Jesus Saves (17 page)

Highway lights illuminated falling ice like patches of free-form static, and the crimson Steak and Ale sign floated up on the hill like a message from an angry God. Rain turned to ice, so the asphalt was slick as oil, and the few cars on the road slid like old dogs trying to keep their balance. Ginger's umbrella blew back with a tug. Several ribs were broken so she pitched it down into the muddy ditch. Slushy water moved sluggishly into a drainage pipe. Drops of ice hit her face in a sensation cold and sharp but not altogether unpleasant.

Mud froze up in ridges like whipped cream, made soft crushing sounds under the heels of her tennis shoes. Branches rattled against one another like dime-store wind chimes as she moved onto
the dirt path past the cat skeleton and the broken-down high chair. Ice glazed the old socks and bits of newspaper, froze bugs to dead leaves, and gathered in mealy drifts on the ground.

The barn was dark. She'd half hoped Ted would be in front of the fire, reading the I-Ching and toasting marshmallows. Ashes surrounded the TV like a moat; plastic carnations scattered over the dirt floor. Moving the toe of her tennis shoe around in the ash, she felt for the deer's head, but it was gone. A sheet of newspaper fluttered at the edge of the ash, diaphanous and nuanced as a scarf, a phantom with a white face. Startled, she thought someone said something, but when she turned her head all she heard was the rain's flat report on the soggy papers in the corner. Drips formed a discordant melody and entered her mind like speech. She listened to the wind flap against the dead leaves on the forest floor. She felt stupid now for thinking the girl might be here. The hippie was probably right: she was headed for Colorado or California or anyone of those states that looked pretty in photographs. Wearing headphones, reading a magazine, the girl was probably curled into a seat on a dark and buoyant nighttime bus.

Wind spun the branches against one another like a chaotic chandelier. Ginger walked out the barn doorway, stood looking into the woods, thought another deer might be moving among the trees, or the ghost deer had come back to haunt the woods, searching for its head. Coming around the side of the barn, she saw a figure and though at first she couldn't make out the features, she presumed it was Ted, but then stray condominium light showed a small hunched man with a long white beard and bulging eyes. Anger shot off him, dense and oppressive as an opened oven door, as he yanked her arm so hard the bone wheezed and strained against her shoulder socket.
He swung his arm up and hit her in the face, thumb jabbing into her eye, the ridge of his fingers breaking the bridge of her nose. Blood ran into her mouth and she felt dizzy.

“What?” She didn't understand.

“Shut the fuck up!” He dragged her around the back side of the barn where his van was parked, the back doors open. Rain fell onto her hot face. Squares of condo-complex light floated like luminous fish back in the woods. She screamed until her whole head vibrated, blood flooding the valley beneath her tongue, and she slid deep into herself, searched room to room: the flashlight's beam illuminated a scattered pile of jigsaw-puzzle pieces and a pot filled with old rice. The tip of a branch caught her arm, bowed then snapped, sent shards of ice flying. The man threw her inside the van, where the girl lay bound and stretched on a mattress, her pupils shiny and huge as moons reflected in water. Ginger rolled her butt up, flexed her feet, and kicked hard at the troll's chest. He sucked air, staggered sideways. The girl screamed through her gag, vowels and consonants mumbled and undecipherable as animal speech. Ginger tried to pull her up at the waist, but the girl's wrists and ankles were secured with a piece of cord that ran underneath the mattress. She yanked at the cord, as the girl thrashed her head back and forth, tears leaking out the corners of her eyes. There was no give and Ginger heard the troll rattling the foliage just behind her, his breath rasping up from his lungs. She turned, saw the raised knife gleam, then felt a tug at the side of her mouth and a soft sound like lettuce ripping, and above her head the sky filled with radiant light, illuminating the veiny backs of leaves, and she thought,
It's an angel coming down to save me.
Branches quivered and shook as four white horse legs broke through the green canopy and the unicorn flapped its luscious white
wings in a succession of tiny flutters that allowed him to land expertly on the van's roof. A brown bear wearing a bow tie, its paws entwined in the long mane hair, rode bareback.

“This really is the best way to travel,” the bear said to the glittery blue butterfly with the long eyelashes pausing on the shoulder of his dinner jacket.

“I couldn't agree with you more,” the little fellow replied in a tiny voice, distinct as a cricket's.

The two went on about the plebeian inelegance of plane travel, the gray waiting areas, the pathetic airport bars. “Every place is the same place,” said the bear, “so it's idiotic really to fly around everywhere.” And then like a radio nudged off its channel to chaotic static, to the exclamations of right-wing preachers and basement revolutionaries, Ginger couldn't make out what anyone was saying anymore. She commanded her eyes to open and after a long while, at their leisure, her lids crept up. The van was gone and she felt so light-headed she thought she'd throw up as she pushed herself off the forest floor and staggered out of the tree line to the first lit window. Inside, an older woman sat at her kitchen table, reading a handwritten letter surrounded by snapshots of a baby. The portable TV on the table was tuned to QVC. Fear blossomed on the woman's face and Ginger saw her own monstrous reflection, blood streaming out of her nostrils, her cheek a raised puddle of raw purple flesh.

“Help me!” she screamed and the woman's eyes lost their wide-eyed worry, grinded down into maternal concern as she rushed around the corner toward the sliding glass door. “Oh my God,” she said, “just a minute.”

EPILOGUE

While she waited for the memorial service to begin, a little blonde girl, encouraged by her mother, placed a teddy bear beside a wreath of pink roses. If Ginger hadn't turned down the familiar road between the two strip malls, she wouldn't have recognized the dump. The new parking lot was filled with Saturns and minivans and the white gravel path that led past a cement birdbath and a wooden bench to the park's center, to these stones arranged like a child's game of hopscotch and covered now with tokens of bereavement: stuffed bunnies and baby dolls, carnations wrapped in cellophane, candles burning in tall glass holders, Hallmark sympathy cards and
homemade construction paper ones sitting upright on the slabs of stone.

Her father and Ruth Patrick shook hands with the reporter from the local television station and made their way around the homemade shrine. He wore his black preacher pants, a white clerical collar, and over these a blue and white seersucker jacket, a gift, Ginger figured, from Ruth Patrick. His letters to Ginger in the hospital had detailed the construction of the Rose Hill Farm retirement complex behind the mall and the Pirates Cove Putt Putt next door to the megachurch, and how the chamber of commerce tore down the barn, hauled away all the garbage, and thinned the trees to create this memorial park. He rarely mentioned Ruth Patrick, but Ginger knew by his change of address that they had moved in together and that he'd given up the cemetery job and was going back to the community college for his teaching certificate.

“Let us bow our heads,” he began, his church voice all the more resonant for lack of use. “Dear Father in Heaven, we pray that this gathering will honor your endless gifts of bountiful love. Amen.” He lifted his eyes and scanned the faces in the crowd with his unnerving composure. “This spring has been bittersweet. While crocuses and daffodils rise and the buds of the maple press out into leaves,” he motioned to the red and yellow tulips swaying in a bed at the park's far corner, “it's as if we've lost a part of ourselves as elemental as our hand or our foot, and this loss shakes us.” He paused a moment. “So let us pray for the safe return of all missing children and for the lost souls who perpetrate these evil acts. Every human soul is a part of God and we must have mercy when we see that one of his holy sparks has been lost in a maze and is almost stifled.” Her father unclasped his hands and looked above the
crowd, his voice less serious, invested now with enthusiasm and hope. “Today we gather together to throw off the miserable blanket of despair and celebrate the memory of Sandy Patrick, a girl with a soul as expansive as this blue sky above.”

Her father gave Ruth Patrick a questioning look and she nodded, took a step forward, unfolded an index card, and glanced down, then up again. “Thank you all for coming today,” her voice shaky. “It means so much to me and my son. It means a lot that you're here to honor Sandy and that in your hearts she will live on forever. We miss her still, but knowing that so many people care has helped us both very much. I thank you.” She paused and looked over at Ginger's father, who nodded encouragement. “As we were going through Sandy's things, we found several poems she had written, and my son Andrew would like to read one now.”

The thin boy in the new blue suit and clip-on tie didn't raise his eyes to the crowd, just started to read fast, rushing the words together in a way that implied if he'd wanted to read the poem before, now, in front of the crowd, he felt embarrassed.

The bear said to the butterfly,

“Come back and be my friend.”

The butterfly said, “No I won't,

we've come now to the end.”

The poem went on about a brown bear and a place where butterflies sang and cattails were pink and ducklings yellow. She imagined Sandy's soul, like diaphanous cotton candy charged with static.

*  *  *

Switching off the lamp with the lace shade, Ginger pulled back the comforter, and got into bed. She was relieved the sheets weren't swarming with Little Mermaids. Downstairs, Ruth Patrick and her father sat quietly together on the couch in the basement, waiting for the spot about the memorial service on the eleven o’clock news, and she heard the boy snoring in the room next door. After the service he'd thrown a piece of gravel at a little girl, and when his mother yelled, he'd started crying and continued in the car all the way back to the house.

Ginger opened the jewelry box on the little table beside the bed. A tiny ballerina popped up, bits of lace for her skirt, a dab of pink paint for a bodice, a dab of brown for her bun, moving in circles on the tips of her toes to the tinkling notes of a lullaby. Ginger looked out the window at the houses spinning out in curly cul-de-sacs like the paisleys the orderly at the hospital called Tears of the Buddha. She remembered the shining police lights, the frenzied dogs, saliva stringing off their pink gums, and the tiny emaciated creature lying on the afghan, strands of her hair encased in ice. Eyes staring through the broken bricks and ice-covered ferns. Smeared with feces and covered with spider bites, Sandy's face strange and shrunken like a blue gray cat's, already transported to the nether world, a wood nymph or a forest fairy, found only inside the pages of a children's book.