Mighty and Strong (The Righteous)

by Michael Wallace

  5. Is there a place for a doubter within a religious community?

  The Devil's Deep (Excerpt: Chapter One)

  by Michael Wallace

  Chapter One:

  It was ten minutes to midnight when Rosa Solorio entered the darkened room to kidnap the retarded man.

  She found Chad Lett twitching in his bed, his arms curled into clubs, biceps stretched like cords. His hands formed claws. Muscles strained on his neck and his eyes fluttered. No sound came from his mouth, but it grimaced as if in pain.

  “Dios mio,” Rosa whispered under her breath.

  She knew Chad’s every spasm and moan. Three other beds lined the room. They held the other residents of Team Smile and after five years she could recognize each of their cries, moans, or screams from the other side of the facility.

  But eighty minutes had passed since night meds. Team Smile took theirs ground into applesauce and spooned back until reflex made them swallow, and one of Chad’s pills was a muscle relaxant. He should have been asleep by now. Instead, that grimace, the right eye rolling, but the left staring straight ahead.

  Rosa hesitated, doubting everything. Every question she’d asked herself, every time she’d studied Chad on nights like this, his face in shadows cast by the sterile, fluorescent light coming from the hallway. Maybe she was wrong.

  She couldn’t pull her gaze from Chad’s eye. Not the rolled-back right eye—the evil eye, she thought—but the left. The living eye.

  It had begun as a fantasy, spun in her own head. She’d dreamed about Chad Lett, not the profoundly retarded man warehoused at Riverwood, but a man who had walked by her side along the beach.

  “Are you sure?” the man in her dreams had asked. “Absolutely sure? Look me in the eye, Rosa. Look! Then tell me that you’re sure I’m gone.”

  And she found herself watching his eyes while she bathed him or fed him. The right showed only the glassy stare so typical of the lowest-functioning residents. But she couldn’t help but watch the left, wondering and afraid, as it blinked.

  She stood over his bed one shift after Riverwood sank into its nighttime slumber. “Are you alive? Blink if you can understand me.”

  And the left eye had answered. Blink.

  He was alive. Not just a body that breathed and a heart that beat while the brain sat cold and still. But a man, alive inside that body. A man who had just blinked his answer. As if to say, Yes, I’m alive. I’m alive and trapped in this hell. For God’s sake, help me!

  “Forgive me!” she cried. “I didn’t know. I swear, I didn’t.”

  And still, it took two weeks to work up the courage to take Chad away from this place. Yet, here she was. Ready. “You’ll get help,” she whispered. “I promise.”

  Rosa had five minutes before Anne Wistrom finished her cigarette break and returned to the nurse station across the hall. Rosa liked Anne and her cynical sense of humor. And she’d use a few words of Spanish, easy stuff like hola and buenos días, but it was the effort that won her points. But Rosa couldn’t let the nurse see her carting Chad off in the middle of the night.

  She brought Chad’s wheelchair from the closet, then untied his restraints. Rosa lowered the bar on his bed and maneuvered the man into position to lift him to the chair.

  Most of the bed-ridden residents at Riverwood Care Center—those handful so profoundly retarded they would never walk or feed themselves, wishful thinking and years of therapy aside—lived in wasted shells and could be lifted easily from bed to wheelchair and back again. Not Chad. The spasms kept his muscles strong. It didn’t help that he kept twitching as she half-dragged, half-dropped him into the chair. She paused to catch her breath and listen for sounds from the hallway before fastening Chad’s head restraints and wheeling him out.

  She heard the floor cleaner down the west wing and knew that this early in the shift, the other night janitor would still be loading sheets into the wash, also in that direction. So she took Chad toward the east wing doors. The hall was silent but for the squeak of the chair’s wheels on the floor and an occasional cough from the darkened rooms on either side of the hall.

  A moment later Rosa pushed Chad into the chill February night. The cold sucked the warmth from her lungs. She wheeled him down the ramp, beneath icicles and a light, dry snow that glittered as it hung around the porch light. What had possessed her to move from the warm, perpetual summer of the Osa Peninsula to the mountains of Vermont?

  Rosa’s father was a fisherman. Rosa’s grandfather had been a fisherman and her brother was a fisherman. But from the time she was a child, her father had promised her something else. “You are a bright girl. Muy lista. God means for you to be something else than a fisherman’s wife, or a maid for American tourists.” A doctor, Papá decided eventually. That’s what she’d be.

  He thought she was in the United States, studying. That had been the arrangement with Dr. Pardo. And in her letters, she always told him about her classes and the things her professors said. And then, when she couldn’t stand to lie any longer, she told him how she was struggling with chemistry and calculus, thinking she could fail the supposed classes and thus be forced to drop out of school.

  He’d returned encouraging letters. Don’t give up, hija. You’re a smart girl. As smart as any of the others. I believe in you. He returned the money she sent the family, urging her to hire a tutor.

  She couldn’t bear to let him down, so when the end of the semester came at the school she did not attend, she wrote back, exulting that she’d passed both classes she had not been failing, even earning a B+ in calculus. Oh, he was so proud.

  Chad was calm now, but still awake. His eyes stared blankly to one side, where his head rested against the head shield. He gave no sign of noticing the cold. She’d seen him take shots without flinching. Once, a careless therapist put his chair too close to the radiator and his stocking feet had burned badly enough to raise blisters, all without movement or sound.

  To all the world Chad Lett looked like any other low-functioning resident of Riverwood—one of the ruder therapists called them the slugs—only less responsive to light and pain. Only now, she knew differently. She imagined that he felt every prick, burn, and pinch.

  Rosa checked for Dr. Pardo’s car in the back lot and breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t see his Mercedes. She’d told Pardo about Chad’s blinking and he’d urged her to keep quiet. And why should that be a surprise? It was Pardo who had promised Rosa’s father to pay for her schooling in the United States, and that had been a lie. Why would he care about one paralyzed man?

  Rosa wheeled Chad away from the globe lights on the end of the building, then looked beyond the gate to the street. There was an SUV parked down the street, by the park, but she couldn’t see anyone inside.

  She heard feet crunching through snow. Rosa turned quickly, her breath coming in a puff of steam that disintegrated in a halo around the globe light. A storm had dropped eighteen inches in late January, but since then it had been cold and dry. Under the eaves of the building, the untrammeled snow had eroded underneath, leaving a crust through which someone walked.

  Who? Not staff, surely. A resident? Maybe Jason, coming to check the break room door and look for half-smoked cigarettes. But why walk across the snow instead of cutting through the courtyard? Besides, Jason knew he’d catch hell if anyone caught him out of bed at this hour. Doctor Pardo.

  The crunching grew louder and a man emerged from the shadows. She let out a second breath, this one of relief. It wasn’t Doctor Pardo.

  “You said to meet in the street,” Rosa said.

  “Thought I’d have a look around while I was waiting.”

  The answer made no sense. Ten below and he was walking through the snow in expensive leather shoes and pressed pants. To have a look around? Her heart was still thumping and she just nodded.

  She made to turn Chad around, but the man stopped her. “No, don’t turn him. I want you to tell me, first.”

  So Rosa repeated what she’d tol
d him on the phone earlier that day, how Chad could blink answers to her questions. “And to think that everyone here thinks he’s retarded.”

  “Who else knows?”

  “Just you and Dr. Pardo. He’ll hurt me if he finds out I told you. I know he will. In spite of everything he’s done to…help me.”

  The man just nodded, and this surprised her. Surely, he’d be upset or show some emotion. Instead, he looked thoughtful and eyed Rosa in a way that made her squirm. Maybe he didn’t believe her. Rosa reached into the pocket of her scrubs and pulled out a small flashlight. “Here, let me show you.”

  The man took her wrist with a strong grip. “That won’t be necessary.”

  The grip hurt. “What are you doing? Let go.”

  And then she saw something in his other hand and her apprehension turned to fear. It looked like a police officer’s baton, but with two prongs on the end.

  “Sorry, Rosa,” he said. “Sorry you got involved. Pardo shouldn’t have brought you here. I told him that. It was a big mistake.”

  She turned toward the building, but he jabbed the baton into her side. An electric jolt sizzled through her body. She dropped to the ground, muscles convulsing. Her body writhed. She remembered Chad in his bed, every muscle straining and the silent grimace on his face.

  Only Rosa wasn’t silent. She screamed, and when the electricity began to tingle out the ends of her toes and fingers and her scalp, she screamed again.

  Another jolt, and this time her attacker was on top of her in the snow. He took duct tape from the pocket of his coat and taped her mouth, wrapping it around her head several times. When he finished and she could no longer scream, barely breathe, even, through the snow choking her nostrils, he started on her hands.

  As he did, he spoke soothing words, as if talking to a child. “I didn’t mean this to happen. You never should’ve got involved with Pardo.”

  He climbed off her, then jabbed her again with the electric prod, and again after he lifted her to her feet. Her legs dropped out from under her, but he grabbed her and kept her from falling. Chad still sat in his wheelchair a few feet away, wearing nothing but pajamas and a thin blanket. Rosa couldn’t feel the cold through the burn and tingle of electric shocks.

  The man gave her one last jolt, then tucked the stick in his belt and lifted Rosa over his shoulder with a grunt. He made his way toward the gate.

  “I am sorry,” he repeated. “I hope you know that.”

  -end-