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“INVINCIBLE”
(KELLY CLARKSON)
Four Months Later…
It was a Saturday.
We were at Angels Headquarters, all lazed in our curved couch.
And Raye’s burner phone was on the desk in front of us, the speaker enabled, and Raye was talking.
“So, I can’t tell you who I am, or how I know,” she was saying. “What I can tell you is that video has been deleted. It doesn’t exist. It’s gone. I can assure you of that.” Raye paused and then said, “You’re free.”
There was a moment of silence, then a hiccoughing sob.
This was the last woman who Brody found. Between him and Arthur, they’d been at it for months, but they didn’t give up. Not until the very last woman had been found.
It took longer for this last one because they had to widen the search. She’d apparently run into Trev during a vacation to Phoenix from her home in Toronto.
We’d heard a lot of hiccoughing sobs (and other verbal responses) over the months.
Precisely fifty-six of them.
I was glad this was the last one.
Allow me to sum up:
Let’s hark back to the Sunday after I got to work on my first paid organization gig (and yes, the organization of Shirleen and Moses’s condo was a massive mountain I had to climb, one could say Shirleen really liked shoes…and handbags…and fingernail polish…and fancy Tupperware, I could go on—but I was there for it).
Javi and I drove up to Flagstaff.
We did this to visit his mom.
I was nervous for the first hour of the drive, until Javi took my hand, squeezed it and said, “Babe, she’s so doped up, she isn’t even going to remember me. You don’t have to be worried about making a good impression.”
This gutted me.
Though, it made me less nervous.
It turned out, he was right.
When we got to the facility, and were shown to a social room, Javi led me to a beautiful woman who was vaguely shifting pieces of a puzzle around on the table. When we arrived at her side, she looked up at him like she didn’t know who he was.
It was absolutely heartbreaking.
Since she looked like she also didn’t know where she was or that anything was happening around her so it stood to reason she wouldn’t recognize her own son, that made it a little less heartbreaking.
But only a very little.
I marveled at how easily Javi took a seat close to her, held her hand, introduced me as his girlfriend, said, “It’s very serious, Ma,” (gah! he was the best!) and generally filled her in on his life, our lives together and other chitchat like she could comprehend what he was saying.
I mean, honestly.
If I didn’t completely and totally love him before (who was I kidding about “falling,” I was head over heels for the guy), that did it.
She smiled at him benignly, like she was humoring him, all while he talked.
He obviously had practice with this and acted just like a son would when catching his mom up on his life.