Mark Gimenez - The Abduction

So she had woken this morning, gotten dressed, and made Carlos put on a shirt and drive her out here. When they had arrived at the big gates, she explained the purpose of her visit to the guard, but he refused to let them in. She begged him to call Senora Brice. When he refused that also, Carlos said he was going to get out of the Chevy and kick his fat Anglo ass. The guard decided that making a phone call was a smarter move than having some Hispanic hombre in a low-rider pounding on him with his muscular left arm, the one with the tattoo of the Virgin Mary. So he called, but he got Senor Brice instead. He let them in.

Carlos had stayed in the car at the end of the street outside the police barricade; he was nervous due to the fact that he had immigrated to America via the Rio Grande just outside Laredo. She had then walked down the street and up to the front door of the house-it was as big as the office building she used to clean each night, before she had become a full-time psychic. Normally she insisted her clients pay her in cash up front; Angelina did not accept personal checks or credit cards, not that her clients had bank accounts or credit cards. But today she did not care about money. In fact, she did not want money. She just wanted to give them the girl’s message and get back home.

Angelina Rojas was afraid that she might really be psychic.

Now she was sitting in the kitchen across a table from Senor Brice and several other Anglos; her eyes were closed and she was clutching the girl’s white school blouse tightly to her face, trying to feel the child. Another cold chill ran through her considerable body, more intense than the first one. But it was not Angelina who was cold.

“Her body, it is very cold.”

“My daughter is not dead!”

Angelina opened her eyes to a woman she recognized from TV. The mother. She was very beautiful, even when angry, as now.

“No, Senora, she is not dead. She is cold. She is shivering.”

The mother rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake. We’d do better with a goddamn Ouija board. You’re just here for the reward.”

“No, Senora, I do not want your money. I am here because the girl is cold and because she calls out.”

The mother put her hands on her hips like Angelina’s Anglo landlord did when she was late with the rent money. “Really? And what does she call out for?”

“She calls out for someone named Ben.”

“Ben! Ben!”

Kate Brice is straining to see down the jetway at San Francisco International Airport; six-year-old John is standing next to her. It’s 1975 and Ben Brice is coming home. That damn war is finally over.

Passengers begin appearing in the jetway. Her eyes search the crowd for a green beret, but her mind is dreading a repeat of five years earlier in this same airport. They were walking down the concourse; Ben was wearing his uniform, pushing John in a stroller, and ignoring the whispered “baby killer” comments. A young man with long hair suddenly stepped in front of Ben and said, “My brother died in Vietnam because of officers like you!” Then he spat in Ben’s face. Ben grabbed the young man by the throat and pinned him to the wall, terrifying the young man but Kate more. She had never seen that Ben Brice before; his blue eyes were so dark. He could have easily killed the young man, and for a moment, she thought he would. Instead, the darkness dissipated; he wiped the spit from his face, released the frightened young man, and said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

They had married three days after he graduated from the Academy. It was a fairy tale wedding in the West Point chapel; afterward, still wearing her white wedding dress, she was escorted by Lieutenant Ben Brice in his dress white uniform through the saber arch, an Army tradition. Her fairy tale marriage lasted exactly three weeks. Twenty-one days a married woman, her husband left her for Fort Bragg and Special Forces school. Ben Brice was going to war. He deployed the day after Thanksgiving 1968. She saw him off at the airport; she never saw that man again.

That damn war destroyed the fairy tale marriage she had dreamed of as a girl. She is praying for a fresh start today.

There! She sees a green beret above a sea of heads… and now his face, tanned and angular, and so handsome. He sees her and smiles.

Ben turned back to her now: the same face, still tanned and angular, and still so handsome. But the smile was gone. He had been walking out to the pool house when she called to him. He came back to her, and they sat on the back porch.

“When will you leave?” she asked.

“When I know where she is.”

Kate studied her husband’s face. “Gracie?”

He nodded.

“You believe that psychic?”

He nodded again.

“Ben, that was odd that she knew your name, but-”

“She’s alive, Kate.”

She calls out for someone named Ben, the psychic said. Why not me? Why not her mother?

But with Grace, it had always been Ben. And Elizabeth had always hated Ben Brice because he shared a bond with Grace that she did not. Now, sitting alone in her bedroom, her thoughts were not angry; her thoughts were of her father and the bond they had shared.

Her memories were of their time together.

Arthur Austin had been a lawyer, but he did not sell his life by the billable hour, so he had time for his daughter. During their last year together, when she was ten, he had taken her to at least one Mets’ game a week, often leaving the office early to make a weekday game. Mother wasn’t good in the heat, so it was just the two of them. She had been so proud to sit next to her handsome father in his suit and tie, his sharp features and head of thick black hair attracting the eyes of other women. But he belonged to her. Those were glorious days she thought would never end.

How could a thirty-five-year-old man be murdered?

She could still close her eyes and see him lying in the hospital bed at St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital, his eyes shut, the white sheets pulled up to his chin (to conceal his wounds, she realized years later), his skin pale and cold, and Mother saying it was time to say goodbye. But Elizabeth Austin, the good Catholic girl, had said, “No, God will save him.” She had knelt next to his bed and held his cold hand; she had prayed to God to save her father. But God had refused. He had ignored her prayers. He had forsaken her. “I will never forgive you,” she had said to God that day. And she never had.

She had missed her father terribly. But somehow she had gone on with her life, always thinking of everything they would never do together. That was before evil had come into her life. Afterward, she had been relieved her father hadn’t been there; it would have broken his heart to see what his happy ten-year-old daughter had become: a forty-year-old rage-filled lunatic forever haunted by her encounter with evil. Just as it was breaking her heart to imagine what her happy ten-year-old daughter would become-if she survived her encounter with evil.

What if she didn’t?

How could this child’s life story end this way? After the way her story had begun? She had given this child life, and this child had saved her life. How was she now supposed to go on with her life without this child? Without Grace? How was Elizabeth Brice supposed to get up one day- when, next week or the week after? — drive to the office, and again care about guilty clients? How was getting a rich white-collar criminal off supposed to fill the empty space inside her?

Her private phone line rang. It was her mother, offering to help in any way she could-which was in no way. It took only a few minutes of pleading to get her to stay in New York.

Mother had been only twenty-nine when Father had died. She had married him right out of high school, while he was in law school. He was her life. After his death, Mother had retreated into her own world, seldom leaving the house, helpless in a harsh world. For all intents and purposes, her mother had died with her father.