Iris conned a very young volunteer into supplying Matthew Brozek’s room number by claiming to be his niece. She got into the elevator, but as the doors started to close she stuck out her arm with a mumbled excuse to the three other occupants and got off, suddenly unable to face a confined space, especially since one of the passengers had a phlegmy cough. At least, that’s what she told herself as she hunted for the stairs. She suspected that she was also delaying the moment when she’d stand face to face with Pastor Matt. She couldn’t afford to do that: she knew she wasn’t going to be able to design again until she’d had it out with him.
A slight burn in her thighs and shortness of breath as she reached the fourth floor reminded Iris that she wasn’t used to the altitude anymore. Pausing to breathe and finish her water, she scanned the area. With a start that made her grip the plastic bottle so hard it crinkled, she realized she was directly across from the room she sought. Before she could find an excuse not to, she approached the half-open door, knocked once and entered.
Her breaths came fast and shallowly, and a dizziness that had nothing to do with the altitude made her grab the door jamb for balance. Sunlight blared through the blinds, striping the floor and making the room too warm. The confined space held a chair, a TV mounted from the ceiling, a potted plant bound with a yellow bow, and a six-foot-high medical gadget or monitor pushed against the wall, silent. A privacy curtain concealed the bed. Could Pastor Matt sense her presence through the thin fabric, hear her breathing? Did he think she was a nurse assistant coming to take his blood pressure? Not even close. Two steps brought the curtain within arm’s reach and she rattled it back with a sweep of her hand.
The bed was empty.
Putting a hand across her mouth to stifle the combination gasp and giggle that threatened to erupt, Iris stared at the rumpled bed as if the intensity of her gaze would cause Matthew Brozek to materialize. He couldn’t be checked-out gone, out of her reach. Not when she’d come all this way.
A footstep warned her of someone’s approach before a voice said, “Who are you and what are you doing in my father’s room?”
Iris whirled. A grossly fat woman stood in the doorway. A pale green garment Iris could only think of as a muumuu covered most of her bulk, and a large silver cross on a heavy chain lay on an outcrop of bosom. Her moon face, cushioned by half a dozen chins and framed by an expertly blonded bob, was smooth and pale and flawlessly made-up, with red lips and mascara-fringed eyes of marine blue that glittered within deep pockets of flesh. They gazed at Iris with a mixture of suspicion and anger. Iris would never have recognized her except for those eyes and the clue of “my father’s room.”
This woman had to be Esther Brozek, but it didn’t seem possible that the slim teen Iris had known was buried in the mausoleum of flesh that confronted her. The changes she’d imagined had run along the lines of a few wrinkles or gray hairs … surface changes. Yet, these layers of fat spoke of a wound as deep as Iris’s, of changes as profound. Esther was like an oyster that had added coats of nacre to an irritant, year after year, making it unrecognizable. A quick flush of embarrassment made Iris grip her lips together. Her fantasies about confronting Pastor Matt seemed juvenile in the sterile glare of the hospital room.
“You don’t belong here, whoever you are,” Esther said, surging forward. “This is a private room. All requests for interviews are supposed to come to me. I’ll have to talk to the hospital administrator again.”
“I’m not a reporter,” Iris said. Even though Esther had obscured her once slim figure, her bossy and condescending attitude still shone through.
“Oh. Well, it’s still not appropriate for you to be here, dear.” Her tone had altered, now carrying a disconcerting hint of the unctuousness that had characterized Pastor Matt’s speech. “I know it can be comforting to stand in the presence of the miraculous, of a great healing, but my father is still recovering and I’m afraid he needs rest when he returns from his tests. Are you ill? We can pray.” Esther closed her eyes and held out a hand, clearly expecting Iris to grasp it.
Iris clasped her hands behind her back. “Esther, it’s me.”
As the sound of her name, the fat woman’s eyes flew open. She studied Iris for a long moment before saying with certainty, “I don’t know you.”
“Pretend you’re throwing stones and then maybe my name will come to you.” Iris stood rigidly, her chin jutted forward.
Esther’s mouth dropped open, jiggling her jowls, and her eyes widened. She stood frozen, only the hem of her muumuu fluttering in a stray draft. “Mercy Asher.”
“It’s Iris Dashwood now.”
A flush of color stained Esther’s cheeks. She exhaled heavily and moved toward Iris, an imposing wall of flesh. “Get out. It is profane for you to be here, for you to pollute my father’s room with your presence after what you did to him. Get out!” Her voice was a low growl.
“What I did to him?”
“Your lies.”
“They weren’t—”
“Your filthy, baseless lies! They tore him apart.” Esther thrust her face toward Iris until their noses were mere inches apart. Her breath smelled of mouthwash. “Then your father tried to kill him, and gave my mother a heart attack, all because of what you’d said.” She drew back slightly. “You knew that, right? You heard your father went to prison for what he did? I hope he rots there! No prison could be as awful, as inhumane as the prison my father’s lived in these past twenty-three years, trapped in his own head, unable to walk or talk or communicate in any way, with us but not with us. If your father has been beaten and sodomized repeatedly, it is still less than what he deserves.”
Esther’s words and fury battered Iris. Instinctively, she widened her stance and shifted her balance onto the balls of her feet. If Esther attacked, she’d be ready. Although she was taller and fitter than Esther, she wasn’t going to underestimate the advantage the other woman’s fury and weight gave her.
“Is that what passes for compassion in the Community these days? I guess not much has changed.” Iris would have been happy to sink a punch into the angry woman’s gut, feel the fat close around her fist like bread dough deflating, watch her stagger back. Even as the thought flitted through her mind, she dropped her fists, knowing she couldn’t make Esther the proxy for Pastor Matt. She retreated to the window on the far side of the bed and gazed unseeingly at the mountains.
“You shouldn’t have come back, Mercy Asher,” Esther said, now more weary than spiteful. “You were as good as dead to the Community—some thought you were dead—and you should have stayed that way. Nothing good can come of stirring up the past.”
“I’m here to see my father and yours,” Iris said, turning, “and I’m not leaving until I’ve done that. I’ll come back at a better time.” When you’re not here.
“There’s no point,” Esther said. She moved to the bed and smoothed the pillow. “You can’t talk to him.”
“We’ll see about—”
Esther shook her perfectly coifed head. “No. He can’t talk. Not really. He hears, because he responds if you say ‘Open your mouth’ or ‘Turn over on your side,’ but his speech and memory are garbled. He seems to think I’m my mother. He’s awake, but he’s not back.”
For a fleeting second, Iris wondered if Esther could be lying to make sure she didn’t return and confront Pastor Matt, but Esther’s frame drooped with defeat as she lowered herself slowly into a chair to await her father’s return. Her thighs spilled over the chair’s sides and her meaty forearms enveloped its arms. She looked up. Her sparrow-bright eyes glittered as she observed, “I guess you came all this way from wherever for nothing.”
No. I am going to make him see me and acknowledge what he did. Without a word, Iris edged around the bed and past the seated woman. The door leading to the hall promised escape, but Iris hesitated on the threshold. She looked over her shoulder, flashing on an illustration
of Lot’s wife from her childhood Bible, to see Esther had opened a book and was determinedly reading it, her stiff posture giving Iris no opening for … what? An apology? Hardly. A request to start over? Maybe. A brief rundown of what she’d missed the last twenty-three years? Iris stepped into the hall and strode toward the elevator. Whatever she’d come for, she wasn’t going to get it from Esther Brozek.
eight
jolene
Jolene set down the phone with a shaking hand, and returned to the piano. The news that Mercy was back unsettled her even more than her father-in-law’s unexpected awakening. Matthew waking up was startling; Mercy reappearing was like a ghost materializing, a fictional character taking on corporeal form and interacting with readers. Hamlet’s father or Banquo’s ghost. She sifted through the sheet music she was considering purchasing for the choir, but couldn’t distract herself from the news about Mercy. Why come back after all this time? She must have heard about Pastor Matt waking up; otherwise, the timing was too coincidental.
“Who was that, Mom?”
Aaron slouched into the living room, lean and almost frail looking in jeans and a University of Colorado at Colorado Springs T-shirt. His hair was a darker blond than his sister’s, brushing his collar in the back and falling over hazel eyes. A scruff of goatee softened the strong chin that was so very Brozek. Zach, his father, and even his sister had that same square jaw. Aaron’s fingers trilled the top two keys on the Baldwin upright and Jolene made a mental note to call the tuner.
“Your aunt.”
“What’d she want?” Aaron’s voice had tightened; he was ready to take issue with pretty much anything Esther had said. Since declaring himself an agnostic during his freshman semester at UCCS, he had gotten into it more than once with Esther, who defended God and the Community with a zeal that would do an Old Testament prophet proud. For some reason, Aaron didn’t often argue with his father, who had taken over pastorship of the Community ten years ago, but Esther’s pronouncements about God’s will and his revelations to the Community acted on Aaron like a red cape on a bull.
“To let me know she’d seen an old friend of mine.”
“Who?”
“Mercy Asher.”
Aaron stared at her. “Asher? As in—”
Jolene nodded. “As in.”
“Did I know he had a daughter?”
“Maybe not. She left the year before you were born. I haven’t heard from her since …” Since the punishment. Since she ran away. Since the spring that changed all our lives.
nine
jolene
Twenty-Three Years Ago
That spring, Jolene Farraday fell in love twice, with Zachary Brozek and Shakespeare, not necessarily in that order. She’d never heard of Zach, and had never read any Shakespeare when her family moved from Ohio to Colorado three years earlier; now, they were the center of her life. Getting off the high school’s activity bus which dropped her a mile from Lone Pine, still high from play practice, she whispered her lines as she started down the path through the close-packed lodgepole pines. Birds twittered, seemingly entranced by her performance.
“‘Things base and vile, holding no quantity, love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.’” She recited all of Helena’s monologue on the walk home several times, shifting the accent to different words and infusing varying degrees of dolor and frustration into the lines, but remained unsatisfied. During rehearsal, she’d asked the drama teacher why Helena would try to help the man she loved, Demetrius, hook up with another girl.
“Helena’s a dumbshit,” Noah Asher, the play’s Lysander, said in an undertone heard only by the students grouped loosely on the stage. “She should give the dude a BJ that pops his eyeballs and he wouldn’t be chasing that Hermia anymore.” He exchanged high fives with a hooting senior who played Theseus.
Jolene heaved a sigh, wondering how her best friend’s brother could be such a moron. Mrs. Asher would have a coronary if she heard him talking about blowjobs. She looked forward to sharing the incident with Mercy and wished they could walk home together, but play practice kept her late and Mercy was helping with something at the church that ate up a lot of her time. Mrs. Asher was pleased that Mercy was devoting more of her time and talent to the Community instead of doing extra-curriculars at the high school.
Thank heaven her own parents weren’t quite so into the Community as Mercy’s. They’d moved from Ohio to become part of the Community, drawn by Pastor Matt’s charisma and a religious philosophy that revolved around simplicity, service, and living Biblically, but her mom worked for the utility company—the only woman in the Community who worked outside her home. She insisted on the modest dress the Community prescribed, but she let Jolene wear a little makeup and didn’t object to her being involved in the high school plays, as long as they weren’t anything lewd. Jolene sometimes wondered if it was her mother’s job that allowed her to be more … independent-thinking than most of the Community’s women, to not kow-tow to Pastor Matt quite as much as Mercy’s mom, for instance.
She had reached the house-sized boulder that crowded the path where it turned and sloped toward the Community. It had landed there two years earlier when a minor earthquake triggered a landslide that sent thousands of tons of rock thundering from the far side of the canyon, filling the ravine and creating a bridge of sorts from the Lone Pine side to the north rim. The tumbling boulders had uprooted whole trees, some of which had adapted to their new locations and now grew there, lonely bursts of green in the rocky landscape. Her gaze settled on the small white cross a third of the way up the slide and she said a prayer for Penelope. She was thinking ahead to the evening’s homework and chores when a scraping sound gave her a moment’s warning. Still, she gasped when Zach dropped off the boulder onto the path in front of her. He grabbed her and tried to kiss her.
She pushed him away. “You’ll break your leg one of these times.”
“You were daydreaming again.” His blue eyes, so like his father’s, smiled down into hers. He leaned in to kiss her again and this time she let him. After long moments, she turned her head, breaking the kiss to look past his shoulder. “We shouldn’t.”
“There’s no one to see.” His hands caressed her back, pulling her tightly against him, and her body reacted to the proof of his arousal pressed against her.
“Your dad would say that’s not the point. In last week’s sermon he said chasteness—”
“But we love each other.” Zach’s hands roamed her body and he drew her off the path. Within feet, the trees embraced them and the path disappeared. A breeze stirred the pines and their scent filled Jolene’s nostrils, blending with Zach’s soap and perspiration smell to make her dizzy. His lips found hers again and she moaned as he sucked her bottom lip into his mouth. Her backpack thudded to the forest floor and Zach’s nimble fingers popped the buttons on her blouse, then slid under the fabric of her bra. She arched against him, the sensations he roused overwhelming her.
“Your parents won’t be home for an hour,” he mumbled against her ear, his warm breath making her shiver.
The implication thrilled and scared her. Was she ready? “I’ve got … geometry homework,” she said between kisses.
“I love you, Jolene.”
He’d said the words first, last week, and they still made her catch her breath. She brushed a leaf from his collar. “I wish we didn’t have to hide our … us. I hate it.”
“Me, too, but not near as much as we’d hate having everyone spying on us, snitching to my dad if we kissed or held hands or disappeared at the same time for a couple of hours, whether or not we were together. Dad’s given me and Esther the speech about how everything we do reflects on him and his fitness for ‘shepherding the sheep’ so many times, I could puke.” He mimed the action.
“Romantic,” Jolene observed dri
ly.
“Let me come over and I’ll show you romantic.” Zach grabbed for her, tickling, and she giggled.
“Okay, okay!”
“Okay?” Zach quit tickling and studied her face.
“Yes. Really okay.” Feeling shy suddenly, she peeped at him through her lashes.
His face lighting up, Zach seized her hand. She pulled it away. “No. I’ll go home like usual. Alone. You come around through the woods”—she traced an arc in the air with her finger that indicated the path he should follow behind the Community’s homes—“and I’ll let you in the back.”
“Ten minutes.” Zach pressed a quick kiss on her lips and jogged away, disappearing almost immediately in the trees.
Jolene waited a long moment, filled with expectancy and fear, a sense of life plunging off in a whole new direction, and then started down the path to Lone Pine, no longer feeling the weight of her backpack as she hurried toward Zach.
ten
iris
Exiting the hospital, Iris grimaced as a radio talk show yammered out of a van idling near the door. Her rental car, nondescript and anonymous as it was, seemed like a haven and she settled into the driver’s seat and relaxed her head against the headrest. Matthew Brozek might have awakened, but he couldn’t communicate, probably wouldn’t know who she was. The lights were on, but no one was home. He was a cup and saucer shy of a place setting, two knights short of a crusade. Iris grunted a humorless laugh. Her chest muscles constricted, like someone had dropped a lariat over her torso and jerked sharply and she breathed deeply to dispel the tightness. All for nothing. She’d lost her one and only chance to force Matthew Brozek to hear her, to acknowledge what he’d done twenty-three years ago. No. She refused to believe that. If it were true, she might never get past the block that was keeping her from designing and making jewelry. She’d come back and look him in the eye and search for a flicker of consciousness, of shame.
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