Anne took the seat directly in front of Darren and swiveled her body to face him. “Thank you for coming.”
Darren held up the rolled flyer. “I thought…maybe…I thought I might…” The mist in his eyes became a single tear from each that streamed over his cheeks. “I don’t want to die…”
What? Anne might have expected a hundred reasons why this man would have come here this night, but that was not one of them. “Why do you think that’s a possibility?”
“Because everything I…everyone I love is dying, and…” The tears came fully now. “…and I can’t help them. I can’t help them. I can’t save my own family!”
Anne watched Darren bend forward, his head touching the seat as the sobs came in waves. She placed a hand on his shoulder, rubbing gently until the spasms ended and he sat back up.
“I’m…” Darren wiped his face on the sleeve of his jacket. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“Do you want to tell me about it? About your family?”
Darren felt the pressure in his chest build like the forces of a mighty river checked by a dam. The floodgates were closed, but not as tightly as a minute before. Before the question was asked. Do you want to tell me about your family? “Yes. Yes I do.”
And he did, talking almost without interruption for fifteen minutes. About Tanya’s murder. About his wife’s spiral into a bottomless depression. About Moises’ destructive behavior. About it all.
And Anne listened, wanting to cry at times. Remembering the news stories, how terrible it had seemed then, and now a living victim of that massacre was here with her, begging for salvation.
Then, as quickly as he began laying out the state of his life, Darren stopped. He was dry. The dam had burst and had let out all that was behind it. His desire for death was no longer there, but the aching he felt for his family was.
“I’m sorry,” Anne said, offering the first words one could after hearing Darren speak of his life, and of his loss.
“Thank you for listening.”
“I’m not done listening,” Anne said. She had to do this.
“What do you mean?” Darren asked.
“You need to talk more. Your family needs to talk. And you need someone to help you with that.”
She was right, Darren knew. But it all seemed so alien now — normalcy. How could they get that back from talking? And there were other considerations. “Thank you, Dr. Preston, but I can’t… I work hard as it is, and with the lawyer’s fees and my wife’s medication, I can’t…”
“Don’t worry about that,” Anne said. “We need to help your family first, and think about the other things later. I’ll make you a deal, though. If you want to do this, I’ll forget the fee if you and your family come to my house for dinner when we have everybody on the right track again. I’d consider that payment enough. You see, I love to cook, but my girl is grown and my boyfriend is into that health-food junk.” She made a face that translated plainly to Darren. It also elicited a smile. “Deal?”
Darren wanted to cry again, but for very different reasons than before. “Deal. Thank you, Dr. Preston.”
Anne handed him one of her cards. “Call me tomorrow. We’ll set up a first appointment.”
“Okay.” Darren put the card away and smiled again. How long had it been since he smiled twice in one day? He couldn’t remember. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
Anne watched Darren walk away, passing Rabbi Levin, who was entering.
“My God, Anne, what did you do to that man in fifteen minutes?” Levin asked. “When I left he looked like the world had fallen on him. Now he’s smiling.”
“The world did fall on him,” Anne said. “Remember the St. Anthony shooting?”
“The church on Crenshaw? Of course. How could anyone forget that? Four children killed.” Levin’s head shook. His grandparents had been dragged from a synagogue in Warsaw more than fifty years before and sent to their death. Now there was death in a place of worship. The senselessness of it.
“His daughter was one of them,” Anne said, hating the reality of it. “Tanya Griggs.”
“Oh dear God. No.”
Anne nodded. “After it happened he began feeling a deep hate for white people, something he’d never experienced. It scared him. He wanted it to stop, because he was starting to hate himself for hating others because of their color. Plus his family is in ruins.” She really shouldn’t say anymore, Anne knew. “I’m hoping I can help him, and his family.”
Levin felt ill thinking of the destruction that had been wrought upon this family. Hate. It was the worst of things. Combine it with ignorance and you had a very dangerous force. That was why he had arranged for Anne to speak to members of his flock. They were good people, but they were becoming less and less sensitive to the danger of misplaced hate. The evil they saw in the world was disproportionately of a darker hue, and they were beginning to transfer their fear of real violence to fear of anyone who looked like the criminals plastered on the news. Compassion was fading from their belief systems. That frightened Levin, because it was the same thing that had happened in Nazi Germany so long ago. Induced fear became hate. Then it became institutionalized bias. Then worse. That road had been traveled. No more. Never again, especially by his people.
“Anne, you are a good person,” Levin said. “Maybe I can ask Ellis to find you a spot in the Cabinet. They could use people like you.”
Anne chuckled at the complimentary suggestion. Levin was a major fund-raiser for the Democrats, and had an ear in the White House in the form of Chief of Staff Ellis Gonzales. Levin’s son had been a college classmate of his, and the bond stretched from family to family.
“I’m flying out for a meeting with him on Friday,” Levin said wryly. “Anne Preston in the White House. Heh?”
“You have pull with both big guys, huh, Rabbi?” Anne asked, laughing.
“Occasionally.”
“Well, I’ll stick to doctoring, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course. How could we get along without you.” Levin thought seriously for a moment. “Especially people like Mr. Griggs. I hope you can help fix what has happened to that family.”
“Me, too, Rabbi,” Anne said, knowing there was a starting point in any project. This one would be the father.
The son, however, had a very different concept of healing. Healing now held the converse of its dictionary meaning for Moises Griggs. Vengeance, strangely, carried the same definition.
There had been another presentation that night by someone purveying knowledge to an assembled group, though this one was much smaller in number than that attended by the elder Griggs. Twelve, including Moises, had come to this place to receive the offering, to receive the motivation. In church it would be called the gospel. Here, as told by Darian Brown, leader of the New Africa Liberation Front, it was a clarion call to battle.
The home of the NALF was a converted liquor store that had been looted to the rafters in the uprising of ‘92, and which the former Korean owners had decided to sell off so as not to have to return to a neighborhood they saw as rejecting them. And that it had, Darian Brown professed, and rightly so. Expulsion was a hallmark of the NALF doctrine, as was compensation to the sons and daughters of slaves. Compensation in the form of land, namely that of the slave states at the time of the Civil War. It was simple in Darian Brown’s mind. You move out the white people, and move in the black. Instant nation building. New Africa in this case. A homeland for the blacks robbed of their ancestral roots across an ocean. Returning to a continent ravaged by white colonialism was not an option. A piece of this pie — America — was the minimum payment acceptable on a bill long overdue.