Adelaide Piper (41 page)

“Can't we find something with a smidge of character?” I asked.

He bit the inside of his cheek and looked at me as though I were a riddle he couldn't quite solve.

One Thursday in late July, when I was to present my speech to Senator Carnes in hopes of serving as a witness for the upcoming hearing, Tobias and Glenda left before me for the Hill so that I could have some time to rehearse in the one-room suite before showtime.

I started to practice, but when Mae Mae sent a mock-up of our wedding invitation through the fax machine for my approval, I tucked it in my briefcase and walked across K Street and into a lovely bookstore named Chapters. Randy's wedding was tomorrow night, and I didn't want to think about matrimony. My speech was polished, and I didn't need to go over it. With a whole hour before I had to be on the Hill, I granted myself a momentary bookstore escape.

The smell of Chapters reminded me of the NBU library, and I loved it. Tracing the outline of several new novels, I suddenly thought of Mr. Lewis and made my first journey over to the Chapters apologetics section.

It had been awhile since I'd read the Bible or even prayed. Things had been moving so fast between preparing for my speech and making decisions about the wedding that somehow I had distanced myself from God, and the void that I had known before was beginning to open up again.

Remember me,
I thought I heard the third voice say as I picked up a copy of
Mere Christianity
and clutched it to my chest.
Refresh my memory,
I said.
I'm already forgetting
.

I closed my eyes and tried to think where I'd put my journal from sophomore year. The one that recorded my grappling with Mr. Lewis as he persuaded me to believe. Suddenly I realized that I couldn't recall one sentence or argument from those days, and I felt as frantic as a bee who is unable to enter the hive.

When I opened my eyes, the room seemed to darken, and the floorboards seemed to shift beneath my feet. Steadying myself, I took a deep breath and looked around at shelf after shelf of books and then back across the street to my office. It was swampy in the midday heat of the city, and the window air-conditioning units were dropping cold water on the heads of the passersby.

Before I knew it, a strangely familiar-looking young man in a suit and loose tie walked into the store and sat down at a table to thumb through a
Washington Post.
He took off his jacket, and two circles of sweat outlined his white shirt, and his hair fanned out at the ends like a rooster along the top of his collar.

When he sat back in the chair and folded the paper back, I remembered. It was Devon Hunt! What in the world was going on here?

I shifted my weight back and forth for whole seconds. Then I marched right over, sat down in front of him, and pulled down the newspaper.

He looked up at me in confusion. His eyes narrowed, and then it came to him, and his face morphed into the most terrified look I had ever seen.

He knew me. And by the look on his face, he knew I had spoken publicly about that night on the graveside hill.

My heart was thumping like a small bird's, and I pulled a Rachel's Rape brochure out of my briefcase and handed it to him.

“Read this, why don't you? And pass the word. Rape is a crime.”

His neck stiffened, but his Adam's apple moved up and down as he swallowed. His eyes didn't follow me as I stood back up and walked toward the door. I still had a Lewis book in my hand, and the cashier said, “Would you like me to ring you up, ma'am?” as I headed toward the door.

I pointed toward Devon at the table, his hands running through his damp hair.

“He'll take care of it,” I said, showing her the title.

What a day,
I thought as my stomach caught in my throat and I tried to calm my beating heart. Funny, I didn't want to castrate Devon as Allison had suggested, and I didn't want to forgive him the way I knew Shannon thought I should. But there was a deep-felt satisfaction in confronting him, and I might have reveled in it longer if I weren't terribly confused about my feelings for Tobias and late for a meeting with a senator that had been set up for a month now.

I had to get to the Hill, but I was so disoriented that I kept walking straight down K Street. Two blocks down from Chapters was the White House, where the controversial President Clinton was conducting business behind a wall of security, and across the park a homeless couple was rolling their supermarket cart of essentials under a shaded tree for a respite.

As I watched a flock of pigeons take flight, I felt at war with myself, and I didn't know what to do about it. I was going to be late for my appointment if I didn't act fast, and so I walked out into the edge of the street and caught a cab over to meet Tobias and Glenda.

They were waiting for me on the other side of a security checkpoint in the Russell Building, and I slid my briefcase through the metal detector as Tobias waved me by the guards and onto the elevators.

When Senator Carnes's aide came out to say that we would have to reschedule because of an emergency session that had just been called, Glenda stayed behind to see if she could pop her head into some other offices, and Tobias and I walked to the subway so that he could help me get off early to Vienna before a business meeting with NOW and a few other activists that he was conducting in his apartment later that evening.

I held back from telling him about running into Devon. I was perturbed for some inexplicable reason, and when the escalator delivered us down to the subway, I could not suppress the desire to needle him.

“I don't know if I like living in Washington,” I said as he slid my subway pass through the slot and the wall opened to let me through.

“We're going to live in Arlington, and it's much nicer there,” he said as he pushed through the doors after me.

“No. I mean, I don't know if I like this whole area. You know I always wanted to live in Manhattan.”

“Manhattan?” he said, rubbing his forehead in disbelief. “Are you serious?”

Then he took me gently by the arm and said through his concerned eyes, “That's one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Adelaide.”

“Would you ever go anywhere else?” I asked, staring back at his sweet eyes. “I mean, is Rachel's Rape what we're going to do for the rest of our lives?”

“What are you saying, Adelaide?”

“I don't know,” I said as I twisted my engagement ring around on my finger. A part of me wanted to take it off and throw it onto the third rail of the subway to see if it would melt like the pocket watches in Dali's
The Persistence of Memory
.

“Is everything okay, sweetheart?” he asked, leaning into me and brushing a strand of hair out of my face.

“I'm bored,” I said, looking up at him. “I feel empty and sad.”

He had not noticed that we had entered the wrong platform and would be headed southeast on the green line toward the inner city of Anacostia if we hopped on the next approaching train, instead of west on the orange line toward the Virginia suburbs. He bit his bottom lip in distress over our conversation as a train made its way toward us.

“Take me to the war zone,” I said as the train stopped in front of us and I pointed up to the sign that revealed our mistake. I suddenly wished that my briefcase were full of St. Christopher medals instead of a presentation on date rape and that I could go skipping down the inner-city streets, throwing a medal on every doorstep.

“We're on the wrong platform, Adelaide!” he said as the doors opened and I stepped onto the train.

“I'd rather be gunned down than bored to death, Tobias,” I said.

“Come with me. Let's do something different for a change.”

“It's dangerous,” he said, and I thought his eyes might pop out of their sockets. I noticed for the first time a vein in the center of his forehead that was pulsing.

“Step back out here!” he screamed as the doors buckled before closing. I crossed my arms and refused to move, and his face turned a ghastly white.

“No!” he screamed as the doors sealed between us and the train barreled down the tunnel, leaving him behind.

And there it was,
I thought, taking my seat next to a weary-looking African-American lady in a gray-and-white housekeeping uniform from the Washingtonian Hotel.

Of course,
I thought to myself.
Why couldn't I have seen this?

If Tobias couldn't bring Rachel back, he might as well marry someone who'd suffered the way she had. It was the closest he could get.

It came to me as I tunneled down the line, then rode the escalator up and out into the inner-city neighborhood, which, aside from some graffiti on the walls and some piles of trash that hadn't been picked up in weeks, looked the same as the rest of the Capitol Hill area. No, there were no bullets flying and no gang fights with switchblades hurling, and I made myself walk a few blocks around the area before I considered my next move.

A young boy looked up at me from beside his mother's arm. He had the most beautiful brown eyes I could imagine; I smiled at him, and he said, “Hello!” before walking by.

“Hello to you,” I turned around to say, and I stopped and waved at him as he looked back over his little shoulder.

Hailing a cab, I uttered the name of the largest church I could think of: “National Cathedral.” My plan was to sit there and pray, as Harriet and I had on our European tour, until I knew what to do next.

When I entered the grand sanctuary, dodging two pockets of tourists being led by two guides who were holding up tall and colorful umbrellas, I sat down on a pew halfway down the aisle and looked up at the altar for a moment before kneeling down in prayer.

The word
love
and a verse about first love that I'd heard before kept coming to mind. Was it from the Song of Solomon? Or Revelation? I grabbed a Bible from the pew, thumbed through the index, and turned to what I was remembering, Revelation 2:5: “Look how far you have fallen from your first love! Turn back to me again and work as you did at first.”

With this, I fell down on my knees and wept silently as the small crowds of tourists snapped pictures all around me. How could I have forgotten what I had received a few short years ago? The One who saved my very soul and then danced with me down the center of the Magnolia Club ballroom. How could I have put that love on the shelf?

Replaced it with human romance—and one that was a fraud at that!

I had missed the mark, almost imperceptibly, as I quietly ignored the red flags being raised around me. Once Dale Pelzer had asked me if God was in the driver's seat or the passenger seat of the car I was in, and my answer had been “Neither.” Instead, I had tied Him on the roof like the Griswolds with their deceased aunt Edna, and I had put a gag over His mouth to boot.

Does God take you back a second time?
I wondered as the tourists shuffled down the stone aisle toward the altar.

Come back to me,
I prayed
. Have mercy.

A kind of warmth filled my lungs as I prayed those words, and in an instant the prayer had been answered
.

Outside the cathedral, the haze of the late-day city smog was hovering over the trees and the cars that lined Massachusetts Avenue on their brutal commute to the suburbs. I hailed the first cab I saw and headed straight to Adams Morgan.

When I reached Tobias's apartment, several other activists were arriving for the meeting.

He embraced me when he opened the door and asked me to sit in with them.

“No,” I said. “We need to talk. I'll wait in your room until the meeting is over.”

And there I sat for just over an hour in his little bedroom as Glenda, a sharply dressed woman from NOW, and a hippie-looking guy from Men Against Rape went over the upcoming vote.

I nearly hyperventilated when I fast-forwarded in my mind to what our life would have been like together: 2.5 children sporting Rachel's Rape T-shirts as we walked around some northern Virginia cul-de-sac.

When I looked down at the perfectly-lined-up shoes in Tobias's closet, I had to smile at what I knew was God's sense of humor making its way into my imagination. Instead of the shoes practicing their scales like last time, now they were singing a song written just for me, to the tune of “Dixie,” and it went, “Oh, you wish you were the heck out of DC. There's not much soul and a lot of PCs. Run away, run away, run away, Miss Piper.”

When Tobias walked into his room, I had already taken off my diamond ring and placed it in the black velvet box that he still kept on his dresser.

“What are you doing?” he asked as I gently handed it to him.

“This life is not for me, Tobias,” I said. “You're a wonderful, caring man, but I don't want to marry you. And I don't want to work for Rachel's Rape or testify on the Hill next week. I just want to go home. And get back on my spiritual journey.”

“Adelaide, I can't believe this,” he said, rubbing his neck in frustration and defeat. “You know Rachel's Rape is my life, and I thought you wanted it to be yours too. If this is about religion, I'm willing to take you to church—”

“This is about my life,” I said as I unloaded my briefcase and handed him my speech and brochures. ”I know you miss Rachel,” I said. “I'm so sorry about what happened to her. But I'm not your sister.”

As I rode the subway back to Vienna and packed up my meager belongings from the Moore family's F.R.O.G., I felt relief. Granted, I was terrified of what the immediate future held—I knew I'd go home to Williamstown, the very place I'd spent half my life dreaming of escaping. I'd have Randy and Perky in my face, with their happy little family, while I worked at some awful temp agency outside Charleston for the next year, as Winkie and Nan were doing. And Papa Great would surely declare me a lesbian. But in the end, I didn't care. I was running back into the arms of the One I had ignored most of my life, and there was nothing else more right than that.