Without Faith (13 page)

“Make a U-turn. Now turn left at the light.”

His face was hidden from me, but his voice served as a menacing GPS, weaving me in and out of the suburbs and finally into the narrow side streets of East Baltimore. I felt like we were going in circles, like my captor needed the services of a real GPS himself as he directed me down familiar blocks and boulevards again and again. Any lessons I'd had about self-defense, whether to scream, whether to fight back or keep still, had gone out of the window the minute I'd felt that cold metal on my neck.

“Make this turn here. Okay, right.” His voice sounded youthful, but the gun told me he was not playing games. I eyed my cell phone, which I had dropped on the passenger's seat the moment I'd first felt the chill of the revolver on my skin. My phone had even buzzed a few times during our quiet tour of Baltimore—Leon's number then Laz's filled the screen—but there was nothing for me to do but keep driving.

Finally, after almost an hour had gone by, I found courage to speak.

“I'm going to run out of gas.”

“Shut up and turn left at the stop sign.”

We drove for ten minutes more as I wondered if these were my last moments. I looked at the people, buildings, homes, and cars around me anew, trying to savor small details that I probably would not have even noticed any other time. I counted trees that grew out of small patches of dirt in the concrete; noticed the handwritten store signs on some corner stores; listened to the loud laugh of a woman with a short, scruffy ponytail sitting on a stoop with a group of giggling toddlers; imagined Roman never knowing what ever happened to either his mother or his father; Leon never knowing that my heart wanted to love him; Laz wondering what ever happened to his beautiful silver BMW.

“Right here. Stop. The third house down,” the man's voice interrupted. “Get out. Go straight to the door.”

We'd stopped in front of a narrow row house near East Biddle Street, I think. My mind had gone numb and my memory evaded me. All I could see were crumbling brick steps, a dingy front door, and a single potted plant on the cement porch. He used a key to open the door and used the gun to beckon me inside. My eyes adjusted to the dark interior of a living room in shambles.

“David? Is that you?” A large woman in a wheelchair sat in the darkness, an oxygen tube running from her nose, her hair done in two sloppy, graying cornrows, her eyes staring off into space. She appeared to be blind. “You picked up my medicine?”

“Yes, Grandma. I'll get your water in just a minute.” He walked behind me, pushing me forward, the tip of the gun now at the center of my spine. His breaths were as labored as mine.

Both of us were scared.

He seemed to be pushing me toward the kitchen, toward a closed door that sat right beyond a large pantry.

“David,” the woman's shrill voice called out again, “someone with you?”

“It's okay, Grandma. I'm getting your water.”

He reached from behind me and opened the door, and I saw that his hands looked massive, powerful. “Go down there,” he whispered, nudging me down unfinished wooden steps. I took the first one and the door clicked closed behind me. I heard him lock it.

The basement was well lit. I took three more steps down and saw that there was a twin bed, a mini fridge, and an old television with a movie playing,
Jesus of Nazareth
it looked like. I remembered that Easter was coming soon. Roman was supposed to be volunteering on a Native American reservation for spring break. He was looking for his father instead. Maybe he planned to come home at the end of his break, the thought occurred to me.
Why all these thoughts right now?

Blue, shaggy carpet covered the floor and the slight scent of laundry detergent filled the air. Shaking and not able to put any logical plan of escape together, I sat down on the corner of the bed.

“I'm sorry I had to do it like this.” A voice from the crawl space behind the stairs whipped my head around. There in the shadows of the stairwell sat a pretty young woman wearing a black halter top and tight blue jeans.

Silver.

“David would never hurt you, but my mother would. I told you I needed to talk to you in person and this was the only way to get you here.”

“Your mother would hurt me?” I recoiled at the thought of the sickly, disabled woman upstairs having some kind of death wish against me.

“No, not David's grandmother.” Silver seemed to be reading my thoughts. “I'm talking about my mother, whose house you just left. Why didn't you call the police?”

“Your mother?” I blinked in disbelief. “Jenellis Walker is your mother?”

“Unfortunately.” Silver was staring at me with the same intensity with which I was staring at her.

How had I missed the resemblance? I wondered. Both women had the same flawless deep cocoa skin, the same high quality use of weave, the same almond-shaped eyes. However, I noted, Silver appeared to have had some work done on her nose and there was a hard edge to her expression and posture that spoke to a rough life. Jenellis may have had that same edge to her but she had learned to disguise it as arrogance.

“Jenellis didn't say anything about you being her daughter.”

“Of course she wouldn't. She probably told you that I had faked the kidnapping.”

“In so many words. And she also told me that I needed to trust her, just like you have told me to trust you.”

“Trust can be a two-edged sword. It can cut you coming or going. Without it, you can get hurt, but if you trust the wrong person, you still can get hurt.”

I looked around the basement. Aside from the television and bed, there were also several posters on the wall: rappers, athletes, and barely dressed women.

The den of a too-mature adolescent or an immature young man.

“So is this where you live or are you being held here against your will?”

“This is not where I live. As far as my will, well, let's just say I am in hiding.”

“Hiding from what?”

“I'll get to that in a moment.”

“And David . . .”

“Is a loyal fan. He's smitten with me. I knew he would help me.”

“Fan?”

“Don't pretend that you don't know my business. It's been all over the news.” She yawned and stretched, then moved closer to where I was sitting, pulling a pillow to her chest and leaning on it like we were two schoolgirls at a sleepover.

“What is going on, Silver, and why am I in the middle of it?” I decided to trust her at the moment, seeing as she was the one with an armed man on the floor above me and I needed her to be relaxed enough to tell me what I needed to know.

“My mother and her men issues.” Silver had a look of resentment on her face. “She wanted me to go on that dating show to get more info about Brayden. She knew he was going to be on the show, something he'd agreed to doing awhile ago, and my mother got me on there to pick him as my date. Only he figured out who I was and, of course, was not pleased at my mother's lack of trust in him. From what I understand, they agreed they needed counseling—and quickly, since they'd already booked their wedding and didn't want to reschedule. My mother told me that they found you after a Google search for therapists in their area.”

“So my involvement is pure chance.”

“Yes, Ms. St. James. You were chosen as the lucky contestant. Or unlucky, I guess, from your perspective.”

It was a very neat story she told.

Too neat.

“What are you not telling me?” I asked her directly. “I get the whole trust issues thing spiraling out of control and your mom and soon-to-be stepfather agreeing to premarital counseling. What I don't get is the kidnapping caught on camera, your mother's statement that you are somehow blackmailing her, and your telling me that you are hiding. What is really going on?”

“What is going on is that my mother is not the only one with trust issues.” Silver's eyes filled with tears. “You are right. There is more. But if I can't trust my own mother, how do I know that I can trust you? I brought you here by force, so when I let you go, how do I know you aren't going to go run to the police?”

“But don't you want the police to know you are okay? What or who exactly are you hiding from?”

Silver shut her eyes and tears flooded her fake lashes. “It's a life-and-death situation. We are not safe. We will never be safe.”

“Who is not safe? What are you talking about? And why are you so adamant that I not go to the police?”

“Listen, I called you because you are the only person I could turn to for help. The police cannot know where I am because then my mother will know. And if she knows, then Brayden will know, and then it won't be good for any of us. If you talk to the police, keep them focused on my mother, regardless of what she tells you or anyone else.” Her tears were gone and a resolve that I recognized as reckless courage had taken its place.

I'd seen the same look in Roman's face once before, when he was willing to face a group of armed wannabe gangsters to get back the lion's head ring, which was briefly stolen at that time.

She was telling me her truth, I was sure of it.

“1502. What is the significance of that number?” I put it out there.

Silver gasped, throwing her hand over her mouth. “You have to go. You have to go now. It's not safe for you to be with me. Please, I beg you, please, please do not tell anyone where I am. I need you to trust me on this.” She grabbed my arm as she pleaded, directing me back toward the steps. “I need to trust you.” She used her fingertips to lightly scratch the door. “David will let you out.” She turned back to face me. “Thank you. Thank you for coming.”

“I did not exactly have a choice.”

“I'm sorry, but
I
did not have a choice. With any of this. There's more, I wanted to tell you more, but it's not safe. I'm scared.”

Everything was moving fast. Too fast. I wasn't sure what was even going on. The basement door cracked open and a pimple- and scar-covered face peeked through. The knit black cap was still there, but the gun apparently was not.

“Let her out, David.”

The door opened wider and I took a step toward freedom. Just as David started to close the door behind me, Silver grabbed my hand.

“Here, take this.” She pushed something cold and metal in my palm and closed my fingers tight around it. “I need you to keep this in case something happens to me. I was holding on to it for a reason, to give it to someone, but I am not sure I will get a chance. When it all makes sense, you'll know what to do with it.”

“Come on,” David grunted. I was beginning to wonder if he was capable of saying more than two-to-four-word phrases.

Loud snores sounded from the darkened living room where his grandmother still sat in her wheelchair. A paper plate that held a baked chicken leg and a heaping mound of cabbage struggled to balance on her knees as she slept. I noted a tall pitcher of water and a glass full of ice on the floor next to her feet.

“Get out,” David murmured as he quietly opened the front door and pushed me through.

The sun had begun its evening descent. I was alone on their porch. The door shut tight behind me as I tried to gather some sense of time, some sense of sense, period. It had been a bizarre, emotional, crazy day, one that could have easily left me off my rocker for the dangers, questions, and confusion I'd had to endure.

Maybe that was why I waited until I was back in the car to finally open my hand and see what Silver had pressed into it.

A necklace.

A simple silver chain with a charm dangling from it.

I waited until I was at a red light to examine it.

The charm on it appeared to be half of a butterfly, a broken butterfly but one nonetheless. It had been split down the middle so that only one wing was left. On the back of the wing were the words W
ITH
F
AITH
A
LL.
The other half of the butterfly must have the rest of the sentence, I concluded.

Something about a butterfly . . .
I shook my head, too worn to even begin trying to figure out what it was about a butterfly that was bothering me.

Silver had seemed desperate when she'd pushed the necklace into my hand, but I understood the power a piece of jewelry can have when it has meaning. I didn't know what meaning it held for her, though she seemed certain that one day I would get it.

I had no responsibility to this woman, didn't know whether I should trust her or believe a single word that had come out of her mouth. Shoot, her mother had sung a whole different tune when I met with her. Obviously, one of them—maybe even both of them—was lying. Whose melody was pitch perfect?

I slipped the broken butterfly necklace into the side of my purse and heard it land with a loud plink near the lion's head ring.

A ring and a necklace, both with their own stories to tell, tucked away in a dark, quiet corner of my world . . .

I pulled up to the front of my house right as the sun had nearly made its way down to the treetops that surrounded my development. The horizon had rays of deep purple and pink, just enough light to remind me that my cell phone still sat on the passenger's seat.

I'd missed eight calls. Five from Leon. Three from Laz . . .

None from Roman.

I walked up to my front door, almost expecting a group of uniformed men and women to jump out of my bushes and tackle me to the ground.

It had been that kind of day.

I put my key in the lock, but the doorknob turned before I could open it.

“Sienna! Where have you been?” Leon's nostrils flared as I stepped into the foyer. I'd given him a key as an emergency backup when I first bought the house. This was the first time I'd known him to use it. “I've been waiting here for you all afternoon. It appears that detective and his crew moved on to another lead and don't seem particularly interested with you anymore. I've called you I don't know how many times. I even had one of my friends in the department track down your phone. I was about to have some patrol cars sent down to where it looked like you were in East Baltimore. I didn't want to leave here in case you came back.”

“Wait a minute.” I only heard one thing in his rant. “You have a friend who can locate phone numbers?”

“I mean, it's off the record, and he's a stickler for the rules, but since you were being monitored by the police and had some kind of connection to this kidnapping case—which I'm still waiting for you to explain to me—I was able to talk him into quietly tracking you down.”

“Can he find Roman?”

Leon paused, exhaled, leaned back against the wall. He closed his eyes, shook his head, reopened them, and then shook his head again. “Let's go sit down in your living room, Sienna. We need to talk.”

“Do you know something, Leon? Do you know where Roman is? Tell me.”

“No, Sienna, I don't, but we need to talk. About everything.” He turned toward the steps that led from my entry foyer to the living area upstairs. I had no idea what to think, what to feel. In the few years that I'd known Leon, he had been a rock. Steady, composed. Constant. I was always the one having meltdowns, breakdowns, but something in Leon's voice, something in his eyes—which were avoiding mine—looked menacingly close to the edge. I was not used to this Leon. I didn't know him; didn't know what he would say or do; didn't know where this was going.

I was terrified of what we needed to talk about, what he needed to say. I wasn't ready for this talk that I knew was coming, but the moment was now. Ready or not, I followed him up the stairs, sat next to him on the sofa he helped me pick out; the sofa he, along with my dad, had helped carry into my house.

Leon took immediate charge of our talk. “Sienna, you know that I care very deeply about your son, as if he were my own. If there was anything I could do or could have done to help locate his whereabouts, I would have done so already. As I said, my connection in the department is a straight shooter. He is only going to help if there is a clear legal pathway to doing so. Roman is considered a runaway, and at his age, and because of his own choices, I did not even consider asking my friend because I know that he will not help.”

“Leon, I—”

“Let me finish please, Sienna.” Leon blew out a loud sigh. “Look, for the past two years, anything you've asked me to do, you know that I have done it. I want to, and I will continue to do whatever I can to help you with anything. Anything. What I need you to understand, however, is that as much as I try to answer your questions, I need you to answer mine.

“You don't answer me, Sienna. My questions, my needs, my wants, you don't answer. And it hurts, Sienna. It hurts because I love you, Sienna.
I love you
and I care about you and I
want
to know your answers. The questions I ask you, especially about your basic safety, your whereabouts, your feelings, I need them answered. I want to share life with you, but right now, no, this whole time, these entire past two years, everything has been one-sided. I understand, and I have waited, and I am willing to keep waiting, but not if there is nothing to wait for. I have been feeling like you do not have the same commitment to sharing our lives together that I have, and, Sienna, I don't want to waste your time anymore.”

He was breathing hard and I could barely breathe. When I did manage to inhale, all I could focus on was the faint smell of pine and lemons, a reminder of the vigorous cleaning I had done earlier that day to deal with the crazy turn my life had taken. I had been falsely accused, abandoned, lied to, and physically threatened all within the past twelve hours. I wanted to tell Leon about the cold metal that had been pressed on my neck, but all I could smell was lemons. Lemons and pine.

“Am I wasting your time, Sienna?”

No!
my mind screamed. My mind was in full motion, the daydreaming part that imagined me jumping from my seat, collapsing on top of him, holding him, him holding me, feeling alive, safe, comforted.

Feeling love.

Laz had touched my lips with his finger and awakened something in me, something that wanted to live out loud with Leon.

My mind was in full motion, but my body, my voice were not. I was frozen, as if the gun were still on me. I could not talk. I could not see.

My eyes are closed,
I realized. And I was rocking, my arms wrapped around myself. Leon wanted answers, and I just wanted something in my life to make sense. I wanted to tell him this, to tell him everything, but all I could do was shut my eyes and rock, shake, and quiver.

“Am I wasting
my
time?” His words were a whisper, but they may as well have been a knife. Piercing. Cutting. Stabbing. Not because of how much it hurt me to hear, but because I knew this was the question he needed answered the most; this was the unspoken answer that pierced, cut, and stabbed him the most. My distance toward him had been what kept us close over the past two years.

But I'd pushed him too far away.

“Am I?” He actually wanted an answer.

I wanted to tell him of course he was not wasting his time; that I had taken steps that very day to move forward, to move closer to him; but all I felt at the moment was pain, and I needed it to stop.

I was a therapist, and a decent one at that, but I had not yet learned the lessons I shared with my clients. I was facing the most emotionally difficult moment of my day, the culmination of the disasters in my life and the prospect of bearing them alone, and all I could do was run away to avoid the pain, the fear.

“So you don't think your friend will help me find Roman?” I whispered, opening my eyes, but looking only at his feet. I could not give him the answer he wanted, the answer I knew he needed. Leon stared at me in silence. Several moments went by before he opened up his mouth again.

“He's looking for his father.” He'd accepted that I had no answer for him. I saw it in his eyes, read it in his posture, heard it in his voice.

It was over. Whatever we had, whatever we didn't have, it was over.

“You knew?” I gasped, playing along. “You knew Roman was looking for him?”

“I figured it out. He told me that he was going to find him one day. I did not know he meant he was actually going to leave to do it, or that he was going to do it now.”

“Roman talked to you about RiChard?”

“All the time.”

At this, I quieted for a moment. Roman had not so much as mentioned his father to me in, what, two years?

“And you knew he was going to run away?” I finally asked.

“No. I knew he was going to look for him. I never knew he was planning to run away to do it. I always assumed it was a long-term goal for him, something he would do as an adult. I never pictured this.”

“Where is he?”

“I don't know where Roman is.”

“No, I mean, where is RiChard?”

“I don't know, Sienna. You said you were going to find out.”

“I never said that.”

“Then why am I here, Sienna? Why have I been here?”

We glared at each other. This scene, these feelings, the silence was foreign to me. Nothing about it seemed right. This was me and Leon, not me and a stranger.
Oh, God, help me!

“Sienna,” Leon broke into my thoughts, “I need an answer. Why am I here? Can you please answer me?”

My stomach hurt. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. I wanted to do anything but answer his questions.

Only because I did not know how.

Strong, passionate, direct woman.
That was what Laz had called me that afternoon. I had the sudden urge to laugh, but I contained it.
Is this what a nervous breakdown feels like?
I wondered.

“Why can't you answer me?” There was no humor in Leon's eyes. Only hurt.

“Roman,” I stated flatly. “I am his mother.” My voice was hoarse, unrecognizable even to me. “You should have told me he was planning to look for his father. You should have told me the first time he even said anything about RiChard.”

His head dropped into his broad hands. I watched as he wiped his eyes with both palms.
Were those tears I saw?

“I can't do this anymore.” He stood, paused, and then walked toward the stairs to my front door. I followed.

We were quiet as we went down the steps, defeated as we both stood in my doorway. Neither one of us looked at each other. I think only thirty seconds passed, but it felt like thirty minutes. He turned to leave, to disappear into the night.

I remembered how he came to my rescue one dark night a couple years ago, when an angry drug addict tried to attack me with broken glass and dirty needles in an abandoned house. I had gone there looking for a little girl named Hope. I thought I'd found my own hope, but now part of it was about to walk away. And I felt too weak and tired and stressed and powerless to stop him from leaving.

“Leon,” I tried. “I'm sorry.”

He stood sideways next to me, his face only inches from mine. I moved in closer. So did he. I held my breath. Waiting. Hoping.

And then he stepped away.

“Bye, Sienna.” His words were softly spoken, soft enough to seemingly disappear into the frost-tinged night air. “I hope everything works out for you. Everything.”

As he jogged down the steps, each footstep away from me felt like a dagger piercing my heart. The slam of his car door was the final, fatal wound.

It was my fault.

I had him. He was there for me.

But I could not get it together. And now he was gone.

“Bye, Leon,” I whispered as his taillights joined a sea of others on the main road off of my cul-de-sac. “Thank you for being the man I needed even when I could not be the woman you wanted.”

I closed my door, closed out the night; but the inside of my house held no light for me either.

My son was still gone.