Lucas,
Hey, buddy. Your mom told me what’s going on in your family. I’m really sorry. My dad died when I was nine, and I remember how confused I felt and how I missed him. Things like this are hard. You already know hard; you don’t need more of it. But you’re one of the warriors, and I know you’ve got it in you to press on.
I hope this email gets to you and I hope to hear from you again whenever you’re ready to talk. You’re a supremely cool young man and I’m glad to have met you.
Keep reading and keep living strong.
Zac
One final thing to do. The dreaded thing.
Zac opened his main app and flinched. New questions about why the post about “Anders” had vanished.
He focused on what he needed to say. Some of these fans were thoughtless; some of them were dirt-grasping gossips. He envisioned the others, the ones Tiana had described. He envisioned her and Jayde and others whose days he had brightened without knowing it. He envisioned the kids watching his videos, the mortals with fragile hopes and fragile health whose needs were met by fund-raisers he could bring awareness to simply because he had the online followers and they did not. In this new world of thumbs up and thumbs down, those icons over a wireless connection could make or break one’s social life; and people put almost as much stock in this as the gladiators who had once awaited those same signals.
The digital world was a weird one, but Zac would use it for good as far as he was able. And that meant reforging trust where he had lost it.
He began to type. This would be too long for a simple post. He’d save it as an image and attach it.
To the fans:
A picture was taken of me a few days ago. Public place, glazed-eye face. Yep, that was me. Yep, I was a mess. No, I am not a drug user. But I know it’s not enough merely to deny. If it wasn’t drugs, what was it?
His mouth dried. He looked up at the ceiling.
“What if I let them think what they want and fade off the scene? Couldn’t I do that?”
It would be wrong. Maybe not wrong for someone else, but wrong for him. His visibility could still accomplish good for others. He wasn’t free to relinquish it yet.
He scrubbed at his face, pressed a hand to his ribs, and shifted on the couch. “Okay, Father. I’m Yours. Help me get this right.”
In that pic, I’m experiencing a panic attack. That’s all I’m going to say for now. This is personal stuff, you guys. If you’ve been through something like it, you know. But here’s the thing: it’s not something to hide. It’s something to go to your loved ones with and ask for help. I’ve had to do that this week. I wouldn’t have shared publicly if not for that pic, but, well, now you know.
And listen up: if you suffer from something like this, don’t suffer in the dark. Step into the light with that crap. Talk to somebody. Talk to a lot of somebodies, until you find the help you need. The talking sucks, especially at first, but if I’m worth it, so are you.
I’ll do a video soon. Still kind of raw over here, but getting better. It does get better when you step into the light.
Zac
He formatted it as a screenshot image. He attached it to a new post. His finger hovered over the POST button. He cleared his throat and fisted his hand.
“You really want me to do this?”
No voice, not even words the way he’d felt them recently, from scripture he’d known since he was truly young. But certainty. And a gentle push.
Zac posted it.
Then he logged off everything and put his phone away and settled in to wait. He lounged on the couch, half dozing. One day he wouldn’t be tired.
Finn arrived first, which wasn’t optimal. If Rachel had beat him there, she and Zac could have worked on her calm. But when Zac studied Finn, his focus was forced to widen. Finn’s T-shirt was rumpled, his jaw shadowed with black stubble, his eyes flat as ever but bearing deep creases around them. Zac led him to David’s living room and offered him a chair, but Finn walked the perimeter of the room. He stopped at the turtle’s habitat. She wasn’t visible at the moment, burrowed somewhere beneath the wood chips and peat moss.
“Box turtle,” Zac said.
“Huh.” Finn halted in front of the piano. “Are you sure Rachel’s coming?”
“She said she was.” He ought to offer something; David had coffee and probably wine. But Zac hadn’t asked and didn’t have the right to assume, especially not lately.
“You’ll leave when she gets here.” Finn’s flat stare expected cooperation.
“No.”
“This is private.”
“Rachel asked me to be here.”
“I’m asking you not to be.”
Zac tried to picture Rachel’s reaction to his disclosing something personal about her. He imagined her nodding permission. It would be the first thing she told Finn anyway; she couldn’t hide it.
“Rachel is afraid of people. Literally.”
Finn continued to stare at him. Skepticism? Hard to tell.
Zac spread his hands. “It’s real; I’ve seen it. And it’s compounded with you because of what she did to you.”
“She told you this.”
“She’s starting to trust me. I’m telling you, this is going to be hard on her, and she’s going to need a stabilizer in the room.”
“Guess it’s true I’m not much of a stabilizer.”
“Is this going to be a problem?”
“Guess I don’t have a choice.” Finn tugged the piano bench out a few feet and sat. If he made any explanation, Zac might consider his request. I’m here for peace, not war, or however Finn would say it. But he said nothing more.
A soft knock came at the front door. When Zac opened it, Rachel stood with her arms in an X, breathing long and deep through her nose.
“Hey, kiddo. You made it.”
“Don’t go anywhere.”
“Not a chance.” He ushered her inside and shut the door behind them. “Need anything?”
“To be somewhere else.”
“That’s an option, remember?”
“Yes. But no. Where is Finn?” Her gaze darted around the foyer and snagged on the doorway to the living room.
Zac nodded. “Right in there, when you’re ready.”
“Finn who I bereaved.”
She shuffled toward the living room, and Zac walked beside her. She froze at the threshold as Finn rose to his feet.
“Hello, Rachel.”
She took a side step closer to Zac and grasped his shirtsleeve. “Hello, Finn.”
Zac guided her to the sofa across from Finn then sat beside her. He wouldn’t speak unless they spoke to him. Not that Finn was likely to forget his presence as long as Rachel clung to him.
“I have things to say,” she said. “But you should speak first, since you requested the meeting.”
Finn nodded. “It’s not much. But it needs to be said face-to-face.”
“Thank you for seeing me. I—I know I don’t deserve it.”
“Well, that’s what I wanted to say.” Finn got up and walked the perimeter of the room as he spoke. “I’ve got experience with violence. A lot of it. Some of it I did, and some of it done to me.”
He looked across the room at Rachel. She was staring at him, and in a minute she’d tear a hole in Zac’s sleeve.
“You don’t talk much about forgiveness when you’re living the life I was. When we were young, you know.” He cleared his throat. “But I needed it bad. And I needed to give some too. And not either one of them things happened. Then the folks were all aged dead and gone, and me still this young self here that you see.”
Words unleashed, as they’d been on the drive from the St. Louis airport. His accent hadn’t changed, but the rhythm of his speech called up old days, old regions no longer existing though the geography was the same.
“Sean and Holly and me, we fell out. Don’t matter why, but it was bitter. Thought I had time to settle with them. Thought I had another hundred years if I wanted
to drag it out.”
“Oh,” Rachel whispered.
He held up an open hand. “What I’m saying, roundabout—I know you were trying to cure yourself. I know Zac here stopped you.”
She nodded.
“I’m grateful he did. I’m grateful not to number you among the departed, Rachel. It wasn’t your time, I don’t believe.”
Her hands began to shake, jarring Zac’s wrist as she held on.
“It breaks me down that they’re gone, that I can’t make things right with Holly and Sean. That I can’t see my good old ones James and Anna, not anymore.”
Rachel’s lips were pressed hard together, but a faint moan slipped past.
Finn raised his hand again. “I’ve got to say all of it, and then I’ll go. Part of me wants to let it eat me up, thinks that would be justice somehow. Never seeing you nor speaking to you. But I can’t take more of that. And you don’t deserve it.”
“I … don’t?”
“They knew what could happen, and the risk was worth it to them, and so we lost them. And wasn’t none of that on you.”
Rachel hunched forward on the couch.
Finn crossed the room and came to crouch in front of her, hands dangling between his knees, the classic pose of the cowboy before the cook fire. “That’s what I had to say. Now if you’ve got anything, I’ll hear it.”
“Forgive me?” she said.
He frowned, gave a short nod.
“That’s—that’s all I had to say.” Her free hand clasped Zac’s sleeve too, both now clutching side by side. “I’m so sorry. I beg your forgiveness.”
“You can stop begging. I forgive you.”
“I’m so sorry, Finn.”
“I don’t see much in people, but I see that.”
“Cady?”
He stood. “I don’t speak for Cady. I told her I was coming here. That’s all I’ll say.”
“I understand,” Rachel whispered.
For the first time, Finn looked to Zac. “We’ll leave in the morning, I guess.”
Zac nodded.
“Now I’ve got to go.” He strode for the front door.
Zac set his hand over both of Rachel’s and nudged. “Let go, kiddo. I want to see him out.”
But her fingers seemed to be spasming around his shirt. She whimpered when he pried them loose.
“Hey, I’ll just be out on the porch.”
“I’m cold, Zac. I’m a deep freeze.”
And no jar of seashells in the room. Zac looked around and brought her a striped throw pillow. “Count the stripes until I come back. Sound like a plan?”
“Y–yes.”
Finn was halfway down the porch steps when Zac burst through the doorway. “Finn.”
He turned back, his face as flat as always.
“Stay in touch.”
“I will. Won’t speak for Cady.”
“She can take all the time she needs. We’re not getting any older.”
A quick squint, a turning up of his mouth that held nothing pleasant. “But sometimes we do.”
He turned and jogged down the steps and out to his car. Something had surfaced in him in those last seconds, something of who he had been the first time Zac saw him, under a parking lot floodlight with a gun in his hand aimed at Zac and David. The Finn Zac had just glimpsed was the one who had pulled the trigger and left David with a scar along his temple. Maybe it was the head injury, as Zac had thought before. Or maybe it was a past of bitterness and violence, chasing Finn’s heels like baying hounds. Running him down.
Zac shut the door and returned to the living room. Rachel held the pillow on her lap, her finger touching each stripe.
“Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.”
Zac sat beside her. “Hey.”
“I thought it would be a relief.”
“Well, let’s give you a minute.”
“Zac, do you know what’s wrong with me?”
He couldn’t tell if the question was rhetorical or not. “You’re afraid.”
“Look at me. This isn’t normal, and I know that, and I can’t make it stop.”
“You came here and talked to Finn. That’s a step.”
In a few minutes her shaking lessened. She squeezed the pillow and then set it aside. “I need to drive some more. I didn’t get far.”
“And you’re okay to do that?”
“It’ll help. I’ll stay in touch and come back by tonight. I’ll park Stormie somewhere out of the way and sleep in my own home. You can have your apartment back.”
“Sounds good.”
Not entirely to himself as long as Simon deemed the couch his designated spot. But maybe Zac didn’t mind that after all.
THIRTY-NINE
Rachel left, and Zac sat alone in David’s house, loath to leave. Hard things happened here, yet safety enwrapped him. Companionship lived here, and the behemoth did not. He padded into the kitchen, looked around without knowing what he sought, and returned to the living room empty-handed, restless. In the turtle habitat, a hollow half log rocked and bumped a glass wall. A head with cunning reptile eyes emerged from hiding and stared at Zac. The rest of the turtle remained in her burrow.
“I think I’ve got it figured out,” Zac said, and she stretched her neck to watch him sink down on the couch again. “He chose an introvert pet.”
She blinked at him. A definite confirmation.
To his right stood a coffee table stacked with books. Zac lifted the whole pile, tugged it into his lap, and set them aside one by one. The complete poetry of Frost. A Western novel, of course. A young adult fairy tale retelling Zac had heard Tiana recommend. Ah, love. Here was a biography of T. E. Lawrence, and beneath it an antique clothbound edition of George MacDonald’s A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul. Zac turned its pages with care. Penciled words nearly crowded MacDonald’s poems off the pages. He shut the book before he could trespass on it further. When he set it aside, the final volume in the stack rested alone on his knees.
A Bible.
Well, of course.
He hadn’t touched the Word of God in one hundred years. He reached out slowly, pressed his palm to the leather cover, let his thumb caress the spine.
“I guess You planned this too.” His throat tightened. “What am I talking about, like there’s anything You haven’t planned.”
He opened the cover. The binding had been reinforced too many times to count. A line of glue, aged brown tape, another line of glue, all beneath several layers of clear packing tape. He chuckled. David wasn’t trying to keep the book pristine, merely functional. Zac turned a page to the family blanks. Ah, this was old indeed. Faded calligraphy: Weddings: John and Sarah Russell, July 13, 1870. On the next page: Births: Michael John Russell, February 6, 1872. Kathleen May Russell, January 21, 1875. Other births a generation later, David’s grandchildren. A few great-grandchildren too, judging by dates. And then their deaths. Each and every death was recorded, and drops of moisture had blotted this page several times. Zac set his palm on the account of his friend’s loved ones, on the imprint of his friend’s tears. Then he turned more pages.
Genesis. In the beginning. Formless and void. And God said …
“Let there be light,” Zac whispered.
He drew up his knees and cradled the book in both hands and began to read. Words that lived in him though he had not read or uttered them since the Great War. He breathed deeper when he read of God breathing life into Adam. He touched the pages again and again, his fingers running along the words, stuffing himself with every line, a starved beggar at last willing to taste the feast.
“Order and beauty from chaos and nothingness.” He bowed his head over the book. “Oh Father, do that with me, will You, please?”
He kept reading. He marveled. When he reached Exodus, he closed the book and pressed it to his chest.
“Thanks, Father.”
He set the book on the table, stacked the others beside it. He would read Exodus tomorrow. His body drooped.
He stretched out on David’s couch and shut his eyes. A minute of rest. No more.
He woke with a start and found a clock. It was an antique, its pendulum ticking away seconds in a way that made him too aware of them. David, on the other hand, chose to live with that ticking despite the digital options everywhere.
Five after six. The bookstore was closed. Shoot. He got up and hustled for his car, locking the door behind him. David and Tiana would still be there, closing out the register, straightening the shop for tomorrow. He selfishly hoped they had no plans tonight.
First he stopped at the bakery. In minutes he had bought a few end-of-the-day specials from Connie and headed for Galloway’s. The bookstore was lit when he arrived, but the door was locked. He knocked and showed his face in the window, and Tiana spotted him and hurried over.
The door opened on her smile. “Well, hello again.”
“Hey.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looked past her into the store, tried to see if he was interrupting. “I, um—well, last week before the chaos set in, David asked me for help with a project. Blind Date with a Book?”
She motioned him inside while he was still rambling. “And you’re here to lend your hands?”
“If you’re not otherwise busy.”
“No way. I’ve got hummus and chips. Let’s party.”
“Party? With hummus?”
“Well, we’ll have to keep refreshments away from the books.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He held up the brown paper bakery bag. “Anyway, I brought the real food.”
She snatched it from him and peeked inside. She nudged items aside and listed them as she went, as if he didn’t know what he’d bought. “Mm, lemon zest scone—for me, of course. Pecan cinnamon braid—for David, of course. And three cookies—all for you?”
“That’s the goal.”
She laughed. “Too much of a good thing?”
“A myth in this case.”
She kept the bag, swung it at her side, and tugged his arm. “I’ve set aside the books I want. Come on.” Her voice rose in a singsong. “Oh David! Look who’s come to wrap books!”
From Sky to Sky Page 31