angry before and it kind of freaked me out. I opened and closed my mouth a few times then leaned back against the seat, squeezing my eyes closed. She was right on all points, I was obsessed with everything supernatural. All the things that had never mattered in the past had now pushed my old life aside until the spirit world was all I could think about.
Before Mom’s death, the afterlife, angels and all the rest of the things that I had recently made it my life to study, hadn’t even registered on my radar. Back then I had believed that none of it was based in science, and was junk that people who didn’t want to accept reality bought in to. I wasn’t sure when my need to know more had shifted from curiosity to obsession, only that it had. For sure Mom’s cryptic message had been the catalyst that had opened the doors to finding out what she had meant, when she had said she would send me an angel when she got to heaven.
At first I had just wanted to find someone who could help me decipher the message that Mom had left me on my phone. But my initial interest had quickly snowballed into me hanging on to every word the psychics and people who were supposed to be in the know, said. I had burned through more than half of my college fund already. I couldn’t see an end in sight since every time I had thought I was getting somewhere it had ended up being all smoke and mirrors. So far my father was too busy playing house with the bitch he had left Mom for, to have figured out that I wasn’t going to college everyday like I had told him I was. And now that his new wifey was knocked up and glowing like a firefly, the new baby was all they talked about.
I hadn’t wanted to crash at my father’s place, but I had nowhere else to go. Well before Mom was even cold in the grave, he’d sold the house that she and I had shared. Moving on took on a whole new meaning when my father was involved.
“I promise this is going to be the last one,” I said with little conviction. I shot her a thin smile. “She’s going to have all the answers I need, I feel it in my bones.”
“That’s total crap and you know it Lexie.”
She shook her head and sighed.
“Look, I believe that there’s more than what we see, but what you want is impossible Lexie. No one can conjure up the ghost of your mother so you can see her and talk to her like she’s still alive because…” She drew in another deep inhalation.
“Because she’s dead Lexie, and I feel like a total ass for being so blunt, but shit, I’m worried about you. You’re so pale and you don’t eat right, I don’t even know if you sleep anymore…”
“Enough,” I yelled. “I told you this was going to be the last time. If you need to bail then do it. I’ll find my own way home.”
I heard the venom in my tone. I despised myself for going ballistic on my best friend since she was one of the few people if not the only one, who still loved me unconditionally. But even though I was aware that Trinity didn’t deserve my tongue lashing, I couldn’t just leave when I was possibly moments away from talking to Mom again. Seeing the fed-up expression on Trinity’s face had me wondering how much longer she would be there for me if I continued to act the way I was.
Before I lost my nerve and caved in to Trinity’s wishes, I threw open the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, that ran the length of the suburban street. The leaves of the mature trees rustled in the quiet breeze and was in sharp contrast to the wash of emotions that were eating me alive. Desperation was the front runner with a side of guilt, and of course the absolute loss that had arrived the day the police officer had told me about Mom.
“Fine, let’s go,” Trinity said.
I hadn’t even noticed she had gotten out of the car. She twined her fingers with mine. I squeezed her hand, grateful for her unspoken support. I really couldn’t have found a better friend than her. There were few people who would have stuck by me with the way I had been acting since Mom had been killed, or as I believed, since I had killed my mother. It didn’t matter how many people told me that her death hadn’t been my fault, I knew it was. If I hadn’t gone to Dallas’s party she would never have been on the road. If not for my selfishness my mother would still be alive, and I wouldn’t have been visiting yet another psychic, wishing and praying for an opportunity to say goodbye to her. I longed to somehow take back the hateful words that had marked the end of our time together.
The house was average enough, giving no indication that someone who claimed to talk to the dead lived there. No neon signs with PSYCHIC flashed red, nor was there a skull and cross bones painted in blood on the front door. The bungalow was white with navy trim, a spray of pink and white trumpet-shaped petunias edging the property, spilled onto a perfectly trimmed emerald green lawn. The walkway that led to the screen door was made of slabs of slate that could have only been described as quaint. A three-foot wind chime constructed of a circle of dark wood and long slender silver pipes, tinkled in the soft wind.
Trinity and I were silent as we mounted the six steps that led to the covered porch. I
stuck my finger out and pressed the glowing light buzzer adjacent to the door. Seconds later I heard footsteps approaching the door then it cracked open. The woman that peered back at us was in her late fifties with salt and pepper hair, cut in a straight bob that just touched her shoulders. Dressed in beige slacks and a salmon colored short-sleeved polo shirt, she was slight of build and as average in appearance as the house.
A while back when I had first started frequenting psychics, I had quickly realized that nine out of ten of them were nothing like I had always pictured them as being. In my mind I had thought that people who claimed to have knowledge of the other world, wore muumuus, turbans, tons of sparkling bead necklaces and tinkling bangles, and would most definitely have a crystal ball to stare into.
Other than the retro horn-rimmed spectacles, perched on the tip of her nose, Gingerella was plain. I hoped that her average appearance wasn’t a bad omen about her abilities to contact the dead.
“Lexie?” she said in a soft voice that matched her quiet look.
I nodded. “This is my friend Trinity, is it okay if she comes with me?”
“That’s absolutely fine,” she said, stepping to the side so we could pass.
Even though I had been to more psychics and mediums in the past few months than I could count on two hands, my reaction was always the same, anticipation and fear. Anticipation that she might actually give me the answers I needed, and fear that she couldn’t, that quite possibly nobody could help me connect with my mother again.
Gingerella closed the door behind us. Both Trinity and I removed our shoes, leaving them on the black plastic mat that had other shoes positioned on it. Gingerella padded down the beige carpeted hallway, covered in a clear plastic runner. Her Tender Tootsie loafers were soundless as she led the way. Trinity and I followed silently. We passed a large family room that was meticulously neat with a soft camel-hued leather sofa, two matching chairs and a dark wood coffee table. A large marble fireplace with a black mantle was built into the wall farthest from the entrance.
Ransom (Holding Ransom # 1) Page 8