by James Dobson
“Yes, please,” he said.
“What do you know about the wrongful death lawsuit against NEXT the courts finally wrapped up this past January?”
He probably knew more than Ms. Winthrop. It was the case that had kept his mom’s estate out of reach for over a year, which in turn had forced him to drop out of college to work for Reverend Grandpa. By the time the case finally did end, releasing his inheritance, Matthew had already descended into the dark place.
“I know that it put us pretty far behind the targets established by the Youth Initiative,” he said, echoing the drum fiscal conservatives had been beating for the prior six months.
“That’s right,” she said, “and put increased pressure on my department to come up with innovative ways to make up for lost ground.”
Matthew suddenly understood why he had been recommended. Who better to help figure out how to grow the pool of volunteers than a top recruiter at MedCom Associates?
“We introduced a new home-based-transition kit several months back, something we had hoped to make available last year. The lawsuit kept us from taking it to market due to the usual oversight headaches. But now we are free and clear.”
“How’s that going?” he asked. “I mean, are many volunteers using the kits?”
“Not as many as hoped, which leads to our present situation. We expect whoever wins the upcoming election to ask for more aggressive strategies. Both parties know we’ve got a major problem on our hands. Other than the initial wave of transitions that included all of the low-hanging fruit, we’ve fallen behind on both projected revenue and savings in every quarter.”
“Low-hanging fruit?” Matthew asked, unfamiliar with the phrase.
“Easy pickings. People who were eager for the Youth Initiative to pass because they were sick or depressed. They flooded into our clinics during the first few quarters. Most volunteers since have required a bit of convincing.”
“Right,” he said knowingly.
“Which leads to the project. We’ve learned that families need more than a self-serve kit. No matter how much they agree it’s in everyone’s best interest for a loved one to volunteer, very few family members seem willing to actually stick the needle into an arm in order to inject the serum.”
“PotassiPass,” Matthew added to suggest fluency.
“That’s right,” Serena said with a smile. “So we’ve decided to test a new service that is more hands-on. We believe families will be willing to spend part of their inheritance on something we are calling a transition companion.”
She paused, watching Matthew’s reaction to the label. “We think it sounds warm and supportive,” she added.
“It does,” he agreed.
“If we’re right, the extra fee will more than cover the healthy bonus we intend to pay our client representatives. And if we’re right, everyone wins. We should see a higher ratio of volunteers transitioning their resources to the young while reducing government entitlement outlays, all funded by family members willing to sacrifice a few thousand dollars for a service that makes the much less expensive at-home option seem more viable.”
Matthew sat quietly, trying to imagine whether he would have used such a service when his mother volunteered. Would it have made the decision easier or not? His first reaction suggested not. There was something safely abstract about driving to a clinic where medical professionals handled the procedure and the disposal process. A highly trained transition specialist seemed professional and hygienic. Transition companion sounded cozy and slack.
“What about the organ donations and disposal process?” he wondered aloud.
“Nothing would change on that front. That process is already working well in most instances. Of course, the transition companion would handle scheduling disposal instead of relying on the family; another benefit to the service that will make the local authorities happy.”
“Why’s that?”
“People are only human, even volunteers. They forget to schedule the cleanup, or enter the wrong date. Officers seem to dislike calls about a decomposing corpse in the neighbor’s bathtub.”
“So the job doesn’t include disposal?”
“Goodness no!” said Serena. “The process runs more like an assembly line. Just as the recruiter will hand off to a transition companion, the transition companion hands off to a member of our follow-up team. We actually have more follow-up personnel than we can keep busy. Our challenge has been finding candidates qualified for the earlier steps.”
She took a sip of her drink before continuing.
“The time-consuming part will be spending time with clients who, on occasion, might get cold feet.” Serena paused to retrieve Matthew’s résumé, then eyed it briefly before looking back in his direction. “We need someone right away to cover the Front Range area. What do you say?”
Matthew realized he had been offered the job. “I’m flattered,” he said, although disappointed would have been more accurate. He didn’t know what he had expected a research and development job to look like. Certainly more prestigious than the role Ms. Winthrop had described. A comfortable office with a window view? Travel to and from New York, Los Angeles, or D.C.? Hardly realistic, he knew, for a man with such a thin résumé. But one could dream.
“You’ll want compensation details,” Serena was saying while handing him a slip of paper.
Twice his current monthly income plus a signing bonus!
“You’ll also receive three percent of the transition estate value for each client served,” she explained.
He mentally tabulated the possibilities. The job, while beneath the stature he had imagined, would provide the funds needed to get back to school twice as fast as his present path. He tried concealing his enthusiasm, but his face betrayed an eager acceptance.
“We would like you to start right away.”
“Not a problem,” he said.
“In fact,” she continued, “I have your first assignment with me now.”
Odd. A first assignment prepared in advance of his first interview?
She handed him a sealed envelope. “Inside you will find a series of confidential details required to access our Research and Development hub. Simply enter the pseudonym listed and then the pass-code. You’ll find several training videos and the specifics needed to begin.”
“Thank you,” he said hesitantly. “But why a pseudonym?”
“This project is highly confidential, Mr. Adams,” she explained. “The company asks that every member of my team use an alias.”
“Why?”
“Plausible deniability.”
“For whom?”
“For both the contractor and the company.”
“Contractor?” Matthew asked. “Not employee?”
“Not technically,” she said. “None of us is an actual employee of NEXT. Nor do we use our actual names.”
“But…”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Adams. This is how things are done when dealing with government contract work. Any disgruntled family member or religious nut case can initiate a frivolous lawsuit. We’ve found this approach protects everyone involved.”
He felt more at ease. “Makes sense, I guess.”
She stood, indicating the interview had ended. Matthew accepted her hand.
“Thank you, Serena,” he said, suddenly curious about her real name.
“Thank you, Mr. Adams,” she responded warmly. “And welcome to the team.”
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Julia looked frantically toward the faint trace of light above the surface. Her lungs wanted to burst, desperate for a gulp of life-giving oxygen that might rescue her from a watery death. She looked down toward the darkness to see who, or what, clung to her ankle like an anchor pulling her deeper.
Then she remembered: the shadowy image of a man extending his hand toward her as she drifted farther away from his comforting presence, her desperate, angry plea for help in his direction, and the terrifying laug
hter of an evil presence summoning from beneath.
She sensed a sudden release as the young man beneath her loosened his grip and began sinking toward a shadowy grave. Her last glimpse was of his descending fist clenched in bitter defiance toward the masculine figure above, the one toward whom Julia now felt herself ascending.
Julia’s head shot out of the water like a rocket launching toward the heavens. She inhaled urgently, gratefully, her arms flailing like unsynchronized paddles rowing in the direction of the man’s extended hand. Her panic waned in rhythm with her strokes as she finally moved close enough to focus on the man’s image, which had been a mere shadow in the distance. Her father? No. And yes.
If she had been able to see his face she knew it would offer a welcoming smile, his relief nearly matching her own. But she saw only his hand, fixed in the same posture of rescue it had held throughout her ordeal. With a last stretch of hope Julia felt him accept her fingers before engulfing them in his firm grasp of safety.
Then she felt her body jolt downward. She tightened her grip in reaction to the painful force. Julia had suddenly become the prize in a tug-of-war between competing destinies. Above, reunion. Below, despair.
She looked up toward the hand tightening itself around her own, giving her the confidence she needed to glance beneath.
A different face. Not the defiant boy’s. A crazed man’s, his eyes eager for adventure, yet filled with fear.
Julia extended her free hand toward him. But he refused it, instead jerking at her leg with greater intensity. He didn’t want rescue. He wanted a companion.
Didn’t he hear the diabolical laughter bellowing from the depths?
Couldn’t he feel the biting chill of waters teeming with cruelty?
She kicked frantically in an effort to snub the mad invitation. The man pulled harder until her chin barely cleared the surface.
Julia turned her eyes back toward her rescuer as she felt an ever-so-slight loosening of her grip. Then she woke at the sudden glow of a bedside lamp.
“Shhh,” Troy was saying, leaning on one elbow while gently caressing his wife’s anxious cheek. “It’s OK. You’re here, with me, at home.”
She looked into her husband’s half-closed eyes, trying to place herself. “Home?” she said through the sound of her pounding heart.
Troy pulled back the covers while moving into a seated position on the edge of the bed. He lifted his leg to inspect the damage. “You kicked me something fierce!” he said while rubbing an abused shin.
“Kicked you?”
“And yelled at me,” Troy added. “Or yelled at someone, anyway.”
She whispered an apology in her husband’s direction while reaching toward the nightstand drawer that had once held a pad and pencil for quick retrieval whenever ideas, or nightmares, invaded her sleep. Then she remembered. The dreams had stopped nearly two years prior, about the same time she met Troy. She recalled the relief after months of restless sleep and the countless mornings staring at a growing list of nocturnal echoes.
MAN
SHADOW
FEAR
ANGER
ABANDONED
“Not at all what I was expecting,” Troy continued, confirming Julia’s attack hadn’t drawn blood.
Julia looked in his direction. “Expecting? What do you mean expecting?”
He flopped back onto his pillow. “Or rather hoping. I thought you wanted to…” he paused, then redirected. “I sort of woke up when you took my hand. I started to come in your direction to run my finger along your thigh, you know, the way you like. But before I could fully wake I felt your foot slamming into my leg. Then I heard you shouting something incoherent like ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Yellow snow.’”
“‘Let me go,’” Julia remembered. “I was shouting ‘Let me go.’”
He rolled back onto his side. “Hey, Jewel,” he said with affection, “what is it? You look pretty shaken.”
She calmed her breathing back to a near-normal pattern before forcing a harmless grin in Troy’s direction. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a silly dream.”
It was what she had always told herself back when the same nightmare dogged her night after night for nearly a year. Well, not really the same nightmare, but close enough to prompt the questions now invading her mind. Was it really possible for one person to inherit the dream of another? Was the similarity between her nightmare and that of Antonio Santos pure coincidence, or had it been a mysterious invitation toward the life she now inhabited? Back then she would have never even considered dating a man like Troy. Sure, he was handsome. Yes, he treated her like the “jewel” he called her. But he was also in the enemy’s camp, or more precisely, defending ideas she’d once considered hostile to women. What a difference a few years could make. What difference, she wondered, might the dream have made?
The earlier dream, Julia eventually discovered, had begun on the last day of young Antonio Santos’s life. He’d died in a nearby transition clinic after recording details of his own dream in a journal. But her earlier dream, unlike this one, ended before Julia could resurface, before she could flounder her way toward the mysterious man, and before the madman’s hand tried pulling her back down.
“Go back to sleep,” she said while patting her husband’s chest. “I’m fine.”
“You’re sure?” Troy said while his head sunk back into a welcoming pillow. “I’ll stay…up…if…you….want…”
She smiled at Troy’s failed attempt at chivalry. He needed to rest after two grueling days on the river. So did Julia. But she knew that her mind wouldn’t cooperate. Notepad or no notepad, she needed to sort her troubled thoughts.
* * *
Julia slipped gingerly out from under the sheets to avoid rewaking Troy. Circling the bed to tap off his lamp, she found her floral robe hanging on a chair. Troy preferred the sheer gowns she’d worn before Amanda’s arrival, but she needed something a bit more practical now that they had accepted the promotion from newlywed lovers to respectable parents.
She stopped at the bedroom door and looked back toward the man whose admiring eyes and caressing fingers remained as thrilling as on the night they had wed. More so than those of any of the guys Julia dated before Troy. Men had always found Julia attractive, if a bit intimidating. They saw her as she intended to be seen: successful, articulate, and confident. But after a night or two in her bed they showed little interest in her mind or soul. Not that she could blame them. She didn’t believe in the soul back then. But that didn’t change the fact that she had one, and that it yearned for a completing opposite.
She knew immediately that Troy was different. He treated her like a prize to cherish rather than a toy to use. And he seemed sincerely proud of all she had accomplished. Or, rather, all that she had become: a loving wife who saw her husband as a partner to support rather than a competitor to beat, a caring mom doing her best to give Amanda the life she deserved, and a woman who courageously spent her journalistic reputation on a cause more important than popular prestige.
That’s how Troy saw her, anyway. But it wasn’t what Julia knew herself to be.
She knew herself as a wife who fought back the impulse to resent a growing dependence upon her husband’s affirmation. She had once been the most independent woman imaginable: winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a celebrated columnist with twelve million weekly readers and a long line of editors eager to contract the next feature story by the famous Julia Davidson. She shouldn’t need his approval or crave his affection. But she did.
Julia also knew how often she wanted to respond to Amanda’s many tantrums by throwing the ungrateful girl out of the house. If not for a deep sense of pride that kept her from quitting anything, ever, Julia would have abandoned the whole motherhood gig long before now.
And Julia knew how much she missed the kind of professional recognition she had once enjoyed. How often she asked herself whether it had been a mistake to take up the bright spots cause with such abandon. Sure, it had helped K
evin gain his current level of influence on the national stage. But it had also lowered her several notches on a journalistic food chain on which the slightest pro-breeder sentiment was considered self-evidently idiotic.
It was Troy, not Julia, who had been the hero of their partnership. He had risked marrying a woman who barely believed in the concept of marriage, let alone Christian marriage.
It was Troy, not Julia, who had initiated their exploration of Christian faith. She’d meant it when she said she wanted to join him on the quest, assuming they would study a philosophy, not encounter a person. A Redeemer. A Lord. But they had. And she couldn’t be more grateful, now. But then? It could have gone either way.
And it was Troy, not Julia, who had first modeled in his own life what he most admired in Jesus. “Lose your life to find it.” Troy had found meaning in his own life by giving himself away. First to Kevin. Then to Julia. And now to Amanda.
A vague sense of fear stabbed Julia’s heart as she pulled the bedroom door quietly closed behind her. The returning dream had some ominous meaning, possibly tied to Amanda. If their enemy was indeed the kind of prowling lion Pastor Alex described, he must hate their desire to give the orphaned girl a proper home. What if Amanda’s future depended upon Julia’s ability to hold firmly to the mysterious man’s hand, whoever he might be? What if the conflict she and Amanda had been experiencing was a warning, or a call to increased vigilance? And what if Julia, despite her best efforts, couldn’t muster the kind of self-sacrifice required? Winning accolades from the journalistic elite had been easy compared to earning the trust and respect of a hurting adolescent girl.
Or was the dream about Troy? He’d been trying to garner support for Kevin’s proposal out of a deep belief that opposing the Youth Initiative “strikes at the heart of our enemy’s strategy.” Maybe he was right. Perhaps the sadistic laughter rising from the dark depths meant that her husband was at risk.
Whatever the meaning, one thing was certain. The dream had brought a sense of dread, as if something dark and menacing was on the horizon. And it was up to her, if possible, to prevent it.