“Toby, you make arrangements for a safe place for all of us to stay,” John directed. “Once this thing starts we’re going to have to disappear. I thought we’d just be able to ride it out, but with this… You know where the best place will be.”
“I know, Pop,” Toby acknowledged.
John continued staring at the wall and its horribly dingy wallpaper pattern. The afternoon light could do little to brighten this room with such drab decor. It would be good to get out of there in short measure. “How did the meeting go?”
“Perfect,” Toby answered, pleased to be able to give his father some good news. “Friday we finalize the details and give them the stuff.”
“They asked about the money, didn’t they?” John inquired.
“Yeah.” Toby looked to his brother.
So much for pure ideology, John thought. But their reasons were their reasons. As long as the end was the same, he didn’t care about the motivation of those just along for the ride. “So they’re in.”
“Yeah,” Toby confirmed.
John turned around, considering for a moment what transpired before his sons’ return. “Friday, when you meet with them, you tell them there’s another part to the job.”
“Okay,” Toby said, waiting for an explanation. But the wait stretched on, and all his father did was smile. “Pop?”
“I want to leave here with no strings,” John said. “Do you think they’ll mind?”
It was Toby’s turn to smile. “If we dangle some cash in front of them and say ‘kill that whitey’… Pop, these guys are ours. We can do what we want with them.”
John looked to his youngest boy, offering him a chance to speak.
“Toby’s right, Dad.”
“Good,” John Barrish said, thinking of the “strings” to be severed. Some things just had to be done, especially to advance the cause. What was the saying? By any means necessary. How ironically appropriate, John thought, considering the source…and the cause.
EIGHT
Transition
Darren Griggs took the tissue offered by Anne Preston and wiped his eyes, then let his head fall back against the liberally cushioned chair.
“Those tears were different from the ones you cried the night we met,” Anne observed. She sat a few feet from her patient, in an identical chair. Almost sixty minutes had passed since the grieving husband and father had come into the safety of her office. A few minutes at the beginning were spent in small talk, he admiring the view through the large window behind her desk, and she showing off pictures of her daughter. That had been a good lead-in to the session, she opening with how proud she was of her daughter, Darren beginning to tell what it was like to have lost his.
But somewhere in the conversation she began to realize that this man, though in great pain, had begun the process of healing himself. How she did not know, and it really did not matter. Constructive healing, from whatever source, was welcome whether elicited or delivered.
“Do you know what my wife did yesterday, Dr. Preston?”
“What?” Anne asked, watching the man stare at the ceiling, his head back as tears of relief rolled slowly down his cheeks. These he did not bother to wipe away.
“She got up and made Sunday breakfast,” Darren revealed, as though proclaiming a momentous event. “The last time she did that was more than a year ago, the morning Tanya was killed.”
“Do you think the fight you and Moises had the night before had anything to do with that?”
Darren looked to Anne and nodded, biting his lower lip. “I think so.”
“Why do you think that affected her?” The best therapists have no answers…only questions. That bit of sage advice from an old professor had been etched in Anne’s consciousness by sheer repetition, and later by recognition of its value.
Darren sniffled and dried his cheeks. “I think when she saw Moises and I…going at each other, I think she felt she was losing the rest of her family. I think maybe her mind told her that one child lost was enough. I don’t know what to call it. The survival instinct. Protectiveness.”
He had the gist of it, so a slight bending of her rule was in order. “It’s called mothering.”
“You’re right.”
“I know I am,” Anne said with a smile. “I’m one of them.”
“I tell you, Doctor, I thought I had already lost her, and here she comes and saves me from…” Darren looked away.
“Would you really have hurt your son?”
“I wanted to.”
“I asked if you would have.”
Darren looked through the big window to the grayish glass of the skyscraper across the street. “No. I would have hit him again, but then I would have wrapped my arms around him so tight.”
“I think he would have run whatever you did, Darren.”
“I know he would have. He’s just so far from me, Doctor. I mean, we could be nose to nose and I still can’t understand the boy. I don’t know what to do for him anymore.”
“Do you think he might agree to come with you some day?”
Darren looked at the intricate rug pattern at his feet, his head shaking.
“I want you to try.”
“I haven’t even seen him in two days, Doctor.”
“You don’t know where he’s been?”
“I have no idea,” Darren said. “I wish he’d just come home for his mother’s sake.”
Anne could do nothing to bring young Moises Griggs home. Though his father talked of him as if he were a child, as any parent would, Moises was a young man, of legal age and wanting to make his own decisions. She sincerely hoped that he was making the right ones.
“I want to meet Felicia,” Anne said, moving the session away from what she called an impassable minefield.
Darren smiled, something he had done infrequently of late when thinking of his wife. It was a good feeling. A very good feeling. “Not just yet, doctor. She’s not ready to come here.”
“That’s all right. But let her know that I’m looking forward to meeting her.”
“I will.”
Anne gave her watch a glance. They were a few minutes over the hour session length she liked to stick to. She reached to her desk and brought her personal schedule book over and scanned the following week. Abbreviated by the Thanksgiving holiday, her appointments were back to back. Flipping back a page she found a slot. “Things are really hairy next week, so is this Friday good for you?”
“Anytime. Sure.”
“Okay, four o’clock.” Anne penciled the appointment in. Later she would transfer it to her secretary’s book.
Darren found it difficult to get up. Part of this arrangement was still bothering him. “I really wish I could pay you, Dr. Preston.”
Anne closed her book one-handed with a slap. “Darren, you need to concentrate on you, and on your family. And we already agreed on my fee.”
“I know, but you making my family dinner hardly seems like a fair exchange. You’re doing all the giving.”
Anne smiled. “ ‘Tis the season of giving.”
Darren laughed softly. “Thank you, Doctor.”
Anne stood and walked her patient all the way through the outer office of her secretary, waiting until he was on the elevator to turn away. “Lena, put Mr. Griggs down for this Friday at four.”
“Okay. Twice in four days?”
“Next week is out,” Anne said, looking over her secretary’s shoulder to the following day’s schedule. “Wow.”
“And don’t forget you’ve got a class tomorrow night,” she reminded her boss.
“It’s going to be a long one, isn’t it?” Long, satisfying, tiring, and of her own doing, Anne knew, though now she was beginning to wonder if taking on two classes to teach was too much, especially with the full schedule of patients she maintained. But UCLA paid generously, and she really loved teaching. Adored it, actually. Still, time was so short, something she had begun to recognize since Art Jefferson came into her life. Though the pangs of schoolgirl crushes were well in her past, she found herself noticing when he was not with her. That did wonders for her concentration during those increasingly frequent occurrences. Love wasn’t a bitch, she thought. It was an eye opener.