Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

not afraid to die.”

“I know you’re not,” she answers him. “You have a brave heart, Ran. But not like this. Think of Hope and Charlie. You’ll wound them in a place so deep they’ll never be the same.”

“I already have.”

“Then stay and make it up.”

“How can I, Shan? I tried, and look at me.”

“Close your eyes and ask him.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

And Ransom does, he turns into the roaring wind and holds the raw and undiluted thing, and the ghost whispers him the answer Ran already knows, like everyone, and has forgotten to remember, and remembered to forget….

And Ransom drops the gun and sets them free.

EPILOGUE

…there was always, deep in the background, the feeling that something other than myself was involved.

—Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

 

In the turnaround before the house, the Odyssey is packed to go. Ran slams the hatch and turns, brushing off his hands. “I guess that’s it.”

It’s difficult to meet Cell’s stare, and yet he does. When the big man offers him a hand, Ran takes it. “Marcel,” he says, not Cell, not Cell Phone.

“Good luck, Ran.”

Ran nods curtly, once, and Cell, after a brief glance at Claire, turns and walks toward the house.

“Shan’s invited Hope and Charlie to Alafia,” he says. “I’d like to take them, Claire. I think it would be good for them.”

“And you.”

“And me.”

“I think so, too,” she says. “You get your levels straight, and then we’ll talk. Here.” She hands him something.

Ran opens a folded check: $11,460.32.

“What’s this?”

“Your sixty-five percent.”

“I don’t want this, Claire.”

“Yes, you do.”

Ran contemplates a crack, but lets it pass and speaks the true thought underneath. “I wanted you to have it all.”

“I know, but this is better, Ran. It’s more grown-up.”

“I didn’t want us to have to grow up, Claire, either one of us.”

“Neither did I. But we had to anyway.”

“You did.”

“So did you, Ran. Don’t take that from yourself. Or us.”

He puts the check into his shirt. “You’re sure?”

She reaches out and strokes his cheek, and Ransom takes her hand and presses it.

“I’m sure.”

“I guess I’ve been holding on to something that really wasn’t all that great.”

“But it was once.”

“It was, wasn’t it? I’m so sad, Claire.”

“So am I. You know what I lay awake thinking of last night?”

He shakes his head.

“Last winter when you took me to the Plaza for my birthday, and we didn’t have the rent, and you hired a limo and ordered oysters and champagne. I would never have done that for myself, Ran. And the next morning when we left, the ATM ate our card, remember?”

“I remember.”

“And we had barely enough change for two cups of coffee from the deli, and not even enough for the subway and we walked home all the way downtown, and I felt…I don’t know, like I’d jumped off some big cliff I’d always been afraid of…. And you gave that to me, Ran, a thousand times, a thousand different ways, and it made me better than I was, it made me bigger and less afraid. And I’ll always love you for it. Always.”

Ransom’s eyes are like rain-sheeted windowpanes. “When I boil it down to what really mattered, Claire, what made each day worth getting up to struggle through, it was you, and what kills me is that I realized it too late, after you’d already left.”

She holds his gaze, neither gloating nor denying the essential truth of what he’s said.

“Cell is a good man, though,” Ran continues, “probably the best I ever knew. If it can’t be me, Claire, he’s who I’d choose for you, and I guess if I was honest, I’d have to choose him over me. So, go, baby. Find your happiness.”

She kisses her fingertips, presses them to his lips. “Good-bye, Ran.”

And she is gone now, too, and Ransom stands, alone, before the closed front door, remembering nineteen years before, how badly he’d wanted it to open and admit him. Under the tumult of his feelings, it’s strange to find a thread of clear relief to be outside again. Overhead, the sky so wide and blue.

Going to find the children, he passes the excavation, where water has collected in the hole. As Ran stares down, he sees an image, just a flash, a man down in that hole digging, digging furiously, covering the bodies. There’s a woman standing over him, watching. When he sees her, he looks angry. “You deceived me….”

“You asked the pot to give you back your wife,” she says, and she holds out her hand…. And then…

And then? The image fades. The ghosts dissolve in sunlight. The curtain falls. Ran loses sight of them. The chapter they wrote has been forgotten. Aye, ages long ago…

And now the woman is Shanté. “You ready?”

“Ready as I’m ever going to be,” he says.

“How do you feel?”

He shrugs. “Calmer. Otherwise, about like you’d expect.”

“Any voices?”

“Not so far. I put the pot into the car. Claire doesn’t want it here.”

“That’s fine, Ran. We can take it. It’s just a pot now, though.”

“You think he’s gone.”

She nods. “Can’t you feel the difference?”

“I don’t know. Some.”

“He’s been released now, Ran. Percival wanted freedom for his children. You finally gave him what he asked. He’s in Mpemba, but he was there for you, just as one day you’ll be there for them.” She nods toward Hope and Charlie in the yard.

“I hope so, Shan,” he says. “I hope I live that long.”

“You will. If not, you’ll come back from the dead and whisper to them from a song and put the truth into their hearts as he did yours, and this is simply how it is. The living and the dead are bound, and we, for all our knowledge, have forgotten what you paid this price to learn. Feel good about yourself. You turned your life around right here.”

As she walks toward the car, Ran thinks of Percival, and suddenly the words are there, the verse he never knew he