Locked (The Heaven's Gate Trilogy) (18 page)

“Stop that,” she said,
crossing her arms against my attempt at distraction. She skewered me with one
of her patented hairy eyeball stares, refusing to give up the issue.

“Do your clients run away
screaming in fear when you stare at them like that?” I demanded. 

Frustrated, she sighed. “You’re
impossible.  Well, I expect you to talk with me if it raises any issues,” she
commanded.

“Sheesh, between you and
Michael I might as well give up on my education and lock myself away for the
rest of my life,” I shot back, keeping the tone light.  I took one last bite of
the pear before tossing the core into the bin.  “I’m going up to study now.”  I
jumped off the stool and kissed her on the cheek.

She wiped the sloppy kiss
off with a look of dismay and rubbed her hands on the dishtowel.  “I guess I
have more in common with that boy than I thought.  Off with you, then.  But I
mean it, missy.”  She shook the towel at me as she spoke.  “Any flash backs,
any nightmares, anything at all, you tell me.  Got it?”

“Got it,” I called over
my shoulder as I climbed the stairs, relieved that she would never know the
truth.

I hurried to my room and
closed the door firmly behind me.  I leaned against it and slid down until I
was sitting huddled on the floor.  Would it change anything, if Michael and Mom
knew about my nightmare?

I turned the question
over in my mind. 

Last night’s dream had
been confused.  But it was just a dream – I was sure of it.  It was full of
images from Maria’s story, some of them things I had never even seen for
myself, some of them pictures I recognized from my Internet searches.  Hungry
children with big brown eyes, crowding me on the streets of Reynosa.  A hot,
stifling truck, the air heavy with fear.  Maria, lined up to be inspected by a
bunch of thugs, her sister clinging to her and then, brutally, torn away. 
Maria, chained to a wall.  And then me, in her place.

But that had never
happened.  And nothing in my dream – nothing – seemed like a buried memory
clawing its way back to the surface.

It was just a dream, I
said, looking at my shaking hands, willing them to stop.  Just a dream.

*****

I kept telling myself
that in the weeks that followed, because the dream never stopped.  Every night
I found myself riding beside Maria on her fearsome journey from Mexico.   And
every night, something new and insidious wove itself into the fabric of the
dream until the line between Maria and me, the difference between her story and
mine, became tenuous. 

As the truck pulled away
from Reynosa and she leaned outside to wave goodbye to her hopeful father, I
saw my father.

When her little sister
turned her up her face, sobbing with grief as the men pulled her away, it was
my face.

As the crowd of men
pressed against her, inspecting her like cattle, I recognized their eyes.  I
just could not place them.  And then they would dissolve, in a rush of wings
and wind.  I would feel myself flying, and begin to believe that I was free,
only to falter, plunging faster and faster toward the ground until I woke up in
a sweat.

Night after night, I
could not escape her story, and my fear that something was terribly wrong, that
somehow our fates were interwoven, began to mount.

I mostly escaped my
mother’s vigilant eyes – she had begun traveling again, and was preoccupied
with a big merger project.  But I could not hide the shadows under my eyes from
Michael, nor from Tabitha.

“Someone’s been burning
the midnight oil again,” she commented as I stumbled into class and sat down
next to her.  Our appearances were a study in contrasts.  I’d barely managed to
crawl out of my bed, throwing on sweats and wrapping a long scarf around my
neck.  My hair was lank, its ends tucked into the scarf, carefully hiding the
symbol on my neck.  She, on the other hand, had carefully swept her hair into a
spiky fauxhawk, complete with hot pink extensions down her back, which she had
matched to her fingernails, eye shadow and shoes.  The pink stood out against
her dark skin, drawing even more attention to her get-up.   It was ridiculously
awe-inspiring.

“No time to shower,” I
mumbled under the noise of the teacher’s lecture as I hunched into my chair.  I
could feel Michael’s stare, burning into my back.  I reached up and smoothed my
hair against my neck, as if somehow he could see through the wall of hair to my
Mark.

Tabitha wrinkled her
nose.  “I didn’t need to know that,” she muttered back at me.

“Ladies, something you’d
like to share with us?” Mr. Bennett hovered between our desks.

“We were just discussing
our research paper, sir,” Tabitha countered smoothly as the class snickered.

“I was just saying that
I’d graded your interim submissions.  Yours is good, but you still have some
work to do,” he intoned, sliding our paper off the top of his pile.

The class laughed as
Tabitha eagerly snatched the paper, and then sagged with disappointment.

“You all do.”  The
teacher skewered the class with a withering glare.  Everyone fell silent.  He
resumed walking the aisles, handing out papers as he went.

“You only have one week
left before your final submissions.  I suggest you take my feedback very
seriously and focus on it during these last days.  Failure to address this
feedback will lower your score by a full grade.”

The class groaned and
Bennett smiled with spiteful glee.

“Because I am a nice man,
I will give you the rest of this period to regroup.  Now go to it.”  Grumbling,
the class soon broke apart, the noise of scraping chairs and conversation
overwhelming the room.

I huddled over Tabitha.  “What
did he say?”

She held the pages out to
me.  “See for yourself.”

I took the paper and
began reading the chicken scratches of red ink he’d left across the front
page.  I was vaguely aware of Michael reading over my shoulder.

“There’s a lot, but it’s
doable,” I said, wondering where I’d get the energy to tackle all the
additional research and revisions our teacher had suggested.

“There’s more,” Tabitha
said glumly, turning the paper over.  The entire back page was a sea of red. 
“But we can’t do it without talking to Maria again.”

“No way,” Michael
interjected sternly.

We both turned to face
him.   After our talk, Michael and I had commenced a careful dance.  Outwardly,
everything was the same.  We still spent most of our classes and lunch
together; he still drove me home every day after school.  But our conversations
were stilted, as if he was afraid to say too much; it seemed as if an invisible
force field kept him from getting too close to me. And I, trying to keep the
secret of my dreams, found it easier that way, even if the distance between us
was sometimes painful.  For as much as I relied on Michael’s solid presence and
the protection it seemed to offer, I was equally afraid of him, and my dark,
sleepless nights had only made me more cautious.

I even welcomed his
discreet, periodic absences.  He couldn’t hide the agony his disobedience
caused him any longer.  I recognized it in the whiteness of his knuckles when
he gripped the edge of his desk; the restless pacing as he waited for my slow,
human body to catch up to him on the walk to his car; the grinding of his teeth
as he muscled through his endless migraines.  It racked me with guilt to think
of him in constant pain – and to think of the people who needed him, whom he
was leaving out there to struggle, all because of me.  His strain mounted and
mounted until, in his most private moments, when he didn’t think I was looking,
he would let down his guard; then it seemed to rack his body in spasms of
agony.

Only when he had reached
that point would he allow himself to disappear – sometimes for days.

When he was gone, I was
grateful that his pain would be lessened, feeling guilty at the role I played
in his misery.  I left unsaid my thanks for feeling that, just for a moment, I
could breathe again.  While I waited for him – and I did wait, cursing myself
as I did so -- I pored over the newspapers searching for another unlikely story
of rescue and redemption somewhere half-way around the world, happy for the distraction
from my own worries and the feeling of Lucas’s eyes, ever watchful.

As far as the research
paper had gone, Michael had simply followed Tabitha’s instructions and tagged
along, adding his contributions during the periods he was in school.  As long
as he didn’t see any threat to my safety, he’d kept quiet.  So his comment took
Tabitha by surprise. 

But not me.  As soon as I
knew what we had to do, I remembered his concerns, and my promise not to go
back to the shelter. I’d braced myself for his protest.  But what I hadn’t been
prepared for was the closeness of his body, the heat I could almost feel
rolling from him in waves, the catch of my heart as he voiced his concern.  I
leaned against the desk and took a deep breath.

“It’s the only way,” I
said calmly, searching his eyes, willing him to understand.  “We can’t answer
any of Bennett’s questions unless we ask her directly.”

He held out his hand.  I
passed him the papers so he could scan the comments himself.

“We’ll just make it up
then,” he said dismissively, thrusting the papers back at Tabitha. 

She looked at him in
wide-eyed horror.  “You can’t just make up a research paper.  That’s
cheating
.  
It goes against the scholarly ethic.”

 “I’m just dumb muscle,”
he retorted, squaring off against her, arms crossed as if daring her to defy
him.  “I don’t really care about scholarly ethic.”

Tabitha stood up, her
patent platform boots bringing her eye to eye with Michael.  “You listen to
me,” she started, pointing a finger at him.

“Hey, no need for that,”
I said, stepping quickly between them to interrupt her diatribe.  I looked
hurriedly over my shoulder to make sure Mr. Bennett was not listening in before
continuing in a low voice.  “We need these answers, Michael, and we need to get
them the right way. But there’s more than one way to do it.”

“Yeah. If you don’t want
to go down there, we’ll just do it ourselves,” Tabitha interjected.

A vein throbbed in
Michael’s forehead.  “No way.  If you go, I’m going with you.”

“What’s wrong with you?
First you don’t want to go at all, now you insist on going? What are you,
afraid you aren’t going to get enough credit?  Or do you just want to keep Hope
all to yourself, keep her under your thumb?”  Tabitha was gesturing wildly, her
fauxhawk shaking with every move. 

Michael’s face burned
with anger but before he could respond, Tabitha continued.  “Well, guess what?
It doesn’t matter what you want.  Mrs. Blankenship said no men at the Center.
Period.”  She crossed her arms in a mirror image of him and jutted out her hip,
mentally declaring the case closed. 

“You heard her share the
rules, Hope,” Tabitha continued, goading Michael with her confidence.    “Back
me up.”

I stared at the ground. 
When I’d made my promise to Michael, I’d conveniently forgotten about that one
little rule.

“She’s telling the
truth,” I mumbled, my hand straying to the back of my neck.

I raised my head, willing
myself to meet his gaze.  His eyes blazed with fury.

“Then you can’t…” he
began.

“We can call her,” I
blurted out.

My interruption stopped
him short.

“What?” Tabitha asked.

“We don’t have to
physically go to the Center to talk to her.  The Center has phones.  We can
just ask to speak to her on the phone.”

Tabitha looked
skeptical.  “What if she doesn’t…?”

I cut her off,
impatiently waving my hand.  “Her English was great, and it’s not like she’s
going to be out somewhere.  They keep her there all the time, under lock and
key.  All we have to do is call Mrs. Blankenship to set it up.”

My logic was impeccable. 
I sat on the top of my desk with a self-satisfied smile, waiting for them to
agree.

Tabitha was annoyed.  She
looked at our paper, now crumpled in her fist, and shoved it into a folder.

“Fine. But we’re doing it
right after school because if this doesn’t work we have no other choice but to
go down there.”  She glared at Michael.  “Alone.”

*****

Michael and Tabitha
huddled around me, oblivious to the bustle of the hallways, as I listened to
the interminable ringing on the other end of the line.

“Why don’t they pick up?”
Tabitha breathed, tapping her foot with impatience.

“They probably don’t have
a full time receptionist.  It’s a nonprofit, remember?” I reminded her. 

Finally someone picked up
and transferred me to Mrs. Blankenship.  I repeated the carefully rehearsed
lines, promising to keep our phone call with Maria short if she would approve
it.

“I see,” I said, my brow
furrowing at her response.  “Well, thank you anyway, Mrs. Blankenship.  And let
me know if anything changes.”