by Jason Mott
Macon was wrapping up work in the sheriff’s office of Stone Temple and doing the best he could to ignore the crowds of people surrounding the building, preparing to pick up his daughter from the hospital in Asheville. He didn’t like looking at the crowds outside the station, but looking away was a challenge, as well. He wanted to understand it all, and the road to understanding is always paved with hours spent doing something that it would be easier not to do. Still, all watching the crowds did for him was remind him that the world around him was getting out of control.
He’d been to the hospital every day since the incident and, each day, the process of getting there was more and more complicated—traffic, people, reporters. And once he was there, he was forced to sit and watch test after test after test run on his daughter. The doctors and nurses came like clockwork. They poked, they prodded. They took Ava’s blood. They took Macon’s blood. There were theories that whatever Ava had done might be rooted in her genetics. And with her mother deceased, Macon became the pincushion through which they hoped to explore their theories. They took bone marrow, DNA samples. And then, like old-world oracles, they came back for more blood, saying that the answers had to be hidden within.
Macon’s arm was still sore from a young nurse who didn’t quite seem to have yet perfected her craft. Time and again, she missed his vein. It was somewhere around the sixth error that he decided he’d had enough. “It’s time to stop this,” was all he said. And, from that point forward, he limited the doctors’ access to his daughter and he told them, in no uncertain terms, that he would be taking her home.
Today was the day he would bring her home. And the entire world seemed to be watching. He had always been a private man, and nothing that was happening in his life right now sat well with him. The earth was falling away beneath his feet.
“Never would have thought it,” John said.
“What’s that?”
“That all of this could fit into a town like ours.”
“I suppose nobody ever thinks something like this will fit,” Macon replied, taking another sip of his coffee. Finally he closed the blinds and returned to sitting at his desk. “But there it is,” he said, motioning at the window and the crowd beyond it.
“I still can’t quite see why you wouldn’t want to stay in Asheville,” John said. He leaned back on his heels a bit and thought. “Then again,” he said, “I suppose that if I were you and Ava was well enough that she didn’t have to be there, I reckon I’d want to have the home field advantage, too. Up there in Asheville, it’s just a city of people you don’t know. At least here, you know who you can trust. And, if you really, really want to, there are enough mountains and backwoods paths that you could sneak away from all of the cameras, even if only for a little while.”
Macon’s office, much like the town of Stone Temple, was small and old. The sheriff’s office building had been rebuilt in the late sixties after having burned down—something to do with lightning. And from that rebuilding onward, little had changed—apart from wiring the place for internet a few years back.
“Any actual crimes going on?” John asked, returning from the window. “I expect not, but I like to ask.”
“Crimes? No,” Macon said. “Mostly it’s just people. Too damned many of them. And everybody’s got their own agenda. You been out there on the mountain road lately?”
“Not if I can help it,” John said. “I try to stay in town most these days.”
“You couldn’t get over the mountain now if you wanted to,” Macon said. “At least not without burning three or four hours. It’s a parking lot. Just full of people. People in cars, people in vans, people in buses, people on bicycles, people walking. I don’t know where they’re planning on staying. Folks have already started renting out their houses and their property to anybody with enough money, but even with all that, I don’t think Stone Temple is big enough to hold all of this. It’s like watching floodwaters rise. Except I feel like we didn’t get the part where it started at our ankles and crept up slowly. All of this—” he made a motion with his hand to indicate the mass of people outside his window “—all of this makes me feel like the waters are already up to our necks.”
John nodded to show that he understood and agreed. He walked to the opened door of Macon’s office and looked out at the rest of the station. “Got a few new faces out there,” he said.
“State police loaned us a few bodies, just to help keep a handle on things,” Macon replied. He leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin. “A lot of people in town now with a lot of different opinions. Some folks think it’s all just some kind of hoax. And I can’t say I’d believe too much differently if it was me. All they saw was some video on the web. And there isn’t much in the world these days easier to disbelieve than what you see. So the skeptics have come and so have the people who think Ava’s the Second Coming. Put those two together, and you’ve got a recipe for shenanigans. At least somebody had the good sense to decide that maybe we could use a little help.”
“On whose dime?” John asked.
“Not sure if they’re getting paid overtime or what,” Macon said. “I think most of it is coming from the state—damned sure ain’t coming from us. But...”
“But what?” John asked.
“Honestly,” Macon said, “I think some of them might be volunteering for all this.”
John grunted disapprovingly. He closed the door to Macon’s office. “Can’t say I’m surprised by that. Keep an eye on them.”
“On who? The volunteers?”
“Yep,” John said. “Nobody volunteers for any damned thing. Not in this lifetime. They got mouths to feed, just like you do. If they’re here, and if they’re working, they’re getting paid. Likely as not they’re working for those reporters out there.” He motioned toward the window through which he and Macon had been looking. There was disgust in his gesture. “Chances are they’re getting paid for information. Little tidbits they can sell to the tabloids or whatever. They show up here, work, listen, watch and then when their shift is over they head out there and debrief.” John sighed. “Oldest trick in the book,” he said.
Macon thought for a moment. “Suppose I knew that, but I hadn’t really paid any attention to it.”
“Got any of them volunteering to work close to your house?”
“A couple,” Macon said.
“Yeah,” John replied. “Those are the ones getting paid the most.”
“Think I should be worried?”
John waved his hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t. Yeah, they’re out to make a buck off you, but I don’t think a single person out there would do it at the expense of your family. They’ll keep you safe, but they’ll make a little gravy if they can. I’d just be careful who I talked to,” he said.
Macon watched John as he spoke. The old sheriff shifted in his seat and licked his lips as he glanced around the office. “Are we going to get down to business anytime soon?” Macon asked. “I know that, as Southern folks, we’ve made taking the long road in conversation into an art form, but my world is too crazy right now to spend much more time on whatever it is you’re trying to bring up, John. I gotta make the drive up to Asheville and, like I said, with the road the way it is, it’s going to take hours.”
John squinted and leaned in toward Macon. “How did she do it?” he asked. “How did she heal that boy, really?”
“I don’t know,” Macon said. “Just like I told the reporters, the doctors, all those biologists they brought in, the twenty different preachers that have called me, the bloggers who keep emailing me. My story hasn’t changed, John. I don’t know anything about what’s going on here.”
“Bullshit,” John said gruffly. “We both know that you can bury a dead body in the distance between what a person knows and what a person pretends not to know. And I have a hard time getting my mind around the notion that you didn’t have any kind of inkling about any of this.” He shook his head. “No, I think you knew and you wanted to keep her...
it...this thing that she’s able to do, you wanted to keep it under the radar.”
Macon sighed. “Everybody on this planet seems to think that, even if it’s not true.”
“You were wrong to keep it secret,” John said. “My wife,” he began. His fingers picked at a nonexistent piece of lint on his pants. “I loved my wife,” John said. “She was a good woman, a kind woman. Better than this world deserved, if you ask me. She was in that hospital a week before the end. Doctors did everything they could to save her. At least, that’s what I thought.” When he finally looked up from his fidgeting hand and into Macon’s eyes, there was a dark mixture of blame and bitterness in his eyes.
“I’m not going to have this conversation with you, John,” Macon said.
“It’s just that you could have helped,” John replied, and this time he was no longer the hard-nosed sheriff; he was simply a man who had lost his wife two years ago and now, very suddenly, believed it could have happened another way.
“John...” Macon said.
John snorted. “Let me guess,” he said. “You don’t know how she did it. You didn’t know anything about her being able to heal people, right?” Before Macon could answer, John continued. “Whatever story you stick to, you’re going to have to answer that question a hell of a lot more. You might not believe it, but those reporters out there paid me five hundred dollars just for walking in here,” he said. “I told them I wouldn’t have anything to tell them when I came out, and that’s still true. But I’m not the only person in this world who, now that they know what you’ve been hiding, will ask questions about what right you have to keep something like this to yourself.”
“They’re already asking those questions, John,” Macon replied. “As for them paying you to come in here, well, do what you feel you need to do. I know how much your pension is, and it’s not enough. Everyone’s got to make a living.”
John nodded emphatically. “They do,” he said. “Each and every one of us, from the day we’re born to the day we die, we’ve got to live. And we’ve got to make a living. Times been tough lately.”
Macon leaned back in his chair. “What else is there, John?” he asked. There was less patience in Macon’s voice now. He respected the old man, thought of him as a good friend, but he saw in John’s eyes that a shade of resentment still remained there. He was still thinking of his wife, Mabel, still imagining what might have been, still imagining what he believed Ava could have done.
John stared at him across the table briefly. The old sheriff’s expression shifted from surprise to acceptance to anger to something akin to embarrassment. John took a deep breath. When he let it go, the words that followed slid out of him like an apology. “There’s this preacher coming to town.”
“We got bushels of them already,” Macon replied. “Could sell preachers by the pound if we wanted right now. Preachers and reporters, whole churches trying to set up camp out there. You name it, we got it.”
“No,” John said. “This one is different. Bigger. If I can talk you into sitting with him for a while...” His voice trailed off.
“Who is he?”
“Reverend Isaiah Brown. You’ve probably seen him on TV.”
“Can’t say I’ve heard of him. But I don’t really keep up with reverends and I haven’t really watched TV since they canceled Seinfeld.”
“I’m not the type to ask for favors,” John said, not pausing for the joke. “And I damned sure don’t beg anyone for anything—”
Macon held up a hand to stop him. “I’m not going to make you say the words,” he said. “I’ll think about it. How much will he give you for that?”
At last, the fidgeting and nervousness stopped. “Don’t know,” he said. “But I figure that’s got to be worth something.”
“Good,” Macon said.
John stood. “I’ll let him know,” he said. Then: “Just tell me, Macon. Promise me. Promise me you didn’t know. That she couldn’t have helped my wife. If you say it one more time, I’ll believe it, and I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”
The hardness and intimidation was stripped away from him. He was a man trapped between the solace that he had done everything in his power to save his wife’s life, and the possibility that, even though he didn’t know it at the time, he could have done more. Every brick of self-forgiveness that he had placed around his heart since his wife’s death was loosened, and all it would take was a word from Macon for it come to crashing down, leaving John to hate not only Macon but, most of all, himself.
“I promise,” Macon said. There was exasperation and confusion in his voice. He had known John for nearly all of his life, and yet here the man stood, ready to test the bounds of their friendship, ready to lay the blame for the death of his wife at Macon’s feet, all because of what Ava had done. But even through his frustration, Macon wondered if he would have behaved any differently. “This is all just as new to me as it is to everyone else, John,” Macon said. “If there was anything that I could have done to help your wife, anything at all, I would have done it. People have a duty to help one another, a responsibility. That’s one thing we’ve always agreed on.”
“All right,” John said finally. He made an awkward motion with his hand, something between a wave goodbye and a gesture of dismissiveness. “I believe you,” he said. “But there’s going to be people who won’t. Your daughter has started something. Something big. People in this world are looking for something to believe in, and they’re going to ask for help. When they do, if you say no—regardless of the reasons—they’re not going to like it.”
He turned and opened the door and finally left, leaving Macon to think about the future of things.
* * *
“Good news, kiddo. You’re getting paroled today.” Macon stood in the doorway of Ava’s hospital room with a small bouquet of flowers in one hand and a gym bag in the other. Floating above the flowers was a pair of balloons. One read Get Well Soon. The other It’s a Girl.
“See what I did there?” Macon asked with a grin, pointing up at the balloons.
“Carmen’s idea?” Ava asked. She sat up in the bed. Her father had never been the type to give flowers.
“Why wouldn’t they be my idea?” he asked Ava as he entered the room.
“Where’s Carmen?”
Macon placed the flowers on the windowsill. Outside the hospital the sun was high and bright. There were still reporters and people waving signs and banners in front of the hospital. “She’s at home,” he said. “She wanted to come, but it was just simpler if she stayed. Leaving the house is a little like heading out into a hurricane. People everywhere. Holding up signs. Shouting. Cheering. You name it. She and the baby don’t need to be a part of all that if it can be helped.”
“She just didn’t come,” Ava replied.
“It’s more complicated than that and you know it,” Macon said, dropping the gym bag on the foot of the bed. “I brought you some clothes to go home in. Go ahead and get dressed. We’re not in a rush, but I’d rather get this circus started.” He sat on the windowsill next to the flowers and folded his arms. “How are you feeling?”
“Fair to middling,” she said.
“Haven’t heard that in a while,” Macon replied. “Your mom used to say it.”
“I know,” Ava said. “She would have come to pick me up, no matter how many people were outside the house.” She sat up on the side of the bed and placed her feet on the floor. The cold ran up from the soles of her feet and tracked all the way up her spine. She still had trouble keeping warm since what had happened at the air show. She told the doctors about it, but they all assured her that it would be okay. They were always assuring her of the “okayness” of things, which did nothing more than convey to her that things were very far removed from okay. They saw her as a child, someone to keep the truth of things from, even if they did not know what the truth of things was. So they went on and on about how much they understood what had happened, and the more they said they understood, the
more frightened Ava became. Though she was only thirteen, she knew that the bigger the lie, the more terrible the truth.
“How bad is this going to be?” she asked Macon as she took her clothes from the gym bag.
“We’ll get through it,” he said gently. “Go get dressed.”
Ava took her clothes and went into the bathroom to change. When she came out Macon was standing in front of the television—his neck craned upward at an awkward angle to watch. On the screen there was an image of the front of the hospital. The banner across the bottom of the screen read Miracle Child to Be Released. He switched it off.
“What happened to your hair?” he asked. Ava’s hair was a frizzy black mass atop her head. She had always had exceptionally thick hair—dark as molasses—and she was just enough of a tomboy that she gave it the least amount of attention that she felt she could manage. “Bring me a comb and come sit down,” Macon said, standing beside the bed.
Ava did as she was told. In the years between Heather’s death and the time when Carmen came into his life, Macon had become a very well-rounded single father. While he had never considered himself the type of man who believed in “women’s roles” or “men’s roles,” he had always been willing to concede that, simply from having split the duties of parenthood along the typical gender lines, he had a lot to learn raising a daughter.
And of all the things he had learned on the path of fatherhood, of all the moments he and his daughter shared, it was the simple act of combing her hair that was the most soothing to them both. For Macon, it was the stillness of it. She was thirteen now, and soon she would reach the age when a daughter drifts away from her father in lieu of other men of the world. He knew that these moments, when nothing was said between them and he could treat her like less of a woman and more a child, would become fewer and fewer as time marched forward.
“How sick am I?” Ava asked. Her voice was assertive—not like that of a thirteen-year-old girl, but like that of a woman deserving answers.