In this chapter, Church answers some questions then goes out to wait for Shawn. I hesitate to say anything else for fear of spoiling the story. I guess you'll just have to read to find out! Enjoy!!
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Crown Vic to a Parallel World: Stolen Love The third and final installment of the ongoing adventures of Church Philips
17
Questions and Answers and Too Much Time
I dragged my head up for the first time in a while. Bem was sitting opposite me. Next to him was Vulp. Vulp looked the same as he always did. He looked the same as the day I first saw him. He was completely bald, had a round head, a thick neck, broad shoulders, and the muscular build of a competition bodybuilder. I knew, despite the muscle-bound appearance, he was also as flexible as a ballet dancer and as fast and deadly as a panther. He and his brother, Cy, were not men I would willingly stand against.
Vulp was the quiet brother, and to my mind, the more dangerous of the two. I liked him immensely. In the years since the original mission, he and I had grown close. Perhaps not as close as I was with Bem, but close enough for me to trust him completely and closer than I ever managed to get with Cy. I liked Cy, but Cy was more of a...not a meathead, but...Cy was far more likely to greet me with a fist bump than Vulp. Vulp seemed more thoughtful, sensitive maybe, and that made him endearing. Cy was kind of a bro, and that made his company less enjoyable by comparison.
I trusted both brothers, but Vulp was different. I just trusted him more than I did Cy. If Vulp said something, I believed it, unless it was said with a smirk in his voice. He had a wickedly filthy sense of humor and was known to reduce me to howling hysterics with little more than a nudge and a whisper. I wished he had the power to do that for me at that moment, but I knew he didn't. I gave the men my silent attention and hoped, whatever they wanted, they'd just get to it.
Bem, as the more vocal of the two, opened the discussion. "Do you have any objection to being completely honest with me and Vulp?" He asked.
"Why would I?"
"Church!" Bem said sharply. He filed the sharpness off his voice and tried again, "Church, I know you're hurting, and I know the last thing you want to do is talk to me about why you're hurting. We don't know who took him and we need to find out. I need information. I don't know what's relevant and what's not. I need to ask questions and I want to know if you have anything that you don't want to say in front of either of us or both of us.
"The questions I'm about to ask you may seem invasive, they may even seem cruel, but I'm going to ask them because I don't know what I'm looking for. Will you answer me truthfully and hold nothing back, even if I record the answers?"
I stared hard into my friend's cobalt blue eyes. I knew those eyes like I knew his body, like I knew his story, like I knew my friend. I trusted him, probably more than I trusted anyone else, to do whatever it took to bring my husband back to me. Of the two men who sat across from me, I recognized Bem as the deadlier of the pair.
Bem who was the former special forces problem solver. The man who had infiltrated countless terrorist and criminal organizations and saved countless lives in the process. The man who had killed when he had to, and who had hated the killing, but who had killed all the same. That man had a soft spot in his heart for Shawn, but perhaps a softer one for me.
He had made it very clear to me, by words and deeds, that he felt he owed his happiness to me and that no price was too high to pay back what he believed I gave him. I had no secrets from him. If, through the asking of whatever questions Bem had to ask, Vulp learned something he didn't know before, I knew I could trust him not to repeat it...ever.
I apologized for answering a question with a question and promised to try. "No secrets, Bem, not now, not ever."
The lean man nodded once, very crisply, and set his cell phone on the table between us to record the conversation. He then started asking what turned out to be the most invasive series of questions I'd ever been asked in my life. He made me recount everything that happened in the last day, week, and month, how I felt about it, what Shawn said about it, what I thought about it, everything. He probed my relationship with my husband and especially my actions and dealings with those outside of the household.
In the process of the interview, I poured out all the worries about Shawn and Met and Shawn's practice and the lack of intimacy and my fears of growing apart from my husband and everything that I'd been chewing on for weeks and months. Bem listened to all of it with professional detachment.
I reminded myself that he cared for me and for my insecurities and my worries and fears, but he wasn't there as my friend. Bem was there as the special forces problem solver who was going to get my husband back for me. That meant his detachment wasn't evidence that he was hard hearted, it was proof that he was a professional.
Near the end of the interview, and almost as an afterthought, I mentioned the letters from Shawn's father, Verpa.
"I want them." Bem demanded, pouncing on the letters as a cat would a mouse.
"Cellarius has them." I explained. "We planned to review them at our next `state of the household' meeting Thursday a week. I never even opened one."
"We'll get them from him." Bem said and slid his eyes around to Vulp, the man who'd listened silently through the entire session, and who didn't have anything to add to the end of it. "I think we're done." Bem said. "I'm sorry that too so long."
"Doesn't matter." I shrugged indifferently and rose from the table.
"You going out to the hangar?" Bem asked.
"Yeah."
"With anyone?"
I shook my head. "No."
"Mind if I come out later?"
I shrugged again and left the room.
Paul met me in the corridor between the dining room and the entryway. He said he wanted to go with me. He wanted to do what he thought was his job. He wanted to keep me company, to look after me. I thanked him for his efforts and asked him to leave me alone. He agreed, reluctantly, once I told him that Bem promised to check on me later.
As we stood in the hall, Cellarius approached. He was on his way to the dining room. He had a stack of papers in his hand. He held them up to me. "They asked me to bring these, sir. Shall I share your private correspondence with them, or do you wish me to withhold it?"
I assumed the papers were the letters from Shawn's father. "No secrets Cellarius, no secrets." I said and walked away.
As I crossed the darkened entryway, I barely noticed the walls were open to the outside and the starry sky was on full display. At the edge of my vision, I saw the glowing airfield lights, stretched out from the hangar like the strip lights along the carpeted walkway of a movie theater.
I turned my back on them and went down the stairs to the first floor. I crossed the empty rumpus room and went into my kitchen to get a thermos full of coffee. I pressed the buttons on the culinarian and accepted the black glass thermos with its screw on cup lid. I held that by the handle loop and went through the door into the garage. The roll up garage door in front of the Vic stood open like it usually did. With no bad weather to keep out and no prying eyes to worry over, there was little point in closing it.
I glanced across the row of cars and noticed the stars glinted on the chrome of the Crown Vic's grill shell. The car still had some shine despite its great age and the more than six-hundred-thousand-miles that had gone under its wheels.
I was glad I'd kept it for all the years that I had. The car had been as faithful as an old dog and even easier to care for. I tossed my coffee on the passenger seat and got in behind the wheel. I reached for the ignition, but a stab of melancholy sadness gripped me and kept my hand from completing its journey. It dropped to my side, and I leaned forward to rest my forehead on the skinny plastic of the steering wheel rim.
"Keep me company tonight." I begged the old car. "Please. I think it's gonna be a long one and I don't think I'll make it on my own."
The car didn't say anything. In all the years I'd had it since Grandmom Helen had given it to me when I was seventeen... I didn't complete that line of thought. Instead, my thoughts shifted as some obvious math forced its way into the forefront of my attention. Forty years,' I realized with a start. I've had this car for forty years. Where has the time gone?'
That thought led me back to my original line of thinking. In all that very long time, the car had never answered me when I pleaded with it. Though it maintained a stony silence, it never seemed indifferent to me. The Vic had always done what I needed it to do.
All the times, during my old life, when I'd slid behind the wheel the worse for alcohol or too much time spent at work, or both, I'd always asked the car to get me home, and it always had. When I really needed it, when I was as near to death as I ever got, not far in physical distance from where it sat at that very moment, after my magic had consumed my body, the car came through for me. It had seen much of my life and was always dear to me, both as a gift from my Grandmom Helen, who I loved, and as a `fuck you' to my parents, who I hated.
I dragged my hand off the seat and twisted the key in the ignition. The car started with no hesitation and idled up, like she was eager to go somewhere. I gave it a second, and the too-eager idle settled into its familiar grumbling. "Thank you." I said to the steering wheel, like by starting, the car had answered me in the affirmative. I leaned back in the seat and put the car in gear. I let the idling engine propel us, me and the Vic, from the garage like it had earlier when I was with Paul, and I steered to the left this time, to drive toward the hangar.
The distance wasn't great. I could have walked it and often did, but even though I didn't want human company, I felt the need for company of some sort. The Vic would be the company I needed. It would give me something to talk to that wasn't my own loneliness, and a place to sit that wasn't the ground, and a window onto the world that seemed very hard and empty just then.
I drove out to the hangar, passed it, and turned to park on its far side, opposite the house, and facing down the landing strip. One row of landing lights stretched out in front of me, like the yellow line at the edge of the road, and the other ran off at an angle to the left. I knew the lines were parallel, but a trick of perspective made them look like they weren't. I got out of the car with my coffee and sat on the hood with my legs out in front of me and my back against the windshield. I rested my head on the roof of the car. I laced my fingers together, put my hands behind my head, and stared up into the endless sky to wait.
"I miss you, love." I said to the sky. "I wish you were here with me now. I hope, wherever you are, you're OK. I hope you're well, and not in any pain." I paused to let my mind pick one memory from the thousands that swirled through my brain. The one it settled on was situational, brought on by my resting place.
"Do you remember when we were here the first time? It was the night before we went through the barrier. I was laying here, and you leaned against the fender, and I asked you if I could go to Earth on a spaceship. You were so worried when you answered me, told me I couldn't. You thought I wanted to go home...back to Earth. Back then I didn't understand why you wanted to be with me. Sometimes I still don't."
I stopped talking and let my mind wander over those times, the very beginnings of the life Shawn and I would build together. From the very first moment I set eyes on him, I was attracted to him, fascinated by him. Every time I looked at Shawn, it was like seeing him for the first time, and every time he looked at me, I felt that we belonged together. I knew that he loved me, and even if sometimes his absence frustrated and troubled me, when we came together, it felt like we'd never been apart.
I tried to remember why I'd been upset the day before. I tried to remember why I hadn't just been happy to see him instead of giving him a hard time that he didn't undress as soon as our eyes met. The whole episode seemed so silly and trivial as I sat on the hood of my car, missing him. "I'll never take you for granted again." I said to the sky. "Whatever attention you can give me, that will be all I need."
I brooded for a while and thought about that and decided I was wrong. The idea of it made me mad, mad enough to rant a little. "No...when you get back, no more of this saving the world crap. Fuck the world. We're in it for us. I am so fucking done worrying about who thinks what and who wants what and who needs what...WE'RE DONE! Gave at the FUCKING office. FUCK YOU, Ars. FUCK YOU, world that I saved. FUCK YOU, family and your bullshit. DONE! Oh, and FUCK YOU, Shawn's practice.
"We've got enough goddamned money to last six lifetimes and then some and with the way Lenis keeps turning it over...fuck. I couldn't spend it if I burned hundred-dollar bills to heat the house. Not that they use dollars here...but if they did...shit. I'm putting my foot down.
"We did the `hero save everyone' thing...like a fucking bunch. Save the world, OK. Spend four fucking years saving smaller parts of it, fine. Spend the rest of our fucking lives saving it one mother fucker at a time? NO! NO FUCKING MORE! Shawn is mine. I earned him and I earned this life with him, and I'm fucking done paying for HIM and IT. When he gets back, I'll never let him out of my sight again.
"I'll white magic this whole great goddamned place to the fucking ground and I'll build another house with just enough room for him and me. THAT'S IT! We'll have our little studio apartment and our stone hot tub and not one more fucking thing. The rest of this crew of hangers-on can get fucked. When we want to see people, we'll go to them. Maybe.
"GOD-DAMN-IT that would be nice. Just him and me and all the time in the world. We would be just like Fidum and Pravus, but without the barrier. I wouldn't even let him wear clothes...just a scarf maybe, in case he got cold. But he'd never get cold because I'd always have my arms around him. FUCK! My whole body misses him, all my senses."
I stopped talking to the sky and shifted my brain in neutral, letting it settle from specific thoughts of Shawn to vague sensations of him. A more recent event cropped up in my idled mind and called for my attention. "I wonder what Paul thought when he found me in the closet crying over Shawn's clothes. He said he understood, but did he? Could he? I wonder."
I pondered over that and enjoyed having something to think about that wasn't the puzzle of where Shawn was and who took him and if...no...when would he be back. I shut my eyes to focus my thoughts and really gnawed on what I thought I knew about the elderly priest.
He'd never mentioned a significant other, but he as much as said it to me when I was crying. His reaction to Lenis' picture told me he was attracted to women. Was there a woman? What happened to her? What happened to him? He'd told me about the village in South America, but was there more than that? I didn't know.
I let my mind wander around thoughts of Paul and Earth. I tried to remember all the things the man had ever said to me and check them through the lens of the things he'd said to me since I'd picked him up from the rectory the day before. I didn't get far in my reflection. The day had been a long one, filled with grief and anxiety.
Emotional strain could be far more tiring than physical work. My eyes, that were already closed, grew heavy and my body, that was sprawled on the warm car hood, seemed to settle into the steel. My mind quieted, and I was asleep.
I found myself walking down a long corridor. It was so long that I couldn't see the end of it ahead of me or behind me. I don't know how much time I'd spent walking along it, but it felt like a lot. The corridor was narrow, narrow enough that if I spread my arms out, I could almost touch both walls with the tips of my fingers. It had white walls and dark blue carpet and black doors. There were so many doors. They were spaced every ten feet or so down both sides of the hallway. The doors had no numbers on them or next to them, no way to identify one from the other.
As I walked, I was very aware that I was there alone. I didn't want to be alone. I hated being alone. I wanted to find someone to walk with. I wanted to find Shawn. I felt that he was close, but I didn't know where he was, which door he was behind. I walked along, trying to reason out how to find him in the long hallway of doors. I couldn't simply open them all, that would take forever, but I had to do something.
I walked and I thought. No matter how far I walked, I didn't seem to get anywhere. The corridor didn't turn, or curve, or change. It just continued as a series of white walls and black doors and blue carpet in both directions forever. It was quiet in the corridor. Completely silent with no noise at all. I couldn't even hear my own footsteps. I kept walking, moving forward with the notion that covering distance was at least progress of some kind.
A door slammed and I stopped in my tracks to look for where the noise came from. As quickly as I heard it, was as quickly as it faded to silence. Another door slammed and I wheeled around to face the sound, but I couldn't tell where it came from. I stayed still and waited for something else to happen, but nothing did. I got tired of waiting and started walking again.
I didn't make it more than a few paces when a door slammed. I turned to look back, only to hear another one slam from the direction I'd just been facing. I spun again and heard another door from the opposite direction. I turned and ran toward the sound of the slam, but another door slammed in the other direction. I stopped with a skid, my feet sliding on the commercial low pile carpet. I reversed course and ran in the other direction.
More doors slammed behind me, and more and more as I ran. I bore down on my run, faster and faster, chasing the slamming doors. They all started to open and close, a cacophony of doors opening and shutting. I got angry and stopped and tried to open the first door I came to. It didn't have a handle to twist, and it wouldn't push open. I felt around the jamb, looking for a button or a catch but found nothing.
I spun on my heels to try the door behind me. As soon as I turned, the door I'd just been fighting with opened and slammed closed. I spun back to it and pounded on the door. I cried out for Shawn as I pounded my fists into the immovable black slab, but my voice and my pounding fists couldn't be heard over the deafening noise of the slamming doors.
"CHURCH!" My husband's voice called, penetrating the noise of the doors like an air horn in a library.
I jerked to look. The doors stopped slamming and the hallway fell silent. At one end of it was Shawn, facing me, waiting for me to gather him into my arms. I took a step toward him, and all the doors swung open to reveal black spaces inside. Shawn dodged into the door closest to him. I didn't want to lose him, so I ran to where I saw him last, but when I got there, he was gone, and the door was closed.
"CHURCH!" He called again.
I jerked around to see him run across the hall, out from one door and into another. I started to run, but he cried out from behind me. "CHURCH!" He called and ran across the hall again.
"CHURCH! CHURCH! CHURCH!" My name echoed back at me, shouted in my husband's voice from everywhere at once. Everywhere I turned I saw Shawn run across the hall from one door to the next. I turned and turned and turned to try to catch more than a glimpse of him, to learn the pattern, to anticipate where he'd be so I could reach out and gather him to me. He eluded my every attempt.
I shut my eyes and screamed for him. My throat grew raw and hoarse from the screaming, but I couldn't even hear my own voice over the shouts of my name. "Church." Shawn whispered, so softly I knew he had to be close. I opened my eyes and there he was, just inside the door nearest to where I stood.
"Shawn." I said and reached for him. I stepped through the door as I reached but there was nothing to step onto. I pitched down into the black nothingness of the space inside the door. Shawn reached out for me as I fell, but our hands didn't meet. Our fingers didn't touch by the space of a hair's breadth. It may as well have been several miles. I fell into the consuming blackness.
I fell and fell, and I cried out as I fell. I cried out for my love, but he didn't answer me. I cried out for my love, but I was alone.
"CHURCH!" A familiar voice that wasn't Shawn's shouted at me.
"SHAWN!" I cried out and reached out my arms. He wasn't there. I was sitting on the hood of the Vic, looking up at the sky, and my husband, my love, my reason for being, wasn't there.
"Church?" The familiar voice said again.
The voice belonged to Bem. He was sitting next to me on the car hood with my thermos of coffee in his hands. I reached out to pull him to me but stopped myself and sat back. "A dream," I said to myself, "a nightmare."
Bem leaned up off the windshield glass to look in my face. "You alright, Big Guy?"
I scrubbed my palms savagely over my face and dropped them to my sides where they slapped against the car hood with a dull metallic sound. "No, no I'm not, but you already knew that."
Bem agreed with me. "Yes, I know." He said, his voice a worried mutter.
"What time is it?" I asked rhetorically as I took my phone from my pocket to check it. The digital numbers told me it was after midnight, but I didn't notice by how much.
"It's late. We got done with the interviews a little while ago and I came out to check on you. You were asleep, so I tried not to disturb you. Before you ask, there were no great revelations. Something is going on with your father-in-law. His letters, the first one looks like a backhanded offer to reconcile, and the later ones are all about investment opportunities. I want you to reach out to him tomorrow...or I guess today...and see what he wants. I want to listen in when you speak with him."
"Anything you say." I agreed without having heard much that Bem had said.
Bem seemed to sense I hadn't processed his words. "Big Guy?" He asked.
His question drew my wandering attention. I looked over at my friend and saw the concern on his face. "Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm...fuck...what did you say? Letters...Verpa...what?"
"It's OK. Never mind." Bem dismissed what he'd been trying to tell me. "We'll figure it out tomorrow. Why don't you go in and go to bed? If someone was coming, they'd be here by now."
"I'm alright. I just need some coffee." I pointed at the thermos Bem had cradled in his lap. He put it into my hands. I spun the lid off and offered him the first sip. He refused so I put the spout to my lips and slugged down the still-hot beverage. I drank until I had to breathe and tipped the thermos back with a gasp. "That'll help."
I put the lid on the thermos, stuck the thing between my legs, and relaxed against the windshield again. Bem and I both idled ourselves for a while, not speaking or thinking. I wasn't thinking, I don't know if Bem was or not. I guess he must have been because he broke the silence after some time had passed. "Big Guy, why did you stop yourself? When you woke up, I mean. I thought you were going to hug me, but you didn't. Why?"
I felt my right hand grip my left wrist and play with my bracelet. I'd given up trying to control the impulse. It was just too hard. "You belong to Mary." I explained to my friend. Bem didn't see the problem. "That just means we can't have sex. You can still hug me."
"It makes it harder."
"Makes what harder?" Bem asked.
It occurred to me, as he asked the question, that Bem hadn't pounced on what should have been a very easy opportunity for an innuendo laden joke. That told me he was being very serious. He was rarely that serious, so I wanted to make sure the answer I gave him was just as serious.
Bem and I had never spoken about how our relationship changed when he committed to my sister. I'd thought about it. I assumed he'd thought about it, but probably not as much as I had. I decided to be very honest with him and not to hold anything back. The time of night and the circumstances...they didn't seem right for secrets. Not that I had any secrets from Bem, but I suppose everyone has things they don't offer.
I told Bem how I felt, and hoped he would do the same. "I miss you...a lot. I miss the way things were between us. I miss touching you, but more than that, I miss YOU. When you got Mary...it's like this part of you I used to have, went to her."
I realized what I'd just said could be taken a number of ways and rushed to clarify. "And that's how it should be. She should have all of you and you should have all of her. Now you have a kid, a great kid, and another on the way and I couldn't be happier for you...but that doesn't change the fact that I miss what I used to have with you."
I sighed out a ragged and frustrated breath and exposed the rest of my emotions around the subject. "I hate being jealous of your wife, my sister, and your kid, but I can't help it. I know I'm just being selfish and I'm sorry, but there it is. I stopped myself from hugging you, because touching you, having you in my arms, it reminds me of what we used to share and then I end up feeling even lonelier than I did before."
My confession seemed to trouble my friend. "Do you want me to go?" He asked.
"No, don't go. I want you here. I like having you around. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say. I'm thrilled for you. I'm happy you found someone who makes you happy. I'm even happier that the person you found is my sister, because she needed someone like you. I wouldn't change a single thing. I wouldn't take away your happiness for anything, but...I miss you."
Bem fell silent as he thought about what I'd said to him. I watched him think about it. As I did, my mind wandered.