Phoebe and the Rock of Ages

by Becky Doughty

  Would she listen? Or would she misunderstand and see him as judging her again? Would she believe—God forbid—that he’d lured her into confessing her deepest and darkest secrets to him so that he could use them against her, to try to coerce her into saying yes to God?

  I’m here. Include me.

  The unspoken words interrupted his frantic thoughts and he paused, focusing on them.

  I’m here. Include me.

  Trevor didn’t hesitate. He knew God would speak through him. “Phoebe, I didn’t just come here to ask for and hopefully receive your forgiveness, although I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am that you’ve given it to me.” He reached for her hand and she let him take it, even though she had pushed herself back into the corner of their shared couch, putting almost of foot of space between them. He wanted to touch her, to stay connected to her physically, in the hope she’d stay connected to him emotionally and spiritually. “Please hear me out, okay?”

  If he hadn’t been looking at her, he would have missed the tiny nod.

  “I’ve known Gia for several years now. Not well—she’s my cousin, Ricky’s friend, and he’s quite a bit younger than I am. We didn’t spend much time together until he was a teenager, but then he and Gia would come hang out at my place now and then. She always talked about you and Renata and Juliette, about your grandparents all the time, about how tight your family was, even though you’d lost your parents years before.” He shook his head as he began to realize just how many ways God had been molding and guiding and leading them to this point in time. “I don’t know why I didn’t connect her story with yours—looking back, she once told me how your parents died, and how you’d all gone to live with your grandparents. I just didn’t make the connection.”

  “Typical man,” she teased from behind the waterfall of her hair. She’d swept it all forward over one shoulder, and with her head down, he couldn’t see much more than her downcast eyes and the profile of her cheekbone and nose. The posture reminded him of the girl who’d sat in the pew hiding behind her hair then, too.

  “But God laid it on my heart to pray for you and your sisters. I didn’t know exactly why, or even what to pray, but every time your family came to mind, I prayed for you. Phoebe, I’ve been intentionally praying for the Gustafson Girls for more than five years now. For each of you by name. For you. Because God put you on my heart.”

  He stopped and waited for a reaction from her before going on. He watched a tear slide down her cheek, but she let it fall. That was enough of a response for him to continue.

  “When Gia talked me into taking Juliette out, and she ended up opening her heart to the love of Christ that night, I truly believed she was the reason I’d been praying for you.”

  “Trevor.” She did look up then, her eyes wide and luminous. “That night changed her life. I saw it happen. I see it every day. A joie de vivre—this inner happiness. It’s like she’s come alive.” She squeezed his hand, her grip surprisingly strong. But then, she was an artist who worked with her hands. “Thank you for bending your rules for her. You might have saved her life.”

  He shook his head, humbled by her statement, but he knew he’d only been a vessel. “What’s that saying? You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink?” He chuckled. “Don’t quote me on that—I’m not calling your sister a horse! I only mean that I know God had a plan for that night and that he wanted to use me. I said yes, that was all.”

  “Maybe so, but because you said yes, my sister said yes, and that’s made all the difference.”

  Oh, how he wished she could hear herself. How he wished she could see that she could have the same thing, the same joy in her life. And all she had to do was say yes. But he held his tongue, sensing that it wasn’t going to be quite so simple as that with Phoebe.

  “Well, I’ve learned the hard way that I’m not very wise when I try to take over for God. I have yet to go wrong when I do things his way instead of my own.”

  Phoebe took a deep breath and let it out slowly, lowering her head again as she did. Her curls fluttered prettily as she ducked behind her hair again. “I wish I could be so confident in him. God and I don’t really have a good track record.”

  “And I know my part in that hasn’t helped.”

  “Actually, Trevor, that’s not true. Not anymore.” She didn’t look at him, but turned her hand in his so their fingers laced together, a gesture of trust on her part. He was pretty sure his heart skipped a beat. “Seeing the way Juliette has blossomed, hearing Gia talk about you, meeting you the other day…and now tonight? Everything about you makes me curious about God.” She said the last words in a whisper, as though admitting a weakness. “But my own experience with him? It isn’t like yours, or like Juliette’s or Gia’s, or even Renata’s.” She shook her head, her voice tight. “I don’t think I can trust him. I still don’t know if I can wholly trust you, Trevor. But if you let me down, it might just kill me, but I’ll pick up the pieces again, like I always do, and chalk it up as par for the course.”

  Her words just about killed him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I know.” Her tone belied her words; she clearly still had her doubts. “But if I let myself trust God, and he lets me down? I will surely die.” Another tear fell. “I don’t think I could come back from that.”

  “I understand,” Trevor said, and he did. He had lived under the same fear, but his had manifested in the opposite way. He’d become a legalistic, by the book, hard line religious fanatic, afraid of letting God down, afraid of losing favor with him, afraid of God turning his back on him. Yet, when he’d fallen off the edge, when he’d crash-landed and lay there in a messy pile of brokenness, he’d learned just how unconditional God’s love was, and just how freeing it was.

  “After you walked out of church that morning, and left me standing there with all my religious formal wear torn to shreds, I could almost see God storming off behind you, disgusted with me.” He grinned at the look of surprise on her face. “Yeah, you pegged me that day. Crucified me,” he said, using her word. “And I knew I deserved it, even back then. It took me several minutes to catch my breath, but when I charged out of there like a bat out of hell—” He broke off and laughed. “That’s probably not the best idiom to use when referring to leaving church, is it?”

  “Probably not,” she agreed. And there was her smile again.

  “I take that back. I charged out of there like a man on a mission—better?”

  “Much.”

  “But you were already gone.” He shifted in his seat so he was turned toward her, now serious, wanting her to hear him. “I looked for you, Phoebe. Every Sunday, I got to church early, I stayed late, hoping to see you come in. I asked about you—carefully; I figured you most likely still hadn’t told anyone—but no one knew anyone named Josephine. And I didn’t know your last name.”

  “Josephine is my middle name.”

  “I know. Juliette told me.”

  Phoebe’s head snapped up and her eyes widened. “Juliette knows?” She tried to pull her hand from his grasp but he held on.

  “Juliette knows we met in that church, but she doesn’t know all the circumstances about why you were there. I didn’t tell her that.” She tugged on her hand again, but he still didn’t let her go. “Please don’t pull away from me, Phoebe. Hear me out, okay? They know I’m here tonight. I’m bending my rules to be here and I need the accountability. Who better to hold me accountable than a man who loves me like a brother and woman who loves you as her sister? They know you came to that church needing a shoulder, and they know that I chased you away with my condemnation. They are praying for us, maybe even now. They have been all week—I went to them Monday night.”

  “She’s known since Monday night?” Phoebe’s voice cracked. “And she didn’t say anything to me?”

  “You…haven’t made it easy for anyone to talk to you these last few days.” He said it gently, softly, not wanting her to
misunderstand and presume he was chastising her. “She was already worried something was wrong when you didn’t go to the hospital with the rest of us.”

  “You went to the hospital with the family? I thought you only met Renata at Juliette’s the other day.” She stared at him like he’d just grown gills.

  “Ricky and I had been invited to Sunday dinner at your grandparents. That was canceled, but Gia asked if we wanted to meet them at the hospital instead. So yes, we were there.” Then he added, “I had hoped you’d be there.”

  “So you’ve seen her?” He felt her hand tremble just the slightest bit in his.

  “I have.” He didn’t add that he’d held her and sung to her and fallen just a little in love with the baby girl.

  “Is she—is she—”

  “She’s perfect,” he assured her. “I think she has your eyes.”

  “That’s what Renata said.”

  He waited for a few minutes, letting her process the idea that Juliette knew what she did. He hadn’t meant to withhold the information.

  “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I interrupted you. What were you saying?”

  He squeezed her hand and went back to his story. “I kinda went off the deep end after that. I kept asking God to bring you back so I could make things right…for myself. So I could get back in with him. Regain my good standing, you know? But when things didn’t go the way I thought they should, I spiraled out of control.” He didn’t tell her everything—this wasn’t really about him, anyway—but enough so she’d understand that he hadn’t just skipped church a few times. He told her how the pastor had handled the mess, how he’d been challenged to get help and not go deeper inside himself, and he described the freedom he’d gained when he came clean with his weakness and addictions and presented himself to God as a broken man.

  “And when I asked God what to do about you, how I could fix that terrible wrong, he told me to let him handle it, and that my part was to pray. So I did.” He shook his head and chuckled as he thought back on all the years he’d prayed. “And let me tell you, woman, sometimes I’d be right in the middle of a conversation or in the thick of writing a song, or out riding, or sitting in church, and your name would pop into my head, interrupting whatever I was doing. I’d pray for you anyway. Countless times I’d wake up from a sound sleep with the urgent need to pray for you. So I’d grumble and complain a little, but then I’d pray for you.” He dipped his head, trying to get her to look at him. “Phoebe Josephine Gustafson, I have been praying for you, asking God to bring you back into my life, to give me a second chance with you since the day you left that church. My motives weren’t always pure, at least not at the beginning, but they changed as I did.” He reached over and took her other hand, folding both of hers inside his. “I have been praying for this moment for almost half my life, believing that it would happen. Maybe not in my timing, that’s for sure, but don’t you see?”

  She was staring at their clasped hands, her lower lip between her teeth.

  “You have been a part of my life all this time. This isn’t an accident or coincidence. He has been steering us to this time and place, chipping away the things in me that sent you running, turning me into that man I need to be so that I can sit here with you as the man you need me to be.”

  She lifted her eyes to his, startled, full of questions. He belatedly realized his statement had been a little more forthright than she was perhaps ready to hear. It didn’t matter, though. Whether they were destined to be lovers—please, God, please—or just friends, he wanted to be the man she needed him to be, the man God had made him to be. He couldn’t take back the words anyway, so he kept on, pouring as much conviction as he could into his voice without sounding like a freak. She probably already thought he was crazy anyway; hadn’t Juliette said as much earlier in the week? If Juliette thought he was, then certainly Phoebe did, too.

  “I believe he’s been working this whole time to bring us together. First introducing me to Gia, the last of your sisters I’d connect to you. She doesn’t look a thing like any of you, so even though her story should have made my antennas perk up, it didn’t. But her presence in my life had me praying for the Phoebe version of you—all along, I’ve been praying for the Jo version of you.” He laughed at how silly it sounded when he said it out loud, but in his heart, it was like he’d stumbled upon the exact combination needed to free them from their past. He could almost see the inner workings of a lock as the tumblers inside all shifted into alignment, each one a piece of the plan that God had put in motion all those years ago. “That opened the door for me to get to know Juliette and then to have my best friend—Vic is like a brother to me, Phoebe—”

  “You’ve said that many times,” she teased.

  “I have, haven’t I? But it’s true. And to see him with your sister? Talk about joie de vivre! He, too, has come alive. And with the two of them getting married, it was inevitable you and I were going to meet eventually.” He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. “Am I crazy? Are you seeing this, too? Or is it just me?” He looked at her again, willing her to agree.

  “It does seem pretty providential,” she said with great care.

  “You forgiving me, Phoebe, is a first step toward God, I know it is. The fact that you can see the difference in Juliette, and that it makes you consider, even for a moment, that God might be…an option? Another small step toward him. Trusting me in spite of everything I’ve done to you? Another one, because I’m here by his doing, by his plan. I’m still a broken man, Phoebe. Without God, I’m not trustworthy. Without God, I would have done more than bend my rules tonight. I wouldn’t even have them for starters, but even if I had, I would have taken you up on your offer to go upstairs with you, and I would have taken every advantage you would have allowed me.” Stop, man, before you go too far. “I have been waiting for you for all this time, and I know God has been too.” He squeezed her hands, imploring her with his eyes. “Maybe it’s time to trust him again. To give him the same chance you’re giving me. Maybe it’s time to say ‘yes’ to God, too, Phoebe.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  She wanted to say ‘yes.’ She wanted to give in to the pull his words, his conviction, his evidence stirred in her, but it was all so much so quickly. As Trevor pointed out how he believed God had steered and guided them and paved the way for them to meet again and clear out the ugliness between them, she, too, was looking back at her own life and seeing mile markers along the way to this day as well.

  The connections they shared were undeniable. She’d truly believed that day she’d stormed from the church that she’d never see the guy again, but over the last several years, he’d become friends with her sisters and would soon be practically family when Vic married Juliette. She pretty much had no choice but to forgive him—they’d be bound together by marriage, and Phoebe would do nothing to stand in the way of her sister’s happiness with Vic. But she wanted to forgive Trevor. She saw the change in him, saw that it was genuine, and saw that he, like Juliette, attributed it to God.

  She’d known all along that Gia believed in God and lived fully in that belief. She never shoved it down Phoebe’s throat—not the way Renata used to do all the time—nor did she ever come across as anything other than exactly who she was.

  And Phoebe knew that her parents—her beloved Maman and Papa—would give anything to know that she was committed to Christ. They, like Gia, had been devout believers with huge hearts.

  She saw the change in Renata, too, and although her sister hadn’t come right out and said so, the softer side of her had come out of her brokenness when she lost her husband. Renata had birthed four boys before Charise and would never have asked Phoebe to be there in John’s place for any of them. Yet, because of the changes in Renata, her heart had been softened toward Phoebe right before Charise was born, and Phoebe had been the sister Renata had called to share in the joy of the birth of her baby girl. That sounded suspiciously like the kind of thing God mig
ht orchestrate, according to Trevor’s logic.

  Trevor. He’d come back into her life at this moment when she so desperately needed someone to talk to, someone to pull her out of the pit of misery she was wallowing in. Of all people, she never would have chosen him, but he was the perfect person for the job, when all was said and done. He already knew what had happened in her life. He already knew the worst of her story—maybe not the tragic ending, but he already knew the tragic course she’d set on. And yet, here he was, sitting beside her, holding her hands, telling her that God had brought them together, that he had become the man she needed him to be, touching her the way she longed to be touched, with something more than lust or power or manipulation…with kindness instead, with tenderness, with love—

  She jerked her hands out of his grasp and stood so quickly she got a little lightheaded and had to brace herself on the armrest behind her.

  “Whoa. You okay?” Trevor asked, getting to his feet beside her. He reached for her but she dodged his touch and headed toward the table.

  “Yeah, I just need a drink. You want yours?” Her voice was too bright, too cheery. “Or maybe more coffee?” She hoped he’d choose coffee. Then she could escape for a minute to try to wrap her head around the insane thoughts spinning out of control in her mind.

  “Water is fine.” He followed close behind and she could hear the concern in his voice. She moved around to the far side of the table to keep it between them; she wouldn’t be able to think if he touched her again. She needed a break. She needed fresh air, or at least air that she wasn’t sharing with Trevor. She took a long swig of water, making a concerted effort to tamp down the panic rising up in her.

  “You know, Trevor, you’ve given me a lot to think about,” she began. “I’m glad we talked. Thank you.” She accidentally dropped the bottle cap and when he came around the table to pick it up for her, she practically leapt back so he wouldn’t brush against her. She tried not to even touch his fingers when she took the little white lid out of his, and she stopped looking at him when she saw the hurt in his eyes.