THE CALLING
Later that autumn evening, after her last free ride had dropped her off somewhere outside of Macon, Georgia, the runaway teenage girl was shuffling along the grassy shoulder of the desolate country road, trying to decide where she would sleep for the night, when she heard what sounded like an amusement park.
The unexpected noises brought her to a sudden halt in the tangled weeds.
Am I going crazy? Am I really hearing this?
She pivoted to the right. A deep, dark forest lay beyond the road and seemed to stretch on forever. Straightening her backpack across her shoulders, she tilted her head, listening.
The noises were faint, but not a hallucination: the rollicking music of a pipe organ . . . joyous cries of children on whirring theme park rides . . . the clank and clatter of fun machines . . .
There were fragrant, delicious smells, too, brief notes of them wafting on the warm breeze: sweet funnel cakes, juicy hot dogs, giant baked pretzels, crispy French fries.
Her mouth watered.
Was it a carnival? She’d been to such a place once, as a younger child, during happier times in her family, before things fractured. She had warm memories of screaming gleefully on park rides with her cousins and gorging herself on delectable treats until her stomach felt ready to burst.
As if her feet had a will of their own, she left the roadside and wandered deeper into the woods.
Some instinctive part of her flashed a warning, told her that danger lay ahead, but her sensory impressions of the spectacle awaiting her blew away those red flags. The carnival sounds grew louder; the smells, stronger.
And she glimpsed, through the pine trees, the unmistakable sight of a Ferris wheel, lit up against the dusky sky.
Oh my goodness! It reallyisa carnival!
She broke into a run, stamping through weeds, knocking aside branches and vines.
After she had sprinted for maybe a hundred yards, she reached a towering chain-link fence, the top of it festooned with glistening coils of barbed wire. The formidable barrier extended as far as she could see, on both left and right.
She was set to turn away, despite the deep craving that gripped her pounding heart. Although she was nimble, and had taken gymnastics classes as a little girl, there was no vaulting over what was probably a ten-foot-high fence.
Gnawing her bottom lip, she ran her slender brown fingers along the cool chain links. So close, but so far away. The enchanting music throbbed in her ears, the tempting smells were so near she could literally taste the food, and the glimmering Ferris wheel lay just beyond a rise in the gentle, forested hills.
On her left, she noticed a gap in the fence—like a patch had been cut out, especially for her. It seemed to shimmer in the moonlight, like a magical portal.
It hadn’t been there before. Had it?
Of course it was, silly. You just didn’t notice it, because it’s almost full dark.
She edged toward the opening.
Don’t go in there, a stern voice whispered in the back of her mind. A familiar voice—her mother’s.
But her mother was mostly to blame for her running away from home in the first place. Listening to Mom had brought her only misery.
She shrugged off the warning, bent slightly, and stepped across the threshold . . .
1
What began as a perfect morning for Nick Alexander went sideways quickly, and in hindsight, what hurt the most was that it was his own damned fault.
At sunrise, he was making love to his girlfriend, Amiya, their bodies joined in a sweet grinding on his Chinese sleigh bed in his Atlanta home. It had started as breakfast in bed—bagels and coffee Nick fetched from a café in his Buckhead neighborhood—but had evolved with unexpected speed into them grasping for each other with a desperate hunger that had surprised him. They had been together all night and had made love for hours before finally falling asleep, and still, they couldn’t get enough of each other.
Straddling him, Amiya rocked in a seductive rhythm, her curly ebony hair hanging down her face in a veil, her lithe figure gyrating, sunlight glistening on her smooth, dark brown skin. His hands roamed alternately between her waist and her hips. Eyes closed, matching her rhythm with his thrusts, he thought with sudden clarity that there was nowhere he would have rather been, and in his forty years on Earth, he had been almost everywhere.
“Do you love me, baby?” she asked, flicking her hair away with her slender fingers.
“Yeah,” he said, short of breath. “Yeah, yeah. All day long.”
