Some Light Can Never Be Seen

The Weather couldn't have been more fitting.

Rose Dwyer felt as if every drop of rain falling from the pitch black sky was pelting her creaky and somewhat overweight 51 year old body as she sat in the driver's seat of her rental car, staring pensively out into the deluge as she waited in a motel parking lot, well over a hundred miles from home.

For a trip that long, Rose came armed with surprisingly little. Dressed in her Sunday best as she stewed in the seat of her parked car, all she'd brought with her was a photo album, her Bible, and a mouthwash bottle full of homemade whiskey she'd snuck from her Husband's private stash.

Rose had asked herself several times why she'd went through the trouble of dressing up in one of her few dress and blouse sets for the long drive instead of her normal down home attire of jeans and sneakers. The voices in her head kept telling Rose what she was attempting amounted to a calling, a mission she'd been sent on by her Lord and Savior to bring one of his lost flock home.

For whatever reason Rose had also applied a healthy bit of make-up, mascara and lipstick, to the point it almost looked as if she was headed to Easter Services at the small church her Husband had been the pastor at the past 17 years instead of a non-descript interstate motel on the other side of the state.

"I'm gonna melt as soon as I step out into this stuff," Rose said to herself as the insides of the car windows began to fog from the radiating warmth of her body.

For all the primping and preparing she'd done however, Rose wanted nothing more than to sit there for another hour or so and the person she was there to meet never to materialize from the torrential downpour.

Rubbing her fingertips over the soft leather casing of the photo album she kept so many of her memories in, Rose flipped back and forth through the pictures under the dimness of the overhead lights in the parking lot. Looking occassionally over to the Bible sitting in the passenger seat beside her, Rose knew she should probably be reading through it instead, but somehow she wasn't sure she wanted to hear God's answers to the questions she'd been forced to ask herself over the past week.

So in that netherworld between trying to make some sense of why she'd driven halfway across the state, and working up the courage to confront the demons that drove her there, Rose unscrewed the cap from the Listerine bottle and took another swig of her Husband's moonshine.

"RRRRRGGGG... AAHHHHH," Rose cringed each time the bitter fire water washed down her throat, but the calming wave that followed was enough to keep her content as she sat in the car watching the watch on her wrist creep towards 10pm.

Pulling the scrapbook towards her chest, Rose nestled it between her ample bosom and the steering wheel and intently studied several of the photos. Childless due to a medical issue in her 20's, with her Husband's status of being the long time religious figurehead of several small towns in the mountains of West Virginia, many of the troubled and forsaken children in the area had at one time or another found a warm bed, a hot meal and a caring shoulder at the Dwyer household.

Rose found herself focusing on one certain boy in the pictures. Even though some of the photos were as many as 5 or 6 years old, Rose could close her eyes and remember the exact moment each of the pictures were snapped as if it happened that morning. It was just part of the nurturing nature of her DNA to remember the people who came into her life and the joy, and sadly sometimes also the sorrow, they brought.

Repeatedly rubbing the plastic sheeting covering the photos with her thumb, tears began to well in Rose's eyes as the rain continued to batter everything around her. She'd almost put herself into a state of hypnosis losing herself in the scrapbook when the faint sound of splashing footsteps in the parking lot snapped her back to reality.

Craning her neck towards the right, Rose could see a shadowy figure through the raindrops streaming down the windshield. Holding her breath as a sudden chill encased her spine, she watched as the man made a soaking wet beeline for the steps leading up to the second deck of the motel. Even though the man's head was down and covered with the hood of a sweatshirt, Rose could tell from his angular frame, and the definitive gait of his movements, who it was.

When he finally topped the steps and turned towards the numbered doors of the rooms, Rose could feel the grip she had on the scrapbook in her lap tighten. Her heart quickly sunk when she watched him slide his keycard into the same room he'd told her to meet him at the previous night. Rose knew right then, any hope that all this had been a mistake or simply all a bad dream wasn't to be.

Seeing the drenched man disappear briskly inside the room before slamming the door behind him, Rose muttered a psalm to herself as she laid the photo album back down in the passenger seat, knowing her moment of reckoning was now at hand.

_______________________________

For Rose, it had all started out innocently enough five days earlier. She'd been over at the house of one of the members of her Husband's congregation, basically house-sitting while the man was away on a business trip. Rose had gone over to Sam Puttman's place each day that week to feed the fish, check his mail and make sure everything was in order. With the increased opiate and meth abuse in the area, incidents of home invasion and burglary had skyrocketed, especially in a small town like Coburn where all the residents pretty much knew the comings and goings of everyone around them.

On her third day over to the Puttnam house, an idea sparked in Rose's head that she would quickly grow to regret.

The treasurer at her church, and an admitted creature of habit, Rose was begrudgingly allowing herself to be dragged into the digital age. Having walked past Sam's small home office each time she'd gone over to the house to tend to things, Rose glanced at his computer and remembered him telling her a few Sundays back about a neat spreadsheet program he had on his system that might help her with the bookwork for the church.

Knowing she had all afternoon free that day, Rose eventually worked up the courage to take a seat at Sam's desk chair before cozying up to the blank monitor.

"This feels weird... maybe you shouldn't," a sheepish voice in Rose's head warned, never one to feel comfortable touching someone else's property without explicit permission.

"Well he does trust you enough to look after his whole house while he's gone," another more forceful voice overrode the first, and within a few seconds she was cautiously reaching out to click the power button on.

Biting her lower lip, Rose felt her skin crawl as the machine instantly began to fire up.

"Good," she sighed with relief when the screen lit up and she saw the icon for the program Sam Puttnam had mentioned.

Pressing the mouse, Rose surfed though the spreadsheet setup for a couple of minutes, familiarizing herself with it, then made plans to bring her folder with the church's paperwork over to the house the next day and see if she could plug in some numbers.

"I'll definitely have to thank Sam for suggesting this," Rose said to herself before preparing to shut the computer down and go on about her business.

Just before she logged off, the internet icon on Sam's screen caught Rose's eye.

"Been meaning to look up that recipe website Gloria was mentioning the other day... the one with those cobbler recipes," she thought out loud. "I'm sure Sam wont mind. "

"Is kind of weird he doesn't even have the password function turned on," Rose mumbled. "But... he does lives alone... guess he doesn't have anyone else to worry with it. "

Clicking on the search function as soon as Sam's homepage lit up, Rose was getting ready to type in the web address when the words "You have mail" echoed from the speakers.

"Don't need to look at his mail," Rose laughed to herself, feeling strangely unsettled with each step she took deeper into Sam Puttnam's private world.

After 10 minutes of so, Rose had copied down several dessert recipes from the site onto the notepad she kept in her purse. With all her curiosity quenched, she was finally ready to log out off, gather her things and head back home.

Seeing there were more than 20 unread messages in Sam's inbox, Rose shuddered to think how many he was going to have to flip through when he eventually got back from his trip.

"Gotta be mostly spam," Rose thought, knowing Sam wasn't exactly a social butterfly.

A widower since his Wife had died in a car wreck five years earlier, the gossip among the women around the church was that Sam hadn't dated much since the accident. He'd seemed to be content burying himself into his job as an antique dealer and often took trips around the country, and occasionally abroad.

Not to Rose's surprise, when she clicked open Sam's email account, it was in fact full of various real estate shams and credit card offers. Just before she could start erasing the list of junkmail however, something way down on the screen stopped Rose in her tracks.

"CCStud88," the email address read followed by the name "Cory" in parenthesis.

An cold wave of nausea swept through Rose's abdomen as she leaned forward in her chair to make sure her eyes weren't deceiving her.

"Why would Cory's name be on Sam's email list?" she asked herself.

____________________________

Cory Randolph Cofield had been one of the seemingly endless array of disadvantaged youths who'd found themselves spending time in the Dwyer household over the past two decades. There had certainly been ones more memorable than Cory, but what Rose always seemed to remember most about him was his intensity, sense of self reliance and an innate survival instinct at such an early age. From what she could recall, Cory always had a supreme distaste when people tried to help him, almost as if the realization that he needed help forced him to be reminded about the upheaval and broken bonds of trust he'd been forced to endure as a child.

Cory had lost his Father when he was 9 to a mining accident, and it wasn't long before his Mother had fallen in with the wrong crowd and found herself saddled with a drug addiction and mounting legal issues. By the time Cory was a teenager, his Mother had pretty much grown ambivalent about everything that had mattered in her life, including her two kids.

Cory's younger Sister had got off lucky. Young enough, and frankly manageable enough, to be salavaged she'd been for all intents and purposes adopted by some relatives up in Ohio. Cory, on the other hand, seemed to have a way of burning every bridge someone tried to build him.

>From Rose's best recollection, she thought the first time Cory had

graced the Dwyer home had been when he was 14 or 15 perhaps, but it became quickly apparent he wasn't going to blend very well into a structured environment.

They'd found drugs on Cory several times, he'd pretty much dropped out of school by age 16, and there were even rumors he'd knocked up several of the local girls before he disappeared from town. It had been almost 4 years since Rose had seen Cory, and with the never ending stream of things to worry about, it had been quite awhile since she'd even thought about him. That was until his name popped up on 46 year old Sam Puttnam's email list.

"Maybe it's a different Cory Cofield?" Rose tried to rationalize, knowing deep down the astronomical odds of that being the case.

"What business of yours is it anyway?" a very sober voice in Rose's head scolded. "And besides... do you really want to know what the truth is?"

Rose breathed in a hearty chest full of air before spewing out a long and bellowing sigh as she stared a hole through the computer screen.

"Just log off and go home... no one knows any of this ever happened, and no one ever has to," she tried convincing herself.

"But... ," that gnawing curiosity in the deepest reaches of Rose's intestines, wouldn't let it go.

Powerless to stop herself, Rose clicked her finger down and opened the latest email from Cory to Sam.

"... Dear... God... ," was all Rose's trembling lips could manage when she read the content of the message.

"Thanks for a great night last weekend Sammy," the email began. "Each time we get together it seems like things get wilder and wilder... Never would have guessed it about you... people can let go a little bit when they get away from home. "

"I'll be in Huntington again late next week... let me know if your interested in driving out. Look forward to it. "

Snakes felt like they were slithering through Rose's intestines as she tried to process what she was reading. Even though the words were relatively mundane and innocuous, the implication was heartbreakingly perverse. Feeling as if the plug had been pulled from her brain, Rose sat in that swiveling chair feeling as if her whole body had turned to gelatin.

"Just back out and log off, no one has to know and God knows you've been keeping secrets all your life... you can keep this one too," that sane voice of reason urged, but as the old song went, her hands felt like two balloons as she tried clicking the backspace key.

Her eyes burning as she read and re-read the text, Rose went nearly a minute without blinking as she tried to make sense of Sam and Cory's relationship. The disgust she started to feel as the comprehension of it all began to settle into her marrow quickly graduated to anger.

"What in the world does Sam think he's doing... Cory is only a boy... he's only a... ," Rose babbled out loud until she reminded herself that he was 20 years old now, and from the harsh way he was forced to grow up, truthfully he'd never had a chance to simply be a boy.

That realization only added to Rose's feeling of helplessness. She knew something must be done, but confronting it on any level would require her to admit she'd snooped into Sam's email, and as disgusting as the facts might be, there wasn't anything illegal about it. For now, all Rose could do was hold everything in like a tea kettle under constant and building pressure.

Finally mustering the coordination to back out of Sam's account, Rose filled with renewed determination to find her way out of this moral conundrum. Defiantly clicking on Sam's list of saved favorites, Rose's blood boiled thinking about how a man she and her Husband had known for over 10 years, who they'd broke bread with, who they'd even helped put together a memorial service for his departed Wife, could be capable of such a shameful and vile act.

When she saw some of the sites Sam had saved however, that blood boiling in her veins quickly turned to jagged shards of ice. Sitting there in the makeshift office, her mouth agape as she stared at the monitor, Rose Dwyer tried to digest the array of gay sex, bondage, and S&M sites, not to mention other ones that went even further beyond the realm of human decency. Mixed in with all the other sites was a link to Cory's Myspace page.

This far into the pit, Rose had no choice but to plow on.

Any hope that the 'Cory Cofield' Sam had been talking to wasn't the same one she'd tried to help years earlier was shattered when she clicked on the link and opened his profile. Rose went limp and slumped in the chair when she saw his picture pop up. While she'd never seen Cory with his shirt off as he was in the main profile pic, she would have recognized those same piercing yet hollow eyes anywhere.

As if Rose needed any more confirmation, seeing the interest list on Cory's profile made her shake her head and bow in shame. Her stomach churning more with each passing second, from what she could gather from seeing his list of online friends, Cory had basically turned himself into a plaything for lecherous, but seemingly well off, older men.

"Well now you know," the stern voice of reason inside her head chimed back in.

"Do you feel better?" it sarcastically quipped.

"You look under rocks and you're gonna see some things you might not like," it continued to chastise. "Now just go home and get back on with the things you have some control over. This ain't your fight anymore. "

Still, Rose didn't budge from her seat. Instead she scanned even further down Cory's profile page until she saw a link to a photo sharing website.

"No," a chorus of frazzled voices in her head begged, but she was too far gone.

Whatever it was Rose Dwyer was looking for when she opened up Cory's 'private folder', she could have never been prepared for what she saw. If seeing Cory posing with his shirt off for a picture was hard enough for Rose to swallow, then the photos in the folder would cause her to choke on everything she held dear. There were upwards of 40 pics, each with Cory in a various state of undress, and a few of them with him and other men.

The normally pale skin on Rose's cheeks and neck now blotched a sickening shade of red and she was visibly trembling as the litany of pictures in front of her swirled and blended together into one horribly vivid cornucopia of flesh of the screen.

The various errands she had to run later that afternoon temporarily forgotten, Rose looked like an entranced zombie sitting in front of Sam Puttnam's desktop computer. Spread out before her eyes were over three dozen pictures of a fully grown young man she'd tried years ago to salvage as a youth. Billions of conflicted emotions swelled through Rose' capillaries as she struggled for her breath.

Rose visibly wretched at the content of the photos, but like a deer in headlights, she just couldn't look away. Cory's eyes seemed to peer accusingly back at her from each one of the pictures until she felt herself melting under the weight of his two dimensional stare.

"Like what you see?" those eyes almost taunted.

The mouse now shaking in her sweaty right hand, it was powerless to stop Rose as she clicked, one by one, each of those thumbnails until they grew into full blown images in front of her. Several had obviously been taken by Cory while he was alone with his digital camera, several others had been taken by someone else while Cory posed provocatively, but the ones that left Rose sickened and haggard the most were the ones of Cory locked in graphic and gross sexual positions with various other men.

Rose had been party to hundreds of sermons her Husband had given over the years on the despicable and sinful nature of homosexuality, but this was the first time she'd ever witnessed for herself the visceral nature of it at its most hardcore. And like a train barreling straight down the tracks towards her, Rose felt as if her feet were stuck in concrete.

She found herself flipping through the photos, trying to find anyone she might recognize from town in the shot with Cory, but thankfully she didn't. One of the things that struck her was that several of the men had wedding rings on their fingers even though they were conjoined in the most obscene of manners with Cory, and the thought of that violation of trust just heightened Rose's disgust.

If anyone else had been in the room watching Rose click maniacally through the pictures, they would have sworn she was having a mental breakdown right before their eyes. They might have even crouched in fear when they saw the way she suddenly bolted up from the chair and made a mad dash towards the nearest trashcan with her right hand cupped tightly over her mouth.

Somehow Rose was able to stifle her vomiting reflex. When the natural flow of adrenaline followed, she could feel the welcoming traces of cool and soothing calm wash through her body. Standing in the doorway of Sam Puttnam's makeshift home office, Rose leaned like a drunk against the frame, doing her best not to stare at what was on the computer screen less than six feet away.