“I don’t think he wants to talk to her,” Daphne said, hating Doug more than ever.
“Someone should make him,” Owen muttered. “I’d try, but I’m not exactly his favorite person.”
Daphne looked back at Janie. Her mouth hung open slightly, and her shoulders slumped as Pastor Ted read to her from a pocket-size Bible. She looked like she needed to be propped up, like she could slide down the couch and onto the floor at any moment.
“Maybe I should talk to Doug,” Daphne said. Her stomach contracted at the thought of it, but she’d suck it up if it there was even a possibility it could help Janie.
“It’s up to you,” Owen replied.
But Daphne had already made up her mind. “I will,” she said. “I’ll go do it right now.”
“Good luck.” Owen squeezed her hand tightly before letting go.
She crossed the room to Doug and planted herself in front of him, overriding the nausea that swelled in her stomach whenever they were close.
“Hey, Doug,” she said, struggling to keep her voice friendly.
He dragged his eyes up from the pattern on the carpet. “Hey, Daphne,” he said tonelessly.
“Are you doing all right?” she asked, hoping to start on neutral ground.
“Am I doing all right?” Doug’s eyebrows flattened into a low, straight line. “I dunno, Daphne—my wife’s a basket case, and my kid’s dead. How do you think I’m doing?”
He laughed a hard, sarcastic laugh and slammed his fist into the wall, causing several heads to turn sharply in their direction. Daphne realized too late that Doug’s detachment and indifference, the antisocial way he’d walled himself off from the rest of the mourners, wasn’t boredom or sadness at all. It was rage—a rage that he’d been trying to keep a lid on by staying well away from everyone, a rage that she’d just brought to the surface.
“Doug, I’m really sorry . . .” she began.
“Sorry?” Doug drew himself up to his full height and advanced on her, making the blood cower in her veins. “My son is dead, Daphne—dead because you thought you could play doctor and deliver him at a friggin’ motocross track. And all you can say is you’re sorry?”
He bellowed the last word, stopping all conversations in their tracks. The crowd stared openly at them, waiting to see what Daphne would say. It was as if Doug had taken a sword and sliced straight through the thick haze of emotion in the room, severing it so that he landed on one side and Daphne on the other.
“It wasn’t like that.” Her throat was dry. “She was going into labor. Someone had to do something.”
“Yeah—someone with a medical degree,” Doug snarled. “Not you.”
She stepped back, surprised.
“I was just trying to help,” she explained.
“Sure—big help you turned out to be.” Spit flew from Doug’s mouth and landed on her cheek. He was towering over her, his face purple with fury.
Daphne looked around at the congregation, appealing for help. Surely someone would realize that Doug was being unreasonable, that he was going too far.
But the faces staring back at her were blank, offering no glimmers of protection. Nobody stepped forward to intervene. They stood suspended as the chunks of pineapple in Eunice’s Jell-O mold, watching, waiting to see what she would say.
Their silence, the sudden unreadable sheen of their faces, unsettled her. “It wasn’t my fault,” she tried to insist—but her voice wavered, unsure. Wasn’t it? a voice in the back of her head taunted. Once a killer, always a killer. Why would Janie’s child be any different?
Doug cocked an eyebrow, taunting her. She felt the mood in the room shift, the gears in the group mind turn, and the mechanisms of blame click slowly into place. They’d read the weakness in her tone, latched onto her own nagging insecurity and seen it as an admission of guilt.
“I was trying to help her!” she tried again, forcefully. These were the people who hailed her as the finder of oil, the bearer of good fortune. So many of them had been at the motocross track when it happened—they’d seen Janie go into labor with their own eyes! Could they really blame her for being the only one who stayed?
“Or maybe you just wanted to play hero,” Doug said bitterly. “You’ve been pretty high on yourself ever since you supposedly found that oil—maybe now you thought you could deliver a baby with no medical training, too.”
Daphne recalled the look of terror on Doug’s face when she’d begged him for help, the way he’d backed away like Janie was a dangerous animal before turning and running into the night. What if he was covering up for his own cowardice, blaming her for having the courage to stay when he had fled? If so, there was no way she’d let him get away with it.
“I begged you to help, and you ran,” she reminded him, sure the crowd would see it her way.
“Yeah, because I’m not a doctor,” Doug said condescendingly, his voice wound with tightly controlled fury. “I don’t think I’m God’s gift to everything and go taking babies’ lives in my hands.”
A murmur of assent wafted through the room. Daphne realized with a shock that people were nodding—they were actually agreeing with Doug!
“Daphne.” Pastor Ted stepped forward, arms crossed over his long black robe. “Did you try to deliver this child?”
She felt like she was on trial. She flashed back to the courtroom in Detroit, back in another lifetime, with the prosecutor asking her point-blank: Daphne, did you kill this man?
The answer was the same. She could no more lie here in front of Pastor Ted and the congregation, her friends and family, than she could after swearing to tell the truth in a court of law.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “But I had to. The baby was coming.”
“You couldn’t have waited ten minutes for the ambulance?” The voice was high and shrill: Deirdre Varley’s.
“Yeah,” someone in the crowd agreed, and the chant was taken up: Yeah, you couldn’t wait? Ten minutes? Really?
Daphne looked around incredulously. The people of the town that had taken her in, the first place she’d ever truly felt safe, were accusing her of something so awful that just thinking about it made tears spring to her eyes—she, who had never cried until that night, not since the day she’d learned that her father was dead. The funeral parlor blurred as she struggled to keep the tears from spilling.
“There wasn’t any time,” she insisted. “I love Janie—she’s like a sister to me. Why would I try to hurt her baby? What could I possibly stand to gain?”
“Power.” It was Doug again, commanding the room with a sinister sneer. “My son was going to be a prophet, but you wanted that power for yourself, just like you’ve wanted everything for yourself since you got here. So you killed him. And that bastard Owen helped.”
“It’s not true!” Daphne shouted. There was no stopping the tears—there were too many brimming behind her eyelids, pushing to escape. They poured down her cheeks and the crowd glared, seeing them as a confession and admission of guilt. The white-hot cloud of their fury choked the airless room, and she could see the malice in their narrowed eyes, in the grim set of their teeth. They had turned on her. “I wanted that baby to live more than anything. I tried to save him. Why would I lie?”
“Because you’re a liar!” Doug thundered. His eyes flashed fire as he took a step toward her, and a horrible premonition made her shrink back, chilling her blood. He was going to say the most awful thing yet, something that would turn the town against her for good. And she was powerless to stop him.
“You lied about everything,” he spat, “who you are, why you’re here, what you did back in Detroit.”
“No,” she whispered. Her heart, her blood, her breath all slowed to a stop as the cold hard truth of Doug’s accusation detonated inside her. He had found out. Somehow, impossibly, the person who most wanted to destroy her had discovered her terrible secr
et.
Doug’s neck cracked as he gazed triumphantly around the room, staring everyone down, daring them to contradict him. “There’s something you should all know about Daphne,” he said, “a little something she sort of forgot to mention when she arrived. She may have told you that her stepfather’s dead, but I bet she didn’t tell you why. It’s because she killed him.”
A gasp snaked through the crowd. Daphne’s knees turned to liquid; she fought through layers of gravity to stay upright.
“Oh yeah,” Doug laughed, his eyes fireballs of hate. “Straight through the heart with a knife. You can look it up in the papers if you don’t believe me . . . but unlike Daphne, I have no reason to lie.”
A shocked silence blanketed the congregation. Daphne felt it tug at her from the inside out, sucking her up like a vacuum, the pressure in her chest threatening to make her implode. Her worst nightmare had come true, and there was no waking from it. She’d been exposed for exactly what she was.
“Is this true?” Pastor Ted asked gravely.
“It . . .” she stammered. “I . . .”
“She’s lying!” Doug screamed before she could form the words. “She lies about everything: She’s a murderer and a liar!”
With that, the crowd seemed to erupt.
“Murderer!” a cracked female voice called from the back of the room.
“Liar!” someone answered, like a twisted game of Marco Polo.
“Baby-killer!” someone else howled.
The accusations flew thick and black as a flock of ravens, swooping in hysterical arcs from one side of the room to the other. Daphne felt like the words were physically attacking her, clawing at her skin, pecking at her eyes, goring a hole in her stomach from the inside.
“Please!” she cried over the noise, her hands above her head as if they could deflect their horrible words. “It wasn’t what you all think; it was in self-defense. The jury acquitted me!”
“Liar!” they screamed, mouths twisting around the word like rubber Halloween masks, fists in the air. Through the shouting and the chaos, the angry words hurled at her like rocks through a glass window, bruising her harder than any stone ever could, Daphne saw Uncle Floyd and Aunt Karen huddled together, looking small and weak and overwhelmed. Betrayed. She had meant to tell them the truth someday. Now she was too late.
But it was Deirdre Varley, not Floyd or Karen Peyton, who came barreling at her across the funeral home. “You killed my grandchild,” she wailed over the din. She staggered forward, skinny hands outstretched in anger, ready to close around Daphne’s throat. “My holy grandson, the prophet—you brought the devil to this town, and you killed him with your bare hands!”
Her kitten heel caught on the carpet and she went pitching forward, arms windmilling in a frenzy of black bouclé and crepey white flesh. She sprawled on the ground at Daphne’s feet, too overcome with grief and anger to stand, beating her puny fists on the floor and calling Daphne a baby-killer over and over again, her voice scraping at Daphne’s last tiny shred of self-control.
Vince pushed through the crowd to help her up, and she collapsed in his arms, wailing. He tried to drag her away, but she turned, narrow lips spewing recriminations. “I see you for what you are!” she crowed. “You’re the work of the devil—and my grandson’s blood is on your hands.”
“But it was on the tablet!” Daphne cried. She felt surrounded and trapped, hunted like an animal, ensnared by their hate. “I could read it, the Aramaic, all of it! It said there would be seven signs and wonders, and one of them would be the death of a firstborn.”
Her words cut a swath through the chaos, trailing silence behind.
“The tablet?” someone asked.
“From Elk Mountain?” another echoed.
“The ancient Aramaic?” a third intoned.
“Yes!” she sobbed, hands open in supplication before them, an offering, a plea. “I don’t know how or why, but I could read it. It said there would be the death of a firstborn, and a whole bunch of other stuff: a plague, a prophet, a battle between the Children of God and the Children of the Earth. I didn’t know the firstborn would be Janie’s—if I had, I would have tried to do something, I swear!”
“You could read the tablet?” Pastor Ted asked doubtfully.
Daphne nodded. She felt the disbelief radiating off of the crowd in waves, acrid contempt scenting the air, and she wished she’d said nothing. Across the room, she saw Uncle Floyd staring at her, bushy eyebrows high on his forehead. For a moment, there was the old glimmer of affection in his eyes, the tiniest trace of the admiration she’d earned by helping discover the oil and landing a job at the rig. He looked like he wanted to believe her. But he was the only one, and in his bereavement and confusion, his last gasp of faith wasn’t enough.
“I doubt they teach that in Detroit,” Vince Varley sneered.
“She’s a filthy liar,” Doug cut in, “just like I said.”
The congregation nodded, simmering, pumped up on coffee and fury, the storm of accusations a potent outlet for their misplaced, unprocessed grief. They shook and sneered, lashing at her with their eyes and words, a pack of wolves surrounding their prey.
Pastor Ted took stock of the situation. He approached Daphne cautiously, like a cop about to put down a rabid dog. “I think it’s best you leave,” he said solemnly. “This is a delicate time for our congregation, and we’d appreciate it if you left us alone to take care of our own.” His eyes were the coldest blue, and somehow his gentle, tactful authority hurt more than all their brutal name-calling combined.
“You’re asking me to leave?”
His nod was short, curt, the message unsaid but clear: not asking. Telling.
“And don’t come back!” someone shouted.
“And take your dirty baby-killing boyfriend with you!” another shrilled.
“Go away!” the crowd chorused. “Go away! Leave us alone! Don’t come back!”
Her eyes, blurred with tears, searched the angry faces and landed on the Peytons. They clutched each other, trembling, staring at her with looks of hopeless shock. She met their eyes and raised her eyebrows slightly, a question, a plea. But it was too little, too late. Karen buried her head in Floyd’s chest, her shoulders shaking, and after a moment Floyd, too, forced himself to turn away.
She had no other choice. The community she’d begun to think of as hers, the town she had started to call home, the family she’d become a part of, were all rejecting her, throwing her out the door like yesterday’s trash.
“Okay,” she said simply.
She turned and walked out the door, her back to everyone and everything she’d come to love.
MILK. She was full of milk, drenched with it from the inside. It felt like milk had replaced all the liquid in her body, her blood, sweat, and tears. Sweet milk, white milk, inside of her, everywhere.
Milk filled her chest, pulsing inside her breasts until they were sore. It leaked from her nipples, leaving slick white trails inside her bra, leaking through until it felt like she was swimming in it, drowning in it, immersed in a pale white sea.
It was for him, but he wasn’t there.
Where was he, her son, Jeremiah, the prophet? She’d given him a good name, a Bible name, a name worthy of the burden he’d bear, the light he’d bring to the world. She had carried the name along with him in her body for months, knowing she had to see him first to be sure.
She’d seen him. She’d been sure. But where was he?
She’d seen him emerge from her body, into the world, Jeremiah, her son, the prophet. But he was gone, hiding somewhere, taken from her, leaving her full of milk, bursting.
She ached for the feeling of his tiny mouth suckling at the nourishment she had to offer, the secret formula of motherhood. Without his mouth her body was wasted. Her arms should have been holding him, so there was nothing to do with her arms. Her l
ap should have been rocking him, so there was nothing to do with her legs. Her mouth should have been kissing him, so there was nothing to do with her mouth, no words to say, no reason to speak, not until they brought her baby back to her. Her ears, listening for his cries, heard nothing else. Her eyes, watching for him, were empty to any other sight.
Her mind was an open wound. Her son, her baby, gone.
There were rooms full of light and rooms full of darkness, people speaking to her and dressing her and holding her hand. There was a needle in her arm and then there wasn’t, there was a blanket around her and then there was dawn. There were nurses and a doctor, her mama and daddy and Daphne, all crying. There was her own bed, there were phone calls, there was a ride in a long black car, and then they were all outside, sitting in rows, and Pastor Ted was speaking, but nobody was saying, “I believe.”
There was a wooden box, no bigger than a shoe box, that they buried in the ground.
Something was wrong, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they bring her baby back to her, that Jeremiah empty her of her endless supply of milk. Where was he? Where was her son?
There had been yelling, accusations, harsh words flung back and forth across a room that was all beige. So much yelling. She couldn’t understand, and she didn’t care, not unless it would bring Jeremiah back. After the yelling they’d taken her home, her mama and daddy, silent, shaking, gray. She had sat somewhere, looking at something, for a few minutes or a few hours, heavy, liquid, bulging with milk, and then Doug was there.
“Everyone’s hanging out up at the house,” he said, standing in front of her, his father’s elk head belt buckle level with her eyes. “So get yourself together. Let’s go.”
A flannel shirt above the belt buckle, his thick neck, a scowl. Doug. Jeremiah’s father. Did he know where their baby was?
“I said, let’s go. C’mon. Don’t you want to do your makeup or whatever?”
Her body remembered a motion from what felt like long ago. Like moving a pile of rocks, she shook her head: one turn to the left, one to the right.
End Times Page 24