Sacrifices of Joy Read online

  “And he was clearly delusional.”

  “Delusional. Psychotic. Neurotic. I told you, Sienna, you met a man who needs mental health treatment. Because of the circumstances and because of where you were, you’re trying to make it all fit together, when, really, your therapist antenna was just effectively at work identifying someone who is in significant need of treatment. He is not your average Joe. He probably does not fit the profile of your usual client, but that doesn’t mean that he’s a terrorist, Sienna.”

  “Right.”

  “Sienna.” Laz sighed. “I need you to spend your energy and thoughts on figuring out what you want. With me. My proposal is still on the table. I know that this has been a tough weekend for you, but start thinking about my offer so we can talk. Okay?”

  “Right,” I said again. “I will. One thing, though. What exactly did your contact say? I am letting it go. I just need to hear the exact response to my concern.”

  Laz groaned. “If you must know, Sienna, the exact response I got from my source was, and I quote, ‘Even in the most horrific of tragedies, there are always people who try to gain interviews and end up on TV for their fifteen minutes of fame. Your friend sounds like one of those people.’ End quote. Please, Sienna, let it go. You’re going to have me looking bad. I cannot be ridiculed at this moment in my career.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Laz. Not just for you, but I am representing myself as a professional. I can’t be seen as a camera-obsessed loon.” That was not what I felt or wanted. I just wanted peace.

  “All right, Sienna, good night. Get some rest. I will be calling you tomorrow and the next day and the day after that until you tell me what I want to hear. I will not be taking no for an answer.” He chuckled.

  “Of course you wouldn’t.” I joined his laugh, wondering at heart why he put up with me. Wondering if I was in the process of running him off like I’d done Leon. “Good night.” I disconnected the call first before I could wonder anything else.

  Peace.

  That’s all I wanted.

  Maybe some joy. Love would be nice.

  For the moment, I settled for sleep.

  Chapter 18

  “A million stars above and a million stars below. Neither the sky nor the sea can contain the brilliance of our love or the pureness of our mission.”

  We were on a kayak tour at midnight on the calm waters of a bioluminescent bay. The warm, salty water shimmered with an eerie fluorescent blue beneath our coordinated but quiet paddles. Like a dance team in perfect sync, we moved our oars as one beyond a lagoon filled with mangrove trees and into the open bay. Billions of microscopic organisms that had the same chemistry as fireflies made the water magical under the moonlit sky.

  The moment had felt perfect. I believed that I was on the side of right.

  I was supposed to be in a dorm room, at the college in rural Pennsylvania where I’d earned a free ride. Full tuition, books, room, and board. My parents were so proud. My sister, age sixteen, was already pregnant with her first child and actively dropping out of school. At eighteen years old and a full-time college student, I was my parents’ joy and hope; there was no secret about it.

  And yet there I was, on a bio bay in Puerto Rico, on a spontaneous trip with a man who was a graduate student at the school.

  RiChard St. James.

  I hadn’t packed a bag, asked where we were going; just got into the car with him when he’d said, “Let’s go to the airport. I want you to see the world we’re fighting for.”

  I’d been awed by his messages of social justice as he preached revolution and decisive action on the college’s marble steps. I’d been a sponge at the lectures that he gave as a teacher’s assistant and at symposiums that he’d organized and held in the school’s student union.

  And I had believed and held on to every word he told me that night on the bay.

  “We are lights in this world, Sienna, and just like these little dinoflagellates in this bay shine brightest when together, our lights will shine brightest if we work as a team. I brought you here, Sienna, so that you could see the magic that could be possible if we join forces. I think . . . I think we should get married and travel the world together to bring change to it right now.”

  I considered that moment often and imagined that the light of the stars above and the glow of the water below reflected in my eyes as I looked up at him. He must have seen the worship of him in my eyes and figured that was reason enough to marry. I thought about that night often and still couldn’t figure out why he asked me to be his wife; and why I went against all that screamed within me, and said yes.

  What a fool I was.

  Never again.

  I woke up around four o’clock in the morning. Sweat made my hair stick to the sides of my face and my nightshirt stick to my chest. I was out of breath, as if I had been fighting in my sleep.

  “You became a social worker to prove something to RiChard,” I could hear Laz say. No, I had become a social worker because I genuinely cared about others and wanted to take real steps to help. RiChard’s way was flawed. His motives weren’t right.

  Mine were.

  And so were my gut feelings.

  I’d talked myself into believing that I was on the right path, marrying him, following him blindly into the world unknown. I’d covered my ears to the gongs that had sounded within me, the warning bells that clanged and tolled like a solemn alarm. When I sat at my parents’ Thanksgiving table five days after telling RiChard yes, telling them I was leaving school to marry him and travel the world, I’d ignored the part of me that agreed with the horror I saw in my mother’s eyes, the defeat that showed clearly on my father’s face. When I said my vows at the Baltimore County Courthouse just a few days later, I’d said them over a primal scream of fear and uncertainty that I drowned out with the promises of love.

  He’d put a bone on my finger as a ring. It was a piece of a vertebrate that came from some rodent in South America that he said was the tradition of some tribe I had never heard of. It was a bone; but I thought it was love.

  I sacrificed myself for his cause, and in the end, I was truly the one who got burned.

  Never again.

  My gut feelings had tried to warn me, to keep me from going astray, but I hadn’t listened. Was intuition the Spirit of God that spoke to us and gave direction when clarity was needed? Verses about the heart that my old Sunday school teacher had made me memorize as a child flashed through my mind.

  The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

  and

  A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.

  There was a difference between following your heart, which could be misguided by its own desires, and following the gentle nudging of Christ, I decided.

  “I feel too far away to know the difference right now,” I half prayed, half said to myself out loud. There was a Bible in my nightstand drawer. I could take it out and read it, but where would I begin? I grew up in the church, knew a lot of scriptures, but I could not figure out where to begin again. Sweat continued to coat me. I tossed off my comforter and sat up on the edge of my bed.

  My initial gut feelings about RiChard had been right, I admitted to myself. And now my gut feelings were telling me there was more to that man from the airport. That didn’t mean he was a terrorist, I conceded, but something about him, everything about him, was off, wrong. He most likely had nothing to do with the explosion or an evil-filled plot; but a rescue, an understanding, a deliverance of some nature, were needed in the worst way.

  That was what my gut clearly told me, and I was going to act.

  A sense of urgency got me out of my bed and led me to the folder of notes that I’d brought home. No name, no age, no contact information, just an illustration in black ink of a window with a cat on its sill, and a name and identity that didn’t make sense.

  Wait, I did have a phone number. I recalled that he had left me a voice mail message from
a phone number with an Ohio area code. I reached for my phone and scrolled through its log. When I found the number, I wrote it down.

  Was that where he was from? Did he have a local address here in Baltimore? Did he have family nearby? He’d said he was going to Chicago on Saturday. Did he go and come back? Did he never leave? What business did he have there? Family? Work? Did he even have a job?

  I didn’t know the answers but I wrote these questions down and every other one I could think of in a notepad I kept on my nightstand. It was supposed to be a journal, but grocery lists, random thoughts, phone numbers, and other mundane notes filled its pages.

  So much for deep thoughts.

  “Conversation.” I wrote the word down and underlined it, realizing that I had never asked him what he meant. One of the first rules in therapy was not to make assumptions about meanings people held. He wanted to call our sessions “conversations” and not treatment. I needed clarity of what he meant by that.

  I filled my notepad up with more questions. Though it was only about five in the morning, I felt invigorated with a sense of purpose and focus. I was going to figure out this man’s problem and help him. He was a mystery for me to solve; and if there was even more danger surrounding him . . . I let the thought go, determined to stay rational. Shoot, if he really was a terrorist, I would not feel at all comfortable being in the same room with him, I realized, and not once had I felt like my life was threatened around him.

  But that didn’t mean anything, I knew. I thought I had known RiChard.

  “Little Blessed One.” I looked at my notes, read what he’d given as his name. With no other idea of what to do with that one, I turned to my handy sidekick: Google. I typed the phrase and added the word name into the search engine on my phone. I gasped when I saw the first line of results.

  The meaning of Bennett is little blessed one.

  Bennett.

  That could be a first name or a last, but everything in me agreed that this man’s name in some kind of way was Bennett: little blessed one.

  Chapter 19

  Name and identity.

  I thought about those two concepts as I pulled into my office parking lot an hour early. I kept several clinical books in my office and I wanted to review them for ideas of how to work with this man.

  He’d said he was coming back today, and I wanted to be ready.

  Name and identity.

  Those words meant two different things to him. He took them seriously, literally, and I had to figure out how and why. I had to start there because that is where he’d started.

  My office suite was on the second floor of a small three-story office park. It had its own entrance from the outside and a professionally designed sign that hung in the large glass window. Actually, I had been the “professional” who’d designed it, loving the fact that I could merge my two best talents, counseling and art, together. Several other small businesses made up the complex, including a dry cleaner, a tiny and exclusive exercise studio, a hair salon, and a day spa. A family-owned café anchored the building with outdoor seating and benches.

  I skipped the elevator and opted for the stairs, digging through my purse to find the keys. It was too early for even Darci to be there, so I was on my own. Still digging through my purse as I exited the stairwell, I paid little attention to my surroundings or to the scene at my doorway, which was three doors down from the stairs.

  When I finally had my keys in hand and looked up, I froze in place.

  The man, Bennett Something or Something Bennett, sat cross-legged on the floor in front of my door. Today he wore a light blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a dark blue striped tie, and jeans. My heart skipped a beat as I tried to figure out whether I should keep walking toward him or turn around and go back down the steps. There was no one else in my office suite, and the idea of being alone with him in there unnerved me.

  Of course I could not turn around; he was looking at me and knew I’d seen him. Thinking on my feet, I put on a smile and hurried my pace toward him.

  “You’re here early. I was about to grab a quick bite from the café downstairs.” My words came out as I thought them.

  “I’ll come with you.” He spoke and stood before my fast thinking could keep up.

  “Um, okay.” I kept the smile on my face and turned back toward the steps. I heard his footsteps behind me.

  Looked like we would be having breakfast together.

  The café served fruit, muffins, and bagels as well as simple hot entrees during morning hours. I settled for a fresh strawberry-banana smoothie, knowing that my stomach was too knotted to try to eat a full meal. I sat down at a table in a quiet corner as he ordered, wondering how to best approach the situation.

  The man asked for only a glass of water and then he approached me.

  “Are you ready to talk?” he asked as if we were colleagues or old friends, and not therapist and client. Then again, he had said that he wasn’t seeking treatment.

  But keeping our “conversation” in treatment mode was my only goal.

  “What exactly are we going to be talking about . . . Mr. Bennett?”

  He froze, narrowed his eyes, and then slowly sat down.

  Upper hand. Checkmate. I wanted to give myself a high five.

  But his sudden growing smile gave me pause.

  He’d wanted me to look him up. He’d counted on me calling him Bennett. Maybe it was some kind of trick and not even his real name. Or maybe it was his name and he was trying to hide his surprise that I’d figured it out.

  I didn’t know what to think.

  “I see you’ve done some research. I’m impressed. That happened faster than I expected.”

  “So, your name is Bennett?” I took a chance.

  He shrugged. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t; that’s beside the point.”

  “What is the point?” I pried.

  “You took time to look it up. You’re my new hero.”

  “Hero? That’s a pretty big title for someone who is just trying to confirm your given name.” I kept myself from cocking my head to the side to avoid coming off as too psychoanalytical.

  We were having a conversation.

  I could not let him think this was treatment.

  “Hero.” The man’s voice was flat again. “Someone who rises above the rest. Someone who shows strength of character by being selfless.”

  “Are you writing a dictionary?” I asked.

  He laughed, but didn’t answer.

  “How is trying to figure out your name being selfless?” I was determined to get some kind of answer from him.

  “What did you use to look up what you believe to be my name?”

  He was not answering any of my questions, but he was talking. That was enough for now.

  “The Internet,” I obliged. “I entered ‘little blessed one’ online and got the name ‘Bennett.’”

  “Exactly.” He picked up his glass, took a sip of the water, never broke eye contact with me, put the glass back down. Whatever trace of his previous smile or laugh was gone. “If you believe Darwin, you would agree that humans are continually evolving.”

  Are we talking about evolution, the Internet, or his name? I stopped smiling so as not to look simple, naïve, or confused. “So you are . . . heavily into Darwinism.”

  “Absolutely not. Evolution implies that there is a beginning, and if there is a beginning, then there is a Creator; otherwise, there is nothing but infinity.”

  “Infinity. That is the age you said you are.” I nodded, as if I fully understood our “conversation.”

  “And of course that is not accurate.” He nodded back. “Because then that would require existence, a beginning, and an end.”

  “Right, because your identity is the non-exister. Okay.” I pushed my smoothie glass away. “We need to have a reality check here. You are talking about a lot of unrelated things that, honestly, are not making sense to me. I simply asked you why you called me your hero and now you are talking
about evolution and infinity.”

  “Exactly.” He smiled, his blue eyes seeming to suddenly sparkle with excitement. “If humans are evolving, then the technology and inventions we currently have would be the best that could be offered for mankind in this moment. And what is the best that we offer? I would argue the Internet, more than anything else, because everything else is where? On the Internet.”

  “Okay, I am trying to follow you.”

  “What is the purpose of the Internet, Ms. Sienna St. James?”

  “Uh, to be a gateway for information.”

  “No, I asked what is the purpose?”

  “You got me.” I sat back in my seat. “I don’t know what you perceive is the purpose of the Internet outside of being a modern-day encyclopedia of information.”

  “It’s not about facts and details and data. When people talk about the Internet, they talk about social media.”

  I didn’t say anything, just let him talk.

  “Yes, there are Web sites for information and businesses, and even dictionaries and encyclopedias, but what are the most successful sites? What Web pages get the most visits? I’ll tell you: e-mails. Chat rooms. Instant messages. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. Social media.”

  “So, you’re saying that the purpose of the Internet is for people to connect with each other?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Was that anger in his eyes?

  “The purpose is vain glory. Self-indulgence. Exhibitionism.” The man leaned in as he spoke. “Human beings have a need to tell their stories and have the crazy notion that others actually want to hear them. Every day, the world over, people take snapshots and write down random thoughts of mundane moments, monumental milestones, and everything in between, and then post them on social media accounts. They wait for someone to click ‘like’ or retweet or post a comment or reply, and then get devastated if nobody notices, and then angry if everybody does.

  “If we are evolving,” he continued, “then we are turning into self-absorbed creatures whose entire existence is based on waiting for others to applaud every second of our lives, regardless of significance. But of course, I don’t believe in evolution. Just existence, and the world as it exists is nothing more than a globe full of itself. Ms. St. James, when you took a moment to use the Internet to figure out my name, you fought against human nature. You didn’t use the Web to succumb to a moment of exhibitionism. You used it as an altruistic act to learn more about me. Therefore, in your act of selflessness, you became a hero.”