Sacrifices of Joy

by Leslie J. Sherrod

  Lasker, Pennsylvania.

  I looked at the sheet of paper in my hands again.

  The Secrets to Deconstructing Heroism and a Critique of the Philosophical and Theological Views of Moral Evolution in the Finite Universe.

  There was no author listed, but the publisher’s name was printed clearly at the bottom of the page. Through the Window Press.

  And underneath was a familiar hand-drawn illustration of a window framed with striped curtains, a cat sitting on its sill.

  Chapter 43

  I needed to get online. I needed to do some research. Where was Lasker? What was in Lasker? Wherever it was, whatever was there, I felt like it held answers.

  It had to.

  I had nothing else to go on.

  My sister’s prepaid phone was as basic as it got. It made phone calls, accepted texts, but there was no Internet access, no World Wide Web feature.

  I left Charles Village and drove to Hampden, where I remembered from Roman’s middle school science project days that there was a small electronics store off the beaten road. I parked at a meter and entered the tiny showroom. A shrill chime announced my entrance and I headed to an aisle of computer tablets before any salespersons could capture me.

  Lasker, Pennsyvlania.

  I typed the name of the town into a search engine box on the first floor sample I saw.

  It was in south central PA, population 903, mostly Amish. I pulled up images that resulted from the search. Idyllic country sides, farmland, and isolated houses, barns, and bridges made up the bulk of the search results.

  What am I looking for?

  I didn’t have an answer to my own question. I shut my eyes, exasperated.

  Stuck.

  “That right there is a power-packed machine that can be both a tablet and a laptop, making it all you need to buy. It’s got both Wi-Fi and 4G. I’ve been watching you tinker with it for a while. Tell me what you think of it.” The saleswoman had bright orange eyeglasses and a fake smile.

  She was interrupting me.

  “I’m not getting anything right now. Just looking.”

  How far away was this Lasker place from Baltimore? I wondered. Couldn’t be too far for that man to be coming back and forth from there.

  I was making too many assumptions and I knew it.

  He’d called me from a phone with an Ohio area code and had driven a Jeep from West Virginia. Though the rusted green pickup truck I’d seen him in last had Pennsylvania tags, PA was huge state. He could have driven the truck from anywhere, assuming it was even his.

  I doubted that it was.

  Two hours and twenty-three minutes.

  A map feature on the tablet/laptop combo showed a complicated route, one I was sure was filled with small two-lane highways, cows, maybe even dirt roads.

  No, it couldn’t be that rural, I analyzed the map, trying to find something familiar. I’d gone to college initially near that part of Pennsylvania. My pre-RiChard days.

  I smiled. Thinking about his name didn’t prick as much as before.

  I truly was free of him.

  “I see that smile. I knew you’d be impressed.”

  The saleswoman had never left, I realized. She stood near my left shoulder, smiling as she peeked at the screen in front of me.

  “There are so many apps that you can get for maps and driving directions. Like I said, that beauty is more than a laptop. It’s a tablet when you need it.”

  “I’m not getting anything,” I repeated as I slid my fingers across the touch screen to exit the map application. The woman still stood there, smiling. A clipboard and pen were in her hands. I turned to leave, but then had an idea. “Actually, ma’am, do you sell any GPS units?”

  Ten minutes later I had a brand new, top-of-the-line GPS unit sitting on the dashboard of Yvette’s old Buick. I hadn’t planned to spend that much of my cash, but it seemed to be the only way to get that saleswoman out of my way.

  Lasker, Pennsylvania. I programmed the unit to that area.

  Street address?

  I had no idea. What was I doing? I needed more information before I started driving to a place where J.B. Infinity may not even have ties.

  But my gut had me on this path and I wasn’t fighting against it.

  I started up the car. It stalled then thought better of it before roaring to life. Darci said she’d run into him at the library the other night. Perhaps he’d said something in passing that would illuminate the way for me to go looking for him. I didn’t want to call or e-mail her for fear that authorities were tapping into everyone who was in my absent phone’s address book. She’d said that she planned to come to the office early Saturday morning before I was even scheduled to see clients.

  This would be a good time to check in, I decided. Plus I could get her to handle my scheduled afternoon appointments.

  There was no way I could lead a therapy session right now. I was too close to answers, and too close to being held for questioning myself.

  I felt it.

  I wanted to go to authorities only after I had a smoking gun, or something close to it.

  Chapter 44

  I drove past the parking lot of my office building twice. Call me paranoid, but the idea that police or some other authority figure could bring me in for questioning before I had answers frightened me. There were no unusual cars on the lot, no suspect-looking people.

  I need to calm it down, bring it back down a level, I chided myself.

  Darci’s bright yellow Beetle was parked in her usual spot, three spaces down from the stairwell that led to my office suite. I realized that my shoulders had relaxed at that observation. I was confident that I would get some more answers, direction as to where to go.

  I bounded up the steps, unlocked the front door myself instead of waiting for her to buzz me in.

  “Darci!” I was out of breath from the run. “I have a question for you. Darci?”

  Her purse was on her desk chair, but she was not in the waiting room.

  “Darci?” I called down the lit hallway, opened and closed each of the four office doors in the suite. Where is she?

  I walked back to the waiting room. Her purse was definitely there. So were her keys. I moved the mouse of her computer and the screen came to life. She had logged on. Looked like she was updating some billing statements, I noted.

  “Darci?” I called out again though it was obvious there was nobody but me in the suite. I heard a vibrating noise. Her cell phone clattered on the corner of her desk. Call from Mom darted across the screen.

  “That’s odd,” I said aloud. Darci never went anywhere without her cell phone. Even when she went to the bathroom she had her phone in hand. I used to joke with her about it until I became the same way.

  Call from Mom darted across the screen again as it buzzed anew. Should I answer it?

  “Darci?” I called out again as the caller disconnected and her screen turned back to her screensaver, a picture of her three-year-old twins, Ella and Elijah, eating ice cream cones at a fair.

  If the phone rings again, I’ll answer it, I decided, picking it up, suddenly aware of the growing discomfort in my stomach.

  “Maybe she’s at the café,” I mumbled, staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring again. It was not unusual for Darci to jog down the steps to the café downstairs to grab a coffee, a muffin, a piece of fruit, or a salad. I put the phone back down and stepped out of the office, locking the door behind me. Yeah, she was probably down there, getting a late-morning treat. She’s probably also freaking out that she doesn’t have her phone on her. I’ll tell her where it is when I see her, share a laugh when I tell her that I was worried that . . . Worried that what? I couldn’t finish my own sentence. Clearly I was over thinking everything right now.

  The café had just a few patrons. Breakfast was nearly over and the cooks and servers were preparing for the lunch rush.

  Darci was not there.

  I scanned the small dining room, glanced at each booth, check
ed over the couple of people standing at the counter.

  “Excuse me.” I stepped up to the cashier. “Did the young lady I work with come through here today?”

  “Who, Darci?” The cashier smiled and I nodded. “Yeah, she was here a little while ago. We talked for a minute and then she ordered a coffee to go. She headed out the opposite way from your office so I don’t know if she was going straight back.”

  “Okay, thanks!” Yes, I clearly was over thinking. There was a dry cleaner’s and a postal store on the back side of the office building. Darci frequented both. I smiled and nodded and turned to leave. There was no reason for me to stay.

  As I put my hand on the glass door to open it, I saw a police cruiser turn into the parking lot. My heart quickened a beat as I grabbed a newspaper from a stand just inside the doorway and plopped down at an empty table nearby. This is ridiculous, Sienna, I chided myself again as the police cruiser circled the lot and turned out of it in the opposite direction. He just wanted to turn around, it looks like. I shook my head at myself as I slowly eased the paper away from my face. I folded it up and laid it on the table.

  DASHED DREAMS, the main headline read. My eyes caught notice of both the headline and the rows of photos of the terror attack victims underneath it.

  “The college lacrosse team that could have been champions,” one picture’s caption read. Several on the team had been killed; most were injured. “A retiree who’d just opened a restaurant.” I recalled the interview of this woman’s grandson that had aired the day of the attack.

  It was all a shame. No reason, no sense for it all, and no time to waste trying to find that man, his real name, his location, his story. Who else would be looking for him?

  I stood up to leave, but I could not pull my eyes away from the last photo. The little eight-year-old boy and his parents, the businessman and the PTA president. FROM WHEATCROPSTOCASHHARVESTING:THEFARMERWHOBECAMEA FINANCIER.

  I froze at the headline beneath the photo of the wealthy family of three. He’d been a farmer? I decided to skim through the rest of the article, but I only made it through the first two sentences.

  He started life toiling the fields of Lasker, Pennsylvania and she was a high school beauty queen in her hometown near Amish country Ohio.

  This is not a coincidence. I stared at sentences again.

  “Ma’am, are you okay?” A busboy looked at me with concern as I held on to the table. “Yes,” I whispered though the room swirled around me and I felt like I was going to throw up.

  I had to go. I had to start driving. I didn’t know exactly where in Lasker I was headed, but I knew from looking at a map that it was not that big of an area.

  Somebody had to be walking around there. Somebody had to know something.

  “God, guide my steps,” I prayed as I left a dollar on the table for the paper and headed once again for the door. I started to go back up to the office, but when a second police cruiser passed by the lot, I decided to head directly to my car. I had on a baseball cap, shades, and sweats, my sister’s keys in my hand.

  “I look and feel a mess,” I conceded as Yvette’s Buick roared to life, “but I’m on the right track.”

  It felt good knowing I trusted my instincts again.

  “Merge onto North 83.” The monotone voice of the GPS system was my only company as I started the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Lasker. I’d done a point of interest search on the GPS for the sake of having an address to input and was en route to a service station. The way Yvette’s car groaned and wheezed up 83, a car service station seemed to be just the place I needed to be headed.

  “Please don’t let this car break down.” I pushed down the thought as I drove through Northern Baltimore County and then crossed over into the York area of Pennsylvania.

  “In 2.5 miles, exit left.” My GPS guide took me off the highway. Forty minutes past the PA state line, I was driving on narrow, winding roads, passing rusted silos and farmlands being prepped for seeding.

  As I drove through the Pennsylvania countryside, I reflected on the journey I’d taken to get to this moment. From doubting myself and feeling overwhelmed by confusion, bitterness, and pain, to being willing to travel to an uncertain destination with confidence and peace despite the still many unanswered questions, I knew that I had grown into a more complete woman. As the roads wound around herds of cows and slow-moving tractors, passed bubbling streams and open fields, I thought about my family and the relationships I had with each member: Roman, and his quiet insistence on making things right; my parents, their hopes and criticisms, their love; Yvette, and our inability to ever really define our sisterhood. I recalled conversations, memories, heartbreak I’d had with the men I’d loved or at the very least tolerated, starlit nights in foreign lands, rousing laughter over kitchen tables, playful arguments at art galleries and lectures.

  There were still decisions to be made. Discussions that had to happen.

  I was prepared.

  I reflected on the victims of the terror attacks: their stories, the tragedy, the senselessness, Jamal Abdul, and his possible innocence. The randomness of it all. My determination to address it.

  Maybe I was a little zany, a little too stubborn in my drive to set things right and get to the bottom of a matter. If my son had been a little too reckless over the years with his resolve to get answers, I could agree that he’d gotten that trait honestly. As did I. I chuckled, thinking about my mother and the daughters she’d accidentally raised to be opposite sides of the same coin.

  Our family’s stubbornness came at a cost.

  All of us struggled with saying what needed to be said in relationships. I thought again of Leon and smiled. It hurt. I missed him. I messed up what we had. And now I was left with Laz.

  The stench of manure brought me back to the moment, to the urgency of my mission.

  To the realization that my GPS guide had grown silent on me.

  “Uh-oh,” I mumbled as I looked at the now-gray screen that sat on the dashboard.

  Reception lost, it read.

  “Don’t do this to me,” I spoke to it flatly, knowing that it had already been done. I truly was in the middle of nowhere because even the satellite system that fed the GPS didn’t know where I was.

  There was nothing around me but fields ripe for planting and forest vegetation that rustled in the quiet breeze.

  As the road dipped up and down over small hills and passed clusters of tall trees and wild shrubbery, the signal followed suit, fading in and out of reception. The voice of direction would chime in with a hint of where to go next and then fall silent, as if testing my ability to stay the course.

  Nearly three hours after I’d started this leg of my journey, I reached a sign that read, LASKER CITY LIMITS. I stayed straight on the two-lane highway on which I travelled, looking, waiting for another sign to give me direction on what to do next.

  I didn’t have to search far. A small service station came into view and I recognized the name as the one I’d used as a destination address. It could not have come at a better time, I acknowledged, as Yvette’s old car sputtered and squealed and cried out for some gas and attention.

  My sister was going to kill me when she found out how far I’d driven her wheels.

  The station had a single pump, a vintage—that is, ancient-looking—contraption with large numbers on a mechanical dial, complete with chrome, and bright red paint. I pulled up to it and my heart sank as I noticed the thick rust that lined the nozzle, the $0.00 on the dial.

  “That pump doesn’t work, miss.” A man came out of a small wooden shack, shouting the obvious. He had a warm smile and wore a long sleeve shirt, pants, and a straw hat.

  I could feel my eyebrow raise, my inward panic button about to go off. Yvette’s car couldn’t go much farther without some TLC, especially gas. I looked up at the sign that hung over the shack. SAUL’S SERVICE SHOP. What exactly was he servicing if it wasn’t cars?

  As if reading my mind, he pointed to a pile of wood
, wheels, and metal parts that sat on the other side of the shack. “Carriages and buggies. That’s the business I do around these parts.” A horse harness was draped over a nearby wooden fence.

  “Oh, you’re Amish?” I didn’t know how else to ask.

  “Uh, not really. I mean, I respect their way of life, the simplicity of it, and they tolerate me setting up shop here. Actually folks around here think I’m aiming to be one of them. I keep saying that one day I’m going to get baptized into one of the local communities around here, but they want to see that you can handle living without all the perks of the Western world, like television, phone service, electricity. I’ve cut back on a lot of that stuff, but we’ll see.”

  “Just cut back on it, not fully eliminated it.” I smiled and pointed to a cell phone that peeked out of his pants pocket.

  He let out a nervous chuckle and pushed the phone out of view. “Yeah, it’s a process. By all appearances to most eyes around here, I’ve done away with all the luxuries of the world.”

  “You actually get a signal out here?” I was genuinely curious. Yvette’s prepaid phone had given out miles ago.

  “I, uh, have a satellite dish that keeps me connected to the rest of the world. I guess you could say I’m straddling the fence as far as letting go of the world and its comforts.”

  “You’re not from around here are you?” I looked at him slyly.

  “Born south of Cleveland.” He chuckled. “Left in my early twenties, been living here ever since. That was over thirty years ago.” He swung his head to the side, looked up and down the street. “Look, I do have a gallon of gas you can have if you want it. Follow me.”

  I hesitated because I didn’t know this man, but really, what choice did I have? I needed gas and I needed answers; he had at least one of those things.

  “Do I follow you by car?” I called after him from the driver’s seat as his footsteps crunched away on the gravel lot.

  “You can park there”—he pointed to a space next to the shack he’d emerged from—“and come with me to that barn.”