Shovel Ready (15 page)

Hmmm. Well, that’s bullshit. My father trolls for that trash all the time on the Internet. Just so happened, one day, he clicked a link, saw his own daughter. In among all the usual naked jailbait he prefers. Just bad luck, really. For me, anyway.

He also told me something else. That your boyfriend is the father.

A dry laugh.

No. That asshole fucked me over plenty, but not in that way.

Your father says it isn’t his.

Well, what do you expect him to say?

I just mean that, if you’re running for some other reason, whatever it might be, I need to know.

She straightens. If any of this is acting, her look right now would win the Oscar.

Wait, what are you saying? You want to send me back to him?

I need to know what made you run. Because you didn’t run at first. When you found out about the baby. You waited. For a few months at least.

I was scared. My father has a long reach. As you know.

But then something made you leave.

Yes. That’s true.

Gnaws her lip. Says to me, her voice catching:

Just tell me you’ll protect me.

I’ll protect you.

Say it again.

I’ll protect you.

Say it again.

I’ll protect you.

She turns. Tears poised on her lower lids, peering over the edge, like jumpers on a ledge.

Yep. Just what I thought. Sounds just the same coming out of your mouth as it does out of everyone else’s.

Grace—

Don’t.

I will. I swear. I’ll protect you.

Jumpers teeter.

Don’t make me go back to him. Don’t make us.

If what you told me is true—

It’s true.

—well, then, I don’t think your father can be forgiven. At least not by anyone he’s bound to meet on this Earth. Certainly not by me. And not by you.

She looks back out over the park.

You’re right. When I found out, I stayed. I thought maybe he would forgive me. He would still love me, love us, if I stayed. So that wasn’t why I ran away.

No?

Jumpers jump. Free fall. Straight plummet down her cheek. Followed quick by more jumpers. They’re all jumping now.

She looks at me.

No. And it’s not the most unforgivable thing he’s ever done.

So at first the rough plan was, we hold tight until Harrow arrives in Manhattan, when we know he’ll be here, he’ll be tapped out, and he’ll be walking among the living. Grace told me that on his New York trips, he likes to meet with his top donors, the ones he calls the Deacons’ Circle, show them a little Christian love. Then, of course, there’s the Crusade itself, with Harrow preaching in public to an overflow crowd. Yes, there will be a hundred bodyguards and twenty thousand witnesses.

I said it was a plan. I didn’t say it was a good plan.

But we thought, maybe a sniper shot. Sideswipe the motorcade. Finagle a face-to-face, rush the podium, take him down in a kamikaze tumble.

That was the plan, such as it was. Until Persephone told me her story.

The rest of it.

The part she hadn’t told to anyone.

So Persephone had a best friend. Rachel.

She was a few years younger than Persephone. More beautiful than Persephone too, at least to hear Persephone tell it.

Troubled girl. Lost her parents young.

Came to church with an aunt and uncle.

Caught Harrow’s eye. A long while back.

He took an interest.

When Rachel was young, maybe ten, Harrow became a kind of surrogate father. He wasn’t around much, given his schedule, but he provided for her. Showed her favor. She was over at the house enough that she and Grace became like sisters, more or less. They always joked that Grace was like Heidi, living carefree in the Alps, and Rachel was like Clara, the sickly cousin come to take the mountain air.

They grew up together. They got older.

She even warned Grace against dating that boy who asked for the photographs.

One night Harrow called Rachel into his study. She thought maybe he was going to talk to her about offering to help her with college. He’d always been so generous. Even so, that was still a few years away.

Instead he told her about this marvelous new ministry.

Paved With Gold.

I want you to be one of my very first angels, is how he put it.

He personally escorted her to the camp. She could barely believe it. The famous T. K. Harrow, with her on his arm. She never went to prom so this felt to her like prom night.

He delivered her to the doorstep and said he couldn’t wait for her to come back and tell him just how real the new heaven he was building felt.

She entered the camp’s main building, which was built to look like a barn. Sodium lamps floated in the dark rafters. Beneath them there lay a checkerboard of hundreds of white-sheeted cots. But only a dozen dreamers so far, tapped in here and there. My pilgrims, Harrow had called them. When she
walked in, the nurses stood to applaud her. She’d worn the best dress she had.

Ironed it twice.

The empty beds laid out so lovingly. Kindly nurses to tuck you in under sheets that smelled like spring. A scent that was hard to place, maybe gardenias.

The tube slides in painlessly.

The nurse leans over and you say a prayer together. She wears a white folded cap, pinned to her hair, like an old-time nurse. She kisses your forehead. You assure her you’ll see her again soon and tell her all about it. She says she sure hopes so, but she also tells you that, for a lot of people, when they get to heaven, they don’t ever want to tap out again.

You smile, and get drowsy, your eyelids drop like a heavy curtain at the end of a play. And you swear to yourself in that last waking moment, even as you still feel the loosening grip of the nurse’s hand slip away, that you hear the distant lullaby of harps, you’re absolutely sure that you can.

At Harrow’s personal orders they tapped her out temporarily and put her under quarantine in an adjacent infirmary, where Rachel lay for a few hours in locked restraints in a sick bed, wondering exactly which of these two worlds she was torn between was the horrible dream.

Normally no one would have been allowed to see her, but she got word out to Grace Chastity through a junior pastor who’d long harbored a crush on her. Grace Chastity still had some special privileges also, daughter of the minister and all.

At this point, Grace wasn’t showing yet.

So when she got word she came to Rachel’s room at night
and visited Rachel and Rachel said nothing. She just smiled and strained against her cuffs as Grace stroked her cheek and she cried.

Then Rachel asked Grace if she still carried that knife.

What are you talking about?

Please don’t ask me anything. Just help me get out of here. Don’t ask me why just please help me get out of here.

So Grace tugged at the locked restraining strap and then, thwarted, pulled from her boot the five-inch knife which she’d been carrying every day since that night when her father thundered drunkenly into her room, waving a tablet, bright with pictures of her, like he was Moses catching the fallen praying to the golden calf. The night that she’d reflexively clutched the covers to her chin, as though they offered some protection, rather than simply something else for him to strip away.

Grace sawed through the first restraint.

Rachel’s right hand sprang free.

Then Grace circled the bed to cut free her other arm but she couldn’t get the angle right on the restraint and Rachel said here let me have it I can reach it better than you can so Grace in a thoughtless moment gave her the blade.

And Rachel without hesitation slashed it brightly across her bound left wrist then plunged it into her chest, plunging and plunging, smiling at Grace Chastity and saying good-bye good-bye I love you I love you I hope I will see you again one day.

What Grace would clearly remember forever is how she plunged with such anger, as though to drive something out.

Saying let this blood wash me clean oh Lord please Lord as she bled red widely on the stiff white sheets, until her
strength drained away and she was lost in the swallowing stain.

And Persephone stood over her, and she took back the blade, and she kissed her friend on the forehead, and wiped the blade clean, and then she ran.

I take the brochure from my pocket, unfold it, lay it out flat on the coffee table.

PAVED WITH GOLD
.

WHY WAIT?

Change of plan.

No sniper shot. No side-on suicide motorcade collision. No kamikaze attacks, no stealthy slit from the shadows.

No surprises. No sudden oblivion.

Because Harrow needs to know.

He needs to know who. And he needs to know why.

I fold the brochure and hide it in my pocket and don’t tell anyone this as we sit in Rick’s Chinatown flat, his sofa as shapeless as a deflating dinghy, and the three of us, me, Rick, and Mark Ray, all trapped on it together like survivors on the first day of month number two, adrift at sea.

Persephone’s pregnant. Persephone gets a chair.

Mina Machina, Rick’s live-in, comes slouching out of the kitchen, slurping at something steaming in a bowl. She’s got long hair and she’s alarmingly skinny, so she looks like a long wooden stand built to hold up a black wig. The wig could use a brushing too.

She giggles at something only she hears or understands, then lets the hot bowl slip and spill with a clatter.

Classic tapper. Still dreaming.

She retrieves, then wrestles with, a mop, which in her hands looks like an identical twin held upside-down, hair shocked white.

I ignore her and lay out the plan to the room.

We need to find a way to get to Harrow while he’s here in New York for his crusade. As Mark said, there’s only two ways this ends. We either hand over Persephone or we convince Harrow to stop asking. We’re going to go with the second one. I’ll handle that part.

Mark shoots me a look. This is the look that says I’m lying, because he actually said there were three ways this could end. But I figured I’d leave out the outcome where Harrow kills me. In any case, that’s for me to worry about.

I continue. Lay out phase two. The post-Rachel part of the plan.

Rick, we also need to find a way to gate-crash Paved With Gold. We need to get into Harrow’s heaven and get everyone out. Everyone.

Rick looks perplexed. Sparks a cigarette.

You want to crash heaven and then send everyone home? Why do you want to shit on the picnic?

I wave the smoke away. Nod to Persephone.

We’ve got a pregnant lady here.

Rick looks at her. Looks at me. Really was hoping to finish that cigarette.

Stubs it out. Doesn’t matter where. The whole apartment’s an ashtray.

Sorry. My bad.

Just tell me if it’s possible. Like what you did with Mark when I was tapped in with Harrow before. Slide someone in, uninvited.

Sure, crashing in one person is easy enough. Tapping out everyone else who’s also in that construct? All at once? That’s trickier.

I don’t care if it’s tricky. I want to know if it’s possible.

Rick rubs his palms on his thighs. Looks lost without his cigarette. Then shrugs.

Sure. Anything’s possible. Sort of.

And what do you need from us?

I need someone inside. I can tap people out one by one from out here. It’s slow going. You have to find them and then sever the link. And it’s a lot easier if the people inside know what’s happening.

Meaning what?

Meaning I need someone in there to give them a nudge. You know, pinch me, I’m dreaming, that kind of thing. Also, it helps a lot if they actually want to leave.

I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that.

I turn to Mark Ray.

Okay. So that’s you and me, Mr Angel.

Mark extends a consoling pastor’s hand to squeeze my shoulder, like I’ve come to him for advice.

I hate to say this, friend, but last time we tried this, you flailed around in there like a fat kid in water wings drowning in the shallow end.

Then Mark pivots to Rick, like it’s time for the grown-ups to talk.

I’ll go in. I can handle that part. But are you sure you can crash me into Paved With Gold? That thing’s got to be a vault.

Rick winces, wrinkling Chinese tattoos.

Hard to say. When I crashed that country church, I learned a lot about their protocols, and those tend to be consistent across the board. That’s the good news. The bad news is, last
time they weren’t expecting us. I’m guessing that won’t be the case this time around. Also, that country-church construct? That was a quickie one-off, whipped up for your meeting. Designed for guests, so it was easy to crash. This heaven place is guaranteed to be a much more complicated construct. More secure. Walls are much higher, so to speak.

Mina, still waltzing with the mop.

You gotta piggyback.

Ricks waves her off. Like a bad smell.

She repeats.

An octave higher.

You gotta piggyback.

I’m interested. So I ask Rick.

What’s that?

Rick rubs his temples like he just got hit by the nastiest migraine ever, and that headache is now dancing with a mop in his kitchen.