The Volunteer

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  In the bedroom, she switches on a lamp, sits on the edge of the tumbled bed wishing to feel Russ’s weight behind her, shifting close. Imagining it, the warm pressure of his hands cupping her shoulders, the tender rumble of his voice. He turns her toward him. She burrows against him, listening to the steady sound of his heart beating beneath her ear. But she can’t or won’t be fooled.

  Or comforted.

  There is only herself, the ragged skirt of lamp light. The ineluctable tick of the living room clock. She thinks how satisfying it would feel to smash it and instead pulls a pillow onto her lap. Who might she have been had she and Russ not met?

  No one. Dead of an overdose probably. It was where she’d been headed when he rescued her, when he took her in hand so to speak. Tutored her ala Professor Higgins to the ever-willing Eliza Doolittle. She had worshipped him, too, for a while. How could she not? He had found Dylan for her, found out the awful truth of what had happened to her baby son and even confronted with the reality of Sophia’s despicable behavior, he had declared her worthy to live.

  “You’re very young,” he had said when he brought her the terrible news. “You were younger still when you—” Russ had broken off here. Out of delicacy Sophia had thought. The truth was that by not framing her untimely pregnancy with words—and he never had—he kept the drama and its taint at arm’s length.

  “You made a mistake, a youthful mistake,” he had continued. “You’ll forget in time and it’s best if you do.” He had flattened his palm between her heaving shoulder blades and talked as if all she had done was to drink too much spiked punch at her high school prom.

  “It’s unfortunate the little tyke died.” Russ’s disembodied voice bumps the walls of Sophia’s brain. “But his injuries were so severe, there was nothing you could have done.” Even then she’d intuited Russ’s relief that she would come to him unencumbered by a living child.

  Forget, he had said.

  When she cried over Dylan, when she wakened from the despair of her dreams, strangling on her remorse and her longing for her baby, her deep wish to make amends, Russ had advised her to forget. “It’s over. There’s not a trace left, nothing to tie you to it.” Russ had managed to eradicate forever the avalanche of paperwork that surrounds any misfortune. They had not needed to speak of it again and they hadn’t. The times Sophia had suggested Carolyn ought to be told, Russ had said no.

  “You have to trust me in this; believe me I know what’s best,” he had said.

  “The truth is best,” Sophia had argued.

  “Suppose she hates you?”

  That was the question that had stopped her cold; Russ had known it would; he had framed it for that reason. He had bidden her again to let it go.

  Sophia couldn’t blame him. She doesn’t now. How was he to know that what he asked was impossible? He had not felt Dylan move inside him; Russ had not borne Dylan’s living dimpled weight in his arms. He hadn’t nuzzled the crown of Dylan’s head and felt beneath his cheek hair as soft as dandelion fluff. He had not failed a child, abandoned a child. Russ had never had to live with that. Sophia could lie—she had lied—but she could never forget. She feels the loss of Dylan, still, in her bones, her teeth, the sockets of her eyes. When that door in her mind swings open.

  She looks now through the open door of Russ’s closet now at his suits and dress shirts that hang in regimented order. Shoes are stowed in their cubbyholes, each pair properly treed and bagged in flannel. Ties are divided according to color. He never knew her, she thinks, not really. He may never have loved her either, but only the image of her he’d created. Although she isn’t certain of that and now she never will be.

  She resents that too.

  Along with his control of her, the lingering inference that she wasn’t born good enough, that she was, in fact, always the pig’s ear and never quite the silk purse he’d envisioned. After he’d put her through grad school and she’d earned her PhD, she’d been so grateful for the opportunity that she hadn’t minded how he meant it to be used, as social currency. The right to be addressed as “Doctor” had been offered up in lieu of proper breeding. Sophia pushes the pillow off her lap and balancing her bare heels on the bed rail, she props her elbows on her knees.

  I loved him and I hated him. Cort Capshaw’s comment about his brother surfaces in her brain and she feels a kinship with it. She studies the floor and wonders if she shares a kinship as well with the 2037 codex. Suppose it is somewhere in Russ’s closet? Cort had said if he were to find it, he would destroy it. Would she? Did Cort or Trent Hunter know whether Russ had been connected to Louis Tilley? Whether Russ had purchased stolen artifacts? Whether he might have known the whereabouts of the codex?

  Was the museum poised to break the news to her? It would be devastating, of course, but Sophia can’t deny—and her thought is as intractable as it is ugly—that some part of her wouldn’t take satisfaction in seeing Russ exposed. In seeing him, albeit posthumously, regarded as fallible and just as subject to temptation as the next person, as she herself has been.

  Sophia lies back, shielding her eyes with her elbow. She will not search Russ’s closet. She will not.

  Chapter 16

  Tuesday, October 5, 1999 - 12 days remain

  On Tuesday afternoon Sophia is outside filling the birdbath when she hears the motorcycle, but she thinks nothing of it until Thomas calls her name.

  “Dr. Beckman?”

  She looks up, shading her eyes. “Thomas? I didn’t expect you until tomorrow. Your mom called and said—”

  “I know. When she cancelled on you yesterday, she wouldn’t let me come over either.”

  Thomas is scheduled to work the same days that Grace has her appointments. It’s a way for her to keep tabs on him. Sophia turns off the hose nozzle. “So she gave you permission to come today?”

  “Yeah. She needed some stuff at the store anyway. Here, let me take that.” Thomas reaches for the hose and begins to coil it, deftly, in a way that Sophia envies.

  “You’re a long way from your neighborhood if all you were meant to do was pick up something at the store.” Sophia glances toward the house, but Cort is out of sight around the corner.

  “I thought I’d check out the pier.”

  “Okay,” Sophia says, but his demeanor seems too casual. She thinks he’s using the pier as an excuse. It is only part of the reason he’s come. And even as she leads the way through the moon gate, she’s dismayed. She can only imagine what Phil would have to say about her lack of professionalism. But obviously, since she hasn’t discussed the situation with him, his advice is nothing she wants to hear.

  She pauses at head of the pier, while Thomas walks its length. At one point, he lies prone on his belly with his head overhanging the side. To examine the pilings underneath, Sophia assumes. He gets to his feet. “I think we should ask Uncle Cort to have a look. He’ll know better what it’s going to take to fix it up.”

  Sophia agrees and against whatever is left of her good judgment, she suggests they sit at the pier’s end. Thomas joins her readily. He slips off his shoes and socks and dips his feet into the water. Sophia surprises herself by following suit and it feels so refreshing, she wonders why she hasn’t done it more often.

  Thomas scoops up a handful of pebbles and tosses them, one by one, into the water. “I could pitch a tent back here, get away from everybody.”

  “Sometimes I feel the same way.” Sophia looks out over the surface of the lake that is as smooth as daylight and the color of old nickels. The air is summer warm, but she thinks she can discern a cooler promise of fall embedded in its current. She mentions the geese, that they stop at the lake sometimes. “Although I haven’t seen them yet this year,” she adds.

  Thomas says he could build a lean-to for his motorcycle, fish for his dinner.

  “What about school?”

  “I’d quit, get a job. It’d be the life.”

  “It’s hard, going to school?”

  “Yeah. It’s like everyo
ne feels sorry for me, or else they rag on me. Everyone except Luke. He’s the only one who hasn’t sold out on me.” Thomas tosses another rock.

  Sophia thinks how as a child, she’d longed for a best friend, but she’d been isolated at the farm. Her mother had discouraged her in any case. Having a friend meant exchanging confidences and in Esther’s opinion, a family’s dirty linen didn’t belong in someone else’s closet.

  “I used to hang out with a lot of guys,” Thomas is saying. “We played ball and stuff, but now it seems like all most of them want to do is fight me.” Thomas flings another stone. “It’s like they think fighting us makes them tough because our old man’s on death row, or, probably, they just want to get on TV. They’re jerks either way.”

  “Do your teachers know? Are they doing anything?”

  Thomas’s look says: Get real.

  Sophia suffers a pang of annoyance. Of course they aren’t doing anything. Gritting their public school teeth, counting the days until the execution is over. This, too, shall pass.

  “The school counselor told me I should learn to walk away,” Thomas says. “I said, yeah, right, like I’m going to turn my back on Bolt Devers. He’s the one who came after Brian the other day, biggest punk in the whole school.”

  “Bolt, that’s an interesting name.”

  “His real name is Kevin, but he had some kind of accident, got a screw in his head to keep his brain from falling out or something.” Thomas pulls his feet out of the water.

  Sophia does the same.

  “He’s always trying to start something. Mom says it’s on me because I’m a hothead. My grandma used to tell me if I didn’t learn to control my temper, I was going to end up in a cell next to Jarrett’s. Sometimes I think I might.” Thomas tugs on his socks.

  Sophia looks at him and then quickly away before he can see her reaction. It never fails to amaze her, the terrible things a so-called caring adult will say to a child, whom they will swear they love. How many times had Sophia heard it from Esther, that she was reckless, stupid. Careless. Overblown. “Who knows where you’ll end up? The gutter most likely.” Esther’s voice echoes through Sophia’s head. I’m saying this for your own good....

  Sophia finds Thomas’s gaze. “Does it bother you that they think you’re like your dad?”

  “It bothers me because they’re right. I do stuff without thinking. I get mad and boom.” Thomas flings his arms. “Jarrett says he didn’t plan on killing anybody either. It’s like stuff just exploded and it was somebody else pulling the trigger.”

  “It isn’t unusual for our minds to dissociate at times of extreme stress.” Thomas is busy tying his shoes. Sophia can’t see his face.

  “His lawyers wanted to use it.”

  “Plead mental defect, you mean.”

  “I don’t know what you call it, but Jarrett said it was no excuse. He wasn’t crazy then and he’s not crazy now; he just wants to die.” Thomas’s fingers still. “I couldn’t live like that either, in a concrete cell? For the rest of my life?”

  Sophia touches his arm, smoothes her palm along the width of his shoulders.

  “He always had my back.”

  “In what way? Can you tell me?”

  “Once when I was a little kid like Bri, there was this huge guy, bigger than Bolt, two grades ahead of me? He took my lunch money off me every day. Took my Walkman, took my Jordans. He got me off school grounds where no one could see or between the buildings or in the restroom. I was still skinny then, like Bri, and this kid was so much bigger than me, I didn’t think there was any way I could stop him, but Jarrett told me how and it worked and after I whipped him? The kid never stole anything from me again. Nobody in that whole dumb school ever bothered me after that.”

  “What was the trick?”

  “I let him punch me, let him take me down to the ground like I was done, then I whacked him with my bike lock the way Jarrett said, right across his shins. The kid broke like a girl. It was great.” Thomas is looking out over the lake and his face is full of a sort of awe. “He was there.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Yeah. He followed me because he said he wasn’t letting that kid whale on me again. He was always there for me like that, you know? He told me I’d get bigger and stronger and I did. He said never to take any shit off anybody. He said I should always believe in myself.”

  “You trusted him,” Sophia says, but her heart is sinking. A relationship is so greatly complicated by love and admiration when the people you count on are human, when they can fail you on every level. When you love them and hate them.

  “I try and tell Bri the stuff Jarrett told me like I told him about the bike lock trick, but when he tried it, Bolt grabbed it and smacked Bri with it and then took off.”

  “It backfired.”

  “Yeah. I tell Bri he’ll get bigger, but it’s not the same. No one’s there for him. It’s not like I can be his dad.”

  Sophia’s glance takes in Thomas’s profile, his unseeing stare, the muscle working the corner of his jaw and the urge to take his chin in her hand, to turn his face toward hers, to pull him into her embrace is overwhelming, but they don’t know each other well enough for that.

  He gets to his feet. “Sometimes I wish I was Megan.”

  “Why?” Sophia tips back her head, shading her eyes.

  “She thinks your dad is supposed to live in prison.”

  “Your mom told me she has never known him when he didn't.”

  “Yeah.” Thomas offers Sophia his hand. “That’s how come I wish I was her.”

  Chapter 17

  Thursday, October 7, 1999 - 10 days remain

  Sophia is seated behind her desk. Wick Bowen sits across from her. He has been her patient for going on two years now and he’s come for his weekly appointment, but they’re talking like friends, about Sophia’s house.

  Wick says he ran into Cort when he drove up. “He’s still scraping. He must be working in sections.”

  “I think so,” Sophia says. “He does it all by hand.”

  “It’s the patchy look. Very nice.” Wick props his ankle on his knee. One corner of his mouth lifts; he gives a little roll to his eyes. He’s teasing her.

  Trying to make her laugh on purpose. He has told her before how much he likes to hear her laugh. “If you like the moth-eaten look,” she says and she sounds silly to herself. Why does Wick have this effect on her? He’s a patient. And this is a patient session, not a date. But what is she thinking? She’s a widow, for heaven’s sake. Women her age don’t—

  “Well, now that you’ve mentioned it,” Wick has turned serious, “it does seem as if the job is taking a long time. Even considering that Cort works by hand. What I mean is I’m happy to talk to him, man to man, if you’re concerned, if you need me to.”

  “No, thank you. There are—extenuating circumstances.” She hesitates on the verge of explaining, wondering what and how much.

  “The matter is confidential.”

  She looks at Wick.

  “Of a covert nature.” He’s smiling, teasing her again.

  She opens her desk drawer, takes out a pen. “Something like that.” Her face feels warm.

  “It’s all right,” Wick says. “It’s why we pay you the big bucks to keep our secrets.”

  Sophia says Cort isn’t a patient. She says, “You may have even seen him on the news. He’s the brother of the man on death row, the one who’s dropped his appeals.”

  “Wow. Are you kidding?”

  “I wish I were.”

  “It’s a problem?”

  Sophia keeps Wick’s gaze.

  He puts up his hands in mock surrender. “I know nothing, see nothing, hear nothing.” His eyes dance.

  “Honestly,” she says leaning back. “You’re incorrigible.”

  “And you’re smiling.” He looks satisfied. “How’s the new car running? It must be getting close to time for a dealer check, huh?”

  “Next week,” she tells him.

 
He’ll go with her, he says. See to it those yahoos do the job right.

  “Yes,” she says, pleased and grateful. Wick helped her purchase the car after Russ died, when her old one gave up the ghost. She’d been overwhelmed at the thought, but Wick had taken over; he’d driven her to the dealership and stayed with her, patiently walking her through the process. He’d done it in such a way that she didn’t feel incompetent or foolish; he’d simply provided her with the information she needed to make a proper decision. To repay him, she’d taken him to lunch. And at his next session, to her everlasting embarrassment, she’d broken down.

  It had been one of those days very soon after she’d lost Russ when she was still teetery, when almost anything could set her off. She’d really had no business seeing clients, but she’d made an exception for Wick. She’d thought it would be fine. But he’d ended up passing her tissues, making her cups of hot tea in her kitchen. At one point, his fingertips had grazed the back of her hand and a look had passed between them, something quick, electric, probing. It had caught them both off guard.

  “I heard from Maureen,” Wick says now.

  “Oh?” Maureen is Wick’s ex-wife and their divorce two years ago is the reason Wick sought out Sophia’s help. It wasn’t the end of their nearly thirty years of marriage that had brought him, but the fact that shortly after he and Maureen separated, he’d begun suffering night sweats, heart palpitations and unexplained skin rashes for which his medical doctor could find no physical cause. He’d told Sophia that he’d endured the same roster of symptoms following injuries he sustained during the 1989 Phillips Petroleum plant explosion at the Houston Ship Channel where he’d been working as a master welder.

  Then he’d been diagnosed with post traumatic stress, a conclusion that Sophia had found to be valid in the case of Wick’s reaction to his divorce. Somehow the events had become entangled in his mind and his body was responding accordingly. Once Wick understood this, the symptoms subsided. But he still called for appointments. He claimed a continued need for the benefit of Sophia’s expertise.