The Dark Heart

by Julie Cave

  Fresh from a long, hot shower, he took a deep breath and went downstairs to where Louise was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of coffee. She was staring at a fixed spot, her eyes unblinking and unseeing.

  “Good morning,” he said, quietly.

  She nodded, stood up, and turned away from him, wiping down a spotlessly clean counter.

  “Louise —” he began.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m not being fair to you. Our children are going to need us more than ever, and they need us to be together.”

  What scared him most was the emptiness in her voice.

  “Angus, I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking a lot, because I can’t sleep and I can’t eat. I’m worried that we could so easily lose our daughter. I’ve been thinking about our family, how important we have always been to each other. I built my life with you, but it was on a lie. I didn’t even know your real name. I don’t know who I am or who we are. And I am so, so incredibly furious with you that it takes all my strength not to hate you.”

  She fell silent, an excruciating stillness.

  “But I am a Christian,” she finally said. “And when Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive a man who wronged him, Jesus told him seventy times seven. Right? In other words, we are to endlessly forgive, just as God endlessly forgives us. We are to show love, just as God loved us while we still hated Him, to the point of sacrificing his own Son.”

  She finally turned to look her husband in the eye.

  “God knows that I can’t do it on my own strength. I’m so angry, so disappointed, so utterly destroyed by what you’ve done. Yet I will forgive you, with the strength of Jesus, I will forgive you. I can’t promise that it’ll be easy. But I have decided that I will obey.”

  She laughed softly, the whimpering sound of a wounded animal. “You know, on those talk shows when they talk about forgiveness, they tell you to just do it, as though it’s easy. They don’t tell you that forgiveness requires utter sacrifice, the loss of the anger and resentment and bitterness that fuels you. It leaves you empty, searching for some other way of trying to exist. They don’t tell you that it’s not just a one-time decision, but that it’s a series of small decisions made every day — decisions not to hold a grudge, not to remember the past, not to allow anger to creep up. It’s not a wash of warm and fuzzy feelings that conveniently wipes out all the wrong. It’s the decision and determination to choose love despite the hurt.”

  Louise turned to face him. All that he had done to her was written on her face.

  “I will stand by you. I will not leave. And although it’ll take every ounce of strength I have, I promise you that I will forgive you and love you. Until death do us part.”

  The prison that had constricted his dark heart for so many years began to crumble; long-held secrets could no longer be kept, and truth had given wings to a bright, fresh future. Hope spread tiny wings in his heart as he went to his wife, and gently took her in his arms.

  “Thank you,” he whispered into her hair.

  TWO YEARS LATER

  She was a small and lonely figure, cutting through the section of the cemetery where the imposing marble headstones stood taller than she. In one hand, she gripped a fistful of flowers, in the other, a single white piece of paper. When she arrived at Chloe’s grave, Grace Whitehall knelt beside it and laid the flowers down gently.

  She closed her eyes briefly and then she laid the piece of paper underneath the flowers. It would not stay there long, she knew. The flowers would die, the paper would flutter away on the next strong breeze. She put her hand on the gravestone and whispered to herself. Nobody could hear her, but the words she spoke were a kind of therapy. They helped her work through the guilt and sorrow, which lay heavy on her heart for many months after Chloe’s death. Now it was a habit, a way of honoring the memory of her friend.

  Dear Chloe:

  Nearly two years, and I’m still sitting here at your grave, talking to you like you can hear me. I still find it so hard to believe that you’ve gone. At first I was really angry with you, furious that you could be so selfish. Sometimes I felt like standing over this grave and just pummeling into the earth to try to hurt you.

  Then, as time passed, I realized that I’d already hurt you in so many ways. Suddenly, I’m no longer angry with you but disgusted with myself. I am sorry that I let you down so badly. I’m sorry that I turned my back on you and didn’t stand up for you when I should have. To think that I blamed you for your mom just doing her job burns me now. I don’t know how many ways there can be to say it, but I am just so sorry.

  Did you know that I flunked out of school last year? I made straight F’s, for the first time in my life. But how could I go to that school and study and concentrate when I saw you everywhere? I saw you at your locker, your hair a crazy green stripe. I saw you in the cafeteria, saving a seat for me. I saw you passing me notes in English class.

  Mom finally pulled me out of school, and gave me a few months off. Now Mom is homeschooling me, and will until I go to college. I can’t do school anymore, Chloe. It’s not the same without you, and believe me, I get that you’re not there because of me.

  Right after you died, Mom caught me trying to take her codeine pills. I told her I had a headache, but the truth was, I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. I know that I wasn’t thinking clearly. What I was feeling was . . . too immense, too big, to even think about. I wanted the pain to go away.

  I hear that your Mom and Dad moved away. I didn’t get a chance to talk to them before they left, but I hope and pray that they’re doing okay.

  My Mom and Dad didn’t do so well after you died. Mom cried a lot for a little while. Dad had to spend a lot of time with the police, but you know what? Despite everything, he was different. Mom and Dad spent lots of time together; they talked until really late at night for a long time. I guess he was worried he’d have to go to jail, but I think he worked out a deal where he didn’t get to keep the money he stole and got a suspended sentence, or something like that. I remember Dad always being a little distant, a little closed off from us until this whole thing blew up. Now it’s like a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. The truth shall set you free — and so it seems.

  He resigned his position as Senior Pastor at the church, even though they didn’t ask for it. He has started up a ministry for perpetrators and victims of violence. He’s making, like, zero money and I don’t know how I’ll be able to go to college, but I guess that’s a problem we’ll work out some other day.

  It’s very weird to think that my own father had once been so violent that he beat people unconscious. I mean, can you ever really wrap your mind around that? When he catches me staring at him, he tells me the story of the murderer Saul, who met Jesus on the road to Damascus, and became radically changed into the Apostle Paul. That is also his story, he tells me. He was once Saul, and now he is trying to be more like Paul.

  Did I ever tell you that Jessica was expelled from school?

  You want to know something funny? Not funny ha-ha, funny peculiar. Jessica is being homeschooled as well, and now I see her quite often. I’ve gotten to know her, and now I understand some things. Like, her dad would hit her if she made a bad grade. And that he used to call her all kinds of awful names. She was a bully because she was scared, Chloe. And I get that because that’s exactly what Dad told me, too. He was a racist, violent bully because he was scared. He told me that he didn’t like being scared, so he became angry instead. That’s what happened with Jessica, too. Dad says that without an anchor, like Jesus, we try to manage our fear and pain ourselves. For some people, like Dad and Jessica, it’s anger and lashing out at other people. For others, like you and that poor heroin addict who was killed, it becomes self-destruction or self-harm or addiction. We live in such a broken world, and we are all such broken people. Only Jesus provides us with a way out of our own mess.

  Together, Dad and I worked through what it means to forgive, and why it was important fo
r me to forgive Jessica. And it took some time, but I have.

  Now I feel like I need to speak up. I need to tell your story and honor your memory, and include Jessica’s story so that this tragedy stops happening. Next week I’ve been asked to talk to the high school in Suffolk. I’m going to tell everyone how awesome you were, and how your death has changed all of us. I’m going to tell Jessica’s story, too. I’m going to tell them that anger and violence and cruelty destroys everyone. I’m going to tell the story of compassion and kindness, of love and forgiveness. It’s the story of Jesus. I hope that even just one person will take notice.

  You know, I really miss being able to pick up the phone and just talk to you. I miss you and your smile; wishing you could be here. I got a gold chain, like the one you used to wear — the one you left at my house right before you died. I put a gold C on it, and I wear it every single day. It reminds me of you, and you never feel far away.

  Oh, Chloe, how I wish I could turn back time and change everything. I wish I could change what I did. Every part of me groans with your absence.

  I miss you.

  Goodbye, dear friend.

  ****

  In coastal Maine in November, the sky was clear and cold, temperatures plummeting. The cruise ships had left the terminal, and the summer tourists had packed up and left. The locals began to bunker down. The days grew shorter and darker, and all that was left to do was to watch huge winter storms roll in from the Atlantic.

  Elise Jones woke at 5 a.m., as was her new custom. In the cold darkness, she sat in the small kitchen of the apartment overlooking the sea. The water lay beyond her window, but it was impossible to see so early in the morning. She wrapped her hands around a steaming hot cup of coffee and reflected that living in an apartment in Bar Harbor, Maine, was the not the life she’d imagined for herself.

  She finished her coffee and pulled on a sweatshirt. Outside, the air was bracing. She inhaled, enjoying the cold searing of her lungs, and she began to jog, just as she did every morning.

  Two years ago, she’d had a frenetic life, working in the sheriff’s department at all hours, taking care of her daughter and rushing through life with her husband. Now, her days were ordered almost to military precision. It had to be that way: it was the only way she could keep from succumbing to the chaos that knocked on her door relentlessly. She wrote lists every day, reminding her that she had to eat breakfast, that she had to pay bills, that she had to go to work. If she didn’t write her lists, she forgot. Life was impossibly hard.

  The town was deserted, but starkly beautiful, lit up with the soft gray of an impending sunrise. Elise finished her jog, had a shower, and ate a tub of yogurt for breakfast.

  She remembered once being a little self-conscious about her weight. Despite the cultural obsession with being thin, the nickname Bonesy Jonesy had never been a term of endearment. If they could see her now, even the moniker Bonesy wouldn’t do her justice. Now, she found it hard to eat. The Profound Loss Diet, she thought wryly, could make me a fortune.

  Once she was dressed for work, she locked the front door and began to walk toward the small family law practice where she now worked as a part-time investigator, an office so small she had to type her own letters and fetch her own mail. It suited her just fine.

  She made a short stop on the way to work every morning. Just as the sun began its ascent into the sky, casting pale, golden light to dance on the water, Elise ducked through the solid wooden doors of St John’s Presbyterian Church.

  She always went to the first row and knelt on thin carpet to pray. The first few weeks after she’d moved from Ten Mile Hollow, she’d walked past this church and glared at it. It reminded her of Pastor Angus Whitehall, of his lies and the hypocrisy of a double life, and of the person she’d blamed for Chloe’s death: Grace Whitehall.

  If they were the kind of people who were churchgoers, she swore she never would be. She remembered being inside her Ten Mile Hollow home after Chloe’s funeral, her shock so enormous it blotted out the sun. She wandered around that house, bitterly recalling that when it was bought, she’d had both a husband and a daughter. Now the house was intolerably empty. Memories stretched like cobwebs across doorways and hallways and rooms; sometimes she walked right into them unawares and jumped with the visceral fear of having had a spider leap down upon her.

  It hadn’t taken long to realize that she couldn’t stay there. She couldn’t face the emptiness of Chloe’s room, the echoing guilt that lay in wait for her around every corner, or the quiet desperation of the master bedroom.

  Some days her phone had rung constantly, and she’d pick up the receiver and listen to whoever was on the other end. It seemed they had been speaking a different language. She’d listen in confusion for a few minutes and then gently hang up mid-speech.

  Eventually, her phone stopped ringing. She had discovered that grief was too large, too raw, too personal for others to grasp, and when the pleasantries stopped and the awkward silences stretched on, people began to forget about her and go on with their lives.

  Unable to restart their own lives, Elise and Lewis left for the eastern coast of Maine. She had not spoken to Angus or Louise since that awful day at the hospital, despite the messages they’d left on her machine.

  For some reason, the small church on her way to work loomed large in her mind every time she walked past. Sometimes it seemed sinister and shadowy; at other times it seemed bright and welcoming. All the time, Elise knew it was crazy to be thinking so much about it all.

  Finally, she relented and entered the church one bleak fall day. Inside, it was peaceful and silent, and Elise sat on a bench and rather enjoyed the meditative atmosphere. When she emerged, she felt calmer and more composed, and so she began to do it every day. It’s just a building, she told herself. It calms me down. It doesn’t mean that I must associate with hypocritical Christians.

  Above the altar of the church hung a big wooden cross. Elise found herself staring at it each morning, taking in each detail intently. She realized that despite having been vaguely friendly with Angus and his family for ten years, she’d never really understood why Christians worshiped a man who had died upon a cross.

  One summer’s day, she caught herself talking to God as she sat inside the church.

  Where exactly are You? Do You know who I am? Do You know about my life? Do You even care?

  Well, she figured, she was inside a church. It was almost expected that people talk to God there. So she continued talking to God, telling Him about her life; the guilt, anger, and grief that consumed her heart in every moment, both waking and sleeping. She told Him about Chloe, about the waste of her life and how desperately she would give anything, including her own life, if only to give Chloe another chance. She told Him about the hatred she harbored for the Whitehall family, and how it felt like it was eating her from the inside out.

  At the end of each talk, her eyes would inevitably drift back to the cross and she’d stare at it for several moments before leaving.

  On the first anniversary of Chloe’s death, Elise took the day off work and somehow found herself inside the church anyway. It was a difficult day, and she woke up after a patchy sleep, nightmares plaguing her. She was desperately sad and lonely, and on that particular day, she’d thrown her head back and silently yelled toward the sky: “Do You even care, God? Do You care? If You care, show me. I’m sick of this one-sided conversation!”

  “ ‘You have sorrow now, but I will see you again; then you will rejoice, and no one can rob you of that joy.’ ”

  The voice, ethereal and mesmerizing, floated to her as if she were dreaming. But the person who’d spoken them was real, and she was about Elise’s age, reading from the Bible.

  “I hope I didn’t startle you,” she said, gently. “But I often read aloud to myself while I’m in here. I didn’t see you in here until I saw you move, and now I believe God wanted to tell you something.”

  Her name was Tara, and she often visited the church in the
early morning, spending the quiet, still part of the day in prayer or reading the Bible. Today, she said, was no different except that she’d had an audience.

  Elise had just experienced the full and relentless love of God, and it pierced the brittle shell surrounding her heart like an arrow into water.

  Now, every morning, she came to the church to celebrate her salvation, her new identity in Jesus.

  Father in heaven, how grateful I am that You loved me first, even while I was mired in hatred and sin. Thank You for showing me that, as great as You are, that You care for even the smallest, most lost person. Thank You that before I even knew what love was, You sacrificed Your perfect and blameless Son upon the Cross; that He bore the punishment for which I was due, so that I can call You Father. Thank You for Your love, so rich, so rewarding, so thoroughly undeserved. Thank You that in my utter weakness and helplessness, you are my strength and joy.

  She stood, looking at the cross, before turning to walk back down the aisle. Then her face broke into a wide smile. Lewis had let himself into the church and in one hand, he carried his own copy of the Bible.

  “Let me walk with you to work,” he whispered, in that still sanctuary of God. “Shall we brave the weather and go out for dinner tonight?”

  Lewis, my heart, my life, my love, my strength.

  Elise took his hand and smiled. “Yes. I’d like that very much.”

  Julie has always been an avid reader, beginning with the adventure stories of Enid Blyton and the fantasy stories of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. In her teen years she gravitated toward mystery and thriller books, including the original Goosebumps series. During this time, she experimented with writing, penning her first novel-length story about kidnapping and teenage angst at the age of 12. She practiced her craft throughout high school, writing three novel-length stories, and then her writing took a back seat to university studies, marriage, and family. She returned to writing as an adult and a Christian, determined to combine her passion for writing with her faith. The result is the Dinah Harris Mystery Series, with Deadly Disclosures published in 2010, followed by The Shadowed Mind in 2011, and Pieces of Light in 2012. The fourth novel in the series is The Dark Heart. In between writing murder mysteries and reading the latest from John Grisham, Julie is a wife, mother to two daughters, the operator of a digital marketing and communications business, and resident on a Black Angus and Wagyu cattle property in Australia.