The Redemptive Return

One

One

Six Months Later

GIVEN A CHOICE BETWEEN nightmares and insomnia, I’ll take insomnia every night.

I may be tired in the morning, but at least I’m not shaking.

Checking my phone for the umpteenth time tonight, I see that only ten minutes have passed since I checked it last.

3:10 a.m..

I went to bed at 10:00 p.m., exhausted again,

I haven’t slept a wink, again.

It’s been this way since July. Since the new nightmares began.

I wouldn’t have had nightmares if I had listened to Helen in the first place.

Of course, a lot of things would have been different if I had listened to Helen in the first place.

For one, Father Leonard might still be alive .

***

“TOM, YOU REALLY SHOULDN’T go in there.”

Helen had looked at me, imploring me to listen to her just this once, to stop being so stubborn and just take her word for it.

I arrived at the jail about 30 minutes after she called. I should have been there sooner but I had made a short detour, a perhaps selfish but at the same time necessary one, to the Blessed Sacrament to say a Rosary, seeking solace for myself before I could offer it to him.

Five decades of the Rosary usually takes no more than twenty minutes from beginning to end.

That night, I barely got through one before I quit.

That was the last Rosary I had tried to pray for the last six months.

But then, there are a lot of things I haven’t done in the last six months.

“Helen,” I had said. “I need to. I need to see him. I . . . I . . . I need to give him Last Rites.”

She had shaken her head. “You don’t want to see this,” she had said, gently. “You really don’t. He hasn’t been moved yet. He’s still as he was found.”

“I’ve seen dead bodies before.”

“Have you ever seen a body after a hanging? It’s not pretty.”

I had looked at her. “Helen, I know what you’re trying to do. I appreciate your concern. But please, let me do my job.”

Helen hesitated before nodding. “OK. I’ll take you.”

She had escorted me from the small office she had taken over temporarily to Father Leonard’s cell. They isolated him from the other inmates, partly because of the assumption that if a Catholic priest was in jail, he was a child molester, and would be an instant target of the other inmates. His cell was a small room with a slit window cut in the door. It was no wonder he wasn’t found in time to save his life.

“Open the door,” Helen had told the officer stationed outside the cell.

As soon as the door opened, the first thing I noticed was not the sight.

It was the smell.

I had looked at Helen. “He soiled himself,” she had explained, quietly. “It’s typical.”

I stepped into the room. Father Leonard’s limp body was hanging from the rail of the top bunk. He was shirtless except for a t-shirt. His arms dangled at his sides, his fists tightly clenched together.

It’s only when I got closer that I saw the scratches around his neck, blood from them staining the makeshift noose.

“You changed your mind,” I whispered. “You tried to free yourself.”

I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer of thanksgiving.

The rest was anticlimactic. I had said the necessary prayers and left the scene to Helen and her technicians.

As I walked past her, she stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Helen had whispered to me. “There is nothing you could have done to prevent this.”

I had said nothing in response, but gave her a terse nod before leaving.

That night I had the first nightmare.

***

I WAS IN HIS CELL. All went exactly as it had been in real life.

Except when I made the sign of the cross over Leonard’s body, his head jerked up. His arm, no longer lifeless, came up and his hand clasped me around the throat.

“This is on you!” he hissed. “This is your fault. Everything that happened is your fault.”

I managed to break away and staggered backwards. I bumped into something. Turning, I found myself face to face with Rachel Watson.

“Your fault! Your fault!” she screamed.

Panicking, I turned to run to the door. In my way was Win Myer, pointing a condemning finger at me.

“You didn’t listen. You didn’t listen. You didn’t listen,” he repeats.

I managed to get around him.

It’s when I got to the door that I heard the cries of an infant.

***

THE BUZZING OF MY PHONE jars me awake. I must have dozed off finally.

I pick up the phone. Area Code 850. The Florida Panhandle.

My sister is calling me from Bellamy. At almost 4:00 a.m..

“This can’t be good,” I mutter. I answer and yawn, “Hello?”

“Tommy!” says a woman’s voice through the static and drops of a poor cell phone signal.

“Sonya?” I say. “What is it? Has something happened to Mom?”

“Oh, Tommy, I need your help,” my sister says. I hear what I think is the sound of leaves crunching. She sounds panicked and out of breath.

“What is it this time?” I ask with little sympathy. “Another dealer after you to pay up?”

“No, no, nothing like that, I promise,” she says. “Oh, God! They’re getting closer!”

“Where are you?” I say. “What’s going on? Who’s after you?”

“You need to help me, Tommy! I can’t trust anyone else and I don’t want Mom to get hurt!”

“What the hell are you talking about? Who’d hurt Mom?”

There’s no sound for a minute, just Sonya’s labored breathing. “I don’t have much time,” she whispers.

“What was that? Sonya, you need to speak up. I can barely hear you.”

“Listen carefully, Tommy, please! You need to come home. You can help stop them. You can help the girls. You need to help Chrystal."

“Girls,” I say, thoroughly confused. “What girls? Who’s Chrystal? Are you drunk or high again?”

“Remember that—.” The signal drops so I miss what she said.

“What, Sonya? Remember what?” I shout into the phone.

“—-Look there. Everything you need is there.” Sonya falls silent. Through the phone I hear what sound like distant voices and the crunching of leaves.

“Tommy,” she whispers. “They’re almost here. I’m sorry for everything. You’re going to find out things about me. I know I was wrong to do them. I tried to do the right thing in the end. You’ve gotta know that. I love you.”

“Sonya! Who’s—.” That’s as far as I get before the line goes dead.

I stare at my phone. I consider calling back, trying to get Sonya on the phone.

My sister was scared about something, so scared she called me, her older brother who’s spoken to her only a handful of times in the last five years.

But why call me in the first place, when I’m 900 miles away?

And how do I know this isn’t one of her drug and alcohol-fueled delusions?

I consider just letting it go, just chalking it up to that. I should just forget about it, and go downstairs, and finally tackle that pile of paperwork Anna’s been after me about.

But the niggling feeling in the back of my mind won’t stop.

I scroll through my contacts and find the only other person in Bellamy I speak to besides Mom.

“Hello?” a gruff and groggy voice answers.

“Gus? It’s Tom. Sorry to wake you.”

“Tom? What’s wrong?” Gus yawns. “Is it Aunt Nola?”

“No, no, Mom’s fine so far as I know.” I pause for a moment. “I got a really weird call from Sonya.”

“Sonya? When’s the last time you spoke to her?”

I think and try to remember. “Probably the last time was when Mom was in the hospital with her ingrown toenail. A few months ago.”

“Well, why was she calling you?”

“That’s just it, she didn’t really say. She sounded like she was running through the woods, kept talking about ‘they’ were coming after her, that she needed my help and couldn’t trust anybody.”

Gus is quiet for a minute. “Did she say anything else?” he asks.

“No, no, not really. It wasn’t the best connection so I couldn’t hear everything.”

“Huh.” Gus says. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. You know Sonya. Probably all in her mind. Got into some bad stuff, you know? I arrested some kid at the high school peddling magic mushrooms. Maybe she got some of those.”

“Yeah,” I sigh. “It’s probably that. Sorry to wake you Gus.”

“Right,” Gus says.

After I hang up, I sit on the bed for a minute. In spite of everything I know about Sonya, in spite of what Gus said, I have a red alert going off in the back of my mind.

I check the time. 4:30 a.m.. No reason to try and sleep. I might as well get up.

I stand and stretch. “Ooh, errg, uhm,” I say as I feel my joints loosen and I hear the popping and creaking of my arthritis. Every morning is another reminder that I’m not 25 anymore.

I sigh. “No,” I whisper. “If I were 25, I wouldn’t be alone.”

Moving shadows through the window catch my attention. I walk over and pull the sheer curtains back so I can see clearly.

“Damn,” I whisper.

It’s snowing.

Again.