Living Proof Read online

  The priest’s words rushed past Trent’s ears and echoed around him in the small chamber.

  “This verse should become second nature to you,” the priest went on, “a fallback for your troubled conscience. May the Lord’s grace guide you to eternal salvation.”

  “Thank you, Father,” Trent mumbled.

  The screen shut, and Trent rose, rubbing his sore knees. There was some truth in the priest’s advice: If he could make himself forget Arianna, he might still be able to get his life back. There was no better time and place to start.

  * * *

  He approached the first woman he saw leaving church that morning who looked to be around his age. She looked delicately breakable, like a ballerina in a snow globe. With the confidence of necessity, he strode toward her with a forced smile and introduced himself. When she smiled encouragingly, he took a chance and asked her out to brunch, and to his surprise, she accepted.

  They started walking toward a restaurant up the block. Emma, whom he vaguely recalled having seen before, admitted that she had spotted him for the first time at a service several months earlier.

  “Why didn’t you come say hello?” he asked.

  She shrugged, smiling down at the sidewalk. “I don’t know. Fear, I guess.”

  “Don’t tell me I’m that good looking,” he teased.

  She blushed, and he got the distinct feeling that he had made her uncomfortable. At the restaurant, the hostess led them to a two-seater table by the window. Crystal wineglasses stood neatly next to silverware on a white tablecloth. A waitress came by and poured them champagne and water, and handed them two laminated menus.

  “This is nice,” she remarked sadly, as if she were watching from the other side of the window.

  He nodded, wondering if she were unaccustomed to luxury.

  “So how come you don’t have any big plans today?” he asked.

  “My family lives on the West Coast, and I couldn’t take off enough time from work to visit them.”

  He groaned. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a community outreach coordinator at a nonprofit. It’s a volunteer ministry that encourages inner city kids to embrace Christ.”

  “Wow.” He eyed her with a new respect. “Must be a tough job.”

  “It is.”

  “So you must have to really love it to be able to get up and do that every day.”

  “You would think.” She cradled her elbows against her body. The creases in her forehead were like dry ravines stretching to her hairline.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I hate my job. But that’s why it’s right for me.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a sacrifice,” she said, setting her elbows on the table. “I’m living my life to help others know God, just like Mother Teresa and Christ himself. My parents always said there were no better footsteps to follow.”

  “Well, if it’s so honorable, then why don’t you like it?”

  “Do you think anyone dreams of walking into Spanish Harlem for a living with nothing but a Bible and a prayer?”

  “What did you dream of?” Trent asked quietly.

  “I was going to be a Broadway star,” she said as the creases on her forehead deepened. “I was going to be Roxy in Chicago.”

  He did not smile, for he knew the slightest lift of his lips would discredit her dream as naïve.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “It’s so impossible. My parents thought so, too. But I was good. I even secretly went on an audition for the part once, ten years ago in college. I got called back, too.”

  “You did? What happened?”

  “I didn’t show up.” She lifted her chin with a melancholy smile.

  “What?”

  She nodded.

  “Why not?”

  “I thought about Jesus, and I realized how selfish I was being. Singing was a waste of time, but I didn’t think I would have the strength to turn down the part if they offered it to me. So I just never went back.”

  A pang of regret crumpled Trent’s gut. “But you threw away your dream!”

  “Don’t you see how it’s better this way? So many people are benefiting from my sacrifice and getting closer to God.”

  “But … aren’t you unhappy?”

  “So? I know the Lord will reward me in Heaven.”

  “With what?” he demanded, not caring about his impertinence.

  She looked at him crossly. “Eternal salvation.”

  For a moment, Trent seriously considered the prospect of existing forever in some other realm that promised intangible paradise.

  “What are you planning to do for all that time?” he asked, only half-joking.

  She raised an offended eyebrow, a response she seemed to feel would suffice.

  “So you don’t know, then,” Trent said, aware that he was pressing her for an answer she could not give him—that nobody could give anyone—and that the girl before him was a mirror of his future self, plunged irrevocably into a religious life she did not want—a living catalyst for the realization of a truth only his own reasoning mind could reach.

  “She was right,” he breathed. “She was completely right about me.”

  “Who was right about what?”

  “I always did everything my parents and the priests said I should,” he said, ignoring her question. “Until lately, I barely questioned whether it was right for me. Or even right at all.”

  “Well, only God knows what’s right for us.”

  “But how do you know what He knows? Or that He’s right? Or” —Trent suddenly thought—“even exists?”

  She looked disturbed. “What are you talking about? What else is there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, feeling his heart start to hammer, signaling the precarious loosening of the linchpin of his belief: blind faith. “But I know this doesn’t make sense. There has to be something else.…”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I have to quit the case,” he declared, marveling at the liberty of allowing himself to listen to the flow of his own, independent thoughts—as if from a repressed underground, they sprang, softly at first, and then louder, demanding to be heard, drowning out the impostor ideas he had for so long tried to believe were his own. One thought clamored above the rest, resounding with certainty throughout his entire brain: I love her.

  I could never love a criminal, he reasoned, so there must be some terrible misunderstanding; she must be innocent, there must be a good explanation for everything. I’ll quit tomorrow, and then we can spend the rest of her days together.… She will never have to know who I was.…

  “—you listening to me, Trent? I was asking what you do for a living?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, noticing her pout. “I’m really sorry. I have to go—but listen, here’s a hundred bucks. Get whatever you want and keep the change.”

  He withdrew his wallet and slapped a bill on the tablecloth as he stood up. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “And do me a favor: Enjoy yourself.”

  “What? Where are you—?”

  But he was already heading toward the door. Before he turned the corner, he looked over his shoulder at her bewildered face and knew there was no language he could use to explain—none she would understand. But he still owed her something.

  “And Emma?” he called back.

  From the table, she raised her eyebrows.

  “Thank you!” he yelled, and hurried out.

  * * *

  The next morning at work, Trent walked to Dopp’s office. He lifted his fist to the wood, silently rehearsing his excuse one last time. He could never tell Dopp the truth, which would mean expulsion from the department, immediate severance of pay and benefits, and probable criminal prosecution for sabotage. Exhaling a breath, he knocked.

  “Come in,” Dopp called.

  From the high pitch, Trent could tell he was in a good mood. He felt an ember of worry spark; the fall would be even steeper
now. With a grim expression, he walked in and closed the door. Dopp was typing, and it took him a second to look up.

  “Trent! I’ve been dying to know what happened after you left our house. Did she say anything?”

  “No, nothing significant, but…”

  Dopp swiveled in his chair to face him. “But what?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Do I not look like I’m listening?”

  “The thing is … I think I’m doing too well.”

  Dopp stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

  Trent’s carefully planned sequence of words burst like confetti in his brain, leaving him to grope for coherent snatches of explanation. He licked the dry roof of his mouth.

  “The problem is, she’s falling in love with me, and it’s going too far. It’s really making me uncomfortable; she’s dying, for God’s sake! And I think she would have confided in me by now, if anything was going on. But we still have no proof … maybe we should let this one go.”

  Trent swallowed hard, already starting to doubt the persuasiveness of his words. Dopp rose and turned away with frightening calm to face the wall. Five seconds passed. Trent wished he would speak, yell—anything but the ambiguity of silence.

  Then Dopp’s deep voice rumbled into the room. “Tell me, Trent, are you so incredibly fragile and important that you can’t tolerate discomfort for the sake of saving lives?” He spun around, glaring. “Is that how you really feel? Because the Trent Rowe I knew would have gone out of his way to do the right thing. The Trent Rowe I knew would never quit a job because he got uncomfortable or impatient.”

  Trent looked at the floor, clinging to the hope that Arianna was not destroying embryos. Didn’t he love her? So how could she be a killer?

  “Look at me,” Dopp commanded. “Do you think you are more important than the multiple innocent lives at stake?”

  “No,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think that her disease excuses her from justice?”

  “No. But if there’s something going on, why hasn’t she told me yet?”

  “When someone has something serious to hide, they don’t spill the beans to the first stranger that picks them up. It takes time. You have to hold on until the end.”

  “Even though we still have no proof?”

  “We may not have direct proof of a current crime, but now we have proof that she is capable of the worst.”

  “Because she did abortions?” Trent winced at the memory of this inconvenient fact.

  “And she did them without remorse. It was scary, how nice and normal she seemed, and then to find that out … You would never see it coming from someone like her.”

  “I know!” Trent cried. “It seems impossible.”

  Dopp sat down and leaned forward. “Even after all these years, it’s still shocking to wrap my mind around how good some people seem and how evil they really are. It’s like trying to understand death, or the size of the universe—some things are on a scale that most of us can’t register.”

  “Exactly,” Trent admitted. “I guess it’s easier to think she may have changed her ways than to think she’s a monster.”

  “It’s easier because it feels much safer. But that doesn’t mean it’s the truth.”

  Trent nodded miserably.

  “This is the worst time for us to quit.”

  Trent knew the DA was set to issue his report about the governor’s bribery in a few weeks, and after that, the state budget talks were to resume. The talks that could make or break their jobs.

  He imagined Arianna’s delicate hands covered in an infant’s blood.

  “We should keep going,” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” Dopp replied. “Keep seeing her as much as you can to strengthen her trust—and keep following her. By the way, where did you follow her to on Friday? You never mentioned it.”

  Trent pictured the dented steel door. He still didn’t know what was behind it. But if he mentioned it now, he would be setting his own trap; he imagined Dopp’s likely response: You knew she was going somewhere strange, and yet you still wanted to quit the case?

  “She went to a drugstore,” he said. “It wasn’t anywhere worth mentioning.”

  “I suspect that’s not the whole story. Follow her every chance you get.”

  “I will,” Trent said, resolving to wait another few days before mentioning the seedy church. In the meantime, he would investigate it better, and remember to bring his gun.

  “And don’t give me another scare like that.”

  Trent sighed. “Thanks for talking sense into me, boss.”

  “Anytime.”

  Trent turned away cringing, for Dopp’s tone clarified his real meaning: Don’t let it happen again.

  * * *

  Trent walked back to his desk, ashamed. How could he have blinded himself to her criminal capacity? Only last night, he had told her how much he was looking forward to seeing her again. Now, he would have to still endure the agony of lying—but for an honorable purpose, he reminded himself. And the agony lay in the possibility of what she could be doing.…

  A red light on his phone was blinking: a message from her. He felt a swell of delight. We are both sick, he thought.

  “Hi, Trent,” came her cheerful voice. “You’re probably writing, so don’t let me interrupt you. But let me know if you’re free later today. There’s somewhere special I want to take you.”

  He stood in front of his desk, facing the picture of the Crucifixion. But he saw nothing except the phone buried under his white knuckles. He loosened his grip and fumbled with the buttons.

  “I’m free,” he said as soon as she picked up. “Where are we going?”

  * * *

  Trent hid his disappointment as he climbed the stairs to meet Arianna at the Museum of Natural History. What could she possibly want with him there?

  “Hey,” she said, using her cane for balance as she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. “I’m really glad you could come.” He noticed that her eyes, despite the levity of her smile, seemed serious.

  The first thing Trent saw as they walked into the entrance hall was the eighty-foot-long skeleton of an Apatosaurus dinosaur, as dramatic as he remembered from childhood. Again, he wondered: Why were they at a museum that specialized in dinosaur fossils?

  “So what’s the surprise?” he asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  At the admissions kiosk, a short line of people waited, most with children. In front of the left wing of the museum, Trent noticed a handful of silent protestors whose signs read, WE ARE NOT APES and GOD IS THE CREATOR.

  “Who are they?” Trent asked, pointing as he followed Arianna into line.

  She gestured to the words high above the protestors’ heads, painted in silver onto the wall: DARWIN HALL: EVOLUTION TODAY.

  “I guess you haven’t been here for a while,” she said.

  “Not since I was a kid.”

  “Those people have been trying to convince the museum to take down that exhibit.”

  “I think I did hear about that,” he said, recalling a stir of controversy that he had experienced only through glimpses at online headlines. “But everybody knows there’s proof of Darwin’s theories now, with DNA analyses and all that.”

  The thought of evolving from monkeys had not unsettled Trent, as it had so many of his colleagues and churchgoing peers—once the proof was widely evident, he had dismissed their vitriol as unfounded. To Trent, a disciple of journalistic objectivity, their anger was akin to sulking about the bacteria invisibly crawling on one’s hands: it was unpleasant to think about, even contradictory to the senses, yet ridiculous to deny.

  “Well, you know their attitude toward proof,” Arianna said.

  Her words homed in on a deeper conflict within him, pointing out a paradox he had recently realized: Christians rejected the need for proof to support belief in God, yet
dismissed proof altogether when it was there.

  Suddenly a conversation with Dopp and his colleagues came rushing back to him, from a meeting months earlier: I never understood how anyone could claim embryonic stem cells would help people, Jed had said, without any proof of it at all. Now this response triggered a question that had not occurred to Trent then:

  Did they have proof of God?

  And if they did, would it be called God, or just a scientific fact?

  “Part of why I love this museum,” Arianna said, “is that they won’t succumb to the pressure.”

  He nodded as they moved to the front of the line. After they paid, he turned to her.

  “So now you have to tell me.”

  “I’ll show you.” She led him into an elevator, out on the third floor, turned right into a narrow hallway, and followed it around a corner. Fewer and fewer people passed them.

  “Someone knows her way around here.”

  She smiled, walking past room after room of exhibits, turning left, right, left, until stopping in front of a plain black door. Trent glanced around the doorframe for a label; there was only a black rectangle the size of a piano key. No one was around. Arianna pressed her right thumb against it, and the door slid open.

  “Whoa,” Trent said. “What—?”

  She pulled him inside, and the door closed behind them. “This is a private exhibit,” she said. “Members only.”

  The room inside was small and dimly lit. On top of a pedestal in the center, there was a single exhibit: a glass box that appeared to serve as an incubator, with fluorescent lights glowing around a red fist-sized lump. With a start, Trent realized what it must be. He held his breath and walked up to the box, seemingly floating in the darkness, supported only by its aura of light. He peered into it. As he expected, the lump was beating in oddly steady contractions that gave life to nothing.

  “This is the stem cell heart,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know it was still here.”

  “It’s the other reason I love this museum,” she said. “The main reason, actually.”

  “Really,” he said, his own heart pounding.