Chapter 38: Sheila

Chapter 38: Sheila
From the start, Sheila was opposed to the plan. She thought it was an unnecessary risk and found herself nonplussed at Ryan’s nonchalance towards that.
“Does this girl really understand what she’s walking into?” she asked him one night when Helena managed to fall into a fitful sleep and Rodrigo was out on the prowl and she could look him directly in the eyes as she spoke out loud what had been danced around since the plan’s inception.
Ryan stiffened but didn’t avert his eyes. “Helena’s no idiot,” he answered. “She knows this is a dangerous idea but she also knows we don’t have many options.”
“Right, but have we tried to come up with any of them? I didn’t hear a mention of other ideas at all.”
“Well, here’s your chance. You got some great plan that won’t put us all at risk?” Ryan jutted his chin out at her. She saw his Adam’s apple bob as he gulped air. Defiantly or anxiously she couldn’t tell. “What’s your big idea?”
Sheila sat back in her chair. They were in the kitchen, a place that had been witness to more than its share of late night, semi-clandestine discourse. The overhead light was off and aside from the yellowed greasy radiance from the bulb above the oven, the apartment was dark. It was a familiar scene to her, to both of them, sitting at the darkened table and occasionally marveling at how silent a city could get at a certain time of night. As children, they sat in the same seats in a time before the spokes on the back part of the chair had to be glued into place and the varnish had rubbed clean off of sections, revealing naked wood, intimate as bones. Their conversations weren’t any lighter in those days though they had less decisions to make when they were kids. They might have still been talking risk and danger but it was someone else’s risk and danger.
Ryan’s face in the buttery light was softer, the same face Sheila remembered from their childhood. The expression changed only slightly when she admitted to having no idea better than the one on which they had landed.
“But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have come up with something else,” she continued. “Something that wouldn’t have opened her up to God only knows what with Troy.”
“I’m not going to let her walk into this blind,” Ryan argued.
“Now what in the hell does that mean?”
Ryan set his mouth to a stone line then sighed, his whole face going slack. “She knows how dangerous Troy is. She knows that he’s the type of guy that wouldn’t blink when it came to killing her. She knows the worst of it.”
Sheila tapped a finger on the table in the space between them. “But that isn’t the worst of it. Do you not get that? Do you really need this explained to you?”
Most of the male pack members acted strangely naive about how female members could be hurt or what it meant for a female member to be targeted but Sheila never thought that was true of Ryan. His clarity of vision extended to everyone, every instance, every situation where the darkest parts of civilization, both human and shifter, cultivated their horrors. It didn’t seem likely that now when the person in question was someone he had grown attached to that he would be so thoughtless with her safety.
The schisms among the pack had made themselves known years earlier. There were the fence-straddlers who seemed to have a foot in both worlds but overall, the divide between the old guard and the new was more obvious than it should have been. The old operated like a gang, and while there was an idea of rank, it was nearly as organized as the senior members of the pack like to pretend. Ryan, in his way, managed to be both part of the established and the new wave but Sheila couldn’t make out which side of the divide this idea was coming from. The obscene danger of it, the absolute unquestionable craziness at the core of it, sounded like something the old timers would tell. Their stories always had a cruel humor dressed up as good times woven into them; lives risked for the sake of a powerplay at best and a prank at worst.
But something the old guard would never do was put a human female at the center of a plan like this.
“Because they don’t think women can handle anything aside from breeding,” Ryan said when Sheila brought it up. “Don’t act like that god damn generation treats you with kid gloves because they respect you.”
“I’m denying that,” Sheila returned softly. These were conclusions she had come to years before anyway.
Ryan stared towards the dark bedroom. Helena, Rodrigo, and Sheila’s toddler were all asleep in there, under one roof, simply cared for but at peace in their slumber. Sheila studied the tension in Ryan’s face, evidence of what he was thinking becoming apparent in the creasing of the lines.
“I wonder what it would be like if it was just, ya know, like this?” Ryan gestured around them sans direction, no aim. “Too many of us in here, sure, and maybe I don’t even think of Helena as part of it. I mean, sometimes I do but if that’s what it came down to…like if I was given the choice and it could just be us? No bullshit from the pack, no stupid petty crimes, gang wars, that kind of thing.” He finally broke off the trance he was held in by the dark bedroom a short walk down the hall and met Sheila’s eyes. “I’d pick us. Me, you, Rodrigo, the baby. Stay here and not fuck with anyone or anything.”
“You’d get bored,” Sheila told him, almost laughing. Almost a joke. Too close to the bone to be funny.
“Well, I’d have to get a hobby then.” Ryan stretched his arms above his head then rested his hands palm down on his face. “I’d take up surfing. We’re Californians, right? I don’t think a single one of us knows how to surf.”
“I’ll bet all the packs down south are wicked, radical, hardcore surfers.”
Ryan allowed himself a small laugh at that. Sheila replied with a smile she was sure came across more as a tight grimace. The past week, everything about it, made her sick to her stomach. If there was a phrase, a suggestion, a plea that could have changed Ryan and Helena’s mind, she would have invoked it but unless she came up with a better plan, there was nothing to sway them.
The night of the exchange, Sheila waited in the kitchen for Ryan to come home. It was creeping from twilight to light-polluted dark and it had been daytime when he and Helena took their trip across the city to turn her over to Troy. Sheila shuddered at the thought of it. Turned her over to him. Presented her like a trophy made of flesh, a statue with marrow filling her narrow bones.
By nine o’clock, Ryan still wasn’t home, and Sheila was getting itchy. She was having trouble sitting still and kept checking the clock, listening intently when anyone entered the courtyard of the apartment complex. Keeping the worst case scenario out of her mind was becoming an increasingly difficult task.
At close to ten, the phone rang, and Sheila yelped at the noise. In the bedroom, she heard the opening whimper of her toddler waking up but she yanked the phone off the cradle fast enough to keep the baby in his.
“Hello?” she asked, her throat tightening and dry.
“He’s got her,” came Ryan’s somber voice. “I watched them put her in a van and drive off.”
“Did you talk to Troy at all?”
“I didn’t even talk to Helena.” She heard him draw a quivering breath. “She wouldn’t let me be there, Sheila. I had to watch this go down and she didn’t even know I could see her.”
“Where are you, Ryan?”
His voice dropped lower on each word. “A bar.”
“A bar.”
“I’m not even drunk. I just…can’t be home right now.”
Sheila leaned her back against the kitchen wall, a fizzing sensation emanating from her gut and winding its way to her head. Her vision went gray for a moment and she heard words that she didn’t intend to say coming out of her mouth.
“What did you see, Ryan?”
“When?”
“When they took Helena? Was she ok?”
The pause before he answered was too long. For a second there, Sheila expected the gruesome reality she was scared of.
“They literally threw her in a van, Sheila,” Ryan said. “Picked her up and threw her in like she was a duffle bag or something.”
Because she’s property now, Sheila thought but, like the original question, never intended to say. She stood upright, her head clearing slightly.
“Ryan, come home.”
“I can’t right now. I will soon but I can’t right now.”
Sheila started to say something in protest. She was interrupted by the clicking noise of the line being disconnected, and she returned to the interminable game of waiting.