I wanted to pummel him with my fists, but in the end we both laughed hysterically.
I visited Henry another time and listened to his soul-felt questions, except they weren’t quite as soul-felt as before. He didn’t rave about Momma’s books as much, and he didn’t beg to see her. He said, “I still have questions for your momma, Paige. Sure do. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to ask them. Not now.”
And though I pried and pried, he wouldn’t explain what he meant.
His eyes weren’t quite so frightening now, but that wasn’t exactly reassuring to me, because in those eyes I could see that Henry knew something that he wasn’t saying. I wanted so badly to shake it out of him, and I actually did say, “Henry! Please, won’t you tell us what you know? It will help everybody. The police will be able to find the person responsible and that will mean safety for Momma and for Libby and Jase and you. Think of it, Henry. They could even lessen your sentence!”
But he wasn’t swayed.
When I asked Detective Blaylock if there was any way Henry could get his sentence shortened if the real perpetrator of the crime was found, he said, “That depends on the jurisdiction, the judge, whether or not it goes federal, and whether or not the hired killer cooperates with the investigation. Think of it like a chess game—the real target isn’t the queen, it’s the king. If you have to let the queen go to get checkmate, then you’ll do what you have to do. DAs and investigators understand that.”
How I longed to find the king, and the American public seemed to agree with me.
We’d been choosing our “American idols” for years now, and once we did it, they were catapulted into stardom. But this was the first time I’d thought about how America also chooses her criminals, deciding who gets condemned and who goes free. Some days I could not bear to look at Momma’s Facebook and Twitter accounts because of the hatred and ugliness some people expressed. I didn’t know what the authorities would decide for poor Henry, but four weeks after the shooting, three weeks after I’d started up the GoFundMe account for Jase’s medical expenses, public opinion began to shift.
Thanksgiving was just around the corner, and America decided to practice generosity, and more and more people felt sorry for Henry. Yes, he was guilty of a terrible crime, the sentiment went, but wasn’t someone else even guiltier? Of course, they simply transferred their hatred of Henry to the real culprit, but that was okay with me since I figured that person deserved it, whoever he or she was.
Twice a week after school, having visited Momma in rehab, I’d drive to the Memorial Campus of Mission Hospital and go up to the Pediatric ICU and sit with Jase for an hour or so. Sometimes I read to him from the books Libby had brought from the library, and other times I made up stories in which a little boy named Jase was always the hero.
But he never opened his eyes. Every time the doctors tried to take him out of the induced coma, Jase had a life-threatening setback. The pneumonia had cleared up, but his little body remained incredibly weak.
Libby alternated her days between her job three hours to the southwest, nights at the hospital with Jase, and trips to the jail to visit Henry. I honestly had no idea how she kept going, such a tiny woman with such incredible stamina and drive. I brought her food that our friends kept us abundantly supplied with and left it in the ICU fridge so that she didn’t have to worry about cooking or spending money eating out.
One day she’d just arrived at the hospital from her job as I was getting ready to leave. While she peeked in on Jase, I heated up a casserole for her in the microwave in the waiting room. I fetched her out of Jase’s room, sat her in a chair, and placed a plate in front of her. “Eat, Libby.”
She wilted a little, gave a sigh, and whispered, “Thanks, Paige. Thank you.” Then she bowed her head and closed her eyes briefly, asking the blessing, I guessed.
When she opened them again and took a bite of the casserole, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “How do you do it, Libby? I think you’re the strongest person I’ve ever known. How do you keep going?”
She looked shocked at my question and blushed. “Me, strong? No. I don’t really know how I keep going. I think it’s just the Lord carrying me. There are verses in the Bible that talk about God keeping us in perfect peace if we trust Him. I don’t always feel peaceful, but somehow God keeps letting me put one foot in front of the other.”
She took another bite, chewed for a minute, and then turned her green eyes on me. “A lot of people are praying for us, and I talk to my parents almost every day. They’re really good about encouraging me. And the church is too. You’ve met a few of the people who have come to see Jase. And my mother, bless her heart, she’s gotten a leave of absence from her job to come stay here with Jase.”
Her eyes misted. “And all that money coming in, Paige. Why, it’s amazing.” She reached over and touched my hand. “Thank you. Thank you for everything you’re doing.”
“I’m really glad I can help in a small way.”
She took another bite, and we sat in silence. Then she said, “Henry never cared much for church. He’s seen too much of the evil side of man. But then with your mother, oh, it’s so odd, the way things work. After she survived his shooting, Henry began to read her books. And now he reads the Bible too. He asked me to bring him one! He keeps talking about forgiveness and grace.”
She blushed again. “Of course it’s awful, everything that’s happened to your mother, and Henry’s part in it, but I’m thankful for your mother and her books.” She gave a timid smile. “They’ve got them on audio at our library, and I’ve already listened to three of them as I drive back and forth from home to Asheville and then up to see Henry. I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but your mother’s books are part of the way the Lord is carrying me and giving me hope.”
I chewed on Libby’s comments for a while, just like she was chewing on the food that I kept piling on her plate.
———
Over the course of several weeks, Detective Blaylock questioned Libby about Henry’s past, his PTSD diagnosis and his medications, and what he’d been doing before the three other surgeries for Jase. She told him the truth—that she had no idea—and she confided to me that she didn’t think Henry had hired himself out before those surgeries because they certainly had never received large amounts of cash back then.
Once, she shared with me about how she’d met Henry at a bar when she was about my age, and she’d felt sorry for him. That was how she put it. She could tell he was real messed up. “But there was a kindness about him, at his core, in spite of what was on the outside and his awful background. He was bright and good. He just needed some help to keep him steady.” She whispered it to me with tears in her eyes. “And I knew he loved me, really loved me.” They married when she got pregnant with Jase, and when she told me that, she got a sad look on her face and said, “We repeated his parents’ mistakes, one by one.”
Fortunately, Libby wasn’t raised by criminals, but wise, caring parents, and she started taking Henry to church, hoping to create a healthier family dynamic for the three of them.
But after Jase’s second heart surgery, Henry refused to go anymore.
Every incremental step forward with Jase seemed to be followed by a huge step backward. Once when I was there reading a book to him, all kinds of alarms started going off, and a troupe of nurses and doctors rushed into the room and hurried me out. I heard “Cardiac arrest” and “I can’t find a pulse” and “Try again! Try again!”
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I texted Drake and Hannah to pray, and then I actually ran down the hall to the little chapel. I stood alone in the room, staring at the stained-glass depictions of the Blue Ridge Mountains in every season. A table and chairs sat in the middle of the room, and there were two kneelers in front of the windows. The whole space exuded peace, and without knowing exactly why I was doing it, I sank onto a kneeler and whispered, “God, if you’re out there, do something! It’s so unfair! Momma’s making progress. C
an’t you spend a little sympathy on Jase? Please don’t let him die!”
The doctors got his heart beating again, and I often thought about my plea. What it said about God, but more than that, what it said about me and what was going on in my heart.
JOSEPHINE
Most days in rehab, I felt enormously thankful that I was alive, but often it came after an excruciating fight with my body and mind, neither of which functioned in obedience to my commands. At times in the past when I could not remember something, Patrick would tease me and say, “Feeny, are you off wandering in your mind again? Who knows where that will take you!”
Now I wandered off in my mind throughout each day, but Patrick did not tease me. He urged me on, as did Paige and Ginnie and Drake and Kit and Mrs. Swanson and Hannah and my church friends and so many others, from near and far, each applauding my newest achievement. I learned the yes and no system through eye movement and head nods or shakes. When I began swallowing, really swallowing, Paige celebrated with contraband—my favorite ice cream, smuggled in from a popular ice cream parlor in Asheville called The Hop. Medications and therapy helped me stay awake and alert for longer periods of time, and gradually my limbs behaved more normally, conquering the spasticity that caused my joints to be so painful and tight. Progress was slow, but I had every hope I would speak coherently and walk again.
But would I write again? That I did not dwell on.
My memory flitted in and out, like the red-breasted woodpecker who hovered over the birdfeeder at home, then flew away, only to return a few seconds later and settle on a ledge. I had no recollection at all of the days before the shooting, but bits and pieces of the past months occasionally landed in my conscious mind. I gradually recognized words again and began reading like a first grader. My speech was impaired, but occasionally I was able to communicate in very short sentences. At other times, the words would not make it out of my mouth, and I was reduced again to blinking and nodding.
Detective Blaylock came to see me several times. He would recount some bit of information—maybe three or four sentences’ worth. Then I would nod or blink or show in some way that I agreed or disagreed with this information. But every time he came to the following question, I went blank.
“Josephine, we found a phone number on your cell that was also on Henry’s. Did you receive a strange, upsetting, or threatening phone call recently?”
This did not compute in any part of my brain, and I read the detective’s frustration in his posture, the way he tugged at his beard and sat forward in his chair, a little more with each visit as if he was trying with all his might to extract some valuable clue by pulling it out of my mind.
I remembered Kit’s laments during my first days of awaking from the coma. I remembered her declaring that she was to blame for something, and something about money. When she sat with me now, her strident voice frayed my nerves. I read behind her eyes that, like the detective, she too desperately wanted me to remember something else. But whatever it was had flown out of my memory during the coma.
The Lucidity Lath sat on a desk in my little room, right by my bed so that I could read it. Except that I could not read. My cursive on the cards looked like the lovely loops and squiggles the girls had made with their Spirograph as children.
But gradually I caught the fragments of my life before this accident, and tried to make sense of them.
Although I might have preferred The Awful Year to have been completely erased from my mind, it hung there, brilliant and huge and startlingly clear, like a harvest moon in October. The fact that the girls knew the truth about my attempt to take my life brought me a deep sense of relief, a lifting of the lies, a wholeness before my family and my God. As for Patrick, he came back to all of us in a deeper and happier way, almost as if he had receded into the sexy young soccer player from decades ago.
For all those years, Patrick and I had kept up the story—the lie—that I was simply away for three months and Patrick had been so stressed that he started drinking and wound up with a DUI and an overnight jail stint. But the truth that I had tried to take my life left remnants of fear in me, in spite of the treatment program and medications, and that fear had buried itself deep in my soul. Wouldn’t it be safer for me if other loved ones knew the truth? And what about all those threatening letters? I’d received four by then. I was afraid of myself and afraid of some unnamed person who wished me dead.
But I played the charade of peace. For Patrick. He had sacrificed so much. Living with the lie had obviously drawn us closer in a distorted type of way. And though I had confessed my sorrow at this deception to the Lord hundreds of times, I never felt the nudging of the Spirit to come clean. Or perhaps I had squelched it quickly whenever it inched up my back into my head. I lived with the guilt of allowing Patrick to choose the lie. It complicated our love, our faith, our family.
———
2008 . . . During her stay at the mental institution, Josephine read the works from the Lost Generation. She had studied them all, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and many others, in high school and college, and had found herself strangely drawn to their lives as they tragically navigated genius. Unbalanced, one even raving mad, they wrote dark beauty. She was no genius by her own estimation, but she obviously had a penchant for the darkness. When it threatened strongly she almost became a very minor actor in a similar play, where creativity won over sanity and brought self-destruction.
Many nights, after she’d cried for Patrick and the girls and herself, Josephine cried for the Lost Generation, for their desperate grasping at life through liquor and liaisons.
Her faith proclaimed hope. That was what she wanted to write. Hope.
She also wanted to choose health and love for Patrick and Hannah and Paige over writing, over the looming insanity.
But during those terrible, anxious months with therapy and medication and begging Patrick to let her tell the true story, she didn’t see hope.
God, why are you punishing us, punishing all of us, for the hole in my head that caused me to write stories that drew wrath from readers and plummeted me toward destruction?
Josephine didn’t write while she was at the facility; she just sat and listened to nature and watched for God in the mountains and waited with feverish anticipation to be released, for life to resume, for a simple stroll on the beach at The Motte.
Then at last they said she could go home.
Patrick’s arms around her felt like safety and security and protection and love. His lips on hers tasted so sweet and tart, like the first raspberry in late spring.
“Now the whole horrible lie can be put to rest. We won’t talk of it again, Feeny.”
But he soon saw the flaw in his logic. She had escaped the media attention of a suicide attempt, but her mind had not fully recovered.
He lay close to her in bed, his body eager and needy. Josephine went to him, eagerly too, but afterward, the darkness encroached. A hint of hope and light and love and then, the darkness.
“Patrick, I think I should stop writing.”
“No, Feeny. That was never the intent of all this.”
“I know. But my writing makes me afraid and infuriates others.”
“It blesses others.”
“That letter writer wanted me dead.”
“Someone who was unstable.”
“Someone whose wrath influenced me to do something unthinkable.”
“But you’re stronger, now, Feeny. You’ve healed.”
“But how can we be sure I won’t receive other hate mail?”
They couldn’t, of course, and the fear made the hole grow wider again.
She tried to hide her deepest reflections from Patrick, but they inevitably leaked out. “Patrick, you know how the apostle Paul says, ‘To me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.’ That’s how I often feel.”
“I’m not surprised you feel that way, Feeny. You love Him so.” But he knew that was not what she meant.
<
br /> “I twisted that verse, sweetie. I used it as fuel for my dark thoughts, and they got darker than ever before, Patrick. And I began to wonder if it would be better if I weren’t alive. I told myself that my life had hurt your life and the girls and others.”
“I know, Feeny. But hasn’t therapy helped? You’ve worked so hard to be healthier.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, it has helped.”
But Patrick saw then that this lie would never be put to rest, and he took the blame on himself.
He found her on the porch later that evening, watching the sunset. He settled into the rocking chair beside her, and they breathed in the sweet scent of the first roses that climbed the latticework and peeked over the porch railing. He reached across the space between them and grasped her hand. Squeezed it. She continued to stare ahead.
“Feeny, look at me.”
She shifted in the rocker, drew her knees under her and faced him.
“Feeny, are you telling me that you might try to harm yourself again?”
She couldn’t bear to hear the pain in his soft and gentle voice.
He stood up, lifted her from the chair, his arms wrapped around her with a loving strength that might never let her go.
“I hope not. I promise I will do everything they suggested in the program.” Everything except to tell the truth to her children and her closest loved ones.
She saw a counselor once a week, and she continued taking medication. Patrick watched her carefully and called her often from work. The medication had helped the darkest thoughts go away, but it didn’t rid her of the guilt she felt that Patrick’s sacrifice caused him to lose his joy, and they both knew that the lie was hurting their marriage and the family.
But in some ways, time does heal, even a lie. They loved again, they laughed, they spent their month at The Motte, and they watched Hannah blossom into a sparkling young woman, full of faith and kindness and good sense. Paige suffered different consequences from The Awful Year. When she announced to them much later that she refused to go to church with a bunch of hypocrites, Josephine knew she was talking about her grandfather and Drake’s father, but in her heart she felt accused and said to herself, I’m the biggest hypocrite of all.
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