Like Always

by Robert Elmer

  “I know that. But this is different.”

  “It’s not different. Can’t you imagine what kind of a story that would be? what kind of a testimony?”

  “This isn’t a story for the six o’clock news, Steph.” His voice flattened and became uglier than she’d heard it before, like he was talking to someone else. “This is my mom and she’s sick. She hurts. I see it every day. I’m sorry, but I just can’t think about anything else right now.”

  He held the flashlight out to her. “Tell your parents hi for me,” he mumbled.

  And he turned and walked back down the trail, leaving her holding the flashlight.

  “Michael!” she called. “Wait!”

  But he just kept walking, disappearing into the night.

  Only the flickering light of a candle on the windowsill pushed back the darkness. It reached it’s fingers toward Merit, who sat on the couch with her three youngest children—one of whom she had not yet met face to face but still knew just as intimately.

  “And if it’s a girl?” Abby snuggled as close as she could get, helping Merit sit up a little straighter. At the moment Merit felt like a mommy sandwich, and it suited her just fine. “What are we going to name her if she’s a girl?”

  “Well…” Merit tried not to sound as spent as she felt. “Your father and I haven’t decided on a girl name yet. He keeps saying it’s going to be a boy.”

  “I don’t think so,” Abby said. “But Mom, I have a question.”

  “Mmm-hmm?” Merit could hardly keep her eyes open, but the girls wouldn’t notice in the darkness.

  “Do you think Michael really likes Stephanie?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “He always acts really weird around her. Like he laughs goofy.”

  “But they fight a lot too,” added Olivia.

  “I hadn’t noticed.” Merit smiled, but the effort drained her.

  “That’s because you’re always sleep—” Olivia began, but Abby reached over and poked her shoulder.

  “Livvy! Dad said we weren’t supposed to say that sort ofthing.”

  “But it’s true. And I can say anything I want as long as it’s true.”

  “No, you can’t. You’re going to make her worried, and then it’s going to be all your fault if…if…”

  Abby couldn’t finish her scolding, and it was just as well. Merit rested her hands on theirs, one on each side.

  “You know what?” she told them, her voice barely above a whisper. “You two are going to make wonderful big sisters, if you can stop bickering long enough. You need to promise me you’ll be nicer to each other, whenever I’m not around to watch your little brother.”

  “You’ll be here, Mom.”

  “No, I just meant—”

  “You’re always going to be here. You’re not going anywhere.” Abby sounded grownup when she said it, so sure of herself. Maybe she knew something the rest of them did not. Something even the doctors didn’t know.

  “We’ll be good big sisters anyway,” Olivia replied. “We’ll teach her to play Barbies, and how to swim, and—”

  “Oh!” Merit winced at the unexpected kick to her kidney, and her daughters both asked what was wrong.

  “Nothing, nothing.” She held her breath and tried to relax, but junior wasn’t done yet. Funny how this happened more and more lately. She remembered the girls kicking before they were born. But this one! Merit took her daughters’ hands and placed them on her widened stomach. At the five-month-plus mark she didn’t think she looked too bad.

  “Here—feel the baby kicking?” she asked, waiting for another movement. “There!”

  “Yeah!” Olivia responded. “I feel it.” She bent over as if to kiss the baby, only she had something to say. “Don’t you kick Mommy so hard,” she whispered. “I know you want to come out and play with us, but you have to wait a little more. How much longer, Mommy?”

  “Just a few more months.” She rested her own hand on her baby and thought she felt a knee or an elbow. “Right, little guy? It won’t be long now. I know you’re ready, but we have to be patient.”

  “And then we’ll all be together,” said Abby, “and everything will be great.”

  Merit didn’t want her daughters to see the tears in her eyes, so she turned her face away.

  She saw Will standing in the kitchen, a piece of firewood in his hand, watching. Someone stomped onto the side porch—Michael, most likely— and the door swung open. A blast of cold air followed their son into the house.

  “Close the door!” hollered Will.

  The silent whirlwind tramped down the hall and slammed another door behind him.

  Just a few months, yes, and everything will be great.

  thirty-four

  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

  SOLOMON’S SONG 8:7

  Michael looked up from his workbench when he heard the soft knock at the shop door, and he knew without turning who was there.

  Stephanie was the only one who knocked. Will hollered, and the girls just pushed in. Merit hadn’t been to his door at all. And despite their awkward truce the past few months, he didn’t mind her visit.

  “Come on in!” he told her, putting down the carburetor from the Evinrude he’d been working on. Those old sixties outboard motors were always getting clogged.

  “Sorry to bother you.” She stood just inside the boathouse door, dripping, her dark hair matted to her face. He tried not to stare. He saw her every day, and yet he didn’t remember her being this beautiful.

  “Whoa,” he managed. “Is it still raining that hard?”

  “Just like it has for the past week.” She stepped closer and pulled a paper plate out from under her windbreaker, then set it on the workbench next to his motor. “You’ve been holed up in here the whole time and haven’t even noticed, huh?”

  “Guess not.” He studied the plate, which held a small mound of homemade cookies covered in plastic wrap. “What’s this?”

  “Oh. My mom made cookies yesterday, and she thought I should bring some to work with me to share.” She paused. “So I am.”

  She’d been friendly lately—so had he. That didn’t fix what he’d broken in December—what he’d broken and didn’t know how to mend.

  Michael picked up a rag and wiped his hands mostly clean before pulling back the wrap and picking up one of the cookies. They looked very good, especially to someone who had forgotten to eat lunch two hours ago.

  “Well, tell your mom thanks from all of us here on staff at the Kokanee Cove Resort. That would be me.” He smiled weakly and stuffed the cookie into his mouth. It mostly fit. She stood watching him for a moment, awkward and dripping, before heading for the door.

  “No, wait,” he mumbled between mouthfuls. “You don’t have to run off.”

  She stopped.

  “Uh…” She looked over her shoulder. “I need to get back to the store. A few people have come by for books this morning. One guy even checked out that Dr. Dobson book on parenting.”

  “Great. But there’s nobody there now.”

  “How do you know? You haven’t looked out the window for weeks.”

  “Only when you walk by.”

  Perfect foot placement, squarely in his mouth. She didn’t answer.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean…” His voice trailed off, and all they could hear was the gentle patter of rain on the tin roof.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered.

  But it wasn’t, not like it had been. He had to fix it. He took a deep breath. “All right, I’ve been thinking about this ever since that talk we had last December—”

  “What talk?”

  She was going to make him spell it out. Served him right.

  “About how I couldn’t handle a relationship just then, and our timing was off, and all that.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, as if it hadn’t been hanging between them for several weeks.

  “Yeah, that. An
d I think you were right about how the problem was between me and God.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know why you’re bringing me cookies today. You have every right to be upset at me.”

  Stephanie turned, parked her hands on her hips, and cocked her head to the side. “Michael, I don’t know what you want, but I’m not mad at you and I never was.” She paused. “Well, maybe a little. But not now.”

  “I was a total jerk.”

  She giggled, shielding her mouth with her hand. “You said it, not me.”

  “No, really. I don’t know why it takes me so long to apologize, but I am sorry.” He picked up the carburetor to give his hands something to do. “And I want you to know that I’ve been praying for my mom. I don’t want you to think I don’t believe or anything.”

  “I never thought that. But you do make me guess at a lot of things. Why are you so mysterious?”

  “Well, it’s just hard to talk about, you know? This is the hardest thing I’ve ever been through.”

  “Harder than…” Her voice trailed off, but he knew what she meant.

  “Harder than my combat stories? Yeah. I wouldn’t have thought so, but yeah. And the worst part is that it’s not even me who’s hurting.”

  “I know.” Her eyes could have melted him into a puddle on the floor.

  “All she can do is sit up in bed or lie on the couch, and I know she’s in a lot of pain. It’s all over her face. And I want to fix things, but I can’t…” His voice got husky and he cleared his throat.

  She took a step toward him. “We’re all still praying, Michael, especially now that the baby’s so close. You know we are, right?”

  “You mean the people at your church? Yeah, I know. My dad talks with your dad all the time. They go out in your dad’s boat and freeze their tails off on the lake.”

  She laughed, and it warmed Michael more than the space heater he’d plugged in beneath his workbench. Why hadn’t he told her this weeks ago?

  “You should come on Sunday, Michael. We’re having an Easter sunrise service.”

  She would be there, which made it an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  “Is it Easter already? I thought Easter was always in April.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Goodness. You have been shut away from the world out here, haven’t you? It’s early this year.”

  “Oh. I never did know how they figured it out each year. Is it just something the Pope decides?”

  “Nothing like that. It’S the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.”

  He looked at her and wrinkled his nose. “You want to run that by me again?”

  She did, adding that the vernal equinox was when the amount of sunlight equaled the amount of darkness.

  “Didn’t they teach you that in school?” she asked.

  “I went to public school, remember, not homeschool. I’m functionally illiterate.”

  “No you’re not.” She moved toward the door. “But listen, you really ought to come. I know your mom’s not up to it, but you can stop working for one day, can’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “I know your dad appreciates all the help,” she said, “but you need to have a life too.”

  “A life. That’s ironic.”

  She turned red and opened the door.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She surveyed the drizzle through the door, her hand on the doorknob. “By the way, I lied.”

  She slipped out into the cool drizzle.

  Michael hurried after her, sliding on the dock outside the boathouse. He didn’t notice the rain.

  “Stephanie, wait!” He had to run to catch up with her by the gas pumps. The clouds opened up, dumping solid sheets of rain on them, obliterating the line between sky and lake. For a moment, Michael wondered if the docks would stay afloat under the load.

  But then he forgot the rain, because when he caught her, he managed to grab her hand and twirl her around on the dock like a dance partner. He wasn’t sure who was more surprised, but he didn’t give her a chance to react.

  He kissed her. And she kissed back.

  He pulled away and brushed a strand of wet hair out of her face. “You said you lied about something,” he said. “What did you lie about?”

  She didn’t look repentant, like she’d sinned. She just smiled up at him as the cold rain dripped down her face. Then she surprised him with a kiss of her own.

  “My mom didn’t bake the cookies,” she told him. “I did.”

  He laughed, the first time he’d laughed in months. “Is that all?”

  “I just thought it would sound, you know…”

  “Yeah, I know.” He did. “But about this Sunday—”

  He didn’t have a chance to finish the sentence, because they heard a mighty crash, like a rifle shot, only louder. It rumbled like thunder, only it clearly wasn’t thunder.

  “What’s that?” Stephanie turned to face the explosion of noise, and Michael’s first reaction was to grab her around the shoulders. If someone had dropped a bomb on the navy base or something had blown up…

  He stopped to think and realized he’d heard about these kinds of things in California, when it rained too much and hillsides collapsed in giant mudslides, burying homes and roads and towns. Was this the same thing?

  The thundering lasted only five, maybe six, seconds, tapering to the sound of the pouring rain and the occasional crack of another crushed tree branch. He wondered if Abby and Olivia had heard the sound down in town at church over the din of their practicing for the Easter musical.

  He grabbed Stephanie’s hand, and they ran to the house, where Michael’s dad met them on his way out, wearing an old jogging suit and a worried look on his face.

  “How’s Mom?” Michael asked.

  “Not so good,” he told them, looking toward town in the direction of the noise. “And now all the powers out again. Trees must’ve taken the line down, which means they’re probably blocking the road too.”

  At the moment Michael could care less about power lines or roadblocks. “What do you mean ‘not so good’?” he asked.

  Michael’s dad looked as if he didn’t want to answer. He crossed his arms and stared in the direction of the downed tree.

  “It’s my fault!” He stomped his foot. “I should have gotten her out of here before instead of waiting. She’s going into labor. And now if the road’s blocked, we might have to load her on a boat to get her out of here.”

  “A boat?” Michael gulped. “You mean like…the one with the engine I just took apart?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. Our only usable boat doesn’t have a running motor? You didn’t tell me about—”

  “I didn’t think we’d need it for a while.” Now was not the time for another of their father-son arguments. “And besides, you asked me to recondition that one before we got too far into the season.”

  “I did?” His father gripped his forehead and paced in tight circles. “But…”

  “Maybe the road isn’t blocked the way you think,” Stephanie suggested.

  “Maybe not,” replied Michael. “Let’s go see.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “I’ll see how Merit is doing while you guys figure it out. We shouldn’t leave her alone.”

  “Right.” Michael nodded. Anything would be better than standing in the rain, fearing the worst but not really knowing what they were up against. Without waiting for his father, he trotted down the driveway to see what had happened. “I’ll be right back,” he called.

  Five minutes later, Michael stood in front of the massive tree trunk stretched across the road, his hands on his hips, wondering what would have happened if anyone had been driving by here a few minutes earlier. An unfortunate power pole bent low over the accident, humbled and bowing to the sheer might of the massive old fir. Somewhere in the tangled mess, a disabled power line lay flattened under the branches like a trampled snake, no match for the t
ree’s girth.

  “Wow.” Michael’s dad came huffing up behind him, his sneakers squeaking in the rain. “I knew it was big, but it looks even bigger laid on it’s side. How wide do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know. Six feet across maybe? We could almost cut a tunnel through this thing.”

  “Right now I wish we could.”

  Michael could see only mangled fir branches and angry raw mud oozing from the high side of the road—even when he stood on his tiptoes. The ancient roots had not been able to hold on any longer in the rain-soaked hillside, and lashing winds had provided the necessary push. The oddest part was the precision with which this roadblock had been laid, giving them no room to maneuver around it—not even with the Land Rover.

  They both hopped back as another tree snapped and crashed next to the grandfather tree. This one tumbled harmlessly off to the side.

  “Well.” Michael’s dad had obviously seen enough. “One thing’s for sure: we’re not getting through this roadway anytime soon.”

  They ran back to the house, trying to figure out a way to get Merit to the hospital and keep her comfortable in the meantime.

  “If we have to row her out,” mumbled Will, “that’s what we’ll do.”

  Michael couldn’t quite imagine that, but right now he couldn’t imagine much of anything in this surreal storm. He nearly slipped as they returned to the yard.

  “Mr. Sullivan!” Stephanie looked desperate as she leaned out the front door. “I don’t know too much about these kinds of things, but I don’t think we have much time.”

  thirty-five

  I’ve read the last page of the Bible. It’S all going to turn out all

  right.

  BILLY GRAHAM

  Oh, Lord…” Will whispered the start of another desperate prayer for his wife, for her life, for Michael and Stephanie. The silent words tumbled from his heart like they’d never done before. He wondered if he could feel closer to God when Merit needed his full attention. He dabbed at Merit’s forehead with a damp washcloth and left the prayer for later.

  Even though Stephanie wasn’t a trained midwife, he could tell she was right.

  They didn’t have much time.