The Volunteer

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  Chapter 8

  Spring - 1955

  Sophia saw the shoes first when she opened her eyes, a pair of Ferragamo oxfords, and the sight of them jolted her. Terrence wore Ferragamos. He had them specially made. Had he found her? But no, she must be dreaming, because she was lying prone on the grass, near the parking lot judging from the oily smell, and the shoes were close enough that looking at them made her cross-eyed, made her head hurt. She groped for reality, struggled to sit up.

  But the man in the shoes knelt beside her and cautioned her to be still. “You could be hurt.” His gaze, his demeanor, was concerned, even tender. Not jumpy, not wild.

  Not Terrence.

  He was around the same age as Terrence though, thirty- something, she thought, (thirty-four, she would learn later), but seemed older, more distinguished and confident. Sophia became quite still in his presence. She wasn’t agitated by his scrutiny. Rather she was intrigued by the warmth of his glance, his beautiful, green-eyed glance. And those eyelashes, so thick and curly, they were wasted on a man. She thought how she would like to touch his hair, there at his temple, where the dark was threaded with silver. He wore it a bit long, a bit disheveled. Charmingly disheveled, Sophia would think remembering later. He danced his fingertips lightly from the feathered tip of her eyebrow to her shoulder. She caught the wink of a cufflink and thought faintly how she loved a shirt with French cuffs on a man. She wondered if she had died.

  “You wait here,” he instructed, “while I find a phone to call an ambulance.”

  “Oh, no, I’m fine.” She wriggled the hem of her skirt down to cover her knees, suddenly conscious of her disarray. She didn’t know what to do with her hands and finally laid them on either side, feeling stiff, like a corpse. “I—I must have fallen,” she said, but she wasn’t sure.

  His face hovered above hers. “There’s a phone booth on the corner. It’ll just take me a moment.”

  “No. Please, I’m okay.”

  “You didn’t fall.” He cupped her elbows, assisting her to sit upright. “I was backing out and hit you.”

  “With your car.” She remembered now—a flash of taillights, a screech of brakes. Big car. Black sedan, she thought. Lincoln? In fact it would turn out to be a new Lincoln Continental, a 1956 Mark II to be exact. Like the one Elvis Presley owned, Mrs. Cavanaugh, Sophia’s landlady, would tell her with a knowing smile.

  He kept her elbows cupped. The heat from his palms radiated up her arms feeding the heat in her cheeks. Still, even in her confusion, even given how he was crouched with his lovely gray suit jacket open, his tie askew, she thought she had never seen such a gorgeous man. Errol Flynn, maybe. She felt like such a child compared to him. She was a child, a clumsy, little idiot.

  “It was my fault,” she said when he offered yet another apology. “I wasn’t paying attention and stepped into your path.” She kept his gaze a moment while the facts reassembled themselves. The last chapter in the whole nightmare that was her life now and then her face crumpled and she moaned softly, unable to stop herself.

  “What is it? You’re hurting, aren’t you? I knew it.”

  “They called the police,” she spoke anxiously to her lap. “They said I failed the lie detector, but I didn’t take the money. I’m not a thief.” She closed her mouth, clenching her teeth. But it was too much. The awful noise in her chest burst out anyway, the tears came and her nose ran as if she had no shame, no sense of what was proper.

  He pressed a handkerchief into her hand, patted her back. She was undone by his kindness, mortified by it.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “My life is just a horrible mess. Everything—” She looked up at him. “I work—worked in that dress shop back there.” She gestured.

  “The Coach House?”

  “Yes and this morning the manager found ten dollars was missing from the cash register. She called the police. They made us take a lie detector.”

  “You failed it?” he prompted.

  “It’s because when the policeman asked if I’d ever taken anything in the past, I said no. I had to. I couldn’t tell them I’d taken Terrence’s car.”

  “Terrence?”

  Sophia caught her lip. “I have to go.”

  “Terrence is your boyfriend?”

  “Was, he was my boyfriend once. I drove his car into a telephone pole. It was a Jaguar.”

  The man’s eyes were huge. No doubt, he thought her insane.

  She pressed her fist to her mouth to stop her wild talk, but then pride took over. She wanted him to know she wasn’t crazy. “I couldn’t tell the policeman what happened,” she began reasonably. “That’s why the test showed— I was afraid to say anything because— I just ran out of there and I wasn’t looking where I was going when you—when I— Oh God! I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “You had the accident here? In Houston? When?”

  “No, in Fort Worth. It was weeks ago now, but I know Terrence is looking for me and I can’t let him find me. If he does, it won’t be good. You just don’t know.” She started to stand. She had to get away. Now. Before she screamed.

  “Wait.” The man put his hands on her shoulders. “I don’t think you’re in any shape to go anywhere.” He searched her gaze. “What’s your name?”

  “Sophia,” she told him.

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen. Nearly twenty,” she added quickly.

  “Well, Sophia, I’m Russ. Beckman.” He tacked on his last name. “If you won’t let me call an ambulance, what about your family, a friend? There must be someone. Your mother or dad?”

  “No!” Alarm spiked her voice. “There’s no one, not anymore.” A fresh outbreak of tears slid humiliatingly down her cheeks

  He slipped his arm around her waist, supporting her so that she could stand, telling her he was taking her to his family’s doctor, that she had to let him do that much for her. “Please,” he said. “Otherwise I may never get a good night’s sleep again.”

  Sophia went with him. What else could she do? She sat down in the front passenger seat of his shiny new Lincoln, balanced her elbow on the window ledge and stared at the passing traffic without interest. The tears she seemed unable to control pooled in the corners of her mouth. It was as if a dam had broken. She pressed the sodden handkerchief Russ gave her to her face. She was such a fool riding with him, a total stranger. If something happened to her, she would have only herself to blame. “If you would just use the brain God gave you, Sophia.” That’s what her mother would say if they ever spoke again.

  But God didn’t care about her and neither did her mother. No one did.

  They drove several blocks in silence. She recognized the neighborhood. River Oaks. Where all the rich people lived. Many of the women who shopped at the Coach House lived here. Russ probably did too; he looked made for it. Why was he helping her? She was no one from nowhere and any moment he would realize it. Sophia closed her eyes and her head swam. Fresh panic peppered her mouth.

  The car stopped. “We’re here,” he said.

  She looked out at the elegant two-story, rose-colored brick mansion with white columns. She had never seen a home that was so lovely. It took her breath. “Is this your house?” Sophia whispered.

  “No. Don’t be afraid.” Russ turned to her slowly, carefully. “This is Dr. Sullivan’s house. He offices here. He doesn’t like driving in the city.”

  Sophia sagged against the car door, huddling into herself. They sat like that for several minutes. Reaching out a finger, she traced the outline of the glove box paneled in burled wood. Smooth and glossy. She said, “I don’t have any money.”

  “I’m taking care of it. It was my fault.”

  “You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

  “Do you want to tell me?” he asked. “I’m a good listener.”

  She thought he would touch her then; she sensed that he wanted to. But he didn’t. He waited and she felt his patience and his concern. She felt like a weary bird who
after hours of arduous flight over endless miles of ocean has finally spotted a bit of land. She thought it didn’t matter anymore what happened to her and so she told him. Everything or almost, and when she finished, when he said nothing, she thought it was disgust at her, at what she’d done, that kept him silent, and then she felt his touch on her chin.

  And his eyes when he brought her face around were filled with such kindness that she couldn’t stop a fresh outbreak of tears. He wiped her cheeks with his thumbs and said it would be all right, that he would see to it.

  He would tell her, but not until years later, that he was already in love with her by then and that not long after their first meeting he knew he wanted to marry her. Her youth, her lack of breeding, his mother’s disapproval, nothing could have stopped him. She didn’t know of his ultimate plan for her. She only knew he cared about her in a way no one else in her life ever had. She felt safe with Russ. He promised to take care of everything. He said he could make her terrible history, her awful mistakes, all of it, disappear. He would help her build a new life. With him. And over time, it unfolded exactly as Russ predicted until Sophia almost forgot the deeply troubled person she’d been before he rescued her. He gave her hope; he restored her faith in herself, her goodness. Under his guidance, she got her GED. She went on to college and grad school, and graduated with honors. The difference he made in her life seemed miraculous to her. She was grateful, so much so that at times, she would bend her face to his chest and cry. Looking back, she would think that the day she wrecked Terrence’s car was the lowest she would ever sink.

  She would think she knew all that she lost on that day.

  All the time she and Russ were together, she was convinced she knew the truth.

  But she was wrong. About everything.

  Chapter 9

  Tuesday, September 21, 1999 - 26 days remain

  Carolyn is upstairs showering and Sophia is in the breakfast nook going over patient notes. The television is on, tuned to the morning news, and while the volume is low, she registers Trent Hunter’s voice. He’s having a conversation with researchers from Spain, two men and a woman, and a curator from the Museo de América de Madrid, via satellite, but it’s hearing Louis Tilley’s name mentioned in connection with the missing codex that causes her to look up. Hunter is once again advising the audience of the pertinent facts: that the codex, a manuscript of 41 stucco-coated, bark-paper leaves was found in a cave near Belize in 1986 and brought to the museum for study, that it had been stolen from the museum in 1992 by Rafe Salazar, the pilot who worked for Louis Tilley, who had taken it with the intention of selling it to two different buyers. According to Hunter, if the plan had worked, proceeds from the double sale would have netted Salazar nearly five million dollars.

  One of the researchers, a man wearing a polka dot bow tie and a disgruntled look says it could have been sold for half again as much and its value would not have been equaled.

  “Even though its authenticity was never established?” Trent asks.

  “We were in the process of that. We’d conducted a number of tests, infrared photography and the like, to bring out more detail on the pages, then poof,” the lone woman on the panel makes a small tossing motion with her hands, “the manuscript was taken. The very idea that a private collector should even have possession of such a thing at any price.”

  “There is the problem that an art thief does not know or care about the proper storage of such antiquities, much less the study of them.” A tag near the bottom of the television screen identifies the Spanish-accented speaker as the museum curator.

  “Precisely.” The woman is nodding.

  Sophia takes off her reading glasses. Russ had mentioned this, that even if the codex was recovered, it could be fatally damaged. He’d been upset about it. Sophia is upset now remembering. The thing is she has no idea how well Russ knew Louis Tilley, nor does she know precisely how Russ acquired the antiquities in his collection. For all she knows, he’d been involved in the unfortunate business with Louis and at any moment the art museum in Houston, to which she had donated the collection after Russ’s death, will call to inform her that Russ had bought every piece on the black market. Was it possible? Would Russ have risked it? Jeopardized his reputation for an art object? It doesn’t seem reasonable to her even given his devotion to his collection. His reputation was more precious to him.

  “It isn’t simply its rarity that makes it important,” the woman researcher says, “but also what it revealed through the initial translations, a veritable treasure trove of details,” she waves her hands, “regarding a cosmic event of magnificent proportions.”

  “But isn’t there a manuscript, also Mayan, that predicts the event will occur at the time of the winter solstice in 2012?” Trent smirks at the camera, eyebrows shot prominently toward his hairline as if he is sharing a joke with the viewers.

  “Yes.” The camera switches to the researcher seated next to Trent. “But according to the 2037 codex, the 2012 prediction is in error.”

  “But,” bow tie speaks up, “any discussion regarding the predictions of these codices is pointless, unless you take the Maya’s beliefs about time into consideration.”

  “For instance,” Trent prompts.

  “Well, for one thing, the very fact that the Mayan Long Count calendar can define any date past or future for millenia indicates that for the Maya time was without end or beginning. The inference is made that anything can happen, any event is possible but ultimately survivable. That time, at least if you believe in the Mayan calculations, will continue ad infinitum.”

  “It’s rather comforting actually,” says the curator.

  “Yes,” bow tie answers. “Not only were the Maya the first culture to develop writing in the Americas but they also seemed to have a grasp of the concept of eternity not seen in other civilizations. Not even now in our own modern day is this concept discussed with any degree of ease or understanding.”

  “Eternity is a daunting concept for the human mind,” the woman says.

  It’s too abstract, Sophia thinks, too vast. She remembers Phil commenting once that no matter how much they protested, most of the human race liked the grind, the well-worn path. It was in the nature of humans to resist change. Better the solid ground under your feet than an unknown flight into thin air.

  When Trent asks how the Mayans defined time, the individual panelists take turns explaining the long count calendar.

  “It was broken into components,” bow tie begins.

  “A tun, for instance,” says the researcher next to Trent, “is made up of kins, or days, and measures nearly one year, while a b'ak'tun measured approximately 394 years.”

  “By the Mayan reckoning civilization is currently in b'ak'tun 13,” the woman continues, “which concludes thirteen years from now on the equivalent Gregorian date of December 21, 2012.”

  “But,” the curator points out, “the Mayan long count registers dates far beyond that point, from b'ak'tun 14 through b'ak'tun 20, a time spanning roughly 3000 years.”

  “When it comes to a cosmic event, though, it’s all conjecture regardless which year you choose, 2012 or 2037, or some other date,” the woman says and heads nod.

  “Not more than reconstructed theory,” bow tie says. “Any interpretation of the dates cited is a matter of best guess. And could be off by some amount,” he adds.

  “Quite possibly a number of tuns,” quips the man seated beside Trent.

  “But my understanding is that the stolen 2037 codex may contain more exact and accurate information regarding a cosmic event, am I right?” Trent is leading the experts who eagerly agree.

  “Given that the Mayans were such skilled mathematicians and astronomers,” bow tie says, “what they wrote with regard to any such event, and its potential for worldwide devasatation, at the least bears further study.”

  The panel concludes with the plea to delay Jarrett Capshaw’s execution to allow time to question him further regarding the codex’s
whereabouts. To prevail upon his humanity to tell what they’re convinced he knows. In the panel’s opinion, if he could be made to understand that quite possibly what is at stake is the survival of mankind, then surely he would disclose its location.

  In Trent’s final remarks, he mentions that an envoy of diplomats and university and museum personnel is scheduled to meet with Governor Bush to ask for his intervention in the matter at an as yet undisclosed time and place the following week. Trent faces the camera to bid his viewers stay tuned. His brows rise again giving him a comic air of intensity as he promises to follow this fast-moving story to its conclusion.

  Sophia switches off the set. It would be so much easier to believe Russ wouldn’t have become involved with such nonsense if she didn’t so clearly recall his fascination for the objects he’d collected. She wishes now she had paid closer attention. Instead she had kept a willfully naïve space around herself, the one that claims what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Setting down her pen, she stacks her patient folders. The murmur of Carolyn’s voice drifts down the stairs as if she might be on the phone. Talking to Larry? One more thing to worry over. Worry upon worry all gathering like crows.

  o0o

  It is nearly four-thirty and Sophia is leaving her office after her last appointment when she sees the boy. He’s sitting on the bottom step leaning back on his elbows, but he jumps up when he hears her. Their eyes catch.

  She pauses. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m waiting for my mom,” he says.

  And that quickly it dawns on her. “You’re Thomas.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thomas Capshaw.”

  The volunteer’s son, he might have added. Sophia can’t pretend she doesn’t know, doesn’t intuit from his expression that he’s waiting for her to tag him in this way. He must be as accustomed as Cort to the notoriety that surrounds their family. She sees the same stoic acceptance of this fact in Thomas’s manner, too, but it’s misplaced in someone so young and wrenches her heart.