Still Life
Page 1
ACCLAIM FOR CHRISTA PARRISH
Stones for Bread
“Parrish’s latest is a quietly beautiful tale about learning how to accept the past and how to let go of the parts that tie you down. Readers can find a great deal to identify with in Liesl’s life, from her tumultuous family background to her reluctance to accept love. All of this is entwined with a meaningful spiritual journey and amazing bread recipes that will appeal to the beginner and satisfy even the most seasoned baker.”
—ROMANTIC TIMES, 4 ½ STARS, TOP PICK!
“The vitality of close relationships is powerfully depicted in Liesl’s struggle to let go of her past and embrace the future right in front of her. Readers will definitely relate to her struggle of faith and confidence.”
—BOOKLIST
“A beautiful story of love and friendship, of redemption and forgiveness, Stones for Bread is uplifting and hopeful. It satisfies like a warm loaf of freshly made bread.”
—LYNNE HINTON, AUTHOR OF SISTER EVE, PRIVATE EYE, FRIENDSHIP CAKE, AND PIE TOWN
“Christa Parrish has once again proven herself to be a powerful voice in inspirational fiction. Stones for Bread is delivered in Parrish’s trademark lyrical style, and its content—a mix of spiritual journey, history, love story, and cookbook—is expertly woven together with Truth. An excellent choice for book clubs and individual readers alike, Stones for Bread does not disappoint.”
—ALISON MORROW, AUTHOR OF COMPOSING AMELIA AND THE HEART OF MEMORY
“No one knows how to plunge the depths of what our souls hunger for like Christa Parrish. Stones for Bread is a masterpiece, a story that is more than a story. You’ll never look at a loaf of bread the same way again.”
—SUSAN MEISSNER, AUTHOR OF THE GIRL IN THE GLASS
The Air We Breathe
“A fast-moving, suspenseful, enrapturing novel . . . Fans of Christian fiction with kick and psychological depth will be engaged and touched by Parrish’s exciting third novel.”
—BOOKLIST
“The Air We Breathe is a compelling and emotional novel about identity, redemption, and faith. Expect it to be popular among women of all ages.”
—CBA RETAILERS & RESOURCES
“Parrish has created an exceptional look at trauma and its aftermath, as well as hope and recovery from grief at its best. Readers will love it for sure.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Watch Over Me
“Parrish’s deft characterization pulls readers into a storyline filled with raw emotion . . . comes together seamlessly for an unforgettable conclusion.”
—ROMANTIC TIMES BOOK REVIEWS
Home Another Way
“. . . written with heart and soul. It is always refreshing to read books with imperfect characters; they seem more real.”
—ROMANTIC TIMES BOOK REVIEWS
“Parrish . . . adeptly avoids the clichéd happily-ever-after ending while still leaving the reader satisfied.”
—CINDY CROSBY, FAITHFULREADER.COM
“Christa Parrish manages the rare accomplishment of telling a very good story peopled with flawed and very human characters.”
—LYNN SPENCER, ALL ABOUT ROMANCE (LIKESBOOKS.COM)
“With its vast array of richly imagined characters, its humor and its substance, this debut is sure to resonate with a wide and appreciative audience.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
OTHER BOOKS
BY CHRISTA PARRISH
Stones for Bread
The Air We Breathe
Watch Over Me
Home Another Way
© 2015 by Christa Parrish
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 trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.
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Scripture quotations are taken from:
HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
The KING JAMES VERSION.
The Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL READER’S VERSION®. Copyright © 1996, 1998 Biblica. All rights reserved throughout the world. Used by permission of Biblica.
ISBN 978-1-4016-8904-9 (eBook)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parrish, Christa.
Still life / Christa Parrish.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-4016-8903-2 (softcover)
1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.A76835S75 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014029129
1 2 3 4 5 6 RRD 19 18 17 16 15 14
For Joseph and Ann Parrish, my parents.
“But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
CONTENTS
PART ONE: THE WRECKAGE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PART TWO: JULIAN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
PART THREE: EVAN
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
PART FOUR: CHROMA
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
READING GROUP GUIDE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AN EXCERPT FROM STONES FOR BREAD
ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE
THE WRECKAGE
CHAPTER ONE
She believes tragedy comes only in the night. It’s her mama’s two stillbirths and a toddler brother lost to a fever her father said would take him; Ada had kissed the listless boy good-bye with all the others in the room, gathered there to pray him home to Jesus, and bit her cheek against the rebellious words—aspirin, alcohol bath, doctor—pooling on her tongue. It’s the Langley family cattle, bloated with a strange plague and struck down dead, nearly forty in all gathered from the muddy pasture the next morning and burned so whatever afflicted them wouldn’t spread like fleas on toast. No one honestly believed the burning was necessary. Surely one of the Langley kin had somehow secretly sinned against God or man. Probably both. Not long after that the eldest daughter confessed these sins to the elders and was deemed restored to the fellowship after twelve strikes with the paddle and three days of solitary fasting in the woods. We are all desperately wicked, her father said over supper, though he would not tell them what Rebekah Langley had done. It can be any one of us at any time, if we don’t take capt
ive our thoughts at the first hint of wandering.
Ada hoped he couldn’t discern her thoughts, even if he was a prophet of the Lord.
It’s the shadows in her bedroom at night, the ones she’d been taught were demons and still may believe it, despite Julian’s skin and scent and laughter beside her—all things to drive her past away. Garlic to vampires. Human hair to garden vermin.
The switch to a disobedient backside.
It’s not dark now, though, and the knock comes on the door. She finds strangers in dark suits, perspiration on their brows, neckties askew. Two men, one young and one old. White men. The young one speaks while plucking the skin beneath his thumbnail, asks if she’s the wife of Julian Goetz, flying from Cleveland to Albany on Union North Flight 207. She tells them she doesn’t know the flight number, didn’t pay attention to it since he plans to drive himself home from the airport, but yes, she is his wife and is there a problem? They want to know if she’s turned on the television today, or the computer.
Now she’s nervous. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“There’s been an accident. A plane crash. Julian was on the flight.”
“Don’t say his name like that,” Ada says. They’re not allowed to be so familiar with him, these men of polyester and sweat. “You don’t know him.”
The old one apologizes, his voice streaked with too many of these visits, and asks to come inside.
She moves, allowing them to pass.
She hadn’t been concerned he wasn’t home yet, or that she hadn’t heard from him. People are waylaid all the time, flights delayed in the gate, traffic on the highway. Cell phone batteries dead. She didn’t bother to contact him.
She breathes easier when he’s gone.
She loves him, she’s fairly certain. There are moments she catches sight of him in the corner of her vision and is stunned by his bone-aching beauty. Something rushes around her, warmth at once, soft and sharp. Her father would call it lust, but she knows better, can almost put a name to it, the proper name; the word is there just outside her understanding. If she can feel this feeling a little longer, she’ll be able to decipher it. But it’s gone too soon and she’s left with nothing, a sensation she’s but a table leg, all one substance straight through, all one temperature, unable to be filled or emptied out.
He called her from the airport a bit before ten this morning. “My flight’s overbooked. Why in the world airlines do that, I don’t know.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, phone beeping several times in her ear, not used to the sleek screen and how her cheek pushes against the buttonless images, turning the speaker on and off, dialing random numbers, muting her voice.
“I’ve been bumped to the nine-fifteen flight.”
“Oh.”
They have reservations tonight for her birthday. Julian’s idea. He wants the day to be special. She’s twenty-six and has never had any sort of celebration. The day came and went with unspoken recognition in her previous life; her mother allowing her an extra biscuit with butter and honey at breakfast, or perhaps adding peaches to her pancakes. Her father nodding as she ticked another line on the door-frame, documenting not her height but her years since she’d stopped growing. They might all forget how old they were if not for the Sharpie marks in the pantry.
She doesn’t want the attention anyway. “It’s alright.”
“No, it’s not.” He sighed. She could practically hear him mashing his fingers against the soft tissue behind his eyelids. “Look, just let me—I’ll call you back.”
He didn’t call, but texted twenty minutes later: I’LL BE HOME IN TIME. BE READY TO PARTY.
The men speak at first in hushed tones to each other. The ditty of a text message, the electronic tap-tap-tap of a reply. The old one puts the telephone to his ear when it rings, nods over and over again, responds with a single, convictionless, “Okay.”
She knows, now, she won’t see Julian again this side of heaven.
What she doesn’t know is if she should offer them a seat or a glass of water, if hospitality is in order, or efficiency. So she waits, fingers interlaced and against her navel, body curved into the banister at the bottom of the stairs. The men’s eyes flicker to the sofa and chair in the living room, to the photographs on the wall beside her. The young one steps forward to look at the first framed image. A protest in some country she’d never heard of when Julian told her of it—world geography wasn’t important in her community—where the off-center face of a young boy, maybe nine years old, shouted his angry words against the crowd. Above him, a man’s arm, in flames. The boy’s hair is beginning to singe, to smoke, about to be set afire in the next moments, the ones not captured on paper. Ada remembers being horrified when she first saw it. Angry. “You stood there and took a picture, and did nothing to help him?”
Julian had turned his body slightly away from her. “He was fine. Someone in the crowd threw a blanket over him. And the guy’s arm.”
“But not you.”
“It was taken care of, Ada.”
“Two strong arms are better than a quick wit. Or a quick lens, in this case.”
He turned away completely. “I’ve helped before.”
She’d wanted to believe him.
The young one isn’t repulsed, though. The photo pulls him closer until his nose is almost to the glass, and he reaches to touch the boy’s twisted face.
“Mike,” the old one says.
His hand dives into the pocket of his pants.
The old one introduces himself as Wright and the young one as Bowen. Airline liaisons. “May we sit?”
“Oh, yes, of course. I’m sorry.” She fumbles with the words as Wright holds his arm out toward the leather living room set, as if it’s his own home and she’s the visitor. She turns sideways to squeeze between them, sits on the chair. They both take a place on the sofa, each on the end cushions, the middle one empty.
“You haven’t seen the TV today, then,” Wright says.
“We don’t have a television.”
“News websites?”
Ada shakes her head. “I’m not good with . . . those kind of things.”
“Me either. Old dog and all that nonsense.” Wright clears his throat. “As we mentioned, there was an accident. A crash. We don’t believe any of the passengers survived.”
She closes her eyes, nestling between his sentences. Her nostrils flare on their own volition. She hears Bowen’s phone jingle again, Wright say, “Take it outside.” Thumping of feet on the dark, shiny floor. Too dark and too shiny for her taste. Masculine wood.
“Mrs. Goetz?”
“Where?”
“On the border of New York and Pennsylvania, in the Susquehanna.”
“I can smell it,” she mumbles.
“No, not from here,” Wright says, and his eyes glaze with piteous familiarity; he’s seen others go half-insane in their own living rooms before. Ada wonders about his everyday job. Plane crashes are few and far between. What does he do in that in-between?
He waits seconds for a response, and getting none, says, “Is there someone you can call? You shouldn’t be alone. Any family close by? Friends?”
“No.”
“No one?”
“Julian’s sister.” That imaginary jet fuel smell thickens to a haze, filling her skull, dulling the speed of her synapses. “She doesn’t live far. Two hours, I think?”
“Is there someone not so close. To Julian, I mean. Someone who—”
“I know what you mean.”
She finds her phone on the dining table, where she dropped it earlier, and scrolls through the contact list Julian programmed there. All people he knows, people she’s met once or a handful of times. Names he parades through conversations, expecting her to remember.
She chooses one.
Hortense.
“Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Ada, happy birthday to you,” Hortense sings. “That man of yours has taste, taking you to The
Waterfront. You think mine would? Nope. Not in fourteen years.”
There’s murmuring in the background, and Hortense says, “I don’t care that it’s only been open for three. You’ve never taken me anywhere remotely like it. Denny’s is a fancy date to you.”
Ada probes around her mouth with her tongue, feeling for something to say, finding only sticky, dehydrated spit. Her hearing tunnels, Hortense at the end of a long, thin tube saying, “Ada? Ada, hey, are you still there?” But her vision grows sharp and she sees Wright, in glowing pixels, moving from the couch to her elbow, prying the telephone from her hand. His voice runs from the other end of the tube, to Hortense, as he explains what has happened to Julian.
“She’s coming,” he says.
In the twenty minutes between hanging up with Hortense and her arrival, Wright covers Ada in a gray chenille throw he gathered from somewhere in the house, brings ice water and microwaved tea to her—both set on the end table, untouched and without a coaster. She watches beads of condensation crawl down the side of the glass, puddling on the wood, and Wright with Bowen at the front door. Suddenly Hortense is above her, around her, and Ada thinks, She will grieve harder than me, she’s known him twenty times longer than I have. But Hortense is iron, and she emerges from the hug with a tearless face and firm jaw. She knows pain. This is nothing. A blip. A nuisance.
Life.
Before Ada met her, Julian had said Hortense was the most beautiful woman most people would ever see. And she is. Even Ada knows it, despite growing up sheltered from the world of celebrities and Cosmopolitan and glossy lipstick. Some beauty is purely objective. No one needed to tell her Rachael was the prettiest of her sisters, prettiest in the community, really. No one needed to point out Ada’s own eyes were too wide set, her nose too blunt, her lips too colorless and pillowy.
And then Julian told her, “She doesn’t have hands,” preparing her, and since it was summer Hortense came wearing a billowy but sleeveless blouse, arms ending at the wrists, three fleshy, bulbous nubs of never-to-be fingers stuck to the end of one of them. The right one.
Hortense speaks with the men from the airline. She nods and responds and gestures. Ada can’t make out anything they say. Bowen takes an envelope from the inside pocket of his blazer, hesitates. Hortense holds out her arms and clamps the rectangle between her wrist bones. She sets it on the side table and leads the men to the door, locking up behind them. Retrieving the envelope, she sits on the sofa across from Ada’s chair, maneuvering a folded sheet of paper from inside. Opens it.