She kicked a power drill out of the way, clearing a path in case she needed an exit. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not? No one ever proved me wrong. I put myself out there, my hopes, my fears, and it is laid to waste. There are no exceptions. The world leans toward atrophy, it slides into chaos. Those of us who pretend that redemption exists continue our charade until proven wrong by the cold hard facts. The world is full of gluttons, self-possessed sex addicts and fiends desperate to make a penny. Retailers stock our bookstores with preachers who tell us that prosperity is ours if we give all of our money to the church. If we believe, then all of our wounds get healed. Well, I'm not willing to play their games. I'm done being the fool. We fight and toil for utopia, but we'll never manage to create it because our hearts are rotten. Someone will spin peace to their profit, thus rendering it as useless as trash left on the side of the road. Don't come in here preaching to me.”
She took a deep breath. Lord, lead me now.… “It’s not true, Wade. Yes, people let us down all of the time. We’re human. You want to talk about thwarting the love of someone who gives his life for another? Look at how you’ve turned your back on God.”
“Yes, look at it.” Wade whipped his arms in the air in a theatrical show. He leaned in, inches from her face. “If you could have seen me before. A beaten down, bitter man who wanted to believe the lie. I wanted to make those children at MissionFocus respect me and it got me nowhere. I thought I was having a heart attack. I looked around and nobody was there to support me. I worked my fingers to the bone and not one soul on this earth was grateful. Did I ever get recognized for my efforts? No. I went home alone time and again, forcing myself to fit into a world where I did not belong. For what? For misery. For death to my soul. So parents could drop their kids off for me to raise them. So that they could rob me of everything I earned. So that I could become an old man whose own skin was ashamed of him.
“You want me to look back, to see that poor fool and be glad for the experience? Take joy because ‘God has a plan’? You want me to pretend that it didn’t hurt like someone pushing a steak knife into my heart? That I somehow manufactured my own misery and thrust it on myself, when I wanted nothing more than to smile? To have someone tell me that they loved me? You want me to go back to that? How can I when the future is so strong? After all of these years of fighting and clawing my way through life, I have finally found my calling. I’ve gone from being a loser, beating my head against the wall for a group of ungrateful children, to being God’s own angel of judgment.”
Traci gasped. The machine. Revenge. “What do you mean, angel of judgment? Is this a bomb? Are you planning to—”
“A bomb?” he laughed. “A bomb? Oh, darling, you think so little of me.”
Wade ran to the side of the machine and jumped into the driver's seat. Wind carried his hair and flapped his clothes. A lump rose in her throat as he turned to face her.
“Behold, my love, the world’s first time machine.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The wind snapped around her. Should she laugh at Wade or pity him? Did he really think time travel was real? The machine resembled a prop in a low budget movie. How sad. The poor, disillusioned man.
“You don’t believe me?” Wade stepped down from his perch. “I imagine it comes as quite a surprise. After all, I’m a crazy old hermit who never leaves the house except to have his heart broken once a decade.”
He bent down to the massive filing cabinets built into the machine and pulled open a drawer near his knees.
“I can only guess at the questions you must have for me.” Wade’s fingers flew through the files, searching for something. “How strange, that the man you dated talked you into making the best decision in your life thirty years ago.”
Wade produced a black and white photograph from a filing cabinet and thrust it at Traci. Her front lawn, her house, stared back at her, taken at least thirty years ago. On her screen porch, she sat straight haired, eyes burned out with tears. A woman at the end of her rope.
Traci snatched the photograph from his hands. “Where did you get this?”
Wade uttered a grotesque cackle and sauntered to a mirror screwed to the wall above his work bench. “Did it never seem strange to you that in the thirty years we’ve known each other I haven’t aged more than a few weeks? That my hair was gray, my wrinkles deep this whole time? I know that Denny left you alone and destitute, to care for a child you never expected to have. I have pictures of them all.”
Was it true? No. Impossible. There is no such thing as time travel. But Wade was right. He looked the same. The photographs corroborated his story. That was her on the swing. How else could he have known about the baby or Denny? She never told anybody.
He sauntered around the machine. “Would you like to meet your son?” Wade unpinned a photograph of Carter from the wall above his compressor and handed it to her.
A knot turned in her stomach. Her son? What did he mean? Could it be? “Who is this?”
“Carter at eighteen years old. Your son.” Wade pulled other photographs from the wall and dug more from the piles on the workbench. “Once upon a time he was a senior in high school, ready to graduate. Smart kid, good at sports, went on to sell cars at a dealership where he tricked people into buying vehicles they didn't need, at prices they couldn’t pay. Even took a special interest in Mrs. Dublin, if I’m not mistaken.”
The dark-haired man in the picture stared at her. It was in perfect focus, taken in a nightclub. Those were her eyes. That man had her eyes. Impossible. He resembled her father, balding in the same way.
No, it couldn’t be. Wade cooked up all of this out of a jealous rage. “What are you saying?” she muttered. “What is this?”
“I’m saying that, in another time, Carter was my protégé. I mentored him, took him to drug treatment and court appearances. You want to talk about pain? Fine, let’s talk about pain. I gave everything to this boy, and to hundreds of teens, so that they could throw it in my face. One day he gets a girl pregnant, Tom's daughter, and tells her that she has to have an abortion or he’ll leave her. So she has the abortion and he leaves her anyway––cheats on her the night of her graduation party. The girl gets confused, thinks she’s committed the unpardonable sin, and walks in front of a moving train.”
Wade stamped his feet, inches from Traci, eyes wild. “He drove her to kill herself. Your son. Your handsome, clever, talented son. Flesh of your flesh. He took Angela away from us without even batting an eye. And what price did he pay? A good job, an endless streak of women. No remorse. No recompense to the grieving family. No. He walks around strutting like we owe him something. As if the life of a child was nothing in comparison to his own pleasures.
“All around the world today women are having abortions. They take the lives of their children and throw them away like it means nothing to them. Thousands, possibly millions of children sacrificed on the altar of our selfishness. And what is their penalty? Nothing. The world keeps spinning. If a person thinks it’s acceptable to kill to improve their life, they ought to be willing to give up their own for the betterment of others. So I do that for them. I’m the judge. If our existence is better without them, they get eliminated, exactly as they did to someone they considered a burden.”
The grit in his voice dug the words into her soul. She tore her eyes away, unable to watch him parade around the garage. He continued ranting, thrusting his index finger at an imaginary people group in the distance.
“Genocide happens in Africa and a thousand people die. It’s a human tragedy. A terrible thing. An airplane gets flown into the side of the building, a few dozen men jump to their deaths, that gets global headlines. But out there, in cold and clinical doctors’ offices, in outpatient facilities, and in shopping centers around the world millions of children are executed and we turn a blind eye because we don’t want to get involved.”
Wade’s face beaded with sweat. His fingers curled in on themselves, pressing into his p
alms.
“They tell us that sometimes there is no justice, that things happen the way they do because the sun rises on the good and the evil. Well I was not going to settle for that anymore. I’m not willing to sit back and let people walk all over the innocent.
“So I have spent the last decade locked away, desperate and alone, building this machine, and I took Carter’s life. I took it from that ungrateful little mongrel and I brought back the dead. I brought Angela back to life and now she has a beautiful baby boy and a home filled with love. You should see it. Toys everywhere on the floor, walls covered in photographs and scripture verses. She has the love of a decent and solid man. She has everything that your son ever robbed her of and more, and it’s all because of me. There was no justice there and I took it, I made it. That liar, that ingrate walked the streets without any consequences for his actions.”
Wade kicked a metal cart, showering the ground with a cascade of nuts and bolts. “You hear me? No consequences. What kind of justice is that? Do you want to defer to God and live and let live, or do you want justice? Do you want kids like Jake to grow up in a loving family, safe from the rage of an alcoholic, drug-obsessed dog like your son? Or do you want to let the darkness rise and have its way with us? I breathed on dry bones and they came alive. I did this. I did it. Not the police, not the army, not your loving God. I did this. I brought justice. I brought safety. I did.”
Traci hated her tears. How dare he yell at her after all she did for him. What nonsense. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I invented a time machine to set the record straight. You? You happened to get in the way. That’s all. I can’t blame you for that. But I let myself fall in love with you. I should have known better.”
She shuddered. In the way? She was in the way? These were lives he dealt with, not concepts. How dare he pretend she was collateral damage.
She fought the tears. “You followed me, tried to control me.”
“I didn’t control you. You enjoyed all the freedom in the world,” he barked.
She got right in his face, poking his chest with her finger. “You followed me around, took pictures of me talking with Aaron. You questioned my fidelity to you and then you hunted me like an animal. Now I’m here and you berate me like I’m some kind of freak. Then you have the audacity to tell me you killed my son.”
“I killed your son? I killed your son? I didn’t do anything of the sort.” Livid, Wade shoved her hard into the corner, his teeth hovering inches from her face, foam bubbling at the corners of his mouth.
“I merely gave you information. I educated you on the issues, counseled you that it was okay to consider having an abortion. It was you who walked into that clinic and told the doctor what you wanted. It was you who surveyed the world and decided it would be better if Carter never existed. It was your own actions that ended the beating of your son’s heart. All I did was give you a list of the options, that’s all. You were the one who chose execution. If you want to blame someone for Carter's death, blame yourself.”
She pushed him away. Her hands reached for his hair, to tear it out, to make his mouth shut. She kicked his shins with her boots. “You’re as guilty as I am. If you hadn’t stepped in, he might still live today.”
“I only—”
She was on fire. “Leading someone to kill is as bad as doing it yourself.”
“But it was you—”
“God forgave me of that sin,” she said, stomping her feet.
“But you—”
“Stop.” She slapped him once, twice, his head jerking back and forth under her power. “I carried that weight on my back long enough. Jesus forgave me of that sin. Jesus saved me.”
“Then what are you so angry about?” Wade stood straight, taking her abuse. “Go about your life and know that you are forgiven. Shout it from the rooftops for all I care. But don’t you dare go blaming his death on me.”
Her voice cracked. “He would be alive now if you hadn’t built your machine.”
“If he lived, others would have died.” Wade turned from her, pacing the garage. “Innocent people. Lives destroyed by his hand. He was an evil man and I did everything I could to get rid of him. You can blame me all you want, but if this were Hitler, Stalin, bin Laden, I'd get the Nobel prize for my good deeds. Why? Because they committed crimes on a massive scale. But what about the rodents and leeches in our normal lives? Why should they prosper when honest people like us have to slave away for every grain of rice we put in our mouths?”
He reached into the filing cabinet and sifted through piles of black and white prints. He pulled out stacks of images, all of them of her dark-haired son.
Wade showed them to her in succession. “This is Carter at the church youth center, the very place where you piddle away your hours, trying to assuage your guilt with good works. He came in so drunk one night that he passed out in the men’s bathroom in a puddle of his own vomit. After his friends abandoned him, I drove Carter to the hospital. He nearly died that night. I watched from a distance as they pumped his stomach. I held his hand as he slept. His mother was nowhere to be found.”
Wade pulled another photograph from the stack, then another. “Here is one of the graduation party he missed so that he could cheat on his girlfriend. And here is one of him as a grown man, courting a married woman. Does she look familiar to you?” In the photograph Carter kissed Adrianna Dublin in a dive bar. “If I hadn’t done anything, that picture would have been taken a few months ago, ten miles from here.”
Traci gasped. How dare he? What business did he have stalking Adrianna? She yanked the pictures from his hands and threw them on the ground except for a close up of Carter’s face. Her whole body shook with rage. Pulse pumping, a mad confusion of anger, hatred, and grief. Wade confronted her with her past, all the sins she sought forgiveness for. Wade ranted about justice when he stood as guilty as anyone else.
“And you,” Wade jabbed a finger at her. “Do you have any idea where you would be right now if it weren’t for me? A meth head living off of government assistance. You traded your body for one high after another until you were nothing more than a skeleton. When I dropped Carter off at your house you were so drugged out of your mind that you didn’t know whether your own son was alive or dead. And you didn’t care either way.
“I did you a favor. I did the world a favor by taking out Carter. Now that he’s gone, you are the benefactor of a relationship with God. Your most prized possession, the thing you go on about endlessly, is thanks to me. And you’re going to stand there and tell me what an evil man I am? If not for my intervention, you’d still dull you pain with drugs, killing your liver. I gave you back your life.
“But don't worry.” Wade’s hands glided up and down the machine as he pet it like a horse. “In a few minutes everything will change. We'll be happy again, wait and see. I'll take you out to dinner, treat you well.” He fell quiet for a moment, looking off into some distant void. “In a few months I may propose to you. We'll be so happy.”
Wade threw a lever and pushed the machine out the door into the dark night. Traci’s knees locked as tears gathered in her eyes. Her heart beat so hard. Pictures of her sat on his workbench, strung out on methamphetamine, hair straight and ragged, teeth black, a cigarette perched on her lip. Flashbacks of her drinking days played before her eyes. This could have become her life, save the help of a few older women and the Spirit of God who led her to the church the night she killed her son.
The harsh winds mirrored her soul, toiling and churning. They beat against her thin frame. All she knew, the black and white, turned into a complex, intermixed palette of grays. The taste of beer, the company of loose men, the thrill she felt when courting them both––it remained. Those whims led her to sharing a bed with abusive or careless men. If not for Christ she would have died in her addiction.
“Did you tell me?” she asked, surprised by the words. Wade paused, leaning against the bulk of the machine, now a dozen feet outside
of the garage. She yelled it, rushing out of the big door and into the driveway.
“Did you tell me? Did you share the gospel? Did you ever give me a chance? Or did you kill my son and leave me for dead? Did you even allow me the option to turn away from my sin or did you abandon me?”
“Believe whatever you want,” he yelled. “It won't matter in a few minutes anyhow.”
Wade continued to walk away from her, pushing the monster. He turned the machine where the gravel path met the driveway and headed for the backyard. His baggy black shirt concealed his body against the vacuum of night.
All she could do was follow.
A hundred feet from the garage, she stepped onto the rutted dirt track heading into the vast expanse of the back yard. Wind stung her face and pulled at the picture of Carter still locked in her grip.
Cradle Robber Page 25