Deceived

by James Scott Bell

  Before she could say another word, the connection cut.

  Geena said, “Not good, huh?”

  “Chalk up another victory for the singing career,” Rocky said.

  “Rocky — ”

  “No, it’s time I got it through my head that I am not going to make it in public. Better to sing in the shower because nobody can see me in the shower.”

  “Come on,” Geena said.

  “I’ll go back to the apartment today. Get whatever’s left and put it in the car and go find my own place.”

  “Stay here with me,” Geena said.

  “I don’t want to bring you anymore bad luck.”

  “You haven’t brought me any bad luck, and anyway — ”

  “Thanks for trying.” Rocky put her phone in her purse and started to leave.

  “I’ll go with you,” Geena said.

  “No,” Rocky said. “I want to be alone right now.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d go to the park and scream at people as they walk by.”

  Geena blinked.

  “I’m kidding, cutie,” Rocky said. “Half kidding, anyway.”

  “Don’t get drunk.”

  She left Geena smiling at the door.

  Rocky did go to the park, five blocks from Geena’s. The day wasn’t so bad. A little cloudy. They said it was supposed to rain later in the week.

  Just not tomorrow, she hoped. Tomorrow when Arty’s rushed funeral would be held. She wanted it to be good for Arty, for his memory.

  And she kept wondering about Liz’s conversion story.

  Very, very convenient.

  But what if it was true? What are you missing out on, Rocky Towne? Is there some sort of spiritual brass ring out there? Need to grab it?

  She found a bench by the fountain and watched some kids playing on the slides. A little girl in a red jacket was being helped up the steps by her mother, who sat the girl at the top of the slide.

  Rocky remembered her dream of Arty sliding down and disappearing.

  The little girl on the slide, she was maybe three years old, whined. But her mother took her hand and said, “Hold on to me. I’m right here.”

  The girl stopped whining. She took a breath and then she went. She screamed on the way down, a joyful scream. When she got off, she had a big smile on her face.

  “Again,” she said.

  It must be nice to have somebody right there, Rocky thought. To hold your hand on the way down.

  She noticed a boy staring at her. Short black hair, like a brush. Six or seven years old.

  “Hi,” Rocky said.

  “What happened to your face?” the boy said.

  Direct little fellow. “A dog bit me when I was a girl.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Not ever?”

  “Maybe a little sometimes.”

  The boy didn’t say anything.

  “What’s your name?” Rocky said.

  “Andrew,” he said.

  “My name’s Rocky.”

  “Rocky?”

  She nodded.

  “Is that a girl’s name?” Andrew said.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  The boy turned and ran toward the slides. She kind of admired that. You say what you want, then get out. Ask your question, then go on about your business.

  Good luck there, Andrew, she thought. I hope you have some good times. Somebody should in this life.

  1:52 p.m.

  Replacing a fuse for Mr. Hecht, Mac thought, People sometimes kidnap their own children.

  He shook his head, almost as if trying to jostle the idea from his mind.

  But it stuck.

  Just take your own child and —

  “Stupid,” he said.

  “How’s that?” Mr. Hecht said. He was sitting in a lawn chair, reading the newspaper. Another one of the old church members, Mr. Hecht was. His wife had died a year ago.

  “Sorry,” Mac said. “Just mumbling.” The new fuse in, Mac shut the box. He tried to shut his mind off the same way.

  But he couldn’t stop the thought of running, getting away from this place, from Slezak and the courts and the rules. Taking Aurora with him.

  Of course, he couldn’t. Not that he wasn’t capable. There was still larceny in his soul, he was sure of that. This whole new-creation business was slow on God’s part. Especially with the material Mac had handed over to him.

  Stop thinking about yourself, stupid. Help Liz and Arty’s sister get through this time.

  “Can I run my washing machine now?” Mr. Hecht said.

  “Sure can,” Mac said.

  “And watch TV?”

  “Yep.”

  “I dunno,” Mr. Hecht said. “Maybe I’d be better off watching the washing machine. Not much worth it on television. Only that reality stuff, what do they call it?”

  “Reality shows, I think.”

  “Why’d I want to watch those?” Mr. Hecht asked. “I got enough reality as it is.”

  You and me both, Sir, Mac thought. More than enough.

  3:33 p.m.

  Ted did one more crunch. His stomach was burning, but he felt no pain.

  He was too busy thinking of her.

  Resting now, in his apartment with the water-stained ceiling, Ted did his confidence-building exercises.

  The book had said you have to self-talk it into being. That was the start.

  You can be anything you think you are, if you say it to yourself and give yourself enough feeling.

  The subconscious, the book said, can’t distinguish between a real event and an imaginary one that is vividly imagined.

  So even though he was alone in an apartment in a lousy neighborhood, sweating through his T-shirt, for a moment Ted was on the prow of a ship, the woman of his dreams under his arm.

  The woman. The only one he wanted.

  “I am confident,” Ted said.

  Wednesday

  11:10 a.m.

  Rocky stood apart from the small crowd starting to gather at the grave site. They were at a far corner of the cemetery. It ended at chain-link fence. On the other side of the fence were the dry brush and rocks of Pack Canyon.

  The cemetery was a carpet of green grass dotted with markers. The sky was more forbidding than yesterday. Cloudy and cold.

  She turned her back on the mourners and looked at the marker at her feet. A woman’s name, Erin Gerber. With the dates 1984 – 2001.

  Beloved daughter, the marker read. She gave laughter and joy and memories forever.

  Seventeen years old. What memories was that enough time for? No one should die at seventeen.

  Rocky had time for memories, and they flooded her head. Memories of the two girls from her high school who died on prom night. Drinking with their boyfriends in the back of a van. Making out one moment, smashed to death the next.

  One of them, Billie Harper, was a secret friend. Secret because she was on the “A List” and couldn’t be seen consorting with an outsider like Rocky. But she did go out of her way to be nice in English Lit, where they found out they both hated George Eliot and loved Jane Austen.

  Billie, who was going to be one of the golden ones. Her life literally came to a crashing and sudden end.

  Now Billie was under a grave marker. Just like this Erin. Just like they all would be.

  But Arty believed a marker wasn’t the end. What had happened to make him believe that? He had tried to explain it to her one night. It sounded too mystical, too much like one of Geena’s fads. But then, Arty wasn’t like Geena. He was the smart one in the family.

  Was he singing with the angels now? Was that what his religion taught him?

  A slap of breeze hit her cheeks. She sensed someone looking at her and turned.

  He was leaning on the hood of a car at the access road. Expressionless.

 
The coldness inside her now was not from the wind. It came from his gaze.

  He did not move. She would have to go to him.

  He would never come to her.

  11:12 a.m.

  Mac put his arm around Liz. “You doing okay?”

  She nodded. She wore sunglasses and was zipped up in a black jacket.

  “You need anything, like water?” Mac said.

  Liz shook her head.

  “Try to think of this as a graduation,” Mac said.

  Liz looked at him.

  “Arty graduated early,” Mac said. “That’s all.”

  She shuddered a little under his arm. He wasn’t doing a very good job here. That’s why he wasn’t a pastor. Pastor Jon, now there was a man who knew the right things to say at a time like this.

  They were standing by the small table with a red cloth over it. On top of the table was the urn with Arty’s ashes. Mac wondered about that. But he figured Liz must have known Arty’s wishes better than anyone.

  Mac looked across the grass and saw Rocky. She was walking toward the cars parked along the interior road.

  He should go to her next. Make sure she was doing all right.

  11:13 a.m.

  “Hello, Pop,” Rocky said.

  “Roxanne.” He didn’t even nod. He was dressed in an ill-fitting sport jacket and thick blue tie. The knot on the tie was the size of a fist. His curly hair, once a vibrant brown, was almost completely white now, and thinning.

  She hadn’t seen him since last Christmas. He seemed to have aged five more years in that time.

  “How are you?” Rocky said.

  “Can’t complain,” he said. “Except a little.”

  “A little about what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Not nothing. What is it?”

  “Bodies break down,” he said. “Even when you used to have a good one.”

  “What’s happened, Pop?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t keep saying that. What’s the prob — ”

  “I’m not here to talk about medical conditions,” he said. With his final-authority, end-of-this-part-of-the-conversation voice. “I’m here for Arty.”

  Not for me, though. Right?

  Her father said, “You working?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But — ”

  “How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “Have you been working?”

  She looked at the sky, the steel-colored clouds hovering. “Off and on, like always.”

  “Still nothing steady.”

  “I’m a freelancer, it’s — ”

  “Not stable.”

  “It’s work, okay? I get paid.”

  “When you work.”

  She shook her head, wanting to run screaming through the cemetery, screaming at the ghosts that they were the lucky ones. They didn’t have to put up with anymore of life. They didn’t have to hear how their fathers never thought they could do anything worthwhile and feel lower than dirt —

  “You still living with that guy?” her father said.

  “Not one for the small talk, are you, Pop?”

  “What’s the point?”

  A long moment passed. A sullen silence woven from too many disappointments, too many lost years. Rocky felt like they should touch, at least. Maybe not embrace, but at least put a hand around the shoulder or something. She’d even take shaking hands.

  Then her father said, “Well, I guess we better get over there.” And he started walking toward the grave site.

  11:25 a.m.

  “If the world were to look in on us at this moment,” Pastor Jon was saying, “people might say, ‘They have come to say their final good-byes to someone they love.’ They would only be partially correct. It is true that we have come to express our love and share our loss, but the goodbyes are not final.”

  Liz thought, I hope this does not go on too long. Can’t they just be done with it?

  On a table, Arty’s urn was sitting, waiting to be lowered in a hole. At least that had worked out. A fast cremation, a fast ceremony.

  Once the urn was buried, she could get on with it. Endure the little gathering they’d have back at the church. Everyone would eat and talk about Arty and comfort her, and she’d be grinding her teeth on the inside. But she could take it. It was a small price to pay for the payoff to come.

  In truth she did feel a little sorry for Arty. He was a good man who had gone a little off the beam with religion. It had affected his lifestyle. Even more, it had affected hers.

  Well, he died because of it. An accident. She hadn’t wanted him to die. But now it was the best thing all around.

  “At the heart of the Christian faith is the truth of eternal life,” Pastor Jon said. “This eternal life is not an abstract idea, not a work of fiction, not a superstition passed down through the ages. It is a fact that has been taught throughout the Bible. Jesus taught it on many occasions. Jesus said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.’ ”

  Never die? Liz thought. That’s kind of scary.

  “Jesus, when speaking with the disciples before he went to the cross, said, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.’ ”

  Why do people believe this?

  “The Bible tells us that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. That is where Arty is right now. He is with his Savior, awaiting that joyous time when all of us, his church family, will join him in our eternal dwelling place.”

  Can Arty read my thoughts? Talk about scary. Maybe there was such a thing as ghosts. But they have no power. She would not let them have any power. No one would ever have power over her.

  “Now,” Pastor Jon said, “we’ll take a few moments for those who’d like to say something about Arty’s life.”

  Liz had forgotten about this part. Pastor Jon had gone over all the particulars with her the night before. Including this deal about letting people talk.

  Things were going to go on a lot longer than she’d hoped.

  11:31 a.m.

  Mac said, “Arty was about the closest friend I had. He was there for me when it counted. Even though we didn’t know each other that long, he was like a brother to me.”

  Tears pressed against his eyes. He took a deep breath.

  “I haven’t had a real good time of it in the last few years, and it’s only because of church and Pastor Jon that I haven’t done something real stupid, like put my head through a plate-glass window. But there was this one time I felt like I was going to do it, and the only guy I could get hold of was Arty.”

  Warm tears beginning now.

  “He came right over, even though it was late at night, and he sat with me and started telling me stories. He was a real storyteller, Arty was. He started telling me about this doctor at UCLA who was doing some genetic experiments with animals. He went on and on, and I started to listen. It was really fascinating.”

  Mac paused, took a breath, continued. “I mean, all the things this doctor had to do to fight the administration and the press and even his other colleagues. And Arty goes on and on, and then finally describes the big breakthrough the guy had, when he was able to cross a dog with a chicken, and got pooched eggs.”

  A moment of silence, then people started to laugh. As did Mac, wiping his eyes. It was a moment Arty would have liked. He was that kind of guy.

  11:38 a.m.

  “I don’t have a whole lot of funny stories,” Rocky said when it was her turn to speak. “Arty liked to laugh, I know that. He used to make me laugh when we were kids. He used to help me, too. I guess Arty was just like that. A helper.”

  Keeping her eyes on Liz, Rocky said, “He would have done anything for anybody. I
guess that’s what we’re trying to say here. And that he shouldn’t have died. It was too soon.”

  The face of Liz Towne, hidden behind dark glasses, was expressionless.

  “He was the most loyal person I knew,” Rocky said. “If he was for you, you knew you could count on him. I just can’t imagine anyone who knew him not liking him or not trusting him or wanting to play him false.”

  Liz looked away.

  “I know that Arty felt like he found a family with all of you.” This time Rocky looked at her father. He was already looking away.

  Her heart dropped. She closed her eyes. “That’s all I really have to say,” she said and melted back into the small crowd, on the opposite side from her father and Liz.

  11:40 a.m.

  “Thank you so much, everyone,” Liz said. Her voice was shaking. “You were family to Arty. And now you’re family to me. I am so touched that you all came out today.”

  All except you, Rocky. I don’t like at all the way you’re looking at me.

  “Arty was close to the earth, I guess you could say. He loved the outdoors. He loved being in Pack Canyon, where you could still find some undeveloped land, right here in Los Angeles, to hike around in. Now as his ashes go to be with the earth, I know that his soul has gone to be with the Lord. That’s the most comforting thing of all. I just praise God.”

  12:09 p.m.

  Mac stood right by Liz’s side as she greeted folks. First in line was Pastor Jon.

  “Thank you for a lovely ser vice,” Liz said to him. She held out her hand, but he put his arms around her and gave her a bear hug.

  “You just lean on us now,” he said.

  “I will,” she said. “Of course I will. You and Mac.”

  “That’s right.” Pastor Jon held her a moment in his strong arms, then moved to minister to some other members of his flock.

  Mac whispered, “You’re doing fine.”

  “Thanks,” Liz said.

  Then Mac saw Mrs. Axelrod step up, along with Mr. Dean. Mac gave Liz’s arm an encouraging squeeze.

  “Brave girl,” Mrs. Axelrod said. “Come here.” She opened her arms like a grand dame and almost smothered Liz.

  Mac saw the look in Mrs. Axelrod’s eyes, a portent of long-windedness. He patted Mrs. Axelrod’s arm and said, “We’ll be along to the church in just a bit.”