Capturing Angels (22 page)

“C’mon,” John said. “We have a lot to do yet to get her home.”

We followed everyone out and paused on the porch. Out there beyond the freeway and the city lights, the stars were far more visible. I know it was just because of that, but I still told myself that they were far brighter than usual. Either the God that John claimed we could never fully understand had changed his mind, or He had nothing to do with any of this. I wasn’t going to ask Him. I was going to wait for Him to tell me.

In the end, what difference did it make anyway, as long as the result was the same and you could find goodness and mercy, hope and happiness, still out there waiting like ripe fruit to be plucked and enjoyed?

As we descended the steps to follow our daughter in the direction of her own restoration and resurrection, I sensed that I was having one of my own. I did feel reborn, and, like someone saved, I looked back at the shell of myself that I was leaving behind. I was glad to leave it, not only because it was stained with sin and sorrow but also because it was really not me.

How many different ways do we follow to find our true selves, and how often do we take the time to rejoice once we do?

“We’ll be fine, Grace,” John whispered. “It’s going to be fine. Don’t worry.”

I tightened my grip on his hand.

Maybe all Jesus meant when he said “I am the light of the world” was “Through me, you will see yourself, and you will know that if you make the effort, you will see that you’re worth every beat of your heart. Maybe then you won’t hurt the ones you love.”

And really, what else was left for anyone, be he preacher or pope, rabbi or imam, to say?

Epilogue

If I were to be honest with myself, I would have to admit that for most of our time together and our marriage, I wanted to see John’s faith shaken. I had a love/hate relationship with his strength and confidence. For most of our marriage, I was dependent on it, but I resented the dependence and so, perhaps unfairly, resented him. At least, that was one of the conclusions we reached in marriage counseling.

Despite everything, it still surprised me that John agreed to go to counseling, even though I knew he had problems with the concept of divorce. Many theological experts had real disagreements over what Jesus had said about it. My husband held with the strict interpretation that when Jesus responded to the Pharisees about divorce, he clearly stated, “What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” In Matthew 19:9, it appears that sexual immorality is a reason for divorce, but John always held that it didn’t mean that the marriage could be dissolved; it meant that the husband and wife could be separated but could never marry anyone else. Marriage was a holy sacrament, and that was that.

However, I could see that what he witnessed now in Margaret’s betrayal of our daughter and Sister Alice Francis’s fanatic belief that God created angels not just out of the dead but also out of the living gave him pause. He had never accepted the idea that anyone but Christ could perform a miracle. He wasn’t even that keen on saints, but accepted a saintly miracle with the understanding that it was usually a one-time event.

We learned later that Sister Alice Francis saw herself as being on a divine mission to ensure that whoever God had determined had the power to be angelic, especially to heal, should be protected and, essentially, trained. She saw herself as running a parochial school for angels. It was too risky to leave these chosen children with sinful parents who, first, would be skeptical of their divine powers and, second, would not nurture them as they should be nurtured.

All of this gave him great pause. I could almost feel his recalculations, his new doubts. It was as if he suddenly saw religion brought down by man and not vice versa. He had new eyes, and with them came fresh skepticism and, in a real sense, a deeper faith.

Of course, there was so much about this that I still didn’t fully understand. Before John and I reconciled, I had coffee with Sam at a café in Brentwood. The FBI was wrapping up the details of the kidnappings, and one thing hovered out there and haunted me: the Santa Claus costume. I was afraid to ask John about it immediately, because that would bring my affair with Sam right to the forefront of our discussion.

Sam admitted that he had no explanation. “In our pursuit of the kidnapper, it was sort of what storytellers call a MacGuffin, something Alfred Hitchcock often employed in his films.”

I shook my head. “I never heard of it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a big reader of detective stories and thrillers. Characters in the story get obsessed with something that might be a central focus in the beginning of a story but often is completely forgotten by the end.”

“Like a red herring?”

“Yeah, something like that. There’s some explanation for the Santa outfit, but whatever it is, it won’t have anything to do with Mary’s abduction.”

Actually, I didn’t have to ask John about it. He brought it up because his boss at work told him that Sam had asked about the Christmas party. He went into his office and opened one of his large file-cabinet drawers and showed me the costume.

“I was going to wear it on Christmas Eve,” he said. “Just to do something fun with Mary.”

I nearly broke out in tears. He shrugged and put it on his desk. “I had been out in Pomona with Tommy Marshall for a meeting and saw it in the window of this costume shop. He was going to return it for me. After her abduction, I forgot about it. I guess I’d better get it to him. Probably some fine is attached like for an overdue library book.”

Whoever was wearing a Santa Claus outfit in the mall that day remained a mystery, or what Sam had called a MacGuffin. There was never any evidence to the contrary, and as Sam had learned by going through the other cases, even cases that were completely different, a Santa Claus outfit did not play a role in any.

Sam had been reinstated, but he was looking to move to San Diego.

“I think I need a fresh start,” he said.

We were both silent, each nearly drowning in our own thoughts. When he looked up at me again, I knew that whatever he was going to say was going to sound like a permanent good-bye.

“You should know that I blame myself for what happened between us,” he began.

“Don’t treat me like your confessor,” I said. It was cold, and I immediately regretted it. “Sorry. I guess I don’t want to hear you say it. I don’t want to feel that I brought unhappiness to someone else.”

“You didn’t bring unhappiness. You’re a very special woman, Grace. The fact is, most, if not all, of my comrades in law enforcement would admit to wanting to do what I did. A few actually told me they were jealous and even congratulated me on having the balls to do it.”

“It would take that,” I said to lighten the moment.

He laughed but grew serious again quickly. “The bottom line is that I should have known better. I took advantage of you, and I’m sorry, but I’m not a hypocrite enough to tell you I didn’t enjoy our time together. That’s a half-ass apology.”

“Works for me,” I said. “And I’ll never believe it was all your fault, Sam.”

“Can your marriage survive?”

“Theologically speaking, it cannot die,” I said, and he laughed again. “I don’t know yet. I feel a lot of guilt myself when it comes to that. I tried to find anything and everything I could about John that would mitigate my own guilt, and I’m not going to be satisfied with just his forgiveness. As I told him, I’ve got to find a way to forgive myself.”

“Yeah, well, don’t be too hard on yourself. You were betrayed by someone you had trusted with your daughter. That’s a lot of trust to invest in anyone.”

“What frightens me now and makes me wonder if I’ll ever trust anyone again is the fact that Margaret was so good at hiding her religious insanity.”

He shrugged. “There are a lot of religious fanatics hiding among us. Shall I remind you about terrorists? She was just a different kind. Anyway, don’t think about all that now. Just give your time and your thoughts to your daughter.”

“No worries there,” I said. I looked at my watch. “In fact, I have to go. We have an appointment with her therapist.”

He nodded. I stood up. There was no doubt that this was the final good-bye.

“Thanks, Sam. If your extra effort came about because of your attraction to me, I’m grateful it happened.”

“I’d better get good and married,” he said, smiling, “so if I’m helping someone as pretty and as nice as you in the future, I won’t lose my perspective.”

“They keep saying marriage is a sacrament,” I replied, leaned over to kiss his cheek. Then I walked out without looking back once. As I drove away, I could feel him falling back into a memory that I would someday have trouble believing ever happened. At least, that was what I hoped.

Twenty minutes later, I joined John at Mary’s therapist’s office. Meg Thornton was an interesting woman in her early thirties who had studied in England and the States. I liked her, but I was also a bit put off by her professional excitement. I foresaw articles, if not a book, in her near future concerning Mary’s case and the dramatic psychological effect of religious fanaticism on children. John wasn’t concerned about it. In fact, he was quite intrigued with the whole thing.

“I think it’s going to be a while, maybe years, before Mary will come to accept that what was done with her and to you and your husband was wrong,” Meg said. “I hate to use the tired term
brainwashed,
but there are so many similarities to how other kidnapped victims and prisoners of war are treated. You’ll have to have great patience. Certain words and actions will trigger automatic responses in her for some time.”

“A child’s version of
The Manchurian Candidate
?” John offered.

“Well.” Meg smiled. She had striking gray-blue eyes and a very comforting smile that sat in her soft, plump cheeks. I liked the way she kept her apricot-brown hair pinned back and free-flowing down her neck at shoulder length. “I guess we can put it that way for simplicity’s sake, but it’s not that bad. At least, she wasn’t being programmed to cause anyone any pain or harm. On the contrary, it was diametrically opposite. It’s the view of herself that we have to adjust. As you know, she bonded with the other children, too, which was very clever. That way, they found companionship and were never permitted to see themselves as somehow too odd or freakish. There were others like them, special, chosen others.”

“What about the way she acts and talks about Margaret Sullivan?” I asked.

“That won’t change dramatically until her realizations about the entire affair change, Mrs. Clark. For now, it’s difficult to get her to see beyond Margaret being called to be with God. Assignment of blame, guilt, and sin all will come in time.”

“How can you be so sure of that?” John asked.

“You and your wife have provided her with a very stable environment. She loves and respects you both. After a while, you’ll return to being the authority she most trusts and believes.”

John looked at me. Neither of us had told Meg much about our own problems. I knew that John was wondering, as I was, if we could return Mary to that stable environment Meg had referred to. Perhaps more to ensure that it would happen than for any other reasons, we were both motivated to make our reconciliation successful.

At family dinners now, with my parents and John’s father fawning over Mary and the two of us standing aside to watch, I felt more of the sorrow that I should have felt at John’s mother’s passing. She should have lived to see the reunion. When I told John that later, he nodded and turned away quickly. I knew he was fighting back tears, and I reached out for him.

“Even Superman cries,” I said.

He turned back and smiled.

Days and weeks passed into months. Meg Thornton’s predictions seemed to be coming true. We could both feel Mary’s slow but sure return to herself as she was before the abduction. Once again, the two of us joined John in his office when he had finished a new ship and sat to listen to his passionate historical explanation of the ship. We smiled and clapped and hugged.

And then I saw a very interesting thing happening to John whenever he began to recite Psalm 23 before dinner. Mary was just as attentive, but there was a little hesitation in John’s voice, in his entire demeanor. It was as if he was afraid that returning to anything biblical, talking about God and religion, even attending church, might damage Mary’s recovery.

I asked him about it eventually, and he said I was right. He was kind of gun-shy. “It’s like anything. You love horseback riding or rowing, swimming, anything, but one day something nearly fatal happens when you’re doing it, and you’re always extra-cautious, extra-fearful. That woman poisoned those children with the Bible and prayer,” he said bitterly.

“I guess we’re all in some form of therapy, then,” I said.

He studied me for a moment as if he was seeing me again for the first time. “I know you’re waiting for it every day, Grace. We dance around it, but I’m not going to say anything about forgiveness,” he said. “We both hurt each other in different ways. It comes with the territory. The main thing is, we’re going through it together, I hope.” He smiled. “I don’t say it often. I don’t say it enough. I’m a tight-ass sometimes.”

“Sometimes?” I kidded.

“Yeah, well, I love you, Grace. I know I love you as much as any man can love any woman. I might even love you more than God intended a man to love a woman, and if that’s sinful, then so be it.”

There were no other words necessary.

We kissed and held each other. And then, one day, I awoke in the morning and realized with the instincts of a woman and a mother that I was pregnant. Later, my doctor confirmed it. Both John and I thought Mary was happier about it than we were. When she found out that I was having a boy, she began her make-believe conversations with him. She helped me set up the nursery and sat with John and me as we went through possible names. She surprised us both by suggesting Stuart.

“From
Stuart Little
!” she exclaimed.

John and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. She wasn’t going to the Bible for a name. She was going to one of her favorite children’s books. It was as if we were witnessing some sort of breakthrough.

“Absolutely,” John said. “He’ll be Stuart Clark.” He looked at me. “We’ll use your mother’s maiden name for his middle name. Stuart Robinson Clark.”

Mary clapped.

Was she really completely ours again?

Months later, we decided to have a Saturday afternoon at one of our favorite beach towns, Laguna Beach. After lunch, we walked along the beach. It was a magnificent day, not a cloud in the sky, with a calm breeze. There were young people everywhere, surfing, playing volleyball and racquetball games, and a few games of basketball on a nearby court.