The Sky Beneath My Feet

Chapter 8


Good Christian Lady





Definition of hypocrisy: this daydream I’m having, in which I slap a fat joint from Eli’s lips, snatch it in the air between my finger and thumb, and grind out the smoldering cherry in the middle of his peanut butter ice-cream cake.

Gregory drives, trying to munch down his McDonald’s hash browns before the grease melts through the bag. He doesn’t look over at me, knowing no good will come of it.

Shocking news plus a sleepless night plus an unwanted errand equals recipe for volcanic eruption.

If Gregory hadn’t arrived first thing, ringing the doorbell with his fast-food offering in hand, there would have been an eruption all right.

And where is his father? Cloistered away while his son puffs himself into a stupor. Is that where Eli goes every day after school? Is he being metaphorical when he calls it riding the trails? Is he laughing at me behind my back?

“You shouldn’t have told me,” I say.

“I gave you the red pill when you wanted the blue one. Or is it the other way around?”

“I’m serious.”

“What? It’s The Matrix. You don’t really think that ignorance is bliss. Anyway, you weren’t such a little teetotaler back in the day.”

“Neither were you.” Low blow. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No big deal. I can take it. Twelve years sober as of last month.”

“That’s great.”

“So you can understand why this means something to me, helping this girl.”

“I thought you liked the mom.”

“I do,” he says. “But it’s not just about the mom. Kind of hard to explain.”

“You don’t have to. I understand.”

“I’m not telling you to go easy on the kid. I wouldn’t. Nail him to the wall if that’s what it takes. Just wait until tomorrow. It’s his birthday, after all.”

“Do you think Jed knows?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. You knew when it was me.”

“What if he wasn’t the one smoking it? Maybe he was just around people who were smoking.”

“Could be,” he says, doubt in his voice. We’re taking the Jones Falls Expressway into town. Speeding one minute, sitting still the next. He drops the last hash brown wrapper into the bag and crumbles it into a white, damp ball, sailing the ball over his shoulder into the backseat: “Two points.”

“Last night might have been the first time,” I say. “Just because he smelled of pot doesn’t mean he’s a stoner.” The more I think about this theory, the more I like it. “The other day he saw a bunch of war protesters and called them ‘hippie losers.’ You wouldn’t say that if you were smoking, would you?”

“Hippie losers? No way. You’d say, ‘Hail brother, well met.’ Absolutely.”

“You’re no help.”

“Hey, I grassed on him, what more do you want? Get it—grassed?”

“Not funny.”

“No, it’s not. And now I’m dragging you into this mess.”

This mess. It sounds like a mess all right.

“What’s the girl’s name, anyway?”

“Her name is Samantha McCone. Sam.”

“And what is Sam’s story?”

“It’s not a nice one. She ran away when she was in her early teens. Her parents were divorced, and her mom had moved her here. I don’t know if drugs came into it before or after that, but she was missing for close to six months. Police brought her back. After that, behavior problems—you can imagine what it was like. I mean, how do you treat a kid who does something like that? But Sam got her act together in high school, graduated in May, and she was in my classroom three months later, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I’ve got a nose for it, and I didn’t sense anything with her. She seemed like a good kid. She was a good kid.”

“So what happened?”

“Same thing that always happens. You get weak, you get tempted, you relapse. Her mom says she started going into the city with these friends of hers, partying, not coming home until the next day. She didn’t want to come down too hard too fast—Sam is hypersensitive—but before she knew it, the girl was gone. That was three weeks ago.”

“When did she call home?”

“Sunday afternoon.”

While I was with the Rent-a-Mob, feeling sorry for myself. “You talked to her yesterday? And she said she wouldn’t go back.”

“She’d run out of drugs over the weekend. Between Sunday and yesterday, she must have scored some more.”

“And they let her stay in the halfway house?”

“It’s more like an asylum. You’ll see.”

If your knowledge of Baltimore jumps from Edgar Allan Poe to The Wire, you have a distorted view of the city, expecting it to be hip deep in drugs, bullets flying through the projects, tattooed thugs eyeballing you as your car rolls through the corner. It’s not that way, I tell people. Even the places that were like that are getting better all the time. There are Volvos parked along Patterson Park. Don’t believe everything you see, I tell them. I’m from Baltimore. I should know.

But Gregory takes me to the Baltimore I’m not from, the city I don’t know or even begin to recognize.

“This isn’t such a great neighborhood,” I say, watching two kids on a street corner bump hands, passing something back and forth. The closed store behind them is hidden under burglar bars, the glass underneath busted out.

“We’re not in Lutherville anymore. Don’t worry. If anybody gives you trouble, start sharing about Jesus and they’ll give you a wide berth.”

“I should have brought my fish.”

Gallows humor. I really don’t like the look of these streets. Long blocks of side-by-side row houses, every couple of facades boarded up and tagged with paint. Old sunbaked black men sitting on stoops, kids in long white muscle shirts running in front of the car with only a foot or two to spare, leaving Gregory to hit the brakes or run them over. At the intersections, lean young men in hoodies and puffed-out coats lean over for a look into the car.

“They’re just checking to see if we’re buying,” Gregory says. “It’s no big deal.”

His calmness reassures me a little. This is the real world. What looks risky to me is everyday life for many of God’s creatures.

“I envy your assurance,” I tell him. “I shouldn’t be a stranger to such places, after all.”

“Why not?”

“Jesus ate with the prostitutes and tax collectors. I’m on his team, married to one of his official servants, and in theory my life is meant to be more like his. I’m supposed to aspire to this kind of thing. But it makes me uncomfortable all the same. I guess I don’t have your affinity for the working class.”

“This isn’t the working class,” he says. “This is flat-out poverty. I don’t want any part of this, or the system that perpetuates it, any more than you do—” He breaks off. I sense there’s more he could say, but for some reason he doesn’t want to. He pretends to pay attention to the road. Finally, this: “In all honesty, I think my Marxism is about as theoretical as your Christianity. I want out of here as much as you.”

“And Sam? How did she end up in a place like this?”

He shrugs. “How does anyone end up in a place like this?”

The amazing thing is, we’ll pass a bunch of dealers hustling on the curb and one block up there’s a parked police car. You’d think they would at least move their action farther down. But these are the front lines, I guess. You don’t run away because the other side shows its head. If you’re in a battle, you stand your ground.

The streets teem with kids. Teens. Grade-schoolers. Running alone or in packs. Dribbling basketballs, snatching caps off each other’s heads and running down the block with them, their laughter incongruous to my ears given the surroundings, but natural enough to them. All of this must seem natural to them.

Eric Ringwald, Holly’s husband, returned from one of his trips to Haiti telling after-dinner stories about the children there. “They have nothing,” he would say, “absolutely nothing—and yet they seem so happy in comparison to us.” He meant it sincerely, and I’ve heard the same thing from many others returning from short-term mission trips: middle-class Americans lamenting their own inauthenticity in comparison to the impoverished and joyous urchins they saw abroad. Maybe I’m channeling my brother’s convictions here, but I can imagine Edwardian travelers returning from their gin-and-tonic-soaked holidays in Calcutta thinking much the same thing. I’ve never heard anyone come back from downtown Baltimore waxing poetic about the authenticity of poverty.

“Don’t let it get to you,” Gregory says. “We’ll be out of here in no time.”

Maybe it should get to me. What kind of person would I be if it didn’t?

One rung above hell is how Gregory described the halfway house, and at first glance he appears to be right. Parking across the street, he unclips his seat belt, lets out a long sigh, and just sits there, working up the nerve to get out. This gives me a chance to look the place over. Mission Up sits at the end of a block of row houses, half of them boarded up and the other half looking like they should be. The tall, narrow facades make me think of a grade-schooler’s smile: you run your eyes left to right and keep hitting gaps where teeth are meant to be.

Once upon a time, thirty years ago at least, Mission Up might actually have been a large boardinghouse, one of those seedy flophouse kind of places you see in old movies, with the creepy attendant behind the counter and the room keys dangling on wall hooks. After that, it must have been boarded up for a long time and only recently pried open and repurposed. Calling it a halfway house gave me the impression of something official. This is anything but.

“It looks more like a squat,” I say.

But looking again, I notice some care has gone into this squat. The sign over the door is hand-painted in pink neon. The lettering is done with flair too, the o in Mission Up rendered as a smiley face. The trim on the ground-floor windows is picked out in the same bright pink. Even though the windows themselves are sheathed in what looks like chicken wire, if you give it a chance, Mission Up exudes a rude cheerfulness.

Gregory turns to me. “It’s not going to be easy getting in. We’ll have to talk our way past the nun.”

“The nun?”

“You’ll see. Just follow my lead.”

Stepping out of the car feels at first like walking on the moon. But the ground under my feet doesn’t give way, and the air is just as breathable as it is in the suburbs. By the time we’re across the street, I’m thinking I can do this. I want to. Beth may hesitate, but Eliza, the girl whose eyes sometimes look back at me in the mirror, would charge ahead.

Gregory knocks on the door. Up close, I can see faded pink detailing on the inset panels, more evidence of life within. After a pause, he knocks again, glancing over his shoulder.

“She’s a bit of a bear.”

The door opens and I see what he means. A wide-eyed black woman about five feet tall and five feet wide looms in the threshold, her bosom and belly conflated into a single roll that pushes on the buttons of her shiny polyester shirt. The collar has a notch of white at the throat, just like the one Deedee’s parish priest wears.

“What you—? Oh,” she says. “The professor come back.”

Not an ounce of hospitality in her voice. In fact, the way she says professor suggests the profoundest doubt that the man standing before her is any such thing. She says it with invisible quotes in the air, implying Gregory is an impostor.

Her eyes cut to me, glancing up and down in frank assessment. On her chest, a gold pectoral cross hangs, hugely out of proportion, its ends whirled with elaborate flourishes. It shines flatly and looks like spray-painted metal. She also wears a dozen or more tiny enamel badges of the sort men used to wear on their suit lapels. Knights of Columbus, a variety of crosses denoting holy orders I don’t recognize, tiny Bibles, tiny Virgins, tiny saints of various sorts. Like a general’s medals or a Boy Scout’s badges. There’s a lot of real estate to cover and she’s managed pretty well.

“Sister,” Gregory begins.

“Mother,” she says, correcting him.

“Mother, that’s right. Is it . . . Zacchaeus?”

His mouth has trouble tumbling out the syllables that emerged so smoothly from my own.

“Mother Zacchaeus,” she says, fixing him in her small, cold eyes. “You know perfectly well.”

“Well, look who I’ve brought!” He frames me with his hands, a magician’s gesture. “This is Sister Eliza, a good Christian lady, and when I told her about your wonderful establishment here, she insisted on seeing it for herself.”

“Hmm.” Mother Zacchaeus looks me over again. “You a good Christian lady?”

“Absolutely!” Gregory says in a bright, loud voice, talking to the nun like she’s hard of hearing or hard of understanding or both. It makes me wince to hear him condescending this way.

“We’re here to see Sam?” I say, turning the end of the statement into a question.

“I know why you here, good Christian lady. And you not coming in.”

Gregory leans into the threshold, and for a second I expect Mother Zacchaeus to deck him. Her torso twists and her hand cocks back, but at the last moment she merely grasps the edge of the door, holding it tightly. Short as she is, I have no doubt she could flatten my lanky brother, whose workout routine consists mainly of carrying a stack of books from his car to his office. Occasionally Deedee will tell me horror stories of the strict nuns of her Catholic youth, but those white-haired women had nothing on Mother Zacchaeus, I’m sure.

“You not coming in, and that is final, hear? This is a sanctuary, not a come-and-go-as-you-please.”

“Come on, Mother Zacchaeus. You have to allow visitors.”

“This isn’t visiting hours.”

“But Sister Eliza came all this way.”

She looks at me again, a hint of uncertainty leaking into her glare. Gregory looks my way too, lifting his eyebrows for emphasis. Help me out here, sis.

“Please let us see her,” I ask. “Her mom sent us to make sure she’s all right.”

She bites her lip. “For real?”

“For real!” Gregory insists.

I nod in confirmation.

Reluctantly, Mother Zacchaeus steps away from the door, allowing us into what looks like the main room where meals are served. Tables in three lines hold newspapers and books. Several street people are sitting on metal foldout chairs. Two play dominoes, while one sleeps with his head on his arms. A couple of women wipe down the serving tables. I see a thick metal bar about four feet in length leaning against the wall. When she shuts the door behind us, there’s a kind of socket bolted into the wood. At night, the bar must go into the socket, in case some predator outside tries to force entry. Judging from Mother Zacchaeus’s continued glare, she must be worried she’s let the predators in without a fight.

At a desk to her left sits a man who dwarfs the woman. Clad in a bright-red track suit, he stands up. “Everything okay, Mother Z?”

“Aaron. Don’t hover over me.”

He shakes his head and sits back down at his post, muttering something under his breath.

“You follow me,” she says, “and don’t go wandering off.”

Aaron shakes his head again. “You best be listening to her, that’s all I got to say.”

From the main room, a hallway extends into several rooms opening shotgun-style, one into another. I hear a television playing cartoons and children’s murmured voices. A head peeks around the entrance: a teenage girl, making sure everything’s all right. She disappears when I make eye contact.

We’re not heading her way, it seems. Mother Zacchaeus mounts the creaking stairs, leading us past a tiny desk with a sign-out sheet on its surface and up to the second floor. Another hallway, much longer and just wide enough for a broad-shouldered man not to have to turn. Along one side, a series of doors, some of them still numbered in tarnished brass. Several are ajar, but no one is in the corridor. Through the walls, I can hear people moving, hushed voices. The place could be teeming with inhabitants, but none make an appearance. As I watch, one of the doors snaps shut. Everyone in Mission Up must be aware something unusual is going on, and they’re keeping their distance.

Mother Zacchaeus pauses on the landing to catch her breath, then we begin the ascent up a third, narrower flight of stairs.

“You moved her,” Gregory says.

She replies with a grunt.

I clear my throat. “How many people live here?”

“As many as need to,” she snaps.

I get the impression she’s not singling us out for harsh treatment. This is simply her manner. She’s one of those people accustomed to putting her world in order and having it stay that way. Anyone coming along to challenge that order has to run the gauntlet of her hostility. Or maybe she just doesn’t care for middle-aged white people turning up on her door talking to her like she’s an idiot. It bothers me too.

The third floor is a mirror image of the second, though on a smaller scale. The hallway seems narrower, the doors smaller. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, which comes entirely from a flickering fluorescent at the far end of the corridor. All the rest seem to be burned out. (I suppose I should be grateful there’s electricity at all.)

Mother Zacchaeus leads us halfway down the hallway to a room marked 3-9. The middle number, presumably 0, is long gone. She pushes through without knocking. Gregory motions for me to go first.

There are three mattresses on the floor, each with a mummy of sheets coiled in its center. Through the open window, the only source of light, I glimpse the rusted metal railing of an emergency ladder, then a patch of grass and busted concrete that must be what passes for the backyard. A girl sits on the mattress nearest the window, her hand propped on the sill, holding a cigarette with dainty grace between two fingers. She wears shorts and a nylon zip jacket, her long, smooth legs the color of caramel.

“Go take that outside, Aziza,” Mother Zacchaeus tells her.

The girl takes a drag on the cigarette, then flicks it out into space.

“Go on, I said.”

She seems to notice us for the first time. She glances over Gregory in a heartbeat, her eyes settling on me. Mother Zacchaeus flicks her hand and the girl rises to go. As she pushes past me, I get a whiff of smoke and cheap perfume. Up close, I am shocked how young she is. Surely not more than fourteen or fifteen.

“You awake?” Mother Zacchaeus says, kicking one of the mattresses.

The sheet mummy on the bed shifts in response. I hadn’t realized anyone was there.

Gregory crouches next to the bed. “Hey, Sam, are you okay?”

He beckons me over. As I approach, the sheet falls back to reveal a sliver of face. A lock of sweat-matted brown hair covers one of Sam’s eyes. There’s so much eyeliner around the other it looks like someone tried to scratch over it with a black crayon. She cracks open an eyelid, testing the light.

“Leave me alone,” she mutters.

Mother Zacchaeus kicks the mattress again. “You get up. Come on, now.”

This coaxing tone is the closest thing to affection that’s come out of the nun’s mouth. Sam responds by propping herself up. I get a glimpse of bony shoulders crisscrossed in straps: white for the tank top, pink for the cami underneath, black for the bra straps. The side of her bottom lip is transected by a swollen cut. No, wait. Looking closer, I see it’s a round piece of metal. A lip ring. Nice.

“Sam, get up. I brought someone to see you.”

“What?” She rears back like a startled fawn, searching the room with panicky jerks of the head. Her black-rimmed eyes look comically huge. When she sees the expected someone—presumably her mother—isn’t here, she slumps back on the bed. “I said, leave me alone.”

The words aren’t out before the nun’s foot hits the mattress again, this time with so much force it scoots sideways half an inch. Sam sits bolt upright.

“Show some respect,” Mother Zacchaeus says, pronouncing it re-SPECK. Leaving no doubt in my mind which of us she intends Sam to pay this respect to.

“Can you just ease up a little bit?” I ask.

Strangely, the nun reacts differently than I anticipate. Instead of lashing out to put me in my place—or worse, using that foot of hers—for the first time, Mother Zacchaeus favors me with a smile.

“Good,” she says. “I guess we all want a little respeck.”

I smile back, hoping we’ve gained a little trust.

Gregory isn’t having any of that. He leans toward Sam, clamping one of his big hands on her face, forcing her eyelid up to inspect her pupil. She twists away without much conviction.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Gregory says. He grabs her arm and wrenches it straight, exposing the socket of flesh inside her elbow. Turning it to make sure I can see the marks. “You call this place a sanctuary, Mother? From what, the cops? I knew the standards were pretty low here, but I didn’t realize the liberties extended to letting your clients shoot up.”

The hard, small eyes of Mother Zacchaeus narrow, but she doesn’t answer back.

“I should call the cops,” he says. “They’d run you out on a rail.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Gregory.”

“What?”

“You’re just making things worse. Move out of the way.”

Reluctantly, he trades places with me. I kneel beside the mattress, taking one of Sam’s hands in my own. Her palm feels hot and clammy. She closes her eyes again.

“Sam, listen to me,” I say. “You need to go home. Your mother is waiting for you, she loves you, and everything will be all right.”

“She doesn’t,” Sam mutters. “She hates me.”

“Nobody hates you, especially not your mother. She’s worried sick about you, Sam. So is Greg. He’s here to take you home.”

Mother Zacchaeus says, “Nobody takin’ this girl nowhere.”

I ignore her. “Listen to me. You can’t stay here, not like this. You know what’ll happen just as much as I do.”

Her head lolls back, but I can tell she’s listening. On some level, no matter what’s swirling in her veins right now, the girl can hear my voice. As I continue to cajole her, stroking her hand in a soothing rhythm, Gregory and Mother Zacchaeus step toward the window for a whispered argument.

“Where’d she get the drugs?” he asks. “Did you hook her up? Is that how you make your money, supplying the girls you keep locked up in here?”

“She ain’t got no money when she come in here.”

“Then how’d she score, answer me that?”

“How you think a girl like that pays when she got no money, huh? How you think?”

I try to tune them out, pulling Sam into my arms, pressing her flushed, sweaty face against my shoulder. It’s no use. Their voices grow louder and the girl starts pushing away.

“Will the two of you shut up?” I ask, wheeling on them.

For a moment, they both stand frozen. Then Mother Zacchaeus stomps past me into the hallway, her face rigid but trembling with rage. She continues down the hall, her footsteps carrying. Gregory cups his hands over his mouth.

“What do we do now?” he asks.

“This girl’s out of it. I don’t think we’re gonna get through to her. Not now. Not today.”

“We have to.”

“Just leave me alone,” Sam moans.

We pause, staring at each other.

“Okay, fine.” Gregory starts pacing. “All right. Let me think.” I’m about to say something when he interrupts. “Tell you what, Eliza. You’re probably right. Let me talk to her alone for a second, though. Just to be sure. In the meantime, you’d better go see what the nun is up to. I don’t want her calling the cops on us. Go ahead, it’ll be all right. Tell her you want to take the official tour or something. Keep her distracted so she doesn’t cause any trouble.”

“You know, if you’d just be a little more decent with people—”

“I know, I know. I just can’t stand these petty tyrant types. People like that know how to push my buttons. But you’ll smooth everything over, Liz. Pretty please?”

I leave him with Sam and go in search of Mother Zacchaeus. As I descend the first flight of stairs, I can hear her steps a level down, slow and deliberate, like she’s afraid of stumbling. When I catch up to her, she’s crossing the main room to the front door, reaching for the metal bar against the wall.

Oh dear.

Irrational fear: I imagine her turning and clubbing me, the latent violence of our surroundings suddenly unleashing itself on my body. Broken bones. Coughing up blood.

But when she does turn, rod in hand, my presence there startles her. She jumps. The metal bar clangs to the floor. She clamps her hand down on the enamel pins dotting her chest.

“You scared me,” she wheezes.

“You kind of scared me too,” I say, nodding toward the rod.

She picks it up and leans it carefully against the wall, catching her breath. “You don’t understand,” she says. “Good Christian woman like you. What a good Christian woman doing in a place like this, huh?”

“Don’t say that. What about you? You’re a nun.”

She touches the spray-painted cross dangling from her neck, as if to confirm that she is indeed what I said.

“I can’t even imagine the things you see here. The things you have to deal with.”

“What, here? Nothing to deal with here.”

“I didn’t mean—no, never mind.” Casting around for another topic, I remember Gregory’s advice. The official tour. “Listen, while I’m here, why don’t you show me around? I’d be interested in seeing what goes on, if that’s all right.”

“For real?”

After a period of indecision, Mother Zacchaeus gives in. She conducts me through the main room. Along with the readers of the Sunpaper, I see the blaring television and the half circle of kids on the floor watching cartoons under the watchful eye of the teenage girl I spotted before. “This is a day care too,” Mother Zacchaeus explains. In the next room, Aziza, the smoking girl from upstairs, is chatting with a couple of older women. They eye me warily at first, then ignore me entirely.

“Some of these girls, they turned tricks, some was on the pipe—”

“Same difference, most the time,” Aziza says, making the others laugh.

The nun smiles, taking me into the next room. Here a heavily pregnant woman is fishing burnt slices of bread out of a toaster oven while a pair of toddlers circles her legs. The galley kitchen looks surprisingly clean, with canned goods stacked in back for storage. Through the back door we emerge onto the slab of cracked concrete I glimpsed from up above. There’s a rusty grill near the edge of the slab. Then a narrow yard packed with a sun-bleached swing set and cast-off toys.

Mission Up, I realize, isn’t run according to any particular plan. Whatever the needs are when women turn up on her doorstep, Mother Zacchaeus sternly improvises some plan to meet them.

“Are there other nuns who help?” I ask. “People from your order?”

She looks at me oddly.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know the terminology. Nuns don’t live in a monastery, but you don’t call it a nunnery, do you?”

“You mean my convent?” she says, putting the same imaginary quotes around convent that she did professor when we showed up.

“Convent, that’s right.”

She ambles back into the building, seeming to lose interest in the conversation. “And nuns do live in convents.”

So much for that.

I follow her back through the series of rooms, taking it all in.

“Did you paint the sign?” I call after her. “The one over the door.”

“Nobody else did.”

In the vestibule, the door stands open. Gregory is already waiting on the curb out front, looking at his watch. He sees me and beckons.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Well,” I say, turning to Mother Zacchaeus. “It was nice meeting you. I imagine we’ll be back. If there’s anything you can do to help convince Sam to go back to her mother . . .”

She lets the suggestion hang in the air. As I exit, though, she touches my elbow slightly, escorting me out, and for some reason I take this as acknowledgment. In her own way, she will do what she can.

“Thanks,” Gregory calls to her. He turns to me. “Now let’s get out of this hole.”

“Please shut up,” I whisper.

Before getting into the car, I give Mother Zacchaeus an apologetic wave. She nods imperceptibly, then closes the door.

“Greg,” I begin, pulling the door shut, “you didn’t have to be so rude to her . . .”

My voice trails off. As he pulls away, giving the engine some gas, I glance between the seats where he tossed the McDonald’s bag earlier. A twisted mummy of bedsheets lies across the backseat, the matted brown hair and scribbled-out eyes poking out from one end.

“Greg,” I say. “Go back.”

“What?” He floors the accelerator. “A girl can’t change her mind?”

“Have you completely lost your mind?”

“She’s out of it, Eliza. And that place isn’t safe. When she wakes up, she’ll be happy we got her out of there.”

He’s right. I know he’s right. But somehow it still feels like a betrayal of trust to me. I picture Mother Zacchaeus climbing back up those stairs to discover Sam gone, and she’ll think we were exactly the predators she sized us up as to begin with.

But we’re not, I tell myself. And that was no place to leave someone.