This Side of Salvation

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  Ouch. Shut down. “Well, have fun.”

  Inside, Mom was gulping coffee and making her usual hurried breakfast of peanut butter sandwiched between two granola bars. “Hi, honey. How was your run?”

  “Fine.” My nose was running from the cold air, but I didn’t want to wipe it on my sleeve in front of Mom. “What’s the deal with Dad?”

  “Fishing trip in the mountains.”

  We’d never fished this late in the year when I was a kid. It was probably deer season now, but my father hated guns almost as much as I did. “When’s he coming back?” I asked her, scanning the counter for tissues.

  “In a few days.”

  “How many is a few?”

  “A few is however many he needs to relax.” She bit into the granola-bar-peanut-butter sandwich, sending a cascade of crumbs down the front of her navy-blue suit. “You know your father.”

  No, Mom, I don’t know him at all, I thought as I blew my nose with a paper towel. Do you?

  • • •

  Dad didn’t come back for a week. Mom acted like it was no big deal, but she checked her cell phone obsessively and never let it out of her sight. She even took it into the bathroom with her.

  One night as we watched TV in the basement family room, pretending we weren’t waiting for him, the garage door opened. Mom jumped up from her armchair, then collected herself, smoothing her ash-blond hair and straightening the sleeves of her robe before walking calmly upstairs.

  I paused the TV and looked at Mara at the other end of the sofa. “Should we go see him?”

  “And do what?” She kept her eyes on her book. My sister could somehow read with the TV on and follow both storylines. “Throw him a homecoming parade?”

  Footsteps clomped on the floor above. When we were little kids, Mara and I would dash from the farthest corners of the house the moment Dad’s car pulled into the driveway, racing to be the first to hug him. Sometimes John would intercept me or Mara, then carry us football-style, dangling upside down under his arm, flailing and laughing. It wasn’t always an advantage, since John would run in slow-motion, spinning around and elbowing invisible linebackers to increase the drama.

  I watched the ceiling, tracing the path of my father’s footsteps as he crossed the floor to the coat closet, then the foot of the stairs. Would he go up to change and sleep or come down to see us? Did he wonder why we didn’t run to greet him anymore? Did he assume we were just too old?

  Stairs creaked, but not the ones that led to us—the ones that led away from us. I hit play on the DVR, to kill the silence.

  • • •

  I wouldn’t let the weirdness of my home life touch my hours with Bailey. When I was with her, the Rush seemed a lifetime away.

  We spent tons of time together, considering my parents wouldn’t let us go on one-on-one dates yet. I joined Bailey’s volunteer work with the parks department, fixing signs and picking up trash, which meant lots of walking and talking. Plus, we made the most of the moments we stole alone together in the woods.

  In return, Bailey helped out at my church’s soup kitchen, where I’d continued to work after finishing my community service. I hardly saw her while we were there, though: She was put out front to pour lemonade and iced tea, due to her radiant smile, while I was forever relegated to the kitchen, washing dishes and stacking boxes of nonperishables. Stony Hill forgives, but they never forget.

  I was cleaning pots and pans in the kitchen one day, totally immersed in the music I was listening to, when someone grabbed my waist. I jumped half a foot in the air, sending the hot-water spray all over my own chest.

  “Oops!” Bailey stood beside me, half-horrified and half-amused. Or maybe 90 percent amused. Emilio, one of the cooks, laughed and wagged his finger at us from across the room.

  I turned off the water and took out an earbud.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize you couldn’t hear me come up behind you.”

  “It’s okay.” I lifted my arms, opening myself to further attack. “Do it again, if you don’t believe me.”

  She grinned and put her hands back on my waist, one on either side. I kissed her, glad my face was already red from the steaming sink.

  “Get a room!” Francis dumped a plastic tub of dishes on the stainless steel counter beside me. “Or better yet, make yourself useful. Bailey, you can’t be in the kitchen without a hairnet.” He stalked away, wiping his hands on his apron.

  “That boy.” Bailey tilted her head back in exasperation. “He’s put in charge of one measly shift and he thinks he’s God.” She pushed the tub closer to my sink and handed me a plate to rinse. “You’ve been volunteering a lot longer than Francis. How come you’re still stuck in the kitchen?”

  “I guess I’m just a humble sinner paying my dues.” I tried to give her a flirtatious smirk and in the process accidentally sprayed her arm instead of the plate. “See? I’m not quite purified yet.” I rinsed the dish, then set it in the mint-green rubber wash rack.

  “You won’t get any purer by hanging out with me.” She handed me an empty coffee mug, brushing my fingers in the exchange.

  “Is that a promise?”

  “Bailey, I’m serious!” Francis called from the swinging door to the kitchen. “Hairnet or get out.” He retreated into the cafeteria again.

  “I’m not even near the food. Jesus.” She covered her mouth and looked at me, then Emilio, though he probably couldn’t hear her over the stove’s exhaust fan. “Sorry, you guys don’t like when people say, ‘Jesus,’ right? That’s hard to get used to. But I’m trying, swear! Wait—is it okay if I swear?”

  “It’s not a big deal.” Taking the Lord’s name in vain was a big deal, but something about Bailey made me question the edicts I’d followed so closely these last two years. Pastor Ed would probably say she was a temptation testing my spiritual strength. If she was a test, she was like the exams that make you realize you know more than you thought you did, but which also teach you something new.

  “I’d better go.” She grabbed the empty tub. “See you at the end of the shift!”

  I watched her stride toward the kitchen door, then stop to read one of the notices on the bulletin board. Her hand came up to rest on her hip in a defiant posture.

  “Earth to David.” Emilio spoke over my shoulder. He held an empty soup pot in his hands, waiting for me to get out of the way so he could put it in the sink. “Very hot.”

  “Okay, thanks.” I put my earbud back in and started rinsing the pot’s interior, thinking how his last two words could apply to Bailey as well as the cookware.

  My latex gloves couldn’t fend off the metal’s heat, so I turned to the prep counter behind me to find a dry towel or pot holder.

  From there I could see Bailey yelling at Francis and gesturing to the bulletin board. Based on his slumped shoulders and downcast eyes, I could tell she’d been doing it for a while. Then she shoved her way through the swinging door—the left-side one, which is supposed to be for entering only—and disappeared into the cafeteria.

  Francis brought over another tub, this one containing dirty plastic glasses. “She’s cute and all, but you are welcome to her.” He set down the tub and slapped my shoulder, a tad heavier than a friendly pat.

  “What was that all about?”

  “She saw that flyer for the intelligent-design seminar Stony Hill is holding. Here, help me unload this, I need the tub back. Are you going to that talk, by the way? It’s for teens and up.”

  “Nah.” I’d avoided science controversies since my mom gave me an F on my global-warming paper when I was fourteen. She wrote “LIES!” across the cover sheet in red pen. I could tell she hadn’t read past the first page, because there were unmarked typos throughout the paper. “What’d Bailey say about it?”

  “She started freaking out, saying we idiotic creationists had our heads up our butts—only she didn’t say ‘butts’—and needed to get out of the Dark Ages. Also, we’re destroying America with our stupidity.” />
  “She called you stupid? That’s not like her.” Even though you are kind of stupid, I thought, which was pretty un-Christian of me.

  “I know, right? Usually she’s all love and flowers and hippie-dippie sunshine face, but she was pissed. You’d think Darwin was her daddy.” He picked up the last four cups by their rims and plunged them into the dirty soup pot. “She asked me if I believed humans used to live among dinosaurs, like in The Flintstones.”

  I knew at least a handful of Stony Hill members who did believe that. “What’d you say?”

  “I would’ve said no if she’d let me talk, but she just kept ranting. Can I use this?” He snatched the clean towel out of my hand and used it to dry the inside of his tub. “Hey, I have an extra ticket to Tree of Life. You know anyone who might want to go?”

  I thought of Bailey. “Yeah, but I don’t know if—” I hated admitting I couldn’t afford stuff anymore. In the month since my birthday, Mom and Dad had tightened the purse strings to a stranglehold. “How much is the ticket?”

  Francis shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. My treat.”

  “Really?”

  “My mom was out of work for a year. I know what it’s like.” He kept his eyes on the tub as he finished drying it. “Living on the Main Line, where every other kid can buy whatever the heck they want? It sucks. But then I remind myself it could be worse. I could be eating here.”

  True. Working at the soup kitchen did put my lack of Madden NFL in perspective. “Thanks, man. Is it okay if I bring Bailey?”

  “Sure!” Francis called back as he walked away. “If she can stand to hang out with a bunch of Jesus freaks like us.”

  I turned back to the sink and fished out the cups Francis had dropped into the soup pot and therefore gotten twice as dirty. Lining up the glasses in the wash rack, I pondered how to make a Christian rock concert sound appealing to Bailey.

  Maybe by this point, all she needed to know was that I would be there. Her presence was all I required to make me happy at any time or place. And the way my family’s future was looking, I needed to grab all the here-and-now happiness I could find.

  CHAPTER 15

  NOW

  This is a joke, right?” Bailey stares down at the pajamas and nightgown in my parents’ bed.

  “If it is, we’re not in on it.” That sense of distance creeps over me again, the one I felt when I first saw these remnants of my mom and dad. Like I’m watching myself on a TV sitcom, one of the smart ones with no laugh track or studio audience to tell you when the jokes are funny.

  In Dad’s office, Mara and Kane are sitting on the floor in front of the small bookshelf. A precarious stack of religious texts sits between them.

  “Anything yet?” I ask Mara as Bailey and I enter.

  “Nope, but we’re only halfway through.” She fans the pages of the book in her lap. “Hopefully there’ll be a note or a map or a picture in one of these. Bailey, can you check his computer? You’re good at that stuff. David, go through the crap in the closet. I think it’s mostly family pictures.”

  I open the folding closet door and survey the stacks of boxes. The one with the mementos of John is now among them, no longer on the office floor where I found it months ago.

  The top box has a “D” written on it in thick black marker. I doubt that a box of my childhood memories will contain anything of use, but I pull it down from the stack and set it on the floor, curious to see what Dad kept of me.

  Just like John’s box, mine contains elementary school assignments, drawings, team pictures of every year of baseball, from T-ball on up. I’m surprised to find a folder with articles clipped from last year’s Suburban and Wayne Times, summaries of every Tigers game I played. At the time, I thought Dad had stopped caring.

  “I’m not exactly an expert,” Bailey says from her seat at the computer, “but it looks like yesterday he went to a lot of trouble to clean out his in-box and clear his cache.”

  “Try his web browser’s bookmarks.” Kane drops another book on his stack. “He might’ve missed it, because they’re in a separate file, not in the cache.”

  “Good idea.” Bailey makes a few clicks. “Lots of Bible reference sites. Oh, wow, he’s got a separate bookmark for each topic like, ‘Weather,’ ‘Sports,’ and ‘Food.’ ”

  “Quotes for all occasions,” Mara mutters. “I guess it’s like marking favorite pages in a foreign-language phrase book.”

  Bailey breathes a compassionate sigh. “He’s got separate bookmarks for you and David.”

  “Great.” I flip faster through a collection of my old team photos. “To him, we’re just another topic of conversation.”

  We keep working, quiet but for the shuffle of paper and Mara’s sniffles. Kane gets bored with the books and switches to the file cabinet.

  Suddenly Bailey jumps up from the chair and hurries out the door. She returns in a few seconds with my father’s Bible.

  “When we were in the bedroom, I noticed he left this on the nightstand with bookmarks in it.” Standing in the middle of the room, she opens the Bible to one of the marked pages. “Jonah. Isn’t that the guy who was eaten by a whale?”

  “Ooh!” Kane rattles the handle of the top file drawer. “If it’s a clue, maybe they went somewhere with whale watching.”

  I go over to join Bailey. “That seems too literal.”

  “Have you met our father?” Mara says. “He took the Bible literally.”

  “He believed in the Bible literally, but he used its words to talk about sports and the weather.” I peer over Bailey’s shoulder at the page the book is opened to. “Ninevah.”

  “Maybe that’s where they are,” Mara suggests. “Is there a real town called Ninevah?”

  “There’s a real town called everything,” Kane answers. “Especially in Pennsylvania, home of Intercourse and Blue Ball.”

  “Don’t forget King of Prussia,” Bailey adds.

  He tilts his head. “I guess that is weird. Huh.”

  I tap the edge of the Bible. “Ninevah was a city of evil people who turned good after Jonah told them to repent. God promised Jonah He’d destroy Ninevah, but when they got their act together, God changed His mind. Jonah was pissed about that.”

  “He wanted to see fire and brimstone?” Bailey arches an eyebrow. “Typical guy.”

  “It’s funny, though. There are tons of Bible passages about the end of the world, but Dad picked one that’s about the world not ending. It’s like he found the most nonapocalyptic passage in the whole Bible.”

  Bailey held the place with her finger and turned to the other bookmark. “Jeremiah twenty-nine. What’s that about?”

  I skim the footnote to refresh my memory. “Exile in Babylon. God was telling the Israelites to suck it up and make the best of it. In seventy years they’d get to go back to Jerusalem, but for now they should ‘seek the peace of the city’ where He sent them.”

  “ ‘Seek the peace’?” Mara spins in the chair to face us. “That’s what Dad said that day when he wanted to move. So this definitely boosts our theory that they ran away.”

  “To find peace,” I murmur. “But where?”

  “A city of peace with whales,” Kane suggests. “San Francisco?”

  “Will you stop with the whales?” I tell him. “Besides, Jonah was eaten by a big fish, not a whale. And I don’t think these are clues. I think they’re comfort.”

  “In case the Rush didn’t happen,” Mara says. “So the Jeremiah passage was for Dad to remind himself he’d find peace somewhere else. A real place, not heaven.” She looks at me. “I’m not saying heaven’s not real, just that they wouldn’t have to die to be happy. They could go somewhere.”

  “A place with big fish,” Kane states emphatically. “And now I’m craving salmon, which reminds me, I gotta get home soon. We have Mother’s Day brunner reservations at two o’clock.”

  “What’s ‘brunner’?” Bailey asks him.

  “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all in one magnificent
, gut-busting buffet.” He kneels before the file cabinet and pulls out the lowest drawer. “I’ll just check this one last—oh, shit.”

  Bailey crosses the room and peers over his shoulder. “Whoa.” From the expression on her face, I know what’s in there.

  “Not again,” I whisper.

  “Not again what?” Mara says. “Kane, what’s in the drawer?”

  He lifts out a folder, which sags beneath a heavy weight. “I guess we can rule out suicide, because this gun would’ve worked great for that.”

  My feet turn cold. I press them together, bare toes overlapping, to fight the sudden numbness.

  Mara stands up, dropping the book in her hands. “Don’t touch it!”

  “It’s not loaded.” Kane pokes his finger into the grip’s empty chamber. “Plus the safety’s on. It’s not gonna blow up. Trust me.”

  She takes a step closer. “Can you tell if it’s been fired?”

  “Remember when I said I wasn’t a one-man CSI unit? I have no idea if it’s ever been fired. It looks new, I guess.”

  “It is new.” My voice sounds like I’ve swallowed sand, and feels like it too. “He had another one before.”

  “What? When?” Mara demands.

  “Before. October? November?” The past is blurring. This room . . . the guns . . . John . . . I have to shut my eyes or I’ll puke.

  “David, are you okay?” Bailey’s voice comes from close beside me.

  “Yeah, I—I have to . . .” I turn away, with no clue how that sentence ends. Numb as they are, my legs propel me down the hall, away from that room and its lethal memories.

  CHAPTER 16

  ABOUT SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE RUSH

  Aminivan for a rock concert! Whooo!” Bailey gave me a brief but solid kiss before climbing inside.

  I followed her, between Nate’s and Aleesha’s seats, to the back row. “Sorry, the VW bus with the shag carpet’s in the shop. This was the best we could do.”

  “David, you’re sitting back there now?” Mara called from the driver’s seat. “What am I, a chauffeur?”