Tiger Lillie (20 page)

I would say yes. And it is one of the few things I can say for certain.

Rawlins is a self-assembled Frankenstein, portions of his twisted ideals bolted together to form only God knows what.

I drive out of the city and north through Baltimore County. The white fences glow, all I can really see in the dark of the country, but I know this stretch well. It’s normally great fun zipping along here.

How am I going to do this? I breathe in and out like a boxer ready to spring into the ring. Psych yourself up, Lillie, you can do it, come on girl. You’re strong. You’re Hungarian. You’re a mean, lean confrontation machine.

…

Okay, so that didn’t help at all.

Maybe I should pray some more, ask God for good words to say, because He sure knows I am one of His children who says, “If only I had said…” five minutes after a conversation ends. Or five hours. Or five days. I hope one day to stop doing that sort of thing. That horrible mulling that takes up way too much of my time. I am a broken record, hear me whine.

So, God, give me words. You know how he’s going to twist things around, and now that I’m talking to You, I have to wonder why I’m even going at all. This is ridiculous. We both know Rawlins won’t budge. So why try to push at this mountain?

Because Mom and Dad need someone to stand up for them, and Tacy needs to know we care. There’s no other way to do that now. This isn’t just about Rawlins. It’s about them. Help me to yell loud enough so she’ll hear me from wherever she is locked inside that prison. Does she even know she’s in prison?

I call Gordon on my cell phone, for which I now am grateful, especially with my parents at home.

“Sweetheart!” he answers. Caller ID.

“Hi, Gordon. You need to be praying.”

I tell him why. He knows all about Rawlins.

“Want me to come up?”

“Nah. It’ll take too long. I’ll be all right.” Gordon’s home is too far away for a quick jaunt. “Besides, I’ve never seen Rawlins actually lose it.”

“We can do this together tomorrow.”

“Believe me, I’d rather have you here, but I’ve got momentum going right now and I don’t want to lose that.”

“Call me as soon as you’re finished.”

“I’ll need to.”

I swear I’m not driving all
that
far above the speed limit, but the miles evaporate. I am Warp-Speed Woman. Whatever the heck warp speed is. Maybe that’s when God is traveling with you. I hope so. Oh, Lord, You know I hope so.

All too soon their stone-pillared entryway appears on the left. Well, here we go then.

God, go with me.

I pull the car up by the barn, climb out, and slam the door as hard as I can on a ’63 car without doing something scary to the poor thing. Good, the bang echoed off the barn and house and soon, the motion detector will throw on the light at the corner of the porch as I stride up to the house.

Bingo. There it goes.

Yes, I stride. I ball my fists. I fool myself into believing that yes, I am the quintessential Strong Hungarian Woman. If only for this second.

Rawlins, you creepy man! I work up some lather. You horrible, controlling misogynist. You big bully, you.

You freak.

Tace, you deserve to have somebody at least try.

The freak meets me on the porch.

“Lillian.”

“Rawlins.”

“I can guess why you’re here.”

“Just a guess?”

“I
know
why you’re here, Lillian.”

We stand before the door. “How could you, Rawlins? What the heck did they ever do to you?”

“I’ll accept no interference. And your euphemism isn’t appreciated either.”

My gosh! Stay calm.

“But your child is in danger, Rawlins.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“Why not? You’re awfully good at that, aren’t you?”

He crosses his arms. “If you came thinking to change my mind, you’re wasting your time. My mind is made up.”

“With a little help from Pastor Cole?”

“He’s a man of God. Of course I went to him for counsel.”

“And here I thought you were your own man.”

A crude-oil hate fills me, and I am sinning. God, help me, but I hate this man standing before me.

“So you’re actually cutting her off from her parents?”

“Yes. To keep her from sinning yet more.”

“Going against rules
you’ve
made, rules that have nothing to do with Scripture?”

“I happen to think they do.”

“Chapter and verse, Rawlins. Chapter and verse.”

“This is neither the time nor the place.”

“Yeah, right. Plus, your lord and master, Alban, isn’t around to feed you the answers, is he? You know, my father is every bit as much a man of God.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“I want to see Tacy.”

“She’s retired for the night.”

“Bull.”

He places a hand on the doorknob. “This is going nowhere, Lillian, and furthermore, it’s going to keep going nowhere.”

“Because your kooky pastor says so?”

“Because
God
says so.”

“You are so
blind!
”

“You’d better leave, Lillian.”

“I
want
to see my sister. You’re beating her, aren’t you? You punished her for going with my mother, didn’t you? Perhaps I should just give a little call to social services? Perhaps a social worker needs to come out, because, by golly, when they hear that child’s cough, they’ll whisk her away so fast you’ll wonder if she ever existed in the first place.”

My own passion scares me. And I hate my own words. This is his child, not some doll. And I’m throwing around words like “social services” as if they are nothing more than confetti.

“Show me my sister!” I scream.

He opens the door and calls up the steps. “Anastasia, could you come here please?”

I force my way in.

There she stands at the top of the stairs, wearing a beautiful white silk nightgown and robe. Their bedroom is above the porch on which we stand. Did she hear?

“Lillie! What are you doing here at this hour?”

She’s heard nothing. Darn, darn, darn!

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” And she smiles like an angel, Rawlins not taking his eyes off her.

“Rawlins called Mom and Dad.”

“That’s enough, Lillian.”

I advance toward the stairs. “He told them he forbids you—”

“I said that’s enough, Lillian!” He puts his arms around my waist and lifts me off my feet. “Tacy, get back to our bedroom!”

She turns without question.

As he propels me to the door, I yell behind me. “Tacy! Can’t you see what’s going on?”

He sets me down on the porch. “Don’t try and come here again. Better she be dead than to be dragged into sin by her own family.”

He turns and walks back inside. The door clicks softly behind him.

And here I stand with nothing left to say, and nothing left to do. Tonight anyway. I scream in frustration.

Gordon’s International is parked down the street and I know he’s already inside with my parents. God love him. Surely by now Cristoff sits down there too, and they’re all wondering what to do next.

I enter the kitchen, the March chill blowing everybody’s hair before I shut the door. Suddenly, I’m shivering and I just can’t stop, and I know I failed, and what will happen to Tacy now?

I feel my shoulders sagging and Daddy says, “It’s okay, Lillie. You did what you could.”

How did he know?

Gordon hugs me. “It was a start, sweetheart.”

Cristoff grabs that concept. “That’s right, sweetie, think of tonight as a building block.”

Mom hugs me next. “You are a good girl, Lillie. We’ve just begun to fight, eh?” She pulls back and smiles into my eyes. “Now, let’s have that milk.”

“Okay.”

“So, he didn’t bite?” Daddy asks.

“It was on the verge of getting really ugly. But he allowed me to view Tacy at the top of the steps and she looked fine. Her usual monotone self.”

Mom removes my mug from the refrigerator. “That’s the frightful part. Dear Lord, you raise a child to respect herself, to be a capable, vibrant human being, and then some lunatic comes along…” She places the milk in the microwave and punches the keypad. “Not that I could see it then! Heavens no! I was so charmed by the money, the chances he offered Tacy for a better life, God forgive me.”

“Kathy, dear, we were all fooled.”

Well, not
all
of us. “I’m thinking about calling social services,” I say.

Cristoff taps the rim of his cup. “Wow, Lillie, that’s drastic.”

Daddy says, “Maybe it’s a little too soon for that.”

Gordon says nothing. He just reaches for my hand beneath the table and rests it, still held in his, on his thigh.

I tell them what Rawlins said about Tacy being better off dead. “That sounds even more drastic to me.”

Dad sighs. “I should go see him myself. I shouldn’t have let you run off like that. It was my job, really.”

“It’s okay, Daddy. I think it was better I go first, you know, a big-sisterly reaction. It also helped to see how firm he is on this whole thing.”

“And?” Mom’s brows raise.

“Very.”

“Not surprising,” Cristoff says.

The microwave beeps and Mom removes my mug. “Why don’t you call him tomorrow, Carl, and set up an appointment?”

“All right, babe.”

How can they be so calm?

“I’ll drive you,” I say, bewildered but unwilling to squash their attempt at action with my doubts.

Daddy shrugs. “He won’t let you in, I’m sure. But at least he’ll know I’m still around, that no matter what he does or says, I’m still her father.”

Fifteen minutes later, I walk Gordon toward his truck. “What a night,” I say.

“Yeah. But you did the right thing. I’d have done as much for one of my brothers.”

“I know.”

The chill wind hits us full-on front. Gordon wraps his arms around me as we stroll down the street to where he parked the car. I nuzzle into his side, trying not to throw him and his prosthesis off kilter. “You know, nights like these have a strange quality, don’t they?”

“Yeah, they do, sweetheart.”

“Dark and large.”

“Hollow yet important.”

“I love you, Gordon.”

“I love you too, Lillie.”

“You came tonight.”

“Yeah, I did. You’d have done the same.”

17

Tacy

The morning after Lillie came, I woke up late. Rawlins had already left for work. Something hard pressed into my ribs and I rolled to the side. My cuff bracelet was still warm when I reached for it. I slid it up my arm and pressed the sides completely together. It slid back down. I tried again. Once more, it ended up around my wrist.

So be it, I thought and set it in the deepest drawer of my jewelry chest. The rest of the day seemed a little lighter. I was no man’s slave.

Rawlins is still alive as I look down on him. He’s beating on the window of the car, trying to open the door.

Lillie

I absolutely need a little distraction right now, and Stan’s wedding proves more than muscular enough. Around Christmastime we decided to definitely go WWII. The invitations just arrived, the words engraved on the wingspan of model Vickers Wellingtons, heavy bombers used in the war.

I did not think of this.

Peach did. He saw lots of planes close up during the war and declared these perfect. The rest of us knew nothing and therefore offered no argument.

Now, there you go. Peach is already moving away from me into the realm of the creative ones. Soon, no one but myself, in my sad and lonely world of facts and figures, will paddle in the waters of the mundane.

Well, I’ve still got Mom. She’s pretty much standard transmission too.

We all sit around the conference room, laying the models into sky-blue tissue-paper nests, sealing the boxes and addressing labels by hand. We’ve achieved a regular assembly line and for only one thousand guests! The invitations alone cost more than most of our customers pay for their entire wedding. Fifteen percent.

Fifteen percent.

Yeah boy.

This is a five hundred thousand dollar wedding easy, really easy, and already two more high-profile customers have signed with us: Stan’s financial manager’s brother’s girlfriend’s sister, who is a film producer, as well as a New York socialite patron-of-the-arts diva who’s supported Gordon’s work for years. Oh, Genevieve is the coolest person I’ve ever met! Why Gordon never captured her for himself is beyond me. I asked him this and he twisted up his face and said, “Yeah, right, sweetheart. It would be like marrying my sister. Genevieve and I have been good friends for so many years, we’d hate to risk losing that.”

H’m.

“
And
,” he added, “she never gave my heart a good tumble like you did.”

Okay, that was the answer I had been looking for.

Thank heavens my romance and my business worries subsided before Tacy’s life took on this toothless quality. If you removed her from that gorgeous house and stuck her in the hollows, I swear you’d see a Flannery O’Connor story in surround sound, Technicolor, and VistaVision. Honestly, her life deserves a poor, rural setting in some “holler” somewhere. We’ve got the weird traveling prophet and a sick child. Where are the rundown farmhouses and the walks along dusty roads to some hidden creek or stump? Where is the sister who is really the mother? Where is the obese woman who runs the tattered boarding house with closed shutters? Where is the dead fly?

As I am a plane nester, holding by far the least creative job on the assembly line, I keep asking people to repeat themselves over the crackle of my tissue paper. “What did you say, Cristoff?”

“Any word from Tacy?”

Of course, the whole gang is aware of the tragedy, and it’s easy to tell it’s never far from their thoughts. This situation has that haunting quality to it, like a holocaust movie or that Dylan Thomas poem, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” Oh, it’s literary all right, and that’s what gets me. Grappling with this stuff is so much easier when it’s in a book.

“No word.”

“Figures.”

“I know.”

Pleasance looks up from where she addresses labels in her elegant yet artistic script. “I still can’t believe he wouldn’t even let your father in the house!” That really angered Pleasance.

She has every right to be furious. Rawlins met Daddy on the porch a few days after our confrontation, almighty Alban present as well. Naturally, my being excommunicated already and being female in general, they forbade me to draw nigh unto the holy presence. Believe me, I tried, but Rawlins nodded at Cole, who said, “This man will not deal with you again, woman. You stay there or he will not speak to your father either.” And then Rawlins took Dad’s arm, very tenderly, too, and respectfully, which made me cringe in a way because it shows how easily he can divorce himself from himself, and led him onto the deck.

Cole glared at me like some possessed character in a (you guessed it) Flannery O’Connor novel, a character more like a metaphorical agent of theological twistedness than an actual human being.

Judging by their posture as they sat around the glass-topped patio table, the discussion grew intense, but they kept their voices under control, because you can believe me I was straining to hear whatever I could.

After fifteen minutes Rawlins stood up and helped Daddy down off the deck and to the car. He said nothing to me.

“Just drive me home, Lillie,” Daddy said, and I pulled away.

“Wanna talk?” I asked.

“Not right now.”

He shook slightly, trembling like a leaf in the rain, and in that moment, he took on the aura of a character actor, that odd pathetic man who never gets a break, whose smile trembles but never wanes as the bully of a world slaps him in the face and kicks him in the hind parts.

In that moment I hated Rawlins. I thought I hated him before but not like this. It wasn’t just a righteous indignation or a fear for my sister. It was hatred a Christian shouldn’t feel, and not only did I fail to push it from me, I decided to stroke it and feed it and change its litter pan every single day.

The next day I called social services and told them everything I knew.

My father remains silent, only answering questions and saying grace, and I believe he talks to Mom but not as much. They removed something from him there on the deck, and I have a horrible feeling that I’ll never know exactly what it was. And maybe I hope I don’t.

Of course, Gordon knows all about Teddy. He hired a private investigator. The bones in Canton weren’t Teddy’s.

“He’s the best, Lillie. Good on cold cases and is in with the police. He’s our best bet.”

Our
best bet.

And now, we’re just waiting for news.

The social worker’s voice sounds like she’s talking to a pile of slime. “Do you realize how backed up we are, and you send us out on a phony charge?”

I focus on my desk blotter. Someone drew a four-leaf clover and two bows. “Didn’t you hear the baby’s cough?”

“Yes. It’s not good but not too troubling at this point. I’m also a nurse, Ms. Bauer, and I believe that child has acid reflux, which she aspirates when she naps. Your sister and brother-in-law have said they will gladly change the routine and feed her as soon as she wakes up from her naps and keep her upright as she digests. Beyond that, the child is well cared for, loved greatly, and her parents want to do the right thing.”

“Didn’t you feel something wasn’t right though? I mean, Rawlins is—“

“We are done with this investigation, Ms. Bauer. I tell you, there are times when I wish people who send us out on false alarms were fined. You need to work out family difficulties on your own. We’re overworked as it is.”

There’s nothing left to say, so I politely end the call and hang up the phone. I have to mull. I have to be shocked at what she said, because she talked so fast I could hardly compute. I mean,
I’m
the bad guy?
I
should be fined? What’s going on here?

Years ago, I remember hearing the conversations of the parents of my friend who took me to the Creation talks. Boy, did they mistrust the government, or “the bureaucracy” as they called it. They didn’t trust anyone really, not even God, now that I think of it, the way they were so scared of everything. But after this, I’m wondering if maybe they had a point!

My father always said to me, “The government isn’t evil, Lil. It’s just stupid.”

Man. What in the world am I going to do next? Rawlins won’t change Hannah Grace’s schedule. The schedule is king, the schedule is god, the schedule is his, and he’s the authority and to disobey his schedule is to disobey his authority, and to disobey his authority is to disobey
God, God, God!

Oh, God, where are You?

She’s just a baby, Jesus, a sick little baby.