“Mickey?” Christine said. “Are you all right?”
“Just tell her I love her,” I said. “Tell her I’m here and I will always be here and I will visit her every day and I will never abandon her. Tell her that.”
“Okay,” Christine said softly. “I will.”
And then I turned and walked away.
When I reached the bottom of the drive, the black car with the license plate A30432 was waiting for me. I wasn’t even surprised. The bald man got out of the passenger seat. As always he wore the dark suit and sunglasses.
He opened the back door.
Without saying a word, I got in.
chapter 27
I NEVER SAW THE DRIVER. There was a glass partition separating the front from the back. Five minutes after they picked me up, we were bouncing through the woods. I looked out. Up ahead I saw Bat Lady’s garage. Just as I had witnessed that day with Ema, the bald guy got out and opened the garage door. We pulled in. The bald guy opened the door for me and said, “Follow me.”
The interior of the garage looked, well, like the interior of a garage. Nothing special. The bald guy bent down and pulled open a trapdoor in the floor. He started climbing down a ladder. I trailed him. We moved through a tunnel in the direction, I assumed, of Bat Lady’s house.
This, I thought, explained the light in the basement I had seen when I was in her house.
When we passed a door, I asked, “What’s in there?”
He shook his head and kept going. When we reached another door, he stopped and said, “This is as far as I go.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you see her alone.”
Her.
He started back down toward the garage, leaving me alone. My head was starting to throb again. The pain meds must have been wearing off. I opened the door and found myself back inside Bat Lady’s living room.
Nothing much had changed. Brown was still the room’s dominant hue. The windows were still blocked by a combination of soot and planks. The grandfather clock still didn’t work. The old picture of the hippies—the first place I had seen the strange butterfly design. The turntable was working now. HorsePower was playing a sad song called “Time Stands Still.” And there, in the middle of the room, dressed in the same white gown I had seen her in just a few short days ago, was the Bat Lady.
She smiled at me. “You did well, Mickey.”
I wasn’t in the mood for more cat and mouse games. “Gee, thanks. Really. I mean, I have no idea what I did or what’s going on here, but thanks.”
“Sit with me.”
“No, I’m good here.”
“You’re angry. I understand.”
“You said my father was alive.”
Bat Lady sat on a couch that looked as though it had been ready for the scrap heap during the Eisenhower administration. Her hair was still ridiculously long, cascading down her back and almost touching the seat cushion. She picked up a large book, an old photo album, and held it on her lap.
“Well?” I said.
“Sit, Mickey.”
“Is my father still alive?”
“It’s not a simple question.”
“Sure it is. He’s either dead or he’s alive. Which is it?”
“He is alive,” she said, with a smile that seemed somewhere south of sane, “in you.”
I never wanted to smack an old woman before, but boy, I did now. “In me?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, please. What is this, The Lion King? That’s what you meant when you said he was alive?”
“I meant exactly what I said.”
“You told me that my father was alive. Now you’re giving me some New Age mumbo jumbo about him living in me.”
I turned away, blinked back the tears. I felt crushed. I felt stupid. Some crazy old lady rants stuff I know not to be true—and yet I choose to hold on to her words like a drowning man to a life preserver. Man, was I an idiot or what?
“So he’s dead,” I said.
“People die, Mickey.”
“Good answer,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster.
“Nothing about what we do is simple,” she said. “You want a yes or no. But there is no yes or no. No black or white. It is all gray.”
“There is life or death,” I said.
She smiled. “What makes you sure of that?”
I had no idea how to respond.
“We save who we can,” she said. “We can’t save everyone. Evil exists. You can’t have an up without a down, a right without a left—or a good without an evil. Do you understand?”
“Not really, no.”
“Your father came to this house when he was about your age. It changed him. He understood his calling.”
“To work for you?”
“To work with us,” she said, correcting me.
“And become, what, part of the Abeona Shelter?”
She did not reply.
“So you were the ones who rescued Ashley.”
“No,” she said. “You did that.”
I sighed. “Can you stop talking in circles?”
“There is a balance. There are choices. We rescue a few, not all, because that is what we can do. Evil remains. Always. You can combat it, but you can never fully defeat it. You settle for small victories. If you overreach, you lose everything. But every life matters. There is an old saying: ‘He who saves one life saves the world.’ So we pick and choose.”
“You pick and choose who gets rescued and who doesn’t?”
“Yes,” Bat Lady said. “Take Candy, for example.”
That surprised me. “You know about Candy?”
She didn’t bother replying. “If we had chosen to help her, the odds are that Candy would have ended up no better off. She has no skills, not much intelligence, and would never be able to be mainstreamed into school or society. She would probably have ended up back with Buddy Ray or someone similar.”
“You can’t know that,” I said.
“Of course you can’t know. But you play the odds. You save who you can and you mourn those you can’t. When you follow this calling, your heart gets ripped apart every day. You make the world better in increments, not grand designs. You make choices. Do you understand?”
“Choices,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Like my father made a choice to leave the Abeona Shelter. Like my father didn’t want this life for me.”
“Exactly, he made a choice.” Bat Lady looked up at me and tilted her head. “How did that work out for him?”
I said nothing.
“With choices come consequences,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I looked out the back, through the kitchen, toward the garden. “You have a tombstone in your backyard.”
She said nothing.
“The initials E.S.,” I said. “Is Elizabeth Sobek buried there?”
“Lizzy,” Bat Lady said.
“What?”
“Her name was Lizzy. She preferred Lizzy.”
“Is she buried in your yard?”
“Sit down, Mickey.”
“I’m fine standing right here. Is Lizzy Sobek, the girl who rescued all those kids in the Holocaust, buried in your yard, yes or no?”
Now there was steel in her voice. “Sit down, Mickey.”
Bat Lady looked up at me, and I did as she asked. Dust came off the couch. She put her left arm out and pulled up her sleeve. The tattoo was faded but you could still read it:
A30432
For a moment, I couldn’t speak. Then I managed to say, “You?”
She nodded. “I’m Lizzy Sobek.”
I sat there in silence as she opened the photograph album. “You want to know how this all began. I will tell you. And then maybe you will understand about your father.”
She pointed to the first picture in the photo album. It was an old black-and-white shot of four people. “This was my family. My father’s name was Samuel. My mother’s name was Esther. That’s my older brother, Emmanuel, with the bow tie. Such a handsome boy. So smart, so kind. He was eleven when this picture was taken. I was eight. I look happy, don’t you think?”