121: Heaven Can’t Wait

Joanne was scooped out of my arms by Amy who carried her between Donna and me back to the big house. All the time she was whispering, “I didn’t do it, sweetheart. I’ll only ever protect you. Please don’t send me away again. I didn’t do it.” Amazingly, Joanne seemed to relax in Amy’s arms and her hand came up to rest on the former Marine’s chest.

After a short debate, we decided to take her to the big bedroom rather than to her own house. Mom and Anna were still in the master suite, but none of us wanted to leave her in the isolation of her big empty home. Lupe and Jose came running to the house when they heard she was here and had to see her for themselves. They agreed, though, that we could care for her better and more continuously than could be done in Joanne’s huge home. Lupe still looked at Amy suspiciously.

“You need to call Ford,” Mom said when I came downstairs. “Don’t delay.”

Ford was disbelieving. He said he was coming immediately and got the address to plug into his GPS. It was past sundown and I was sure he wouldn’t get there until after midnight, so I figured it would be a long night. Ford had never been to the ranch.

Hope renewed in the midst of tragedy and loss gives people decisive powers. Mom and Anna announced they were moving over to Dinita’s for a while so we could have the master suite for Ford when he got there. I called Lupe and had her prepare a guestroom for Joanne’s father, though I didn’t plan to move him over there until the next day, after he’d seen his daughter and affirmed she was all right. I figured her mother would arrive as soon as there were flights from Paris available. SCATANA, the Security Control of Air Traffic and Air Navigation Aids, was lifted on Friday, but there were a million passengers stranded trying to get home. I didn’t know when Ellen would arrive.

Joanne roused enough to get a shower. The first thing she saw was Amy, still whispering and begging her forgiveness. Joanne lifted a hand to stroke Amy’s cheek and whispered, “I know, honey. I’m sorry.” Amy took her to the shower, bathed her, and dressed her in a borrowed t-shirt for bed.

When Ford arrived at one in the morning, I took him to see his daughter. My family had mostly dressed in t-shirts and panties, knowing that we’d have a visitor in the night. When we approached the portion of the bed where Joanne was sleeping, he found Amy curled up on one side of her and Xan on the other. Joanne had her arms wrapped around my daughter.

“Are you really here?” Ford whispered. Joanne opened her eyes and lifted a hand to her father’s face.

“I’m here, Daddy. Don’t worry. I’m sorry I worried you. I’m sorry for the person I’ve been all my life. I’m sorry.” Xan petted Joanne’s face softly as tears wet her cheeks. Ford lifted Joanne’s fingers to his lips and kissed them as she drifted back to sleep.

“I love you, my precious daughter,” he said.

It was well into the morning when I returned to the big house from the bakery. My son had asked me if I’d slept at all. I shook my head and he told me to sit down. All I needed to do was put the heavy trays in the oven. I watched and dozed as he worked, rousing myself enough to help put the trays in or take them out of the oven. I caught snatches of his whispered monologue as I napped, waiting for the other children.

“Papa and I are both orphans,” Matthew said. “My daddy died. His daddy died. I love Grandpa Harry. I’m sad he is gone. But when my daddy died, I still had my Papa. Does Papa have a Papa? He needs one now that his daddy is gone.”

Rees came in with the kids and cooked breakfast for them.

“Rose says we’re taking another week before we return to live broadcasts,” she said. “So I figured I’d come over to cook for my fan club.”

“Are all these urchins your fans?” I asked.

“Yes! We have a good time, don’t we guys?” All the kids chorused ‘Yeah, ‘ and Rees made breakfast. I just continued to nap on my stool until customers began to arrive.

Ford went to pick up Ellen at the airport Monday afternoon. She’d had a harrowing trip, her first flight having been rerouted to Reykjavik, Iceland, then to Atlanta. She flew from Atlanta to Chicago and then to Indy. I hadn’t seen Ellen in a long time and as old as Ford looked, Ellen looked just as young. I expected she might be a little on the snooty side since she’d been living in Paris for ten years. But she was warm and friendly, focused entirely on her daughter’s well-being.

Joanne had been up and ate sparingly, but just shook her head whenever anyone asked her about her experience. The most she would answer was to whisper, “Later. Not now.” Lupe visited and Joanne asked her to make her parents at home, but said that she would stay with Xan for a while. That was interesting. Not me, but Xan. Donna visited her old friend, both in the morning and at night, but didn’t get any more response than the rest of us. While Xan was in school, Joanne just sat on the sofa and held Amy’s hand. When Xan got home, she immediately undressed Joanne and put her own naked little body against her Aunt’s chest. You could see Joanne relax.

Sly, Lily, John, and Bea made sure Ford and Ellen Barnes were welcomed in the village and weren’t simply hovering over their daughter twenty-four/seven. We all were appreciative of that. Matthew had asked if I had a papa. Yes. I had two: Papa John and Papa Sly.

It wasn’t until Wednesday, eight days after the attack, that Joanne pulled me down on the sofa to sit with her and Amy before bed. A UPS delivery had arrived that afternoon that proved to be all of Joanne’s things from her hotel room. All she’d taken with her when she went to the hospital that morning was her wallet. Her cell phone that I’d tried so unsuccessfully to call was in the box. She charged it and now she sat with it held in her hands. Since all the previous generation had gone to their hosts’ homes, we’d returned to our normal mode of nudity. Tears leaked from Joanne’s eyes and Rose came to join us, sitting on my lap next to her.

“Amy, I’m so sorry,” Joanne said.

“I didn’t do it. Really,” Amy pled. “It was ... Conrad.”

“I know,” Joanne whispered. “I found out. I found out so much. He published those photos so I would get rid of you. His plan was almost foiled when I said I was bringing Brian as my bodyguard, but then his Dad died and he couldn’t go. There was nothing and no one to stop him.”

“Stop him what?” Amy asked.

“Stop him drugging and raping me,” Joanne whispered. Oh fuck! Joanne handed her phone to Amy after opening a text message. It had a photo attached.

The photo was of semen dripping from Joanne’s pussy. The message said, “Get your fucking ass over here to the broker’s office. It belongs to me now. One word to anyone and this series of Heavenly porn shots will join the others I published. Tonight we’ll celebrate by fucking your hot little ass.”

“Oh Christ!” Rose said as she closed the phone and set it aside. We all hugged Joanne and all cried.

“I’m going to hunt him down and kill him,” Amy said.

“He’s dead. He was at the broker’s office on the 93rd floor of the North Tower. Look at the time of the message. It said eight-twenty-eight. Only I didn’t go to the tower. I went to the hospital and ordered a rape kit. I was sitting there waiting for them to take my blood to confirm drugs when all hell broke loose. Ambulances were leaving and arriving. No one ever came to take my blood. They came into the emergency room and asked me, politely, to please go back and wait in the waiting area because they had a ‘real’ emergency to deal with. I sat there all day, staring at the television in the waiting room as everything got worse and worse. Sitting in the hospital waiting room with dried come on my pussy waiting for a rape kit that never arrived.”

“I’m so sorry, Joanne. I should have been there!” Amy cried.

“If you’d been there ... we’d have both died. He wouldn’t have drugged me or raped me and we would have been on time to the stupid fucking meeting and we’d have been in the office when they crashed the planes and we’d have died.” Joanne was crying. We were all crying. All holding each other. What could we do? What could anyone do?

We went to the shower, gently washed each other—all four of us—and went to bed. Not more than a minute after we lay down, Xan squirmed in between so she could lie next to Joanne. Dani cuddled up behind me.

“Je vais vous prendre soin, Tante Ciel,” Xan whispered to Joanne once she was next to her.

I will take care of you, Aunt Heaven.

“It’s a beautiful house, Jo-Jo,” her mom said as we ate dinner that Lupe had prepared Friday night. “And this is a lovely meal, Lupe,” she added. I guess Paris hadn’t made her all that snooty. “But it’s so big! What are you going to do with all the rooms?”

“I thought I’d open an orphanage someday,” Joanne snorted. She shrugged her shoulders at her own snide remark. Xan, sitting beside me, seemed to process that information. “I don’t know. It seemed right at the time.”

“Are you moving back into your own room now? I mean while things settle down?” Ford asked. Joanne looked at me and then looked at Xan. She’d insisted that I bring my daughter with me to the family meal. I tried to carefully keep my expression neutral. She turned back to her parents.

“I don’t think so. Not right away. I want ... I need to be among ... my friends for a while. I’m ... afraid to be alone,” she said. Ford nodded. Ellen sighed. He put his hand on his wife’s.

“I know what you mean, sweetheart,” Ford said softly. “You have that friend beside you, and the little one, too. Just like you always did when you were little. Did he tell you he showed up at my kitchen table the night of the attack?” Joanne shook her head. “That old Navy pistol of mine ... It hasn’t been out of its holster in years. Not since you were born. It was on the kitchen counter with a box of shells when Brian came over and washed my dirty dishes. I didn’t know yet. I had to know for sure. But if you’d died in that attack, I’d have loaded it. I wouldn’t be able to bear knowing both my children were dead.”

“Daddy!”

“Of course, it’s so old and dirty and the shells are so old that it probably would have jammed or blown up in my face. Not exactly the way I intended for it to work. But your young friend from next door came to talk to me. I decided there was more whiskey under the bar than I could drink and it wasn’t helping me forget. So I quit drinking and put the old pistol back in my footlocker.”

“I won’t ... I didn’t ... I’m alive,” Joanne sputtered. Having Ford say his life depended on her living might have been too much for her.

“Don’t you think you should see a counselor, Jo-Jo?” her mom said. “I think that’s what your father and I should do. We’ve been living different lives for too long. We need to be where we can share our pain and our joy.” Ford had never let go of her hand and she turned it so she could squeeze his. He smiled at her.

Counseling wouldn’t be a bad thing for any of us.

We returned to our normal broadcast schedule on Monday the twenty-fourth. Our schedules for guests had been completely turned upside down and we’d canceled and refunded audience tickets for two weeks. Rees had her casa hearthmates on the show to get through Monday morning. They talked about being normal and what a normal meal was for them at Casa de Audacia. It was good. It was low-key. The recipes were great. I was going to bring all the kids from the bakery in on Tuesday for her to entertain for breakfast. Cassie had agreed to a school field trip.

Elaine chose to ignore direct reference to the Trade Center attack. Her monologue was about pimples. If you sat and thought about it long enough, you’d see that it wasn’t as irrelevant as it sounded.

What surprised me was that Lee asked me to come back and do the opening monologue on XX/XY. I spent most of the weekend in the library, thankful that a university library is open seven days a week. I didn’t know if I could do this.

ME: I want you all to know that the fact we are on the air doesn’t mean we’ve recovered. The fact that Lee invited me back to do a monologue should be evidence of that. How do we even begin to have an intelligent discussion when our hearts are broken? How can I possibly tell you what I’m going to and not be as hated as our enemies?

I hate them, too. I hate that somebody—anybody—thinks it is okay to just kill a bunch of random people to make a political or religious statement or because they were underprivileged or weren’t breastfed, or had a bad fucking day. Fuck you! It’s not okay. It’s never been okay.

I’ve heard a lot of people tossing around the blame for this terrible thing to have happened. Believe me, it’s going to touch everyone. Everyone is going to be tarred for letting this attack on America happen. The President. The Mayor of New York. The CIA. The FBI. The Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Secretary of State. And let us not forget, it will tar American allies in the Middle East. It will tar American enemies in the Middle East. Let us not forget that we fought a war there just a decade ago. For all I know, China and North Korea are going to get blamed for it, too. We’re standing on the brink of World Fucking War III because some assholes learned how to fly airplanes. One way.

I hung out in some of the popular cafés and bars in Indy and Bloomington this week, just listening to what was being said. Everything has been said. ‘Nuke Saddam Hussein.’ ‘It’s the damned Jews.’ ‘It’s a communist conspiracy.’ ‘It’s Muslims. We should get rid of all of them.’ And most of all, ‘It didn’t used to be like this. Our nation has turned away from God. If we had prayer in the schools, we’d be stronger.’ What a load of bullshit. We had twenty-three assholes who decided they could set the world on fire by flying planes into buildings, and already, we’re out trying to prove them right.

How stupid can we get?

This isn’t new, people. It’s as old as it gets. It’s been going on since before the Israelites wiped out the Midianites. They wiped them out. We don’t know exactly how big the Midianite kingdom was. We know—if we believe any of the historical details of the Bible—that there were thirty or forty thousand women and girls who had never lain with a man that were all that was left. It’s the way of the world. We disagree with your politics or your religion or your ethnicity and so we’ll kill you.

Between 1492 and 1900, we of European descent killed off 48,000,000 indigenous people in the Americas. Because we wanted their land. Their gold. We wanted a place where we could be free! Most of them were killed because one of the great gifts we brought with us was smallpox. And flu. And syphilis.

Lacking a native population to enslave and force to do our work, we imported 700,000 slaves from Africa. No, that’s not all the slaves that were brought to the Western Hemisphere. There were 12 million of those. That 700,000 only accounts for the ones brought to the United States. By the time of the Civil War we’d expanded that number through our breeding programs to four million. Grow your own.

So we fought a war over it. Over 600,000 men died in battle in the Civil War to prove that we now have the longest undefended border between two countries in the world running right through the middle of the United States. No one won that war. We’re still two countries that have one government.

Australians don’t get off free. They knocked off 700,000 Aborigines between 1800 and 1900. Not just disease, but programmed removal of children from families in a concentrated attempt to destroy the indigenous population.

Between 1915 and 1923, the Ottoman Empire annihilated the Armenians. 1.5 million people dead. Because they were Christian.

But it doesn’t make a difference what the religions are. In Bangladesh in 1971, the year I was born, three million people died at the hands of Pakistani soldiers and another 400,000 women and girls were raped.