A Life Intercepted

by Charles Martin

  There was silence in the announcer’s box. In the background, a single clap started. The radio announcer picked up on the source. “Folks, that single clap you hear is Dunwoody Jackson, Matthew Rising’s former center and agent. Those two have been friends a long time.” Wood’s clap was followed by a second. Joined by a third. Then hundreds. Then thousands. Soon it was raucous. The announcer said, “For you folks at home, I’ve never seen this before. Dalton Rogers has stepped away from Audrey Rising, in an attempt to give her the spotlight, so to speak, and when he did so, both sides of this stadium have taken to their feet and given her a long and loud ovation. The cameras have moved in and she is surrounded on the fifty by news media and other personnel. That’s a pretty good smile right there.”

  The second announcer chimed in. “And although it’s just a guess, I’d say those are tears of joy and not sorrow.”

  The first announcer picked it back up. “I don’t know what Mrs. Rising is feeling at this moment, but the look on her face tells me it’s pretty good. For those of you who don’t know, Dee changed his number this year to number 8 in honor of his friend and coach, Matthew Rising. Oh look—she’s just walked over to Dee and hugged him.” A pause. “Audrey Rising has taken off the coat she was wearing to reveal that she is also wearing a number 8 jersey.” A pause. At this point, the first announcer began questioning the second. “Ken, I can’t tell for sure, but is that an older jersey that Mrs. Rising is wearing? Looks like it’s got some wear and tear on it.”

  “Yep, George. It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a jersey in here like that one. It’s, I’d say, at least a decade old.” Another pause. “Folks, we’ve just received confirmation up in the press box that Audrey Rising is wearing a number 8 jersey that is more than a decade old, which could make it Matthew Rising’s jersey. And she’s just turned around where we can see the back and there are two names on the back of the jersey. The first is ‘Rising’ and the other just below it is ‘Rogers.’ Wow. That’s quite a statement. No matter what you think about the events of the past, this is a strong moment for that lady and that young man. She’s is going on record, telling everyone she believes Dalton Rogers is of the same caliber as Matthew Rising. And that’s saying a lot. During his career, she was a vocal, animated, and passionate advocate for her then husband. Even earning the name ‘Spider Monkey.’ For those of you who don’t know, Audrey Rising is, or was, I’m not quite sure, the wife of Matthew Rising. Following his trial, she disappeared and it’s only been in the last few weeks that she has resurfaced in the public eye.”

  The second announcer interrupted the first. “Yeah, George, it would appear that she has spent the last decade or so of her life selflessly raising Dalton Rogers.”

  George continued, “Evidently, she’s done quite a job. That lady right there has my deep respect and admiration. She did then and she does now. To know what she’s been through, and yet here she is, this is really something special.” The announcer paused while they listened to the cheer coming out of the bleachers. They let us listen while the stadium roared. One side yelled, “Dalton,” while the other side answered with “Audrey.” The announcer continued, “I’ve covered a lot of games, and I’ve never seen anything like this one. This is one for the books. Folks, we’ll be right back.”

  I smiled in delight. Not because of my part in it, but because I was proud of Audrey. Especially when she, Ray, and I were the only three that knew the truth of the birth certificate. There might be a fourth, but I couldn’t be certain of that.

  Gage propped his feet up on my cell bars, peeled the wrapper off a Snickers bar, handed me half, smiled, and didn’t say a word. No one did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Sunday morning rolled around, and Gage tapped on my cell door. He was not carrying a football. He said, “You got visitors.”

  I sat up. “Wood?”

  “And your wife.”

  His tone of voice told me this was not a social visit. I stood up. “They okay?”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it.”

  I extended my hands and he cuffed me, led me out of my cell, out of our building, down a razor-wired fence, and into the cement-and-steel building with few windows that we affectionately called Oz. Inside, somebody behind some wall or curtain controlled all the levers to our lives.

  I walked into a large room with several stainless steel tables and stools all bolted to the floor. The tables were bare, no windows, nothing that could come loose and be used as a weapon in the event that someone in the room got into a disagreement. Gage pointed at a table and I sat. He slid the chain of my cuffs into an eyelet in the center of the table and locked it. This kept my hands visible and on top of the table at all times. Around us, multiple cameras recorded our every move and sound. They’d been used more than once to aid in the truth of a case, and evidence discovered here could be used either for or against any of us.

  Gage turned to me. “I am required to tell you that you are not allowed to receive anything from anyone and you will be strip-searched when you leave here regardless.”

  I stared around Gage at the door, waiting for Audrey. “Got it.”

  Gage leaned in. “Given what you’ve gone through, it has been suggested by the eyes behind those cameras that we put you on suicide watch.” He glanced up in the direction of the cameras. “That said, you’d do well to control your reaction to whatever walks through that door.”

  “Thanks.”

  Gage left me alone with the cold, echoing silence of the stainless room. In a few minutes he pushed open the door and appeared with Wood in tow, followed by Audrey. My heart jumped into my throat.

  Dee was not with them.

  Locked to the table, I could only partially stand, making my greeting rather pathetic. Gage nodded at me and backed into a corner. Present but not.

  Wood walked over and hugged me. He was teary. Audrey stood at a distance. Her eyes were puffy and she’d been crying. A lot. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and her hands were tucked up inside the sleeves. She looked cold. The dove hung outside the sweatshirt and glistened under the reflection of the fluorescent bulbs above. I spoke softly to her. “Wood said you been taking care of Tux.” She nodded. I tried to get over the uncomfortable part of this. “He likes tuna with a little mayonnaise and a few cut-up pickles. Loves pickles.”

  Wood spoke for her. “He’s turned into a pretty good watchdog. Anybody peeks in her window and he goes ballistic. ’Bout bit my head off when I picked her up.”

  Audrey wasted no time. “Have you talked to Dee?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “What?”

  Wood spoke for the both of them. “He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, he’s gone?”

  “This was lying on her breakfast table this morning.” Wood slid a folder across the table. It was Dalton Roger’s folder that Audrey kept under her bed. Across the front, written in Dee’s handwriting, it read:

  You should have told me. You both should.

  Wood looked at Audrey and waited. A moment passed before she spoke. “After the game last night, I fell asleep with the light on. After he went out with his friends, Dee must have come by to check on me. Sometime after midnight.” She rubbed her hands together. “He’s been doing that since…” She waved her hand across the prison then continued. “All I can guess is that he turned out the light and somehow saw the folder because—” She proffered the folder, suggesting I open it.

  I opened it. His birth certificate was missing. I looked up, first at him, then her. “That’s not good.”

  The cold, hard environment of my world matched that reflected by Audrey. She was doing everything she could to keep it together.

  I’d never felt so helpless in my entire life.

  We sat in silence. None of us knew what to say. Audrey broke the silence. When the words came out, they were soft—as if the speaking of them hurt her. “He bought a train ticket early yesterda
y morning with my Visa.”

  “Where?”

  She paused but wouldn’t look at me. “New York.”

  I felt like someone had kicked me in the gut.

  She continued, “He won’t answer his cell phone.” Audrey looked away as the tears rolled down her cheeks.

  My hands were tied. Literally. I offered what I could. “I can petition the prison to allow me to call her, but that’ll take a few days at the soonest. And… there’s no guarantee that they’ll grant my request.” I shrugged. “He’s not technically family, so it’s not classified as an emergency.” I looked at Wood. “Wood, you mind—?”

  He cut me off. “Wouldn’t take my call.”

  That left it to Audrey. Wood knew what I was thinking and answered for her. “Wouldn’t take hers either.”

  I searched in vain for comfort—to say or do anything that would ease Audrey’s pain. Helplessness bled into despair. We sat in the quiet a few minutes. Behind them, Gage quietly cleared his throat and held up five fingers, as in, five minutes remaining.

  As the clock wound down, the door opened. It surprised all of us, Gage included. The warden appeared; his face expressionless. He pushed open the door, held it, and motioned someone to follow him.

  Dee walked in. Followed by Ginger.

  I felt my fists tighten and, out of the corner of my eye, I witnessed a visceral bodily reaction from Audrey. I slid my hand a few inches across the table, rattling my chains in the process, and gently slid my hand beneath Audrey’s. To my surprise, she let me.

  Dee scanned the room and then immediately walked over to Audrey and hugged her. “It’s okay, Mama. I’m sorry.”

  If ever a voice spoke everything a heart needed to hear in a single word, it was that one, Mama. He kissed her cheek and held her, letting the hug reinforce what his mouth had spoken. He then hugged me. “How you holding up?”

  “Better now.”

  Ginger stood at a distance, a shadow cutting her face in half. Dee held the chair for Audrey and motioned for her to sit. She did. Dee sat next to her. This left Ginger standing and alone.

  Ginger was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. She looked tired. She wore no makeup, had no bodyguards and no entourage. Gage appeared next to the table, and the warden looked at me and then Audrey. He then spoke to Gage. “All the time they need.”

  Ginger approached the table in much the same way Tux had first approached me. Yet to make eye contact with anyone, her eyes were bloodshot and scouring the floor. The warden spoke to Ginger. “Just signal when you want out.”

  Ginger looked up at me, and then Audrey. She pointed at the only available stool at the round table. “May I?”

  Wood had bowed up and the veins in his left arm had popped up like rose vines beneath his skin. She sat, folded her hands, and finally spoke. Her voice was broken.

  As was she.

  The woman who sat before us was not the woman I’d witnessed on the stage of the courthouse. She started, “When I was a girl, long before any of us ever met, my dad—” She bit her lip. “He did things.” She shook her head and paused. A long pause. “After… he told me no one would ever want me. I believed him. How could they? So I became the girl that all of you met in high school.” She attempted a smile. “Ginger.” She rolled one thumb over the other. As she spoke, Audrey had slid her other hand on top of mine, now holding both of mine with both of hers. Her hands were trembling. Ginger continued, “I told myself that everything would be better if I could convince someone of value to love me.” A shrug. “Someone of the highest value. I made my way through the boys, thinking each one would erase… but they didn’t.” She looked up at me as a tear trickled down. “Then I met you. And you… you were kind to me. And to make matters worse, you didn’t want anything from me. That made me only want you… want to be yours… more.” She sunk her head in her hands, trying to catch her breath. Doing so exposed her fingers. Her nails had been bit to the quick.

  She returned to me. “The night I came to your room in high school with the ring—” She laughed. “There I stood, offering you what I thought you’d never refuse, and you did. I left there thinking I wasn’t good enough for you.” Her eyes bounced to Audrey. “You’d given your heart to another.” Another pause. “I left your room and went to a party, where I got introduced to a drug I’d never used. I woke up with bruise marks on my neck—” She paused. “And pregnant.” A longer pause. “To this day, I do not know the identity of the father.”

  She let this sink in, then returned her gaze to me. “I blamed you. And that’s when I decided that if I couldn’t have you, I’d destroy you. You had the world at your fingertips. More power than one person should ever command. I had nothing. My life was ruined. What did it matter? So I became what I’ve become.” She hung her head in her hands and spoke with her mouth to the table. “Nine months later—” She shook her head, changed direction, and looked back up at me. “I was content to let you rot in prison, sending you postcards yearly on the date of your arrest, until you were paroled and…” She laughed out loud. Incredulous, she said, “You—” Her voice broke. “You did the one thing I couldn’t or wouldn’t do and had never done.” She turned to Dee and reached out her hand to touch his, but thought better of it.

  Dee sat calmly. Taking it in. He was quarterbacking this play, and whatever was about to happen, he’d already set it in motion.

  Eyes staring at the ground, she pointed at Dee. “Then yesterday, my s—” She stuttered and then stopped herself and chose another word. “Dalton came to see me yesterday. I thought I could remain unaffected by him.” A shrug. “Detached.” She shook her head, then fidgeted in her chair. “To my surprise, he didn’t ask me why or spew hatred. He didn’t ask me for anything. He simply told me that I’d already cheated him of his mother.” Ginger’s voice choked to a whisper and she lifted her head to look at me. “He then asked me not to cheat him of the only dad he’s ever known.”

  She stood, reached into her pocket, and pulled out a DVD, which she laid on the table. She palmed away the tears. Her resolve was returning. Wood’s jaw rested on the table and his head was spinning to put the pieces together. Ginger let out a deep breath. Finally, she motioned to the DVD and looked at all of us. “My attorneys advised me against it.” She rubbed her temple and ran her hand across her eyes, then looked at Gage, who signaled into the camera above him and immediately the lock clicked and door swung open.

  Ginger sunk her hands in her pockets and took a step to leave. She paused, then turned to Audrey and spoke with a tenderness I’d never heard come out of her mouth. Torment streaked her face. She held her eyes closed a long second and the words hung on the tip of her tongue a long time. When she opened her eyes, the color matched the dull, steel table that chained me to the earth. The only thing more painful than watching her speak the words was hearing them. She was looking at Audrey when she spoke. “He told the truth.” She swallowed. “Every word. Always has.”

  The events that followed were foggy, and the chronology remains muddled. I don’t remember Ginger leaving, don’t remember Wood jumping up and hugging Dee and then dancing around the room, and don’t remember the warden telling Gage it was okay to let them celebrate. I do remember my wife vaulting the table that separated us, grabbing my chains, pulling with both arms and pushing with both legs and screaming at the top of her lungs. “Somebody cut these chains off my husband! Let him free! Cut these chains right now! Somebody break these chains!”

  I remember standing in the peaceful eye of a swirling storm that had erupted around me and smiling at her. “Audrey.”

  She wasn’t listening.

  “Honey.”

  She paused, and the third time I spoke, my voice shook her loose from the hell she’d been living in. I smiled. “Audrey?” Her eyes found mine. “They’re okay. I’m free.”

  I remember her tackling me, wrapping her arms and legs and body around me and burying her face in my neck and sobbing from a place in her soul that had been buried since the tr
ial. With words from her mouth, Ginger had cut Audrey’s chains, and I remember the sound of pain leaving her body. I remember her taking my face in both her hands and pressing her lips to mine and holding it. And I remember us crying. And laughing. I remember hearing my wife laugh.

  I do remember that.

  Exposed beneath eight cameras, chained to the table that was bolted to the concrete floor inside four sets of double electronic doors, four-foot-thick walls, three electric fences topped with concertina wire, and two guard towers where armed snipers stood with rifles, I’d been cut free.

  And there on the playing field that had become my life, my wife had crossed the sideline and was fighting for me.

  Again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Following the pandemonium, the warden uncuffed me as Audrey commanded and led us to a room where we, along with several other prison officials, including Gage, watched the video. With no script, no makeup, and little introduction, Ginger launched into her story. She told it with a straight face, vivid detail, and a keen memory for dates.

  Ginger admitted to lying in high school about the bruise marks on her neck, confirming that I had nothing to do with it. She told about the date-rape drug used on her both on the night that she threw the ring at me and the night Wood and I rescued her at the railroad warehouse and how she would use it later on me. She told how she woke up from that nightmare a seventeen-year-old mom and that she wouldn’t recognize his father if she bumped into him. And how she wrongly blamed me for all of it. She relayed the events surrounding the railroad warehouse where Wood and I saved her. How I broke my hand that night and then played the following night. And then she relayed, in vivid detail, the events that took place in the hours following the draft. How I’d awakened at three a.m. for my workout. She knew I’d been working out the week prior in the fitness center in the basement. She laced the first few paper cups with the drug and the water cooler itself, and when I began drinking the water in the cooler, she was afraid she’d given me too much. She said she’d purposefully chosen her route to the elevator and her room by the number of cameras that would record our movement and that when she walked in and put her arm around me, that I was incoherent and too heavy and she thought she’d never get me to her room. She then described how she led me, as shown by the security cameras, both in the fitness center, hallways, and elevator, out of the fitness center, down the hall, up the elevator, and into her hotel room, where two teenage prostitutes lay passed out beneath the same drug. She told how she’d hired a male prostitute to fill in for me—who, fortunately for Ginger, died of a drug overdose a year later. She paid him to star in a grainy and dark video in which he engaged the underage girls in various acts—recorded prior to my entrance. She explained the doses she’d given them, guaranteeing that they wouldn’t be able to remember anything. When all four of us—Ginger, me, and the two girls—woke in the same bed the following day as the police broke through the door thanks to an anonymous tip, the girls naturally believed it’d been me. They had no reason not to. She also relayed how, following the trial, she had created a fake company that served to free girls from the sex trade. The company was a cover to privately return them to Malaysia. She gave them enough cash to live several years and had not heard from them since. Following the safe return of their only clients—ever—the company closed its doors. Finally, Ginger explained how she and the fill-in staged her final act—her own “rape.” How she paid him $10,000 to “make sure it looked authentic.” The swollen eye, busted lip, lacerations, bruises. At her invitation, he had literally knocked her unconscious. Ginger had bought the drugs, drugged the girls, paid the guy, taken the beating. She had planned it all for the better part of two years.