Sacrifice

by J. S. Bailey

  “We need to go there,” Bobby said, straightening. “If this is her garbage, then she’s been there more than once. And I’m not about to start asking around about her in Ann Arbor.”

  Carly brushed her hands against her pants. “Maybe you can go there, but I’m skipping out on that one. I have an image to keep.”

  IT HAD taken Adrian Pollard years to realize her life consisted of one long chain of mistakes, one leading to another then another like a falling line of dominoes.

  Looking back, she saw that her fear of parenting the children she’d carried had stemmed from a self-absorption buried so deep within her she didn’t even know it existed.

  She’d always considered herself a kind woman—she didn’t gossip or pick fights, she didn’t lie or steal—but the other, darker Adrian hidden beneath the surface had total reign over all.

  This realization came one day when Adrian had the news on at the house she shared with her now-estranged husband, Yuri Polusmiak (never would she use that surname again). The anchor reported on a story about a woman who allowed herself to be murdered by a violent burglar so her young child would have time to escape and call for help. The woman’s brokenhearted husband, who hadn’t been home during the burglary, praised her self-sacrifice because their daughter had survived the ordeal without a scratch.

  The story rendered Adrian more than speechless. Never before in all her years had the idea of a mother losing her life for her child crossed her mind. She’d thought the anchor would go into additional details about the woman and her child but he moved on to lesser stories about a celebrity’s million-dollar wedding and an unfortunate hike in energy prices.

  Adrian left the room unnerved and located the story on the Internet. The woman’s name had been Krista Boone. She was a stay at home mother who often volunteered at the school where her daughter, Lila, attended kindergarten. The entire community where the woman lived had gone into mourning. A few kind souls started a fund for the Boone family to cover funeral expenses because while they had been a happy family, they had not been rich.

  Adrian took one look at the four-carat diamond mounted in white gold on her left ring finger, then at the designer bathrobe draped over her thin frame, feeling somewhat lower than the dirt she and the cleaning staff never allowed to cross the threshold of the house.

  She grew increasingly withdrawn over the next several days as she pondered the disparity between her own life and that of the late Krista Boone. Yuri, her husband of five years, demanded to know what her problem was since she could barely bring herself to crawl out of bed and cook for him, but she had not yet formulated her thoughts and feelings into words that could easily be conveyed.

  He’d taken her silence for insolence and punched her so hard he blackened her eye. Sobbing, on her knees, Adrian had blubbered out the story she saw on the news and how she felt she’d made a grave error by not bothering to raise any of her children.

  Yuri, who despised all children and had even paid for Adrian to have a tubal ligation the week after they were wed, laughed at her and asked if she was stupid.

  Stupid was an understatement that did not fully describe the irresponsibility of her actions. She’d given birth to four children—two boys and two girls—and left them all when they were less than a month old, partly from fear. Or was it mostly fear? Parenting would have required her life to change, and change had always frightened her.

  Would she have chosen to die for her children? Never.

  Days passed, and Adrian’s despondency showed no signs of lifting. Yuri mocked her, telling her she needed to get over herself and forget about her children since she’d never had anything to do with them in the first place.

  His words and increasing hostility deepened her awareness of her extensive failures. During the years they’d been together, he’d often knocked her around if she didn’t do things precisely how he requested. She’d taken it all without complaint. After all, he was her husband and provider. He paid for her nice clothes and her favorite wines and beer and gave her everything she ever asked for. Sometimes she didn’t show enough gratitude, so she more than deserved the punishments he periodically bestowed upon her.

  Except for this. Regretting her past decisions didn’t disrespect Yuri in any way she could see.

  Over dinner one evening she casually brought up the topic of her children again. “Yuri,” she said, mindlessly twirling her fork through the pasta on her plate, “I really do think it’s appropriate that I call on each of them so they know I’m sorry for treating them like I did.”

  That sent Yuri over the edge. “You know what’ll happen if you go knocking on their doors at this point?” he’d screamed as a vein throbbed in his temple. “They’ll find out I’ve got money, and they’ll want to bleed me dry like a bunch of little leeches. Is that what you want to do to me? Make me go broke over a few little whelps whose only connection to me is that they came out of that hole between your legs?”

  Adrian bowed her head to avoid meeting his gaze. “You’re right. I was wrong to think I should see them. I’m sorry, Yuri. I’m so, so sorry.”

  He seemed to accept her apology for the time being, but he kept his gaze fixed on her for the rest of their meal like some wild beast monitoring its prey.

  That night Adrian slipped two sleeping pills into one of his drinks. Once he was out like a hibernating bear, she gathered up as much cash she could find around the house, packed a travel bag, and left on foot.

  She paused once to glance back at her home, knowing she wouldn’t see it again. Tonight the three floors and sprawling north and south wings looked more like a cold fortress than a place where a family might live.

  Strangely, leaving Yuri was harder than leaving any of her children or their fathers. With Yuri she’d lived with riches and comfort, and she was reluctant to let those things go. Did that make her a bad person? Of course it did.

  She walked for an hour before calling a cab that took her to a used car lot, then waited by the entrance until it opened in the morning. She bought a disintegrating Ford Escort for $300, picked up some clothes at the thrift store next door, and got out of town before Yuri could find her.

  It took Adrian several weeks to track down her three youngest children, and her reunions with each of them were anything but heartwarming. There had been tears. Screaming. Cold indifference, which somehow was worse than anything else.

  Not that she’d expected much different.

  When she learned that her oldest child had moved to the west coast, she’d almost thrown in the towel, but her conscience wouldn’t let it go. The fact that he was her firstborn seemed to make it even more important that she speak with him, if only for a minute or two—however long it took for her to say what needed to be said.

  So she set out on what would prove to be the longest road trip of her life. About midway through Iowa the Escort’s exhaust started making an unpleasant rattling noise that made her think the whole bottom was going to fall out of it. Then a couple states after that the brakes began grinding whenever she applied them. If she didn’t know any better, she’d have said the Escort was trying to self-destruct like one of those spaceships in the movies.

  All of this went through her head as she stood waiting on a sidewalk in the darkness, arms hugged against her chest. Squares of pale light shined from the fronts of silent houses, and further down, a yellow porch light cast its glow over a narrow front yard.

  Things are going to be better now, she thought as she continued to wait for the people who might give her a job. So much better.

  The front door of the house with the porch light flew open and one, then two figures bounded out. Adrian squinted to see better but a sudden flash of headlights blinded her and then—

  THE FIRST things Adrian became aware of when she awoke were blinding pain in her head and overwhelming nausea in her gut. I’ve been in an accident, she thought, though she could remember no such event. Perhaps she’d hit her head so hard that she was experiencing temporary
amnesia.

  Something cold and damp touched her head, and her eyes flew open. A fiftyish brown-skinned woman standing beside her held a wet cloth that dripped onto Adrian’s shirt.

  Adrian scrambled to sit up. Instead of a hospital, she found herself in a windowless room with concrete walls lit by three bulbs in pull-chain fixtures on the ceiling.

  She tried to think, but it only deepened her pain. How had she arrived in this place? The last thing she could remember clearly was driving past the green and white Welcome to Oregon sign beside Interstate 84. Other things must have happened between then and now—the dull shadows of them flitted back and forth in her mind, and like dust motes, the more she tried to grasp them the further they drifted away.

  Two other women sat on cots nearby, quietly weeping. One was Asian—Chinese, maybe?—and the other was white like Adrian.

  “Where am I?” Adrian asked in a cold voice.

  The brown-skinned woman pursed her lips and said something in Spanish, but it had been so long since Adrian studied it in school that she couldn’t understand.

  “Doesn’t anyone here speak English?” She glanced over at the white woman, who had blonde hair and looked young enough to be Adrian’s daughter. “Hey. You on the cot. Can you hear me?”

  She gave no acknowledgment that Adrian had made a sound.

  The woman with the dripping cloth backed away, her posture and expression oozing smugness. She wore nice clothes in contrast to the other women, whose outfits were torn and stained with grime.

  A bucket topped with a toilet seat occupied the back corner of the room. A half-used roll of paper sat on the floor beside it.

  The walls closed in around her. Adrian rose on trembling legs and seized the Spanish-speaking woman by the shoulders. “Where are we? Why can’t you tell me where I am?”

  The woman pulled away and slapped Adrian hard across the cheek.

  Their two companions glanced up but said nothing.

  Tears stinging Adrian’s eyes, she said, “I know you can understand me. I demand to know what’s going on.”

  The woman slid a phone out of her pocket, dialed a number, and spoke rapidly into it for ten seconds. Then she moved toward a smooth metal door that didn’t have a knob and waited.

  A minute later the door swung open and a beefy man holding a gun stepped into the room, raked his eyes over its occupants, and then let the woman out into the hallway that lay beyond it.

  He gave a nod and followed her out. The door swung shut so hard that Adrian felt the floor vibrate.

  The blonde woman lifted her head. “It sure sucks to be you right now, doesn’t it?”

  Adrian’s heart skipped a beat. “You can understand me.”

  “Yeah, but she can’t.” She gestured at the Asian woman, who gazed longingly at the closed door. “They don’t like it if you talk too much. Your best bet is to stay calm and just accept whatever happens because freaking out isn’t going to fix anything.”

  “But where are we? Why are we here?”

  “Haven’t you guessed?” The woman gave her a sardonic smile. “We’re for sale.”

  PHIL MASON, Randy Bellison’s predecessor as the Servant, stood at the window with his back to the living room, thinking about too many things, one of them being the fact that he would essentially have to train a terrified weakling to be an exorcist. With Randy it had been easy. Randy had known ahead of time what he was getting himself into.

  Bobby didn’t.

  And that was only one problem. The tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

  When Phil and Allison first wed, the humble dwelling in which they lived was a refuge where he could leave his woes on the doorstep and not be bothered by them again until he left. Lately Phil had been unable to switch off his worries, and they crept inside the house like malevolent spirits and turned the calm atmosphere into one that was slowly poisoning the home’s inhabitants.

  It didn’t help that his hours at the doctor’s office where he worked had just been cut in half. That announcement had come just this past Monday, and he and Allison hadn’t yet settled on a solution for their upcoming financial crisis.

  In addition to that, Phil’s thoughts kept drifting to the stack of papers sitting on the desk in his home office, or, rather, what he’d learned about the information printed upon them.

  And still, that wasn’t the extent of his problems.

  Allison came up behind him and massaged his shoulders. Ashley, their five-year-old daughter, was in her room playing with dolls. “What is it?” Allison asked.

  A fraction of the tension went out of his body at her touch. He couldn’t tell her everything, of course—at least not until he’d checked a few more facts in regard to the papers on his desk.

  He began with the safest thing that came to mind. “I was thinking about Bobby. About how he’s so…”

  “Unprepared?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Everyone has to start somewhere. Is that really all that’s bothering you right now?”

  “Frankie’s run off again.”

  She gave a soft laugh. “You sound surprised.”

  “And it seems he’s taken Janet with him.”

  “Now I’m surprised. Any idea what he’s up to?”

  “I haven’t got a clue.”

  Frankie Jovingo had been the Servant from 1987 to 1992—long before Phil entered the fold in the spring of 2002. Unlike Randy’s gift of Tongues and Phil’s gift of Healing, Frankie was blessed with the gift of Evangelism. When Frankie hadn’t been cleansing the possessed, he went from town to town spreading the gospel from Seattle to San Diego. Due to his gift, people actually listened to what Frankie had to say.

  Frankie never boasted the number of people who had been saved as a result of his works, though Phil suspected they may have numbered in the hundreds. “I take no credit for changing people’s hearts,” Frankie had once said when Randy pestered him one evening over drinks and cards. “It was all God’s work. I was just a vessel.”

  “Do you think he went up to Portland again?” Allison asked.

  “Lord, I hope not.”

  Frankie no longer held a crowd’s attention as he once could, much in the way that Phil’s ability to heal people had waned over the years. The summer before last Frankie got it into his head to proclaim the word of God in the streets of Portland, which like many cities was not known for its piety. Frankie claimed that an undisclosed number of people were saved through his efforts, though not without cost: a group of young men who didn’t like what Frankie said ganged up on him and would have beaten him to death if the police hadn’t intervened.

  In the end Frankie was arrested for disturbing the peace by the same cops who saved him and spent one night in jail. The young men who’d beaten him were verbally chastened and sent on their way with no further punishment. For the next week Frankie wore his black eye, bruised ribs, and new arrest record like badges of martyrdom. “There is no greater pleasure,” he’d said, wearing a look of utmost radiance, “than suffering for Christ.”

  Phil shook his head at the memory. “If he tries a stunt like that again, someone’s going to kill him.”

  Allison laughed. “But he’d love that. Saint Frankie the Evangelist. They could start naming churches after him.”

  The thought of a place of worship bearing Frankie’s name was enough to give Phil an ulcer.

  He returned his attention to the street.

  Allison quit rubbing his shoulders and gave him a piercing stare. “Phil Mason, is there something else bothering you?”

  “That black car has been parked across the street for a long time now.”

  “So they’re visiting someone.”

  The car’s windows were tinted so Phil couldn’t see into it. “I haven’t seen anyone climb out.”

  “Maybe they broke down and are waiting for a tow truck.”

  The tension that Allison had so recently massaged out of him came back with reinforcements. “They never found Jack Willard.”
<
br />   Allison tossed her blonde hair over her shoulder and put her hands on her hips. “Any self-respecting scum like him would have scampered days ago. Quit worrying.”

  “On the news they said he was arrested three years ago on charges of assault. He beat a man so badly the guy had to have reconstructive surgery on his face. If he comes here and tries something, I…I…”

  Allison held a finger to his lips. “Will worrying add one moment to your life?”

  “Allison, I’m being realistic. People do bad things.”

  “People do good things, too. You should know.”

  Phil had nothing to say about that. Being lax invited trouble. Jesus may have said to turn the other cheek, but Phil wasn’t about to sit idly by while the man who’d shot Randy in the leg walked free.

  As he thought this, the driver side door of the black car opened and a teenage girl talking on a phone climbed out. She checked something on a slip of paper, stared at the row of houses on that side of the street, walked up to the door of one of them, and knocked.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Allison said with a smile. “I’ll go ahead and get some lunch started and you can take some to Randy. Okay?”

  Phil could feel a headache coming on, and he kneaded his eyelids. He’d planned on going over to Randy’s anyway to show him the papers. “That sounds great.”

  When Allison disappeared into the kitchen, Phil sighed. Allison was probably right. He shouldn’t worry. After all, the black car that had caused him concern turned out to be nothing. Maybe that meant Bobby and Frankie would be okay, too.

  BOBBY COULDN’T suppress the dread that assaulted him on the ride back to his house, knowing it meant he had to hurry and find the woman before it was too late.

  He let himself inside, deciding he’d look up The Pink Rooster in the phonebook and ask for their hours of operation so he wouldn’t end up sitting in their parking lot all day waiting for them to open.

  The bar might be a dead end, but it was the only lead he had.