“My grandmother… spoke of it.”
He nodded. “Myth, legend, whatever you want to call it. Sometimes stories get passed down through the generations. At some distant time in the past, maybe the Shelljah was used to scare small children or perhaps just as part of a story-teller’s trade. It was silly, of course. There is no Hebrew magic, let alone the ability to move through time.”
I nodded.
“I need to go say hello,” he said. “Would you like to join me?”
As I looked up to the front of the synagogue, I was suddenly overcome with a powerful sense of loss. I could feel tears forming in my eyes, and I felt weak.
I tried to smile, but that didn’t work so well, so I shook my head and nodded, excusing myself to go to the bathroom.
As I splashed water on my face and took some deep breaths, I wondered how I could hold myself together for the service. Somehow, I had to.
A few minutes later I walked out and into the main chamber of the synagogue. Several other women had joined and were seated.
Who are these people?
By the time the service started, there were more than a hundred people waiting. All were women.
The service itself was professional but caring. Clearly Rabbi Pfeiffer knew my grandmother very well, and he sprinkled his talk with stories of her life.
He didn’t mention her being captured by the Germans during the war and how she barely escaped the fate of so many other Jews.
I wondered why that never came up, until the end of the service. As I was about to leave, I stood and looked at all the women present. They were all ages, with the youngest looking like she was still in high school, the oldest needing a wheelchair and perhaps would be joining Ariela soon.
One of the women across the aisle must have seen me staring. She walked over and put a hand on my arm. She would have been in her forties, the start of gray intruding on her otherwise chestnut hair, a nice smile on her face.
“You must be David.”
I nodded.
“I’m Sarah Cruit. I’m one of the people your grandmother helped.”
“Helped? I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean. Who are all these people?”
“She was the leader of our group. Ariela’s collection of holocaust survivors and their families. As you can see, she was only comfortable with women, but every one of us has spent time in your grandmother’s hands. She would collect us like postage stamps, adding each to her group. She encouraged the older ones to talk about what they’d experienced, and the younger ones to talk about what they remembered about their family members who perished.”
She frowned and then added, “I never knew my own grandparents. They were both gassed. Ariela helped me to place that loss in the context of everything else in my life. It allowed me to love my ancestors, to feel what they felt, to appreciate every little thing about them, and to remember the horrors.”
“She did that with all these people?”
Sarah nodded. “Over time, of course. She wasn’t big on crowds, and more than a few people at a time was hard for her to manage, so we rotated in and out, brought new members to the group, met several times each week, and eventually, she showed us how to carry on when she passed. This group will live on, and we’re all so much better prepared today than we were a couple of years ago.”
“When did she start doing this? I just can’t believe I never knew.”
“She spoke of you often, David. She started this when you moved out of her home. She wanted something to do that would take up the free time she had.”
I stood there like a goose to which somebody was explaining the alphabet. It was hard to imagine Ariela had this whole secret world I never knew about.
“Thank you for telling me this.”
Sarah smiled and walked away. I never saw her or any of the other women again.
Chapter 20
As I sit here now in my prison cell, I often think back to my time with my grandmother, wondering what I could have done differently.
And to close out one part of my story, her statements that the Shelljah would no longer work for me after her burial was, of course, correct. I did try, several times, to be sure, but no luck.
Maybe that was a good thing. My travel to murder Jesus indirectly resulted in millions of people being killed, and I had no desire to make things even worse.
After Ariela’s burial, I spent time closing out her estate and then gradually started to pick up some of the usual freelancing gigs I loved. My photos took on an even deeper meaning for me, because I knew that life was short and getting shorter with every passing day. I didn’t want to grow old and die (or worse, die young) and not leave something behind. A legacy of some kind.
Death leaves a mark on the soul.
Part of me wanted Karen Anderson back. She was still aboard the Skywheel and about to leave Earth orbit for the moon. I watched every bit of news about the mission, but never tried to contact her. She was one of Earth’s emissaries to the aliens, and I didn’t want to distract her.
Besides, we’d proven we weren’t compatible.
Emotionally, that didn’t much matter. I still wanted another chance. Somehow.
It was three months after Grandma’s funeral that I got the email that threw yet another monkey wrench into my odd life. It was from John Questore, the general editor at Time magazine.
David,
This is going to sound a little odd, but I’m totally serious. We need you for this assignment. Nobody else will do. Please phone me ASAP to discuss.
I’m sure you’ve heard about a woman in upstate New York named Erika Sabo. She claims to be the daughter of God, and over the past couple of months, she’s been setting up business, posting sermons on her website, accepting donations, and frankly, the whole thing stinks.
My own personal opinion aside, though, Sabo has never given a formal interview.
Until now. She’s willing to sit down with Carrie Hargrave for an in-depth interview this coming Friday afternoon. She only had one condition: that David Abelman be the photographer who comes with Carrie.
She seems to like your work.
Call me. Now.
I almost laughed at the note.
“Well, who wouldn’t want to meet the daughter of God?” I asked myself.
Bullshit and more bullshit.
It was after eleven at night when I’d opened the email. I was tired and cranky.
What the hell.
I grabbed my cell phone and slid over to John Questore in my Contacts and clicked to phone him.
After I left a voicemail message, I sat at my computer and looked up Erika Sabo. Somehow, I had missed a lot of news lately.
She was nineteen years old, lived in a small town called Aynsville in New York state, and had started to preach at the local library eight weeks ago. As Questore had said, she told anybody who would listen that God was her father, and she was here to deliver His message.
Or maybe I should say ‘messages,’ because she seemed to have a lot to say.
Her website was www.ErikaSabo.god which certainly was catchy.
Now, I’m not a techie by any means, but even I knew that “god” wasn’t a valid top-level domain name. I typed in the address, though, and it worked. Her website popped up.
I’d have to ask somebody about how that was possible. I’m sure it was a trick of some kind. So, we weren’t dealing with some dummy.
The home page of the site carried a photo of her. She was a pretty black girl with a nice smile and bright blue eyes.
The rest of her site contained dozens of sermons. I didn’t stop to read them. It wouldn’t surprise me to find she could write compelling stories. If she was gaining the attention of Time magazine, she had something special.