twenty-one

Paul twisted towards Michael as Rachel dropped to the floor of the  cave. The blond man was almost laughing as he released her neck.

There still was not much margin left for Paul, but he threw himself forward against the loosened ropes and hit Michael hard with his shoulder, throwing the man off balance. Twisting himself back up, Paul waited until Michael predictably struck at him. He blocked the blow with his shoulder then butted him with his head. He could feel himself coming loose from the tree, although the rope around his ankles held him back.

Then Michael darted his fists and seized two handfuls of the ropes that swung around Paul’s chest and fell back, pulling hard. With his foot to Paul’s chest, he kicked Paul backwards against the tree, aiming blows on his scar.

Winded, Paul was squeezed back against the trunk of the tree by one rope that still caught him around the stomach. He wrestled to keep fighting but Michael was out of reach now, standing just out of range and bracing himself with the ropes.

“Got you,” Michael panted, crossing the two ends of the ropes, giving them a deft twist and spreading his arms to drive the knot down against Paul’s chest. When he was sure that Paul was trapped again, he knotted the rope a second and third time and lunged forward with a powerful blow to strike him.

Paul tensed himself, but Michael paused, his hand hovering above Paul’s vocal chords. Slowly the rage in his eyes took on a new tint, and he dropped his eyes to Rachel’s body.

That was exactly what Paul had been hoping to avoid. He lunged forward at Michael again, but the blond man wasn’t interested. He lowered his hands and smiled at Paul’s struggles. “She did call the police after all, the little chit. But Craig is up there explaining to the officers how I drove you to a mainland bar for a friendly chat hours ago. Even if they do search my property, they won’t find you here—either of you.” His eyes wandered down to Rachel again.

Paul saw that the combination of the drugs and alcohol had heightened Michael’s sense of power and obscured his judgment. He tried to speak, but the words came from his dry throat like puffs of wind.

Michael merely cursed at him as he leaned over the unconscious girl and lifted up a handful of her inky dark hair. There was no response from Rachel. Paul watched miserably. He had no weapons left to stop the man, and they both knew it.

“She doesn’t mean that much to me,” Michael mused, toying with her tresses. “But even so…” He inspected the back of Rachel’s calves with a finger. “Quite a dish. Made for our pleasure, wasn’t she? Tell me, did you really love her, or did you just want to—”

He paused and looked up at Paul. “You really love her, don’t you?”

His eyes were cold. “Too bad for you.”

Rachel woozily resurfaced into consciousness, and found her cheek pressed against the gritty stone floor of the cave. Someone was behind her, talking. His smooth, steady voice made her skin crawl. Now the distinction between nice and good was chillingly clear.

“You think she came back here for you? No, she came back here because she’s hungry for what I can give her.”

It was Michael’s voice. She felt a sudden urge to vomit. He was wrong. She had no taste now for anything from him. But when she tried to push his hands away, she found that she couldn’t move. His knee was planted on her back, pinning her down.

Michael chuckled. “You know what I’m going to do now, clown? I’m going to eat her alive in front of you. And man, you are going to watch me.”

She tried to wrest herself away, but he merely laughed at her. He had a hand over her mouth, and was working a gag down her throat. Becoming aware of his other hand tracing a line from her neck slowly down her back, as though he were deciding where to start cutting her open, she tried to jerk herself away. He squeezed her neck once more, cutting off her resistance abruptly, and black bees swarmed around her head, stinging her with sharp pricks of light.

She tried to scream as he started pulling up her skirts, but all that she could manage was a strangled gasp through the gag. It was as if her throat was full of sand.

Then she became aware that Paul was crying out in a strange, gravelly voice, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. Nonsense syllables with an odd, familiar resonance.  Over and over again he was crying them, struggling against his hoarseness, louder and louder.

He’s saying the rosary in Japanese, she recognized.

The words had an effect on Michael. He hissed, “Shut up!” when Paul began. But when Paul defiantly cried the words again, something in Michael seemed to snap.

He got to his feet, screaming at Paul to stop. And as he did, Rachel twisted to her knees and scrambled up towards the exit of the cave. But Michael put her into a headlock. Scratching his arms and tearing through the gag, she bit his forearm, hard. He got his arm out of her mouth and started to shake her. Paul kept intoning his prayer in a high cracked voice, more and more insistently, and Rachel felt the power of words storming the heavens, and was sure, although she didn’t know how, that the words would not return void—

And then suddenly a new voice broke in, a roar of battle-hardened fury.

“Let go of my daughter!” Dad bellowed, seizing Michael by the shoulders and throwing him against the wall of the cave. Rachel saw her enemy crumple to the ground, out cold for the second time that night. 

Winded, she staggered towards Paul, and collapsed on the ground by his bare feet.

Then Dad was lifting up her head, saying anxiously, “Rachel? Are you all right?” The gag was pulled out of her mouth, and she breathed, relief flooding over her. She knew they were saved.

“Help Paul,” she managed to say.

She became aware of Prisca, standing with her back to the entrance of the cave and hollering, “Hey! Mr. Policeman! We’re over here! Yes, on the side of the cliff!  There’s a hidden cave over here! Wait, I’ll come and show you.”

Paul was grateful, and happy.  He sat in the police boat, clothed again, rubbing his wrists and trying, but not too hard, to stay awake. There would be police reports to make in the morning, and probably more grief to go through with the arrests of the night, but right now, he was free, having been released with some hesitation by the paramedics who had come to the island. After a long drink and a plunge into the bay, whose salt water soaked his cuts in a stinging but healing bath, Paul felt certain, and had argued with them, that most of the effects of his ordeal would be erased after sleep, but they still wanted him to come to the hospital the next day.

But right now he could simply be happy. Colonel Durham sat across from him in the boat, one arm around Rachel, and the other arm around Prisca. The moon shone above them, and her light danced on the water.  Paul yawned, and grinned up at the moon.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I know who you’re really talking to,” Rachel spoke up from beneath her dad’s arm. Her sea green eyes sparkled at him.

Colonel Durham didn’t ask, but he grinned at Paul. Then he reached across, and unexpectedly tousled his hair, just as if Paul were his son.

“We’ve got to get you cleaned up,” he said. “You won’t believe what’s written across your forehead.”

“Don’t tell me,” Paul said cheerfully, but he saw that Rachel’s face had grown somber.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “That word’s not true, for one thing. It wasn’t right that you had to—go through this—when I’m the one at fault.”

“Don’t take all the credit, Rachel,” Prisca put in. “All of us made mistakes.”

“But Paul’s the one who suffered most for it,” Rachel said.

Paul flushed. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“But it’s not fair,” Rachel said again, looking over the bay.

“It’s okay,” Colonel Durham said. “He’s a man. He can handle it. Every good man has to take that sort of stuff once in a while.”

Paul nodded, thankful for the articulation, and felt himself losing consciousness. He yawned. “There’s only one thing I ask, Rachel.”

“What’s that?” she said, turning to look at him once more, her lovely face still grave.

“Try to be a whole person. Not just a night person, or a day person. Be the kind of person who can live in both. Like a person is supposed to do.” He yawned again. “Sorry if this is a little incoherent. But that’s all I ask.”

He thought he heard Rachel say, “Is that all?” but now, being fully asleep, he couldn’t answer her.

Rachel observed that Paul remained essentially asleep for the rest of the night. Of course, by this time, it was early Saturday morning. Sallie and all the girls were awake when the escaped captives and their rescuers returned. Paul roused himself long enough to get out of the police boat, thank the officers, and be mobbed by a mass of crying, ecstatic girls who had been sure they would never see him alive again. Rachel had to grin as she watched him, his lids constantly edging down over his eyes, attempting to be civilized and aware and respond to the dozens of breathless questions. She half-expected him to pitch forward, snoring, at any moment.

But he was shepherded into the house by his admirers, and Sallie insisted on making up a bed for him on the couch. He thanked her, his head slumping forward, and Colonel Durham said, “Stop pestering him now, girls. He’s exhausted.”

Paul staggered appreciatively onto the couch, attempted to say something that sounded like good night, and plunged forward, dead to the world again.

“What did they do to him?” the girls asked Rachel anxiously after they had tiptoed out of the living room. They had, of course, noticed the obscene word which was still faintly scrawled across his forehead.

Rachel attempted to explain what she had witnessed as she wobbled over to the kitchen table, feeling more than slightly exhausted herself.

“That is so sick,” Tammy said angrily. Debbie got up from the kitchen table and slipped out of the room.

“Girls,” Colonel Durham said from the corner. They all looked at him, suddenly silent and guilty, remembering that until tonight, he had little knowledge of the events that had led up to this night’s catastrophe. He opened the cupboard. “Does anyone want something to drink?  Rachel?”

“Yes please,” Rachel said, suddenly realizing how thirsty she was. She lowered herself into a chair. The others also asked for drinks, and their dad pulled out glasses and poured juice and water for everyone. Debbie came back in, took a coffee mug, and went over to the sink. Sallie, still in her bathrobe, handed around the glasses until everyone was settled.

When everyone was sitting down with their glasses, Colonel Durham pulled out a chair on one side of the table and sat down, rubbing his graying hair.

“Well,” he began, looking around at them, a bit hesitant. “I’d very much like to hear the whole story, if any of you want to tell me. Your mother and I have been mostly in the dark, until you all stormed into our bedroom at two this morning.”

Sallie nodded. Cheryl raised her hand. “I have one question,” she said, “how much did Paul tell you?”

“Nothing,” Dad said, spreading his hands. “I asked him if he could find out from you girls what was going on, and he said he would, but only if he was free to not tell me anything until you girls were ready to tell me. So I’ve been waiting, and praying, and I don’t know very much at all.”

Rachel’s face reddened. “That’s what Paul said the other night to me,” she said. “That he wanted us to tell you ourselves.”

“Well, will you?”

Rachel looked at the other girls for the final decision. Brittany was nodding her head emphatically, and Melanie, Cheryl, Lydia, Rebecca, Tammy, Taren, Linette, Miriam, and Prisca were all doing the same. She noticed again that Debbie was missing.

“All right then,” she said. “Cheryl, you were there at the beginning. Why don’t you tell them how it got started?”

Cheryl looked at Rachel a bit surprised. At first she looked as if she would object, but then seemed to change her mind. “Well,” she said, “it all started when a few of us decided to rearrange our room one night.”

Everyone in the family was listening to her intently. Rachel drained her glass, and unobtrusively rose from the table. After a few minutes, she stepped into the dining room, looking for Debbie.

Rachel found her in the living room, kneeling next to Paul’s head. She had a coffee mug of warm water and a small washcloth, and was cleaning his forehead carefully. He was still blissfully asleep.

The ugly word was mostly erased. Debbie worked slowly. “I’m trying not to get soap in his eyes,” she explained.

“Are you sure you’re not bothering him?” Rachel asked.

“I asked him and he said to go right ahead,” she said. “I don’t think he even knows I’m doing it any more.”

Rachel sat down in an easy chair, put her hand on her chin, and contemplated the sleeping man, grateful to see him comforted. What a remarkable person he was. Her first assessment of him, made a bare few weeks ago, had vastly missed the mark. Paul’s goodness—for he was good, not just nice—was of a different quality—less easy to categorize, tame, and dismiss. He hadn’t been content, either, to remain apart from them, untainted in his goodness, but had insisted on going out and getting himself mixed up with their own brand of badness. And she had seen what it had done to him. 

Yet he had accepted it. She could tell he didn’t resent her, despite the spasms of pain that momentarily knitted his sleeping brow.

“Sorry,” Debbie whispered. “I’m almost done.”

She rubbed even more slowly. “Rachel, what did that word mean?”

“You don’t want to know,” Rachel said wryly. “It wasn’t true, anyway.”

Meeting Paul had done something to her, and she wasn’t entirely sure what it was. But she felt certain that she was never going to see the world in the same way again.

Now her own eyes began to grow heavy, and she put her head back against the chair.  The last thing she saw before she drifted off was Debbie kissing Paul on his cleaned forehead and patting his hair.

But once she closed her eyes, the stupidity of her actions and the pain and anguish she had caused came back to her. She put her head against the cushions of the chair and wept again, her tears hot on her cheeks, this time asking for forgiveness. Somewhere in that misty land between sleeping and waking, it was granted, and she fell asleep.

 

With everything that had happened, Rachel should have slept in. But something woke her up before nine in the morning.

She found herself in bed, and was confused for a moment. She didn’t remember coming up to bed, but after a few moments, recollected her sisters and Sallie helping her into some welcome softness at some point during the night.

Slowly, she opened her eyes. The girls’ bedroom was warm and air was heavy with the sounds of gentle breathing. Carefully she moved away from Debbie, who was snoring peacefully on the other side of the bed.

Cheryl slept in the other double bed, her arms protectively around her youngest sister Linette, who still looked like a baby when she slept. Tammy and Taren were lumps of blankets crowned with strands of blond hair. Miriam, her arm thrown over her dark hair, breathed deeply in her top bunk bed, and Prisca was sleeping fitfully in the bottom bunk, half-laughing to herself in some dream. Lydia’s arm hung over the side of her top bunk, and Rachel tucked it back on the bed. Becca lay on her back, the covers up to her tilted nose. Brittany slept like a guy, the blankets over her head and her bare feet thrust out of the covers.  

Below her on the bottom bunk, Melanie was curled up on her pillow. Her face was perfectly content, and she smiled in her sleep. Touched, Rachel stroked her cheek with the side of her finger, and her sister sighed and turned over. Rachel couldn’t help smiling at her.  Melanie’s heart was unburdened at last.

Rachel was still wearing her midnight butterfly dress, which, despite its trials, was in fairly decent shape. But after having slept in it, it felt to her like a tight cocoon. She wriggled out of it, relieved, and put on her denim blue dress.  Paul liked this dress on me, she thought, and felt an unusual tremor in her stomach.

I’m never leaving you again, she had said to him fiercely, sometime last night, or this morning. And she vividly remembered her hands touching his distressed face. There was something there she didn’t want to let go of.

But she was suddenly conscious that this was the daylight, not the phantasms and terror of the nighttime. Things were different here—different religions, different churches, differing paths of life.  There were obstacles here, too—more prosaic and discernible, but still obstacles.  But Paul had asked her to live in both the night and the day.

In the bathroom, she carefully brushed her hair, cleaned her teeth, and studied herself in the mirror. What will Paul think of me now? After everything that’s happened? She didn’t know what to expect.

At last she stole downstairs and tiptoed to the living room, to look again on the sleeping man.

But all that greeted her in the living room, bright with fresh sunshine, was a tangle of blankets, and no body.

Dumbfounded, she stood still. For an instant she almost wondered if she had been right—if Paul, as she had thought of Michael last night, wasn’t really a human being, but something else, something beyond human.  But that was silliness.

She hesitantly turned away and went into the kitchen. Her father was up, at a sunny spot on the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading his Bible. He turned when she came in.

“Good morning, Rachel.”  

“Good morning,” she came to him, put her arms shyly around him, and kissed him. “Where’s Paul?”

“He’s already up and gone,” her dad said with a smile.

“Gone?” she repeated, dismayed.

“To church. He just left a moment ago. He said he just had time to walk to morning Mass, so he left.”

“Oh.”

He took her hand unexpectedly. “Rachel, I’ve decided to step down from leadership in our church. What do you think about that?”

She paused, holding his hand. “I think that would be wonderful, Dad.”

“The more I’ve been thinking about it, the more right it seems to me. You girls are growing up so fast. Before you know it, you’ll all be out of the house. So I want to take advantage of the time left and spend more of it with you and your sisters. I’m convinced that God wants this of me. And I’m ready.”

His eyes were solemn. She bent down and kissed him, feeling a sweet happiness come over her. “Thank you, Dad. I think that’s just what our family needs.”

“Good!” he said, kissing her cheek and letting her go. “Would you—” He started to say something else, but she cut him off, unintentionally.

“Dad, can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.” He didn’t seem to mind that she had interrupted him.

“Can I—” she looked away, towards the door, where Paul had left. “Can I go—?”

“With Paul?” he asked. “To church?”

She nodded.

He seemed to be a bit disappointed, and she realized he had probably been about to invite her to join him for morning devotions. But then he seemed to make up his mind.

He squeezed her hand again and smiled a knowing smile. “Go with that young soldier, Rachel.”

Nevertheless, she didn’t let go of his hand right away. “Dad, are you sure?” she asked, uncertainly.

“Go with him, daughter,” he said, smiling sternly. “That’s an order.”

Without another word, she kissed him on the cheek, turned, and ran out of the house.

The sun was moving swiftly up into the blue sky, and the bay breeze was gusting merrily as she ran down the driveway to the gravel road. Her sandaled feet slapped against the brown pebbles, and her hair kept blowing in her face, but she didn’t care. As she rounded the curve, she saw him far ahead of her, walking easily. The bend of his muscles, his brown hair fluffed by the breeze. She called his name.

I’m never leaving you again.

He turned, and she raced towards him, scattering pebbles behind her. Her breath was catching in her throat, and she laughed, almost giddy with the exertion. She had never run after anything this fast, she was sure.

And as she came closer, she saw his face, first startled, and then wondering, like a child’s, and then he understood. And a grin lit up his face like she had never seen before, and he held out his hand to her.

He knows, she realized. He knows. And I know, too. I know that I know.

I know goodness. It has a name.