Reunion

by Karen Kingsbury; Karen Kingsbury

  When they climbed off, Cole held his hands up and Landon swung him onto his shoulders. They were laughing about something, but Ashley was too far away to make out what. They barely made it out of the sandpit and onto the grass before they spilled onto the ground, giggling and rolling around.

  Ashley’s eyes stung as she watched them.

  God . . . I doubted you all my life. And now . . . She breathed in sharply through her nose and lifted her eyes. Now I’m healthy and I’m marrying Landon and my little boy has a daddy; all my dreams are coming true.

  She wanted to fall to her knees, to beg God to forgive her for every time she’d ever doubted him. But she’d already done that so many times before that here, now, she looked across the park to Landon and Cole and grinned. Thank you, God. I’ll spend the rest of my life being thankful.

  A verse flashed in her mind, so real, so distinct she wasn’t sure if she’d heard it or just remembered it. “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

  It was a Scripture from John, Ashley was sure. She’d taken to reading a chapter in her Bible every night before bed. The verse about trouble was one she’d come across a week ago.

  But why would it come back to her now?

  Cole bounced to his feet and began running from Landon, but Landon was quick. He chased her son, and several yards away he caught him and spun him around a few times before setting him back down.

  Suddenly it dawned on her why the verse had come to her here as she watched Landon and Cole. In this world she’d had plenty of trouble. Paris? Jean-Claude? Her resistance to Cole, to Landon? Her determination to fight her family’s faith?

  A sad chuckle came from her. Yes, she’d had trouble in this world. But God had overcome all of it.

  She sauntered toward them, and after a few steps Landon spotted her. He tapped Cole and in no time her son was running toward her, his short blond hair flying in the wind. “Mommy! You came!”

  “Of course, silly.” She swept him into her arms and kissed the tip of his nose. Landon was smiling, drawing closer, his eyes intent on hers. Her stomach flip-flopped the way it always did these days when Landon was near. The wedding couldn’t come soon enough.

  “Good, let’s go swing!” Cole slid down, grabbed her hand, and closed the distance to Landon. “We’re gonna swing, Landon. Wanna come?”

  “Sure.” He came up alongside her, slipped his arm around her waist, and kissed her. Then in a voice for her ears alone he said, “You look beautiful, Ash.”

  “Thanks.” She grinned and felt her cheeks grow hot. “You too.”

  “How’s your mom?” He moved slowly, his long legs in step with hers.

  “Better, I think. She looks stronger, healthier. Still talking about that crazy reunion on Sanibel Island.” She thought for a moment. “I’m worried about her, Landon. But I think she’s winning the fight.”

  “No one’s too crazy about Sanibel, huh?” His voice was tender, understanding.

  “Not this year.” She blew at a wisp of her hair. “We want to stay home, around the Baxter house, remembering the good times and helping Mom get better.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Hey!” Cole ran a few steps ahead. “You guys are taking too long. Come on . . .”

  “I missed you, Ash.” Landon spoke near her ear.

  “Me too.” His closeness sent shivers down her spine. “What’re we doing tonight?”

  “Nothing alone.” He gave her a crooked smile. “I can’t take it.”

  She giggled and let herself melt against his side as they walked. “Definitely nothing alone.”

  They’d imposed guidelines on their engagement dating. A curfew if he was at her house and an agreement not to be alone together. Whereas before they could kiss and no matter how difficult, still walk away, now the desire between them was more than either of them could take. Especially since she was healthy.

  Cole jumped onto the first swing he came to and looked at them, wide-eyed. “Ready, guys. Someone push me, please.”

  Landon leaned in and kissed her again. “I called Kari. She’ll watch Cole at your parents’ house. How ’bout dinner near the university and a walk near the art gallery?”

  She caught his eyes and her heart dissolved. He loved her so much, knew her so well. The week before she’d finished a painting, a piece detailing a little boy and a puppy playing in the front yard of a country home. The local gallery had it in the front window, and Ashley had wondered if they had sold it yet. And what else had the gallery taken in?

  But with the wedding plans and worries over her mother, she hadn’t had time even to call.

  This time she leaned up and kissed him on the cheek. “You’ll never know how much I love you, Landon.”

  He grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “You know what?”

  “What?” He turned and faced her, ignoring Cole’s cries for a push.

  “I can’t believe we’re getting married.” She brought her voice down to a whisper and brushed her cheek against his. “I was thinking of a Bible verse before I walked out here. It’s in John, when Jesus is talking: ‘In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.’ ”

  Landon’s face was inches from hers, and he looked straight to her heart. “That’s just what he did with you and me, Ash. He overcame every single thing.”

  “As long as we live—” she tapped her nose against his—“even when we’re old and gray, he always will. He’s that kind of God.”

  “Guys, come on!” Cole swung his feet and made a halfhearted attempt at getting the swing in motion. “Someone push, please!”

  Ashley gave Landon one more look, a look that said she couldn’t wait to walk down the aisle and become his wife, couldn’t wait for their first night together and their first year and every other wonderful thing that would happen after that. She whispered another, “I love you” and then turned to Cole.

  She darted around behind the swing and tickled Cole. “Okay, mister, get your feet out. This is gonna be the best under doggie you’ve ever had.”

  * * *

  All he could think about was the photograph.

  Dayne Matthews pulled the baseball cap low over his eyes and climbed in behind the wheel of his Navigator. He had a house on the beach in Malibu, and for now, a leased apartment in Manhattan as well. The movie cast and crew had the weekend off, so he’d taken a flight home and arrived at his beach house late last night.

  Today, a long jog on the shores of Malibu, tennis with his neighbor—an MTV video producer—and lunch on his balcony overlooking the water. Through all of the day’s activities he looked to this moment, to the time when he would leave the house behind and head for the storage unit. He grabbed a grungy sweatshirt from the backseat, pulled it on, and backed onto Pacific Coast Highway. The tinted windows helped, but he needed the cap and sweatshirt. He wouldn’t take any chances of being recognized. Not today.

  Tomorrow he had to catch a flight out of Burbank, one that would change planes in Chicago and land at New York’s LaGuardia sometime after midnight. He was due back on the set Monday morning, so he had no time for autograph seekers or paparazzi, no time to think about anything but finding the picture.

  The storage unit was off Ventura Boulevard near North Hollywood, and after forty minutes behind the wheel, he saw the sign up ahead. He pulled into the parking lot, turned off the engine, and fingered the key. After spending an hour looking for it, he’d found it in a drawer in his Malibu kitchen.

  The unit number was taped to the key ring. Unit fourteen.

  He glanced at the office, but the woman inside was busy on the phone. Keeping his face down, he raised one hand in her direction and kept walking. Unit fourteen was easy to find. He turned the key in the lock and lifted the door.

  The place was dark and musty after years of never being exposed to fresh air or sunlight. He flipped on the light switch and stared at the contents. Thirty or forty boxes, s
ome bigger than others, stacked eight feet high in what had to be the smallest unit the office rented out.

  A step stool sat against the inside door, and Dayne grabbed it. He was six-two, but the top boxes were out of reach without some help. The stool wobbled and a cloud of dust billowed out as he took down the first box. He coughed and waved his hand in front of his face. Dreaded dust, bound to kick up his hay fever. He’d be sneezing and coughing straight through Monday’s shoot if he didn’t be careful.

  The second box brought just as much dust, and Dayne breathed into his sweatshirt. This was why he’d thought about hiring someone for the job. But that wasn’t possible either. He couldn’t trust anyone. Regardless of what they found in his parents’ archives, the tabloids would hear about it within a week.

  Dayne couldn’t take that chance.

  When half the boxes were spread in rows across the floor, Dayne started with the first box on the left. “Tax Documents” the box read. He opened the lid, peered inside, and verified that the contents were, indeed, tax documents.

  Then he moved to the second box, which was marked “Support Letters.” Inside were letters from churchgoers who had supported his parents over the years. He picked out one and opened it.

  Dear Bob and Andrea Matthews,

  Enclosed please find a support check for $1,100, collected last Sunday at a special offering for your jungle work in Indonesia. We approve of your efforts at getting out the Word of God, and we pray that the love of Christ and his saving truth will spread and gain acceptance in the places where God has put you. . . .

  Dayne stopped reading.

  The places where God has put you? If God was so good at putting people in the right places, how come he didn’t put his parents in the same village as he was? Four hundred miles away at boarding school couldn’t possibly have been God Almighty’s idea of good placement, could it?

  Dayne shoved the letter back in the box and shut it. When his parents died he’d told himself the same thing he’d always told himself every day since: It was their choice. They loved mission work. Flying in small planes over jungle areas was just one of the risks they were willing to take.

  He could shake his fist at God or hate his parents for taking a job that kept them away from him most of the year. He could walk around angry at the irony of his parents’ spending a lifetime telling other people about God while their own kid didn’t get it.

  Or he could simply accept the facts, the way he’d worked to accept them every day since their plane crashed.

  His parents had followed their hearts, given their lives to something they loved. If they died doing it, so be it. At least they were happy. If they were in his business, they could’ve died on location for a film. He wouldn’t have spent a lifetime hating them if that had been the case. Just because their work involved a God he didn’t believe in didn’t mean he’d spend a lifetime hating them.

  Rather, he had spent his years trying to remember the good times, the summer months and furloughs when they were together. His parents had been wonderful, totally focused on helping people and tending to the needs of others.

  No, they hadn’t exactly tended to his needs. Boarding school had never been his idea of a perfect family setup. But as long as Dayne lived he would respect them for the kind of people they were, and for following their beliefs. Still, enough of the support letters.

  He worked his way through the boxes as one hour became two. Finally, scribbled on a box stacked near the back, second row up from the floor, he saw words that made his heart miss a beat.

  “Adoption Information.”

  Adoption.

  The word landed in Dayne’s gut like a rock, and for a moment he could only let it sit there. Adoption?

  “Adoption?” He whispered it out loud, and it felt foreign on his tongue.

  Suddenly memories jumped out at him and came to life.

  He’d been what, six? seven? He and his parents were on furlough back in Chicago, Illinois, staying in an apartment leased by one of their supporting churches. They had called him into their room and sat him on the bed.

  “We want to be honest with you. No matter what, you’re our son. You’ve always been our son, and you always will be.”

  The memory grew more vivid, the details sharper.

  Dayne had pulled his feet up and sat cross-legged on their bed. His stomach hurt because where in the world was the conversation going? “I know all that,” he told them.

  “Yes, but there’s something you don’t know.” His mother angled her head; her eyes looked watery.

  “A different woman carried you and bore you, Dayne.” His father gave a serious nod. “She was too young to have a baby so she made up her mind long before you were born to give you to us.”

  “Because you were our son, honey. Does that make sense?”

  Not a word of it made sense, but Dayne nodded anyway. A few more times over the years, they had mentioned something similar, something about praying for the woman who had given birth to him. But never in that time did they use the word adopted.

  He was their son from the start, end of story.

  What would a kid know of things like that? He had been what, eight?—nine maybe?—the last time he’d even considered the idea that someone else had given birth to him? Middle school came and then high school, and even at a boarding facility a kid has more to think about than whether he was adopted. Especially when his parents never came out and said as much.

  Another memory hit Dayne then, almost knocked him back on the storage unit’s cement floor.

  The week before his parents’ plane crash, his mother had called him and asked the usual. How was he doing in class? What were his study hours like? Which play was he working on? How was his relationship with Christ? Being missionaries, his parents were always asking how his relationship with Christ was.

  And being a missionary kid, his answer was the same each time: “Fine.” What else could he say? That he hadn’t a clue how to have a relationship with someone invisible? If that someone even existed in the first place.

  Anyway, his mother had said something else at the end of the conversation, something about the pictures. Dayne closed his eyes now, and he could almost hear her voice, hear her end of the conversation as if it were playing again in his mind.

  “Now that you’re a senior, there are some things we want you to have,” she’d told him. “Photographs, things you’ve already seen but things that should be yours now.”

  They made plans to look at the pictures next time they were together. But the plane had crashed before they had a chance, and his parents’ belongings were shipped to the storage unit in North Hollywood.

  One of the men from the missions board at their supporting church in Chicago had met Dayne at the airport and told him about the storage unit. He had offered to take Dayne there, help him sort through his parents’ belongings. But Dayne had put it off.

  He’d applied to UCLA, sending in thirty minutes of highlights from plays he’d starred in at boarding school. Because of his tragic situation and his high promise, he earned a full-ride scholarship. Since then he hadn’t had either the interest or the time to go through their things. They were gone; nothing in the boxes could bring them back or give him a family where he had none.

  But now . . .

  Now, looking at the box, with a lifetime of memories taking shape in his head, Dayne realized something he hadn’t ever fully acknowledged. He wasn’t merely a kid who’d had a different woman give birth to him than the one who raised him. He was adopted. His parents would always be his parents, but somewhere out there was a woman who had given birth to him, who had struggled in some way or been unable to raise a baby. A woman who had loved him enough to give him to the people he called his parents.

  Never in all his growing-up years could Dayne remember his mom and dad using terms like adoptive parents or birth mother. They never said, “Dayne, you’re adopted.” Rather they walked around the issue and lived with the fact that Da
yne never connected the dots. Why would he? There were no family members around to remind him of his background, no reason to talk about it at all except when he was interviewed by a variety magazine or a TV talk-show host.

  “Orphaned at the age of eighteen” was what they usually said. Once in a while they went a little deeper. “Reared in a boarding school while his parents were missionaries in the jungles of Indonesia until a plane crash took their lives.” That sort of thing. The story never got deeper than that because Dayne didn’t let it. Never had he mentioned that “oh, by the way, another woman gave birth to me.”

  It wasn’t something he thought about, wasn’t something he acknowledged or admitted on a conscious level.

  Until now.

  Slowly, not sure if he should turn and run or open the box, he headed toward it. The contents were heavier than some of the others, and when he set it down he heard the clank of glass. Picture frames. The box had to contain pictures. But why would framed pictures be in a carton marked “Adoption Information”?

  He opened the flaps and took a step back, as if the documents and pictures might take the form of a rattlesnake and bite him. But there was no turning back; now that he’d come this far there was nothing to do but look. His jeans-covered knees hit the ground, and he slid the box closer.

  One look inside told him the box didn’t contain pictures. Rather it contained framed documents of some sort. He lifted the top frame, a cheap brown metal one, and under the glass was a document declaring “Dayne Matthews the son of Bob and Andrea Matthews, residing in Chicago, Illinois.”

  The one beneath it was similar, but the document had some sort of official seal. He looked closer and realized it was his birth certificate, at least as far as he could make out. But in the section marked “Birth Mother” the name was x-ed out. At least three times across, so that the entire line was a smeary black mess.