“Words of advice or experience?” I ask her, returning the mischief back to her.
Aimes sticks her tongue out at me as we finally make it through the congested room of the library to an open, private corner. She pauses, looking to me with honest curiosity. She asks me, “Why do they always think they are God’s gift?”
“Because we never tell them about the flukes.”
She laughs as we take the two over-stuffed reading chairs in the corner. From here, we can see most of the room and the conversations are a mixture of volumes and moods. It swirls in the room combining the different elements like a recipe of life. No one is really happy and no one is really depressed. It’s a flat line of facts that once again the sun is upon us and another day is here to survive, which in itself sounds pretty depressing.
“Glad to see the morning finds you two well.” Selma’s voice slithers from a spot beyond us. Like magic, or voodoo, the crowd parts right at that instant to reveal whom we missed when we picked this area to sit. Like a viper in the tall grass sensing its prey, I’m pretty sure she saw us the whole time.
“It had. Now, not so much,” Aimes answers sounding a lot like her old self.
Selma isn’t phased by Aimes’ remark at all. Her smile is stuck on sentimental, and with how she is watching me, I have a sickening suspicion that Aimes is not her target today. I have that privilege with all the earned bonuses of psychotic that goes right along with it. Lucky me.
I sigh, bracing myself for the attempt of a mind screw I know she is plotting behind her smile. “Need something, Selma, or did you just get lost on the way to the punch?”
“I hear strawberry helps hide the taste of crazy when serving bullshit to the masses.” Aimes is twirling a strand of her white-blonde hair with a relaxed poise Lawless would be proud over. If she could stop tapping her foot with the energy of a toddler on a sugar bender it would be a lot more convincing.
Selma doesn’t even flinch with the remark. Her dark chocolate-colored eyes are locked on me with a death grip. She could be chiseling my tombstone by hand with her intensity. She most likely is doing it mentally.
“It must be hard to always be the strong one; the one they always look to. Especially when your friend just skates through life, living behind their adoration to keep her safe,” Selma says reopening a book I have closed. She is a few chapters behind for her to reach her goal.
I say nothing, giving her not the least little nibble of which way to dig her talons into me. It’s more fun to watch people like her try to grasp at air than to give them an avenue to skip down. I want to see how well she can play this game before I return her pitch.
She isn’t discouraged with my lack of concern. She just finds a different swamp to wade through. She says still wearing the artificial smile, “Rhett has spoken so often about you. He really admires your strengths and how bravely you are always putting them before your own safety.” She pauses with hopes the compliments will take root so that her next move may bear fruit. “He also mentioned how awful your parents were to you. How they never really loved you like you deserved to have been loved. You’ve lived your whole life trying to earn someone’s love and now you are searching to fill that same void with their respect.”
I’ll give her points for getting closer to home with that one. I continue to stare at her, waiting for her attempt for a homerun, which worries me some since that last pitch was so close to the plate.
“He told me about Law and Leslie as well. I was very ashamed of her actions when I found out. I feel like a fool to have trusted her.” She lets her smile fade to a forced frown as she tries to play the an-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-a-friend-of-mine card. It’s cute, but not the homerun she was hoping for. “The shame you must have felt when you found out trusting Lawless to such a degree. Then to find out it was all a plot by the man who had sworn to protect you, how heartbreaking!”
That one flew right over home plate, but I’m not taking the swing. I have two more strikes before I’m out.
“You deserve so much more, Helena.” She looks at me the way a mother is supposed to look at her child when discovering they are hurt. With how starved my heart has always been to have Carol look at me in such a manner, I can feel my resolve cracking. “Tell me it wouldn’t be nice just once to let someone else carry the weight. How nice would it be just once to be the one just accepted and not the one who is always tested?” She asks me with a face I have craved and I feel myself finally give under her skills.
“What are you trying to get at, Selma?” I ask her, forcing my voice to fill with contempt and not the cravings.
“It’s okay to be tired and scared, Helena. It’s not fair for them to force you to always bear their faults. You have your own needs. You have just as much right to be comforted as they do,” she implores me to understand.
Aimes laughs with a tone of amusement. She says, “You obviously didn’t hear her last night. She was comforted just fine.”
“Flukes aren’t very satisfying for anything the heart needs,” Selma says, entwining me in my lie. To disagree now would unravel the web I have spun. A web she has used to trap me to be devoured later.
“Is that how you’ve become this person, Selma? Has a lifetime of flukes left you a puppet master for Travis? Or, is that just an added plus of this new role of yours? You lure them in and he makes them sign on the dotted line?” I told myself I wouldn’t take the bait, but once again my mouth is moving before my brain can stop it. My mouth and my feet once again with a plan of their own - shocking. Obviously, it is not self-preservation.
She melts back to her self-assured smile. We both know I have taken the poisoned bait and now she just has to wait until it’s fully digested to win. Her silence is provoking as she reverses the roles we were playing. She lets me sit and wait for her answer showing her smile as she climbs under my skin.
With a nod she begins her story, sharing some small glimpse of the woman before us. “No, I was blessed before all of this. I had a good husband. He was my first love and we had the perfect fairytale. A few years after being married, we had our son, Beau. Our blessings kept growing, and like most people, the more they grew the more we forgot who to thank for them. We became so busy with our perfect life that we soon lost track of our beliefs. Church became something to do only on holidays and then slowly, not at all. We would tell ourselves we were going to change, but we never did. We never did until we were forced to.” Her smile is finally free from its cage and I see the real woman.
I know the twist her story is about to take before she says it. It’s the same twist that all of our stories have.
“There I was on the floor holding our son’s dead body, hating the Lord and ranting about how unfair for Him to take Beau and not me as well. I promised everything I owned if He would take me, too. I wanted to be with my son more than I wanted to live. I just never thought the Lord would collect.”
I watch as her memories take the slyness from her face. I see her stripped of all of her programed manuscripts and manipulations. Her heart is blistering and I can almost understand why she is the woman she is as I watch her suffering.
“My husband came in and started to try to revive him. He kept screaming for Beau to breathe and I kept screaming for him to let me hold him. When Beau came to, we were both so relieved. My husband picked him up and held him and that is when the real screaming started. Beau killed his father while I watched. I watched while my little boy murdered my husband like a monster and then he came for me, too. God did as I asked. He gave me the choice to live without him or to die with him. I killed my little boy for God and God took everything I had just like I had offered. So no, I am not the woman I am because of flukes. I’m who I am because of truths, simple black-and-white truths. When you’re ready to live with your truths, I’ll be waiting.” Selma stands, pressing her palms down her jeans to smooth imagined wrinkles with a nervous habit of a lifetime ago. She doesn’t glance backwards as she leaves, but I’m sure she feels Aimes and I staring
at her retreating back just the same.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Aimes carefully says. It almost sounds more like a question than anything else. My weakness for the child story is not exactly a secret. Just the reason why I am so susceptible to it is.
“No, it doesn’t change anything,” I tell her with a voice as unsure as hers. “We all have our stories. You don’t see Chapel going all medieval crusades, so why should it make it okay for her?”
“Wonder what’s Travis’ story?” Aimes asks off-handed. Curiosity, cats and her have a shared theme.
I call her on her question. “You want to find out?”
I watch as her eyes grow and shrink from shock to uncertainty to shock again before she can finally find her voice. “You’re serious?”
“Come on, no one loves to talk about themselves more than Travis does. We’ll just tell him we are looking for repentance for our naughty, naughty ways.”
“The sounds Lawly was making last night, you might have to.”
“Jealously is such an ugly shade,” I tell her with false airs.
“Yeah, but whore isn’t. You’re just so purdy, remember?” she returns and I mock a gasp before playfully hitting her arm.
Hiding behind our laughter we are both nervous, if not outright afraid, of walking into the den of snakes. We have seen their handiwork and how their forked tongues can convince people to do such horrible things to the ones they love. Adam and Eve were God’s chosen. They had paradise to themselves and all it took was the whisperings of a single snake to bring them to ruins. What chance do we have against a whole den?
We continue with our completely inappropriate jokes as we make our way to the third floor. The more lewd the joke, the larger and deeper the looks of disapproval we gain from those we pass. By the time we reach the metal barrier of the top floor, I have verbally done more sexually in the time it took to climb the stairs than I have my whole life. Shockingly, Aimes tops my every joke with her own falsified escapades. If this gossip does reach our group, we will have a lot to try to explain and a harder time keeping a straight face as we do.
The floor is much as we left it yesterday, dark and emotionally stagnant. The same hollow eyes stare at us as we enter. Those same eyes watch us as we travel down the hall looking for the man who brags about having the ear of our Maker. Their depression hangs in the air like accumulated cobwebs. I can almost feel the shivers of walking through their wraithlike strings. Their sadness clings to me like a living thing, attempting to devour my life and laughter. Conversations aren’t just hushed here. This is where they go to die.
A man sits in the hallway letting his daughter invent her own version of the game duck-duck-goose. She’s been “ducking” the whole time we have been walking towards them, and by the smile on his face, I don’t think she ever reaches “goose”. They are an oddity of light and joy in a place devoid of any such sensations.
“Travis?” Aimes asks, reluctantly disturbing the private world of theirs.
“Ryan,” he says, momentarily distracted by his daughter.
Aimes cocks her head over the misunderstanding and asks again, “No, Ryan, where is Travis?”
“Oh,” he replies, still bewildered as to why we are talking to him, “down the hall. It’s the room holding the meeting. They have been doing that a lot as of late.”
“Any clue why?” I ask. I toss my hat into this almost one-sided conversation with the chanting embedded between the attempted words.
“Nope. I don’t have a lot to do with that group. They have names all written down like there’s a giant roll call going on.” He pauses as his daughter’s never-ending circle loops in between us. “Besides, I have my hands full as it is.” He smiles a proud beacon of fatherhood letting us know exactly what he speaks of. Not that we really would have had to guess.
I pass him, leaving him and his little girl to their game. “Thanks, Ryan,” I say as I watch them. I do have to applaud his constant stream of peace. I have only been in the hall for minutes and I am already starting to hate the word “duck”. Some people are not cut out to be parents. I’m raising my hand for that line, please.
Travis is easy to find like Ryan had said. He, and his collection of God Squad, are in one of the few rooms with life actively happening within it. It’s a hustle of running to-and-fro with some urgency of lists. There are many names and just as many lines connecting them. Names are circled in either red or blue ink leaving purple ink to underline the rest. Unsettling as it is to watch, I feel that same numbness coating my insides with a reverse act of climbing up instead of down. It settles my stomach, steadies my heart, and slows my breathing to the calm space I crawl out from each time I step into something I really want to run from.
“Tell me Travis,” I hear my voice and it’s a rock of solid strength from my throat, “did I make the naughty or the nice list this year?”
As if playing musical chairs and my voice was the signal to rush to a seat, the room is upheaved in the duty to hide what I had mentioned. It’s charming really that a woman as small as myself can cause such stress with one simple sentence. Wait till they see me on a bender.
“Helena.” If Travis could glow with his self-importance, he would. As it stands, his smile and unnerving eyes will have to suffice. “I was wondering when you would honor me with a visit. I didn’t expect you to have the club’s sidekick in tow though. It’s a shame really the people we align ourselves with sometimes.”
“What is this? Did I forget a holiday? Hallmark invent a new card while I wasn’t looking? Happy Kick the Blonde Day everybody!” Aimes shouts, outstretching her arms to further add to her exaggerated angst.
“It’s like kick the can, but with better tits.” Rhett’s dark voice is shocking and seductive at the same time from behind us.
To say we spin to see him would not fully explain the motion I made to quickly see behind me. If I could learn to move this quickly always, I might not keep finding myself at the bottom of a pile of Risen.
Travis chuckles a sound of reprimand. He says, “Now Rhett, we have talked about that mouth of yours. Sinning starts with the mind and follows the tongue. You must remember this.”
Rhett stretches along the doorframe like a lazy cat. “It’s not my tongue I want to sin with, Reverend.” He couldn’t give Aimes a more poignant look and she couldn’t turn any more pink even if she were competing with the streaks in her hair.
“Rhett!” Travis snaps his voice, but Rhett doesn’t flinch. His eyes ascend from Aimes to Travis with deadly precision. My numbness falters being so close to his mood swing. Even Travis has to recover some of his dignity under such a stare.
“Rhett,” Travis starts again, calmer with a more respectful edge, “perhaps it would be best if you left your inner-demons elsewhere. With consideration to the girls’ feelings, of course.”
Rhett smiles an instant beam of teeth. “Of course,” he replies, but the smile never penetrates the ice of his eyes. With the same lazy cat-like attitude, he watches Travis and the men around us but doesn’t say anything more.
Travis walks towards me with one arm extended in a mockery of sincere friendship. I fight against the shudder my body wants to do as he wraps it around me, engulfing me in his cologne as he pulls me from Aimes. A stale cologne that is too sweet to be male and too musky to be female. It eats at my numbness as my skin crawls.
“What can I help you with, Helena?” Travis asks me. He has dialed down the smile to that of one a good friend would wear when greeting one another. He sounds almost sincere with his desire to help me. I can hear the hinges being pulled back on the trap and yet I still find myself putting my neck out.
I don’t try to lie to him. Someone such as Travis has too much skill in doing that himself. He would see through it before I could see that he had. Honesty is the best policy someone once lied to me. So, I try it now.
“I want to try to understand,” I start, leaving no ambition in my voice, “I want to know what happened to start thi
s mission of yours.”
Just as I had suspected him to, Travis stares at me, trying to read my face. He nods, his face a serious look of stillness when I pass the test. Just another sheep to the flock, that’s me.
“It’s always been my mission to bring the people back to their roots; to their very foundation of religious beliefs, if you will. Now the people have no choice but to see their way back to Him. It’s glorious!” He exclaims that last part like a man in love. Maybe he is. “I saw what was happening all around us. I saw the sinners being contorted with their black souls. They became the evil that lived inside them.” Travis cups his spare hand in front of me like he’s holding something precious and fragile. “In one fell swoop, God picked his survivors, his namesakes, and showed us the proof we needed of His glory. The proof so many had dared to forget.”
“Why? Why did you take up the call so unwavering?”
“As I said,” he inhales as if I have insulted him, “it was my duty as a man of God.”
“Carol,” Rhett remarks in his boredom.
Travis’ hand tightens across my shoulders, squeezing me, keeping me from looking over my shoulder.
“A woman?” Aimes asks with a little more interest than Rhett had for the topic. “I thought you Holy Rollers couldn’t double dip?”
“You must ignore Rhett.” Travis is dripping with charm to cover the fact he is losing his poster-boy perfection. I felt his hand clamp reactively on my arm at the mention of the name. “He has been misled by the gossip of the Devil.”
“I’m not sure Selma would appreciate such characterization,” Rhett says with his face still a map of boredom. I know better. He can’t look at Travis or I or his smirk will ruin the game.
I watch the muscles by Travis’ mouth twitch. Seems Selma likes to share everyone’s little secrets in hopes of keeping her bedmate.
“I’m sure it was just a mistake on how you interpreted the topic.” Travis is forcing his smile. His voice comes from behind clenched teeth.
“Maybe,” Rhett shrugs one shoulder not even investing his whole body into the conversation. “Something about how she was a member of your church. You two had a little thing going on. When her husband found out he was going to let the church know what kind of man you were,” Rhett pauses to look at Aimes and I, “Oh, yeah. Travis has a thing for other men’s women. When Travis here found out his gig was up, he shot the husband, claiming he was possessed by demons that made his “tongue foul with lies”.”
The Risen (Book 4): Courage Page 24