The Volunteer

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  “You can’t tell anyone, can you?” he asks. “It’s against the shrink rules, right?”

  “What if we do it together?”

  “But what about Bri?”

  “Well, if you want to do the right thing and tell the truth, then that’s going to mean telling why you wanted to see your dad.”

  Thomas rocks his head back. “I don’t know,” he groans.

  “How about if we start with your uncle, ask his advice?”

  “I don’t know,” Thomas repeats.

  “It will be fine, you’ll see.” Sophia speaks over her own doubt. She’s honestly not sure of her ground, legally or professionally, but regardless, an explanation would be better coming from Thomas than from her. Better if she doesn’t have to break the “shrink rules”.

  They’re on the stairs outside when the patrol car appears in Sophia’s driveway. Thomas halts so quickly, Sophia nearly runs into him. He jerks a questioning glance over his shoulder at her, but she’s at a loss. Now Grace’s SUV sweeps to a halt at the curb and Cort, on foot, rounds the corner of the house. He’s heading across the lawn to intercept Grace and doesn’t see Thomas and Sophia.

  “They’re going to arrest me.” Thomas makes a move as if to retreat. Sophia sets her hand on his shoulder.

  “Thomas?” Grace with Cort behind her walks rapidly up the drive. “Don’t say anything.” She turns to the officer who is exiting his car. “I’ve called my attorney.”

  “I’m not here to make an arrest, ma’am.” He lifts his hat off his head, adding, “At least not yet.”

  “Mom?” Thomas sounds like a much younger boy.

  Grace puts a finger to her lips. Her eyes shine with anger, or panic, or both, Sophia thinks, and she tries to catch Grace’s glance, wishing to reassure her.

  But Grace is looking at Cort now as he draws abreast of her. “Why are you here?” he asks the officer.

  “I’d like Thomas to take a ride with me to the station. I need to get his statement. I would have taken it at the hospital, but he—”

  “I left, I know. It was a mistake and I’m sorry.” Thomas walks down the rest of the steps.

  “You won’t talk to him without me and his lawyer present,” Grace insists. “He’s a minor.”

  “Yes, ma’am, and it’ll go a lot easier for all of us if we take this up to the sheriff’s office.”

  “Is it really necessary? Can’t you ask your questions here?” Cort asks.

  The patrolman says no and begins an explanation that Grace interrupts. “I’ll bring him,” she informs and switching her glance to her son, she says, “Come with me. I’ll take you.”

  He shoots a pleading look at Sophia.

  She addresses the police officer. “Could you give us a moment?”

  “Mom?” Carolyn appears in the kitchen doorway. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Thomas is—”

  “Grandmother’s on the telephone. She’s upset.” Carolyn’s glance seems flat, even accusatory.

  Sophia feels a tight frisson of alarm that is as unnerving as it is distracting. “What about?”

  “I think she’s worried about the hurricane. Mom?” Carolyn comes outside, eyes dodging down the driveway. “What is happening to Thomas? Is he being arrested?”

  “No!” Grace’s voice, a shout of denial, cuts sharply across Sophia’s awareness. “Thomas!” His name is a cry. “How could you lie about a thing like that?”

  “He was driving.” Carolyn comes up beside Sophia.

  “Yes, but this—I don’t think it’s about the accident, not entirely.”

  Thomas is stammering, repeating, “I don’t know,” to everything Grace says.

  Sophia moves in their direction, but before she can intervene, the officer takes Thomas by the elbow and installs him in the backseat of the patrol car. Grace, with Cort on her heels, dashes to the SUV. A minor argument ensues as to who is in better emotional shape to drive, giving Sophia time to catch them.

  “What can I do?” Sophia asks Grace.

  “You knew,” she declares. Having lost the argument, she climbs into the SUV on the passenger side. Cort is already keying the ignition.

  “I only found out just now,” Sophia protests. “Literally minutes before you came. We were coming to find Cort.”

  Grace slams the car door.

  “He’s frightened, Grace, and worried for you and Brian. Grace?”

  Cort angles his gaze to meet Sophia’s, but the window glare blinds her to his expression. “Will you call?” She mouths the words, making the sign of a telephone, but watching them tear down the street in the wake of the patrol car, she thinks Cort could very well be as angry at her as Grace and it’s understandable. Grace feels betrayed; she’s hurt that her son has confided in a stranger. Except Sophia is not a stranger. She’s involved with the Capshaws, with Thomas, at their insistence.

  “Mom?” Carolyn speaks at Sophia’s elbow. “What is going on?”

  “Oh, Cecie, I’m so sorry. About everything.” Without thinking about it, Sophia drops her arm around Carolyn’s waist, pulling her close enough that their hips bump.

  Chapter 25

  December - 1956

  The sound was soft, but persistent. Sophia heard it through her sleep, and eventually, it wakened her. She turned onto her back. Weeping, someone was weeping. She climbed out of bed, the narrow bed of her childhood, and went to the doorway. The sound was coming from her mother’s bedroom across the hall, on the other side of the bathroom and Sophia went there on bare feet, shivering and hesitant, to stand in her mother’s doorway.

  In the lavish light of the full moon, the curl of her mother’s spine was easily discernable and Sophia pushed herself across the gulf that separated them on tiptoe, hardly daring to assume that her mother might actually be grieving and in need of comfort, much less that she, Sophia, could fill that need.

  She touched her mother’s elbow and, after a breathless pause, Esther turned her swollen face toward Sophia. For a moment their eyes remained locked and searching. Then as if by mutual consent, Esther moved over, raising the bedclothes, and, in wonder, Sophia slipped in beside her and they lay hip-to-hip.

  “I'm glad you're here,” her mother said.

  “I wish I'd come sooner. I wish I could have told Daddy good-bye. I just can’t believe he went so quickly.”

  “It was a blessing. The doctor said the cancer was all through him.”

  “You’ll go to live with Aunt Frances now, won’t you?”

  “In Fort Worth? Heavens no. She has that man friend. I’m sure she doesn’t want me crowding her. No, I’ll stay on here.”

  Sophia turned her face into the bone of her mother's shoulder. “I'm sorry for the trouble I've been.”

  “Shh. You're making up for it now.” Esther pulled Sophia into her embrace and Sophia yielded despite her unfamiliar sense of it. Even the unexpected rush of happiness at being cuddled by her mother made her feel prickly and too warm.

  “He was so proud of you at the end. Imagine it, you’re going to be a psychologist thanks to Mr. Bateman. Mercy.” Esther jostled Sophia a little. “It’s turned out for the best, hasn’t it? Despite everything.”

  Her mother must have felt Sophia stiffen because she said, “Don’t be so sensitive, Sophia. You know what I mean.”

  “Dylan would be four-years-old, Mama,” she whispered.

  The announcement collided with a wall of silence.

  “You think I should go to the police, don’t you?”

  “What?” Her mother’s head lifted from her pillow enough that Sophia caught the glitter in her eyes. “Absolutely not! What gave you that idea?”

  “When we were doing the dishes before, you talked about shouldering one’s responsibility, I thought that’s what you meant.”

  “Heavenly days, girl, talking to the police is the last thing you should do. I thought we agreed, we weren’t going to speak of the boy again. Mr. Bateman was specific on that. He said it was the only way he could h
elp you is if you kept quiet.”

  “I know, but it helps me to talk about him.”

  “No help comes from wallowing in it, Sophia.”

  “I’m not wallowing. It’s just—”

  “Listen to me, there isn’t a man on earth, especially not a man like Russell Bateman, who will stand for a bunch of drama about some child that’s not his. You tried that before and look where it got you.”

  “I know, but—”

  “You don’t want to mess this up, Sophia, not when Mr. Bateman is taking care of all this trouble not to mention footing your bills. You just be careful not to play the tease. And don’t dare let him have what he wants before he puts the ring on your finger. You haven’t, have you?”

  “No! He’s never even acted like— But why do you want me to marry him? You don’t even like him.”

  “He thinks he’s better than we are, but I suppose he can’t help it.”

  “It isn’t him, it’s his mother who—”

  “He is older so be prepared to be widowed young the way I have been. Of course, you’ll be wealthy, in a much better place than your father has left me.” Esther stroked Sophia’s arm. “You could do worse. I shudder to think. Like that twit from high school.”

  Dylan’s father, Sophia thought, who after flunking out of Texas Tech had enlisted in the Army and gone off to fight and die in Korea.

  Her mother sat up. She held Sophia’s gaze.

  “What?” She was suddenly alarmed.

  “I don’t know that I should do this.” But even as Esther questioned herself, she crawled over Sophia and went to her dresser. Sophia heard the squeak of a drawer, a sound of rustling, like the feet of tiny mice. She sat up too.

  “That man, Terrence, sent this to me. He said he found it in his car when he went to see the damage at the junk yard.” Her mother laid a small, tissue-wrapped bundle on Sophia’s knees. “He claimed he didn’t know where to find you. I hope that’s true,” her mother added. “He’s not a very nice man. I told Mr. Bateman about him, but not this.” Esther indicated the bundle and switched on the bedside lamp.

  Sophia didn’t need the light. Had she been blind and cast down into the darkest hole in hell, she would have known what her mother had given her. She lifted the small red sweater, the one with the train engine from The Little Engine That Could appliquéd on its pocket, to her face, breathing in until it hurt, wild to fill herself with Dylan’s smell, but finding only the pungent scent of crushed vitex berries that her mother sprinkled in her dresser drawers. The tears that rose scalded Sophia’s eyelids, her cheeks.

  Her mother sat beside her and Sophia turned into her embrace and felt the shock of her mother’s cheek pressed against hers, the mystery of her mother’s tears mingled with her own.

  “I’m so sorry,” her mother whispered.

  The apology, her mother’s tenderness, was so unexpected it stopped Sophia’s crying; her sobs settled into soundless shudders. She clung to her mother and her sorrow was briefly pierced with joy that somehow Dylan’s loss, and that of her father, had softened her mother. Esther would be different now. She would be kind, Sophia thought. They would be close.

  But within a matter of moments Esther straightened and finding the tissues, she took one and passed the box to Sophia. Blowing her nose briskly, she indicated the sweater with a thrust of her chin. “I don’t want to hear another word about it, do I make myself clear?”

  Sophia’s head drooped. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’d advise you to get rid of it.”

  Sophia clutched the sweater more tightly to her chest.

  “Well, then, don’t you ever let Mr. Bateman see it.”

  Sophia shook her head. She didn’t. Not ever. Not even after they married.

  But she kept the sweater with her, although she could scarcely bear the sight of it. At the boardinghouse where she lived before she and Russ were married, she stowed it in an old satchel that she kept in the bottom of her closet. It was only on occasion when she was very blue that she’d take it out and hold it on her lap. And then Dylan would come alive to run down the hallways of her imagination. She would hear his giggle, his high-spirited shrieks of delight that had sent Terrence into a fury. Sophia endured the hard urgency of tears at such times, bent over that small sweater, but she didn’t cry. She didn’t deserve the release of tears.

  Still, the fact of the sweater, its constant proximity, wore on her. Even if she didn’t take it out, its presence was with her, a physical sensation, a burden, a noise in her brain. It haunted her. Like Poe’s tell-tale heart. It was especially hard in February around the time of Dylan’s birthday. Her mood would sink. She had trouble sleeping, couldn’t eat. She didn’t imagine anyone noticed. Russ never mentioned it if he did. He was always very careful never to say so much as Dylan’s name to Sophia. But one day three years after her father’s death, Mrs. Cavanaugh, her landlady, waylaid her in the front hall to ask what was wrong. Sophia tried claiming it was nothing. Winter blahs, she said and hoped for escape.

  “No, you don’t fool me, child. I’ve heard you pacing in the middle of the night. You’re eating less than a bird these days.” Mrs. Cavanaugh drew Sophia into the downstairs parlor that smelled of dried rose petals and lemon oil and faintly of the gas-fueled fire that was used to heat the room in winter. “I have a niece who got herself in the family way, dear. It only seems like the end of the world, but it isn’t.” She patted the sofa.

  Sophia felt lightheaded, unable to do more than stare.

  “Is it your gentleman caller, Mr. Bateman? You should tell him, dear. If he loves you, which he seems to, he’ll do right by you.” Mrs. Cavanaugh paused, waiting, Sophia guessed, for her suspicion to be confirmed, but she couldn’t summon any words. Certainly not the ones it would take to rectify her landlady’s misunderstanding. She couldn’t say that “Mr. Bateman” had never so much as kissed her.

  The landlady searched Sophia’s gaze. “Is it that you can’t face him?” Pause. “Well, then, why not call him?” Her expression turned brightly conspiratorial. “On Sunday, after we’ve all gone to church. I could say you have a headache and can’t attend.”

  Sophia glanced over Mrs. Cavanaugh’s round shoulder at the stairway landing where the telephone sat on a red-lacquered table. Next to it, there was a ladder-backed, cane-bottomed chair painted to match. The seat of the chair sat higher than was usual. When Sophia sat in it her feet barely touched the floor. It was silly, but she felt like Goldilocks sitting in that chair. Sophia thought of it as Papa Bear’s chair.

  She jumped when Mrs. Cavanaugh patted her hand. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Can you tell me what happened to Dylan? The question surfaced wildly in Sophia’s mind. She wished she could explain it to Mrs. Cavanaugh, that Dylan hadn’t looked so very injured to her after the collision; she had heard him crying, which meant he’d been breathing. But at some point his breath, his heart had stopped. On the way to the hospital? After he arrived there? She didn’t know. And it was killing her. Her mother and Russ wanted her to forget, but it wasn’t possible. She was plagued with the mystery, the uncertainty of it. She thought she might never come to terms with it, might never be at peace.

  She met Mrs. Cavanaugh’s gaze. “If I were to use the phone, would you care if I called someone long distance?” A plan was hatching in Sophia’s mind; she realized it might have been in there a while, but it had needed encouragement, a sign of some sort. Something like the unexpected return of Dylan’s sweater.

  Mrs. Cavanaugh’s eyes widened.

  “I’d pay for the call, of course.”

  “There’s someone besides Mr. Bateman?”

  “Oh! Oh no. No. It’s nothing like that.” Sophia felt warm.

  “You aren’t—?”

  She gave her head a vigorous shake. She traced the line of her brow, but even as they shared a bit of uneasy laughter, Mrs. Cavanaugh’s eyes narrowed and giving Sophia’s abdomen a cursory glance, she said, “You know, my dear, there are ce
rtain secrets that won’t be kept.”

  Years would pass before Sophia would think of Mrs. Cavanaugh’s words again. She’d be crossing her lawn through a hoard of reporters, all shouting. She would hear Russ’s name, and Dylan’s, and think how ironic it was that they were dead, but the secret had not died. Just as Mrs. Cavanaugh predicted. And then for a moment, she would be transported back to this room and the mixed scents of gas-fired heat, lemon oil and old rose petals would nearly overwhelm her.

  “You aren’t thinking of doing something rash, are you, dear?” Mrs. Cavanaugh bent forward.

  Sophia glanced away. Better not to lie, she thought. It would be her daughter, who, years later, on the day of the reporters, would point out that a secret wasn’t better than a lie or even different. “Just silent,” Carolyn would say and Sophia would be heartsick on hearing the accusation and disappointment in her voice.

  But sitting in the parlor with her landlady fielding her anxious inquiry, Sophia’s only struggle was with herself. She badly wanted to speak up, to say Mrs. Cavanaugh had entirely the wrong impression, but the fact was that Sophia did intend on “doing something rash” and she needed her landlady’s help. “This Sunday, if you could do as you said and tell the others I have a headache?”

  o0o

  She was on the verge of hanging up when Terrence Lucky finally answered his phone. His voice was hoarse with sleep. Older sounding than she remembered. And when he realized who was calling, his tone roughened with disgust. What did Sophia want? Had she bothered to check the time? he demanded.

  “Who is it?” Sophia heard a woman ask. Her voice was ragged with sleep too. An image of the pair of them, nude, entwined, tried to form in Sophia’s brain. She shut it off.

  “I need to talk to you about Dylan.” Sophia mustered the courage to say the line she’d rehearsed.