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(Seattle, Thursday, September 25, 2013)
Janet Andrews sat in her car down the block from the Emergency Pregnancy Care Center and wondered if she had lost her mind. What was she doing? She was relieved when no voices answered her question. Who had told her that you didn’t have to worry that you were crazy for talking to yourself—not until someone answered? Her father, she remembered suddenly. He used to say that. She turned away from the thought.
She’d had a hard time keeping her mind on work all morning. The picture of her son seemed to call to her. She resisted the urge to pull it out of her purse. What was he like? What did his voice sound like? Like her father’s, she imagined.
She made a few calls: to the office that handled Tim Brandt’s scholarship, and to payroll to get the address his stipend was to be sent. She stuck it in her wallet next to the photograph, and resolutely returned to work.
But after work, she sat at her kitchen table, looking at the picture in one hand, the address in the other. Pulitzer put his head in her lap and whined for his walk unheeded.
For 20 years, she had carefully avoided thinking about her son. She made her decision and gave him up, and there was no going back. She had been cast out. There was nothing to go back to.
Work had helped her heal. She was good at what she did. It had led her to interesting places, introduced her to interesting people. New experiences put distance between her and Jehovah’s Valley in a way that nothing else could.
Sometimes she wondered about her son. Wondered if he was doing well in school. Wondered what he was like. When she returned to Seattle after D.C., she’d called Roberta Brooks and found out about him. Then she set up the scholarship fund.
In all those years this was the first photograph she’d seen of him. The first time she’d seen what he looked like.
She’d become passive in all this.
That’s not like me—I’m not a passive person, she thought. So, what am I waiting for, a knight in shining armor to rescue me? She smiled at the absurd image of Mac Davis in armor on a horse, lance at the ready. Still, he was using his weekend off to go to the Valley and investigate. What was she doing?
Waiting for a champion? She sighed. Not likely to happen. She was a champion for other people, other causes. Her friends turned to her for support; her staff relied on her. People in the community lobbied for her support for their causes. She made a real difference in other people’s lives.
If you can’t champion your own cause, what kind of champion were you, anyway?
Idly she wondered why Mac was doing this. Something had caught his attention. Something was bugging him, even if he wasn’t sure what it was.
Her star reporter scared most of her staff, but she trusted him. The core of rage he kept under such tight restraints left people holding their breath wondering when it would blow. With him, she felt like she had as a child, gentling the foals or taming the half-wild barn cats. She was good with wild animals, she thought, amused.
She looked back at the picture and the address. “Come on Pulitzer,” she said, getting up abruptly. “Let’s go for a ride.”
Tim Brandt’s mailing address turned out to be the Emergency Pregnancy Care Center. Janet drove by slowly, then parked the car and walked Pulitzer back by the building. Why would Tim use this as a mailing address? He had to be living somewhere. She and Pulitzer walked around the block, down the alley behind the building, back by the front of it again. Walking a dog was great camouflage. No one paid much attention to a middle-aged woman walking her dog.
People were coming and going, but no one who looked like the young man in the picture.
Janet took Pulitzer to a park nearby for the walk he was expecting. Seeing a payphone, she impulsively called the Center. She asked for Tim Brandt, making up a story about how he’d been helpful to a friend, and now that she needed help, she hoped he could meet with her.
“Tim Brandt?” the woman said, with doubt in her voice. “Well, if your friend said she found him helpful....” Her voice trailed off.
“I know it’s late in the day,” Janet began.
“Not a problem,” the woman assured her. “Let me call Tim and see if he can accept a counseling appointment this afternoon. What time is good for you?”
Janet said it would take an hour for her to get to the center, would that be OK? And could she call back? She wasn’t where she could give out a number.
The woman seemed to find no surprise in that. Janet guessed that young, scared women often didn’t give numbers or names. She gave her name as Linda.
When she called back, the receptionist assured her that Tim could come in at 6 p.m. for a counseling appointment.
At 5:45 p.m. Janet again parked her car outside the clinic and wondered if she’d lost her mind.
Pulitzer whined. Janet scratched his ears, and he flopped down in the passenger seat with a moan.
Shortly before 6 p.m., a young man hurried down the street and entered the side door. Janet waited. She’d thought about going in and meeting him for the appointment, but she was a bit old for the kind of counseling they did. Although, maybe not. A baby at this time of her life would most certainly be a crisis. She shuddered.
Tim Brandt waited for his no-show appointment for 20 minutes. He stomped out of the same door he entered, letting the door slam behind him. Once outside, he stopped, took a deep breath.
Janet got out of the car and slowly walked toward him. He looked at her curiously, but without recognition.
Tim Brandt really did look like her father. He was tall, slim now, but he’d fill out in the shoulders eventually. Brown hair flopped over his forehead. He was frowning.
“Tim?” Janet said, stopping about three feet away.
“Yes?”
“I am Janet Andrews.”
His eyes widened. He took a step backwards. “You! What are you doing here?”
“I came to meet you,” she said. “I came to see what you were like, and if you were part of the group that’s harassing me.”
He looked stunned. They stared at each other. “I have nothing to say to you,” he said, finding his voice. “You—turned your back on Dad, on the Valley. You’ve turned your back on God! You represent everything that I...”
“Don’t understand?” Janet suggested sardonically when he fumbled for the words.
“Everything I despise,” he said firmly. A muscle in his jaw twitched.
Janet nodded her head once. “Did it ever occur to you that you might not have all the facts? I rather doubt... the Rev. Brandt has discussed me much.”
“Is that what you think of him as? Can’t say father?” he needled her.
She smiled. “My father thinks of himself as the Rev. Brandt. Why shouldn’t I? Have you asked Stephen about it?”
He shoved his fists in his pockets. “Uncle Stephen?” Tim said with surprise. “What does he know? I know all I need to know. I can read the newspaper and know all I need to know.”
“Tim? Is everything all right?” a man called from the Center’s doorway. Both of them looked at him.
“It’s fine, Mark,” Timothy Brandt called back to him. “I’m just giving her directions.”
Janet looked at the man who had to be the Center’s director, Mark Ryan. She couldn’t guess at his age, he had one of those faces that seemed frozen. He looked at her with suspicion.
“If you’re sure,” he said, and turned back into the building. He watched through the window in the door, however.
“Come on,” Tim said abruptly. “I’ll walk you to your car. You shouldn’t be here.”
Janet wondered why he’d lied, why he hadn’t identified her. She didn’t comment.
“Isn’t your Uncle Stephen leading the Valley?” she asked instead.
“Of course not,” he said. “I mean, he’s a nice man, but... No, John Welch makes the decisions that Dad is too tired to make.”
“Really?” She stopped on the sidewalk across the street from her car and stared at him appalled. “He’s still the heir apparent? Not Stephen?”
Tim looked perplexed.
Janet sighed. “Tim, are you involved in something bad? Something beyond the harassment?”
“None of your business what I’m involved with,” he said angrily, forgetting his curiosity. “Just go away!”
Janet walked a few steps into the street, stopped. She looked back at him. “If you need help, you know how to find me,” she said dryly. “You can come to me.”
“Trying to be my big sister?” he said angrily.
“Something like that.” Janet crossed the street, got in her car. When she looked at the front door of the Center, Mark Ryan stood there, watching her. She shivered and drove down the street two blocks. Out of sight of the Center she pulled over, leaned her head against the steering wheel and took deep, shuddering breaths.
She had met her son, she thought. It was pretty clear he was involved in the harassment, but what else?
John Welch was still waiting to step into her father’s shoes? Surely her father had learned something from that time years ago. Hadn’t he? Troubled, she sat there for a few minutes, collecting herself. Pulitzer whined, licked her face. She laughed and pushed him away.
“Okay, we’ll go home,” she said. John Welch?
The picketers showed up at 7 p.m., not long after Janet pulled into her driveway. She heard a car drive slowly along the street and park. She peered through the closed curtains. Two men and a woman got out of the car and walked toward her place carrying placards.
She tensed, but they didn’t come onto the property. Instead, they lifted their signs and walked solemnly down the sidewalk in front of her house. At the end of the block, they turned, walked back past her house, and up the street to the other end.
Another carload joined them at 7:05 p.m. The third car pulled up at 7:10 p.m. Janet watched from the window. The signs said the same slogans she’d been hearing on her voice mail: Baby Killer, Stop Biased Reporting, Confess Your Sins, Feminists are the Devil’s Work—she kind of liked that one.
They were quiet, talking among themselves some, but mostly just a peaceful parade on a warm summer evening.
Janet searched each face, looking for someone familiar. No young man with floppy hair. No compact scary Mark Ryan. No one she’d ever seen before.
She found her address book, looked up Rodriguez’s direct line. He was in. She explained what was going on.
“Do you have any reason to feel threatened?” he asked, somewhat formally.
“No.” Janet was definite. There was no threat here.
“Then there isn’t much we can do,” Rodriguez said. “They’ve a right to peaceful assembly. But then you know that.”
Janet laughed, heard the hysteria that threatened to spiral out of control, and stopped. “Yeah,” she said dryly, thinking of all the times she had argued with the police about the right of a reporter to be on the street watching. “Yeah, I know about peaceful assembly.”
Rodriguez grunted. “I’ll have an officer swing by and watch, just in case,” he said. “You call Mac?”
“No. I can’t keep calling him to come to my rescue,” Janet said. “He works for me. It’s not fair. I have to handle this myself.”
“I don’t think that’s how he sees it, Janet. He’d want to know.”
“Maybe.” But Janet knew she wasn’t going to call him. She wasn’t afraid of these protesters in their cotton dresses and slacks and shirts. Besides it was still daylight. The ghosts that haunted her came out at night.
Janet watched at her window until she saw a police cruiser pull up and park across the street. Satisfied, she found her garden gloves and went out to weed in her back yard.
She felt brave, defiant to be going about her business, enjoying the early evening sun in her garden—in spite of the protesters on her street—until she heard a car pull into her driveway, the door slam. Damn, she thought, looking at the distance between her and the house. She stood still, uncertain what to do.
Mac’s face peered over the back gate; he looked relieved when he saw her. She sighed.
“Rodriguez call you?” she asked, as she went to let him in.
He grunted. “I was planning to come over anyway,” he said. He gestured toward the front. “You want me to run them off?”
Mac chasing them off like shooing chickens out of the garden flashed into her head. She grinned. “No,” she said. “They...” She shrugged. “It’d be hypocritical of an editor to deny people the right to protest, hey?”
She opened the back door, padded into the kitchen and poured herself some iced tea. “Want some?” she asked and poured him a glass when he nodded.
“When you left the Valley,” he began. Stopped. Started again. “You moved in with your aunt, here, right?”
Janet nodded.
“Did you go to church?”
Janet smiled sadly, remembering. “I didn’t leave the church just because I left the Valley,” she said. “I came here, stayed with my aunt. We went to a Baptist church. I sang in the choir, until I started to show, and was very happy. I belonged. There’s been nothing like it since.”
Mac winced. Belong was a word that pushed buttons for him, Janet guessed. Well it did for her, too.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I’m seeing Kate Fairchild,” he said.
Janet raised her eyebrows. “And?”
“She’s bright and funny and well-read,” he said, searching for the words. “But she’s immersed in this church thing and seems quite contented. And she’s really smart.”
Janet nodded. “You can be smart and religious,” she said, hiding a smile.
“What made you leave?”
“Desert Storm.” She laughed at his expression. “Here I was, a reporter covering politics, and the church was getting more and more conservative, rigidly so. And then they were preaching pro-war from the pulpit.”
She shook her head, remembering. “I interviewed Senators during the week, but at Church they believed I couldn’t make decisions without consulting a man. And I left. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But I couldn’t juggle the hypocrisy of being two people anymore.”
“Kate’s 26 or so.”
“Biology, right? She may not have that crisis,” Janet said. “She may be able to keep the church and have a life as a professional woman. I couldn’t.”
Mac nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t know if there is room for me in that world.”
Janet smiled at the image that thought created. “I don’t know,” she said. “But you can’t unknow what you know. But I will tell you, that belonging, that sense of community is very compelling. You might find that attractive, enough so that you could put up with the rest of it. Especially if you found a woman to love and find a family with.”
“And I’ve been around a bit,” he said ignoring the rest of it. Belonging was a button with him; he'd learned that much about himself.
He frowned, shook his head. “I don’t get why women put up with it,” he said. “Why don’t they leave? Why do they stay in a situation where they’re treated as second class, where they can’t do anything without permission?”
Janet sighed. Mac wasn’t the only one to ask that. Most non-believers did. Hell, a lot of believers wondered about the women in the more conservative churches.
“Where would they go?” she asked. “Everyone they know is part of the community. They’d have to give up their families, their friends, their church. Maybe even their children. Why would they even think there is something to go to?
“They’re told from the time they’re very small that the world is sinful and will destroy them. Everything they see on TV—and FOX has made it worse—just confirms it. They think they’re protected from all that.
“And I’m not just talking about the really right-wing groups like Jehovah’s Valley. It’s true for most Christians. Other faiths too, I guess, to some degree or another.”
She paused, then burst out, “So even if a woman decides she wants to get out, where does she go for help? The police? Joke. A shelter? They’re backed up with waiting lists for months. Where does she go, Mac?”
He just watched her carefully, listening, not judging. It was what made him a good reporter, she thought.
“Maybe she’s got a high school diploma. Has never worked outside of the home. Has two or three kids. Has never gone anywhere. Most of them have never gone anywhere alone, not even to the grocery store.
“She doesn’t know anyone who isn’t like her. Her family, her friends, her church, the women’s Bible Study. Leave? She thanks God every day she doesn’t have to. And feels sorry for women who don’t have what she has.”
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “When I decided to leave the church, I had a college degree, a job I loved, a home. It was still the hardest thing I’ve ever done. When I talked to a church friend of mine, she said it had to be me, she didn’t know anyone else who was upset by the sermons on a woman’s place. I said that’s because most thinking women have already left. And then I did, too. But I understand why a lot of women stay.”
Mac nodded. He said nothing for a moment, waiting to see if she had more to say. He filed it away to think about later. She sat at the table, her eyes closed, head tipped back, taking a few deep breaths. He watched her, then changed the subject.
“I want to go and check out your dad and Jehovah’s Valley, but as isolationist as they are, I don’t see how they’d be involved,” he said. “And Eli is definitely not your stalker. That leaves Tim.”
She nodded. “I think he’s involved, but I’m not sure how. I don’t think he’s the instigator.”
“Probably not. Although some of the stuff they’re using comes from him,” Mac pointed out.
“Yeah.” She thought about that. “He’s angry. And I’m his target—for the wrong reasons—but even if he knew the truth, I’d still be his target.”
Mac nodded in agreement. “Well, what are you going to do?”
“Probably nothing,” Janet said wryly. “I’m not sure there’s anything to do but ride it out.”
“All this still worries me though,” he said.
She shrugged. “It will go away, I suppose, when they find a new target.” Soon, she hoped.
Mac went into the living room and peered out through the curtains, taking care not to position his body in front of the window. Janet watched him. He does it instinctively, she thought. Always cautious, always aware. She’d become more aware in the last few days. She shuddered at having to make it a way of life.
“Come take a look,” he said softly. Janet joined him, looked out the window. It was getting dark. The picketers seemed more ominous now, she thought. Maybe just the dark. At least they weren’t in white hoods and burning a cross.
“There are more men,” he pointed out softly. “The women are leaving.”
Janet studied the picketers and saw what he meant. “It seems more threatening,” she admitted. “But things always do in the dark.”
“I don’t like it.” Mac looked around at her, the living room. Janet waited, watching him think. Then he smiled. She stopped her natural impulse to take a step backward.
“You got a camera?”
She smiled back. “Yeah. A nice, state of the art digital with a powerful flash.” She got it for him. He checked it out, made sure the batteries worked.
“I’ll be back.”
Mac walked across the street to the police car; the officer rolled down the window. “There’s nothing I can do unless they trespass,” the officer said defensively.
Mac shook his head, raised his hands, showing the camera. “Don’t want you to do anything. But I’ve got a right to take pictures of people in a public venue, right?”
The officer grinned. He was a young man, macho and proud. It hadn’t set well to sit and watch, Mac guessed. “Let me clear it with the captain to make sure,” the officer said reaching for his cell phone. He talked to someone and nodded. “Captain says they’ve got the right to peaceably assemble; you got the right to photograph it.”
The officer opened the door of his cruiser and got out. He leaned against the car. “Enjoy,” he said.
Mac grinned at him, checked the settings on the camera, and walked across the street. He started snapping pictures mid-way, ignoring the mutters from the protesters.
“Stop that!” a man ordered. He stopped in front of Mac, planted his feet. Mac took his picture. He was about Mac’s age, but shorter, just shy of six-foot, Mac guessed. Muscled, but the way he stood said he hadn’t fought much. A bully, Mac concluded, used to throwing his weight around without needing to follow through.
“I said stop that. You do not have permission to take our pictures.”
Mac took another photo, lowered the camera, letting it drop to hang around his neck. He shook both hands free. “I don’t need your permission,” he said levelly. “You’re on public property.”
The man looked him over, then looked away. He called to the officer, “We don’t want our pictures taken. Tell him to stop.”
The officer didn’t move from his position against the hood of his car. “You have the right to protest,” he said calmly. “He has the same rights to photograph it. Already checked with the Captain on it.”
There was muttering. Mac pointed his camera at another person, who threw up her hands to hide her face.
“This is intimidation!” One woman said indignantly.
Mac said nothing. He took another picture, always keeping his eye on the first man. Slowly people were leaving, drifting away as if they had intended to do so all along. The young men left first, except for the asshole who still stood on the sidewalk with his arms folded across his chest. The women squawked for a bit, but when no one did anything, they too left.
Mac walked back to the man who had first accosted him. “You’re the last to go,” he said softly, moving in close. “It’s time, don’t you think?”
The man looked around him, saw that the others were gone. He looked over at the officer, who hadn’t budged. “Don’t think you scare me,” he said back. “I’m going. But we’ll be back.”
He turned and walked down the hill to his car. Mac watched him go. The asshole hadn’t been scared one bit; Mac acknowledged. And that worried him all the more. Who were these people?