The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  Advance Acclaim for The Merciful Scar

  “We shouldn’t be too surprised to discover that a singer-songwriter as gifted and sensitive as Rebecca St. James has produced an amazingly moving novel—one that young women will find both relevant and deeply satisfying. Beautifully crafted with co-author Nancy Rue, The Merciful Scar will not only touch your heart, it might just help heal it.”

  —KARI JOBE, DOVE AWARD-WINNING

  ARTIST AND SPEAKER ON THE REVOLVE TOUR

  “My brother Joel and I speak after shows to teens and young adults across the country. Because of this, we know that the message of this book is relevant and timely! The mix of humor, insight, and drama in The Merciful Scar helps to powerfully convey needed truth. Congrats to our sister Rebecca and Nancy on a great book!”

  —LUKE SMALLBONE, FOR

  KING AND COUNTRY

  “The Merciful Scar is a tender, beautiful, and insightful book about a difficult subject. Nancy Rue and Rebecca St. James have crafted a heart-touching story that feels more real than imaginary. While reading, you might need to remind yourself that these characters are fiction. The plot-lines, twists, turns, and heart-wrenching situations will wrap around your heart in such a way that you can’t help but be affected.”

  —LORI TWICHELL,

  FICTION ADDICT

  The Merciful Scar

  Also by Rebecca St. James

  What Is He Thinking??

  Pure

  Wait for Me

  Sister Freaks

  She

  Loved

  40 Days with God

  Also by Nancy Rue

  The Reluctant Prophet series

  The Reluctant Prophet

  Unexpected Dismounts

  Too Far to Say Enough

  The Sullivan Crisp series

  Healing Stones

  Healing Waters

  Healing Sands

  Tristan’s Gap

  Antonia’s Choice

  Pascal’s Wager

  © 2013 by Nancy Rue and Rebecca St. James

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Authors are represented by the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

  Scripture taken from NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION of the Bible. Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rue, Nancy N.

  The merciful scar : a novel / Nancy Rue and Rebecca St. James.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4016-8922-3 (trade paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3568.U3595M47 2013

  813’.54--dc23

  2013010269

  Printed in the United States of America

  13 14 15 16 17 18 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the brave women who shared their stories so that others may find their voices . . . and God’s.

  Contents

  A Note from Rebecca and Nancy

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Three

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Five

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Reflection Questions and Resources for the Merciful Scar

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  For he is our God,

  and we are the people of his pasture,

  and the sheep of his hand.

  O that today you would listen to his voice!

  PSALM 95:7

  A Note from Rebecca and Nancy

  Hi to our readers! We wanted to share with you about a unique ministry tool that this book provides. At the end of every chapter is a quote that we’ve selected as a potential ministry tool for you. We know how crazy busy all of our lives are and that it’s hard to think of social media content that can provide God-honoring encouragement for our family/friends. So we have included these quotes for those of you who might want to use them as “ministry content” in your twitter/Facebook feed. Though the Internet can be used negatively, as believers we can be a light shining in the darkness, online and everywhere!

  Shine on, friends . . .

  Rebecca and Nancy

  Part

  ONE

  He . . . went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die.

  1 KINGS 19:4

  Chapter

  ONE

  It was the only real fight Wes and I had ever had. Actually it was the only fight I’d ever had with anyone. That’s probably why I wasn’t very good at it.

  Now discussions . . . we’d had those, and that’s how it started out that night. Another conversation about Wes moving in with me.

  I should have known that was where we were headed when he tugged at the back of my shirt and pulled me against his lean self and said, “You know what I love about your couch?”

  “That you never have to get off of it from the minute you walk in the door?” I said.

  He let his blue eyes droop at the corners until they teased at his cheekbones. That was Wes pretending to be hurt. “Are you saying I’m a couch potato?”

  “I’m saying I wait on you like you’re the couch prince.” I leaned forward and picked up the all-but-licked-clean plate from my IKEA coffee table. “More quesadillas, your highness?”

  Wes scooped me into him, plate and all. “It wouldn’t be that way if I wasn’t a guest, Kirsty.”

  Yeah, there it was. Again.

  “First of all,” I said, “you know I hate it when you call me that. It makes me feel like I’m on a Jenny Craig commercial.”

  “Huh?”

  “Kirstie Alley. She was their poster girl before Valerie Bertinelli—”

  “You’re getting off topic.”

  “What topic?”

  Wes scooted himself sideways so he could face me without letting go. He knew as well as I did that I was about to wriggle away and go do . . . something. Anything to not have this discussion for the ninety-sixth time.

  “Come on, babe, you know what I’m talking about. It doesn’t make any sense for me to get an apartment for the summer when you’ve got room here.”

  “I have one bed
room.” Which, may I just add, was incredibly difficult to say with his long-fingered hands holding my face and his nose headed for mine for that irresistible pre-kiss thing he did. “And I need my other room for my studio—”

  “I know.”

  “And you also know where I am on this.”

  “I do. You’ve been there for three years, six months, two weeks, four days, and . . .” He glanced at his watch. “Twenty-seven minutes.”

  He let his lips bounce off my nose and onto my mouth but I talked right through the kiss.

  “It’s going to be another however long,” I said, “so get over it.”

  This was the part where he was supposed to say, You’re killin’ me, Kirsten. Killin’ me. And then I would let him kiss me one time and then I’d get up and make another batch of quesadillas. That was how this déjà vu conversation was supposed to go.

  But Wes stiffened all six foot two of himself and took me by both shoulders and set me away from him like he was stacking a folding chair. I watched him step over the coffee table and shove his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts and pace to the back window where he stopped, rod-necked and tight-lipped, his blondness standing stiff on his head. It wasn’t a pose I’d ever seen him take. That’s when my skin started to burn.

  “What does ‘however long’ mean, Kirsten?” he said.

  Until we’re married. That was the answer, stuck in my throat where it had been for three years, six months, two weeks, four days, and twenty-seven minutes. I just closed my eyes and crossed my arms so I could rub both shoulders. The burning kept on.

  Wes faced me now, muscles working in his square jaw. “Do you know how hard it is to love you and not be able to . . . love you?”

  I attempted a wry look. “Uh, yeah, I do.”

  “Then what the—” He crossed to the coffee table and sat on it. “Look, I think I’ve been way more patient than any other guy would be.”

  “Good thing I don’t want any other guy,” I said.

  “Stop it, okay? Just stop it.”

  “Stop wh—”

  “The cute remarks and the little dance you always do. I want to talk about this. Now.”

  I pressed myself into the couch. “We’ve talked about it a thousand times, Wes. We’ve worn it out.”

  “So you just want to keep on dating forever?”

  I swallowed, hard. “Way back when we first started dating, we both agreed that neither one of us wanted to have sex outside of marriage.”

  Wes let his mouth soften and took both my hands. “How old were we then, babe? Eighteen? Nineteen? I think we were pretty naïve.”

  We’d never gotten this far into the discussion. If we had, I might have come up with a retort to get us out of it. Something along the lines of No, naïve is when you think you can lose ten pounds before Christmas. But here we were, and my determination that I wasn’t going to be the first one to say it seethed under my skin.

  “I thought we were being true to the faith that, if you’ll recall, you introduced me to,” I said.

  “I’m not buying it,” Wes said. “We haven’t been to Faith House since you started grad school. What’s that, nine months? When was the last time we went to church, either one of us?”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t still believe—”

  “Nuh-uh.” Wes let go of my hands and waved his palm like he was erasing my words. “That’s not what this is about. You want me to marry you, don’t you?”

  My throat closed in on itself. At least once a day during those three years and twenty-seven minutes or whatever it was, I had imagined Wes broaching the subject of marriage. The images went from Wes on one knee amid glimmering candlelight to a proposal tucked into a Big Mac. But none of them had included an accusation in those blue eyes or all my anxiety mobilizing under my flesh.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” he said. “Why didn’t you just come out and say it?”

  “Because I wanted you to say it first!”

  The words sliced their way out of me before I could stop them, and they seemed to want to keep on slicing all on their own.

  “I don’t want us to be like everybody else—just having sex and living together and then someday deciding we might as well get married. Look at Caleb and Tess. They’re like a pair of reclining chairs. I’m not doing that, Wes. I’m not.”

  He was staring at me as if I was a stranger suddenly intruding on the conversation that had long since stopped being a conversation.

  “Y’know,” he said, “I’ve been practically begging you for, like, forever to open up with me and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “I wanted it to be on yours.” My words had lost their edge. Others spun in my head. Clever, Kirsten, very clever. You picked a fine time to, I don’t know, grow a backbone.

  Wes sagged onto the couch beside me. “Look, babe, I’m not in a good place for this. I didn’t graduate—I have to make up the class this summer—I don’t know what I’m gonna do after that.”

  “I know all that—”

  “But you—you’re set. You always are. That’s why you’re my rock. I just need you to be here for me just a little while longer. Can you do that?”

  What does that even mean? I wanted to scream. But I’d done all the slicing I could do for one night. It was more slicing than I’d done my whole life. At least, that kind.

  “Okay, look, I’m gonna go,” Wes said.

  “Now?”

  Nice touch. Pathetic is always good.

  “Now.” Wes gave me half of his usual who-loves-ya-baby smile. “Before I get you drunk and take advantage of you.”

  My reply was automatic. “Like either one of those things is gonna happen.”

  Again, that was his cue to say, You’re killin’ me, babe. But what he said was, “Yeah.” Just yeah.

  He pulled me up from the couch and walked ahead of me to the door. Hand on the knob, he turned only slightly toward me. “A bunch of people from my class are hiking the M tomorrow.”

  I groaned silently. Hiking the M was a Montana State graduation tradition that entailed making one’s way up a steep trail and a long ridgeline in the brutal Montana sun to get to a huge M made from white rocks, and then partying and turning around and coming back in the now even more brutal Montana sun to party some more. I’d skipped that when I graduated the year before; I would actually rather poke a fork in my eye than have that kind of fun. Since Wes had missed graduating by one class, he hadn’t gotten to have that kind of fun either.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No, they want me to go with. What’s three credits? To them I’m there. I just didn’t have to sit through a bunch of speeches in a bathrobe with a board on my head.”

  “I don’t even know what to do with that,” I said. “So what time?”

  “We’re leaving Caleb and Tess’s at seven.” Wes lifted a sandy eyebrow. “If I can get them out of their reclining chairs.”

  Ouch. Bet that gotcha right in the heart.

  “You want me to pack a picnic?” I said.

  Wes’s gaze shifted away and he ran a hand over his flattened blond spikes.

  “Or we can grab something at the store in the morning,” I said.

  “Here’s the deal . . . I think I just need to go single. Most of these people I’ll never see again, which is weirder for me because I’m staying here. I don’t know, it’s just a thing.”

  Right in the heart fell far short. I was stung to the bone. I didn’t want to go. I just wanted him to want me to go.

  Beyond pathetic. We’ve moved into pitiful. I mean, way in.

  “Okay, so . . . okay,” I said.

  “I knew you’d get it.” Wes kissed my neck. “You always do.”

  The Nudnik voice didn’t wait until Wes was out the door before she started in. I always thought of it as the Nudnik, which was what my kindergarten teacher used to call us kids when we pestered her to the brink. Nicely done, the Nudnik said now. Ya made everything all right when it clearly isn’t. Ano
ther layer of unadulterated bad stuff, right under your skin.

  Forget it. I’m not doing it. I haven’t done it for—I don’t know—a long time.

  Not since Valentine’s Day when yet again our sweet Wesley didn’t come through with a ring. Or was it Easter? Yeah, you did it on Easter. But then, who’s keeping track?

  You are! I wanted to say out loud. But I always stopped short of audibly answering the Nudnik. If I did that, I really would have to admit I was crazy.

  But she was right. I’d been holding back for six weeks, since the beginning of April. I promised myself that was the last time, because I was so sure Wes would propose when he graduated. And then he didn’t. He’d spent last Saturday hiding out here playing Scrabble with me instead of walking with his class to receive his diploma. It wasn’t a good time for a proposal. Clearly there never was a good time.

  The Nudnik was quiet now, although she couldn’t have been heard over the screaming of my skin anyway. It needed my attention more.

  I made sure Wes’s Mini Cooper, the one I loved to watch him fold his lanky self into, was gone before I slipped into my bedroom and closed the door. Even alone in my tiny cottage, I always ensured my privacy. This was one thing that was all mine.

  The instruments were in a polished African mahogany box under my bed, but I didn’t take it out yet. I sat on the rug and pulled off my turquoise top that Wes always said made my eyes look like blue topaz. How could someone so certifiably romantic be the cause of so many scars?

  But as I ran my fingers over the fine remnants of delicate incisions on the tops of my shoulders, I stared down at the less precise ones on my belly. Those didn’t come from man trouble. I could, in fact, name every one of them.

  The wobbly ones that traced the lines of my ribs were drawings of freshman year panic, when I suddenly found myself alone here in Bozeman with four years of expectations stretching out before me like an endless road up a mountain.

  The staccato dashes below my belly button were the beat of the summer before my sophomore year, when I went back home to Missouri for the last time.