If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  To everyone’s great relief, the remainder of that healing session saw no more fireworks, even though several other spirits had to be expelled.

  Joanna laughed to herself at how many times she had returned from these trips exhausted by a constant level of vigilance, along with repeated explosions of relief and joy. At least it was never boring.

  The Girl in the Mirror

  If a sigh were a taxable act, perhaps for overuse of scarce clean air, Anna would have doubled her tax burden on the ride home from the Dupere house and the subsequent hours in her apartment that afternoon. She looked at her digital recorder, lying on her kitchen table. She hadn’t recorded a single word of her time with Justine. Nor had she taken a single photo; though, if she had, she might have had to blur out sections to keep a PG rating to her article. But her feeling of failure as a reporter that afternoon faded under the layer of swirling emotions at the top of her stomach.

  Anna had interviewed dozens of celebrities across a wide spectrum, from political leaders to skateboarders, from Academy Award winning actors to new lottery winners. None of those reporting assignments had ever gone as far off the tracks as her experience among Beau Dupere’s family.

  She looked in her bathroom mirror, leaning on the edge of the sink, oblivious to her own image there. Her hair stood in two hillocks where she had sat holding her scalp, brown locks arching between tense fingers. Her eye makeup now outlined the bowl-shaped sockets below her weary eyes, with assorted drips spilling from those bowls, down her cheeks and her nose. The cherry-shaped bulb at the end of that nose shone redder than usual. She saw none of that.

  Anna sighed instead at what she saw inside herself.

  Finally, standing up and scuffing over the tiny white hexagonal tiles of the bathroom floor, she felt as if elastic bands had been attached to all of her major joints, hooking her to the floor and straining against her. She passed through the little hall that linked bedroom to bathroom to kitchen and living room, aiming for the refrigerator. When she swung the textured white door open and looked at the pale faces of food and drink that seemed beyond recognition, she thought of Bethany. The golden curves of her nude body seemed to lead inevitably to her face and to her eyes. Those eyes must not have looked so comfortably and casually set into her perfect face before her recovery. Anna had interviewed anorexic women for a piece on eating disorders in college. They all looked haunted, and not just because of their physical resemblance to concentration camp victims. They all looked desperately hungry for more than food. Fragile, that’s what it was. The anorexics she had known personally, and through those interviews, all looked fragile. Bethany seemed strong and whole.

  “I wonder how long she’s gonna walk around naked,” she thought. Anna didn’t expect that stage of recovery to last much longer. Bethany looked more recovered than Anna felt.

  Nothing in the fridge enticed her. Anna closed the door without disturbing the sleeping residents. She hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since Justine’s brought her water, followed by something stronger to revive Anna when she seemed like she might faint. It was good lemonade. Homemade probably. Was it magic, like those women and children she met? Did the lemonade provide all the sustenance she needed, negating hunger?

  She forked one hand through her hair again, disrupting the dual lump look in favor of a half-parted look. Her irrational thoughts about magic began to scare her, driving her hands to wreck all earlier efforts at quaffing herself to impress the interviewees. She snorted a little laugh. They didn’t seem impressed by her, they seemed to pity her.

  Even Rhonda wasn’t impressed—the newest resident of the house, the late thirties woman with slack blondish-brown hair and clothes that left her body looking like furniture draped with dust covers. Rhonda didn’t fit at all. She hadn’t gotten very far in whatever recovery she was pursuing. But even Rhonda paused to smile across the kitchen island, a sympathetic smile sealing Anna’s realization that she was the most desperately needy person in that house.

  Of course, the most stunning thing about Rhonda, was what Justine said about her after she headed out to the pool and a walk along the beach. “We were all like her, and most of us worse than where she is now, when we first moved in here,” Justine had said, a nostalgic squint to her eyes and a grateful smile on her lips.

  Anna meandered back through her central hallway sleepwalker-like. But the mirror there caught her attention. She wondered what Justine meant by that, “all like Rhonda.” All sad and droopy looking? That was hard to believe of the “wives,” often described as looking like a bevy of models or actresses. Then Anna realized something about Justine and company. They all looked fresh and gorgeous even without makeup. Their faces shown with natural luster, their skin smooth and relaxed. That was it. Relaxed. They all had that wonderfully age-reducing look of someone peacefully asleep, but with clear opened eyes and ready smiles. Most actresses didn’t look like that when she saw them up close.

  But most actresses didn’t try to heal your anxiety or wash your fears away with a word or a touch. Maybe those healing touches and prayers would make her appear younger and fresher, Anna thought, looking still at her image in the mirror, the low light of the hallway leaving room for imaginative generosity.

  She suddenly remembered little Luke’s startling pronouncement. She said it aloud to herself. “It’s okay, Anna.” And she smiled.

  After a Miracle

  In a café overlooking the Pacific, early lunching customers occupied only three of the dozen outdoor tables. The umbrellas over those tables offered their optimal coverage, as the sun neared its apex, on a day with no clouds and a ten-mile-an-hour wind. The cool breeze off the ocean made long sleeves comfortable, not to mention long pants and shoes.

  Beau Dupere had stopped at the shoes. If he didn’t really have to, he preferred not to wear shoes. Brown leather sandals sufficed for him, with white linen pants and a pale blue sweater over a light gray t-shirt. Across the table sat a familiar face to American movie-goers. Randy Cooper had appeared in dozens of Hollywood features since he was a teenager. He usually played the bad boy that everyone loved. He usually played himself, in essence. His long, wavy brown hair favored one side of his head, persuaded by the westerly wind. Black plastic aviator sunglasses disguised his eyes, but the deep lines in his forehead and around his mouth offered plenty of expression for Beau to see through his own sunglasses.

  Dropping the menu as the waiter arrived, Randy said, “Give me a Corona with lime, and some pretzels.”

  “Grapefruit juice and tortilla chips for me,” Beau said.

  The waiter, a slight-built young man with spikey hair and dark eyes, nodded. “Very good. I’ll be just a minute.”

  Randy waved a hand absently, as if sweeping the waiter away, perhaps to assist the young man in speeding their order back to the table. He looked at Beau and said, “You heard anything from Bond since you healed his broken hand?”

  Beau shook his head. “No. I think it freaked him out. I’m not surprised he hasn’t called or anything.”

  “You gonna call him?” Randy said.

  “I don’t plan to, but that could change. Why? Did you hear something?”

  “No, I just wondered how this worked.” Randy grinned and leaned forward in his chair, brushing a lock of hair off his glasses. “I mean, do you like go in for the kill after you rock somebody with one of those healing miracles?”

  Beau laughed. “‘In for the kill?’ You think I’m collecting scalps or somethin’?”

  Randy laughed, but not as comfortably as Beau. “Well, I don’t know. I really mean it. I don’t know how this works. I mean, do people just say, ‘hey thanks for making me not blind anymore’ and then just go back to their life of screwing around and getting stoned?”

  Beau considered Randy for a second and then looked past him to the blue water, and the first sign of clouds on the horizon. “The healing is free. No one pays for it, not with money, not with good behavior. He didn’t have to stop fooling around wit
h other guys wives in order to get healed, he doesn’t have to get sober in order to stay healed.”

  Randy swore and added more awkward laughter. “Okay, I get that. But, I guess I’m asking about human nature here. I’m asking what people usually do after they have this monster miracle knock ‘em over. Do they repent and all that. . . ” He stopped himself from another expletive, as if just considering whether he might clean up his language around the Jesus freak.

  The waiter arrived with the drinks and snacks. For Beau, it was about lunchtime, but he knew that Randy had only been awake for a couple of hours and it was too soon for his second meal of the day. This meeting wasn’t about eating and drinking, anyway, so he would wait until he got home to eat a proper lunch.

  Beau thanked the waiter and didn’t pause for him to get out of earshot before answering Randy. “People react all sorts of ways to seeing God’s tangible power at work. Most of them manage to deny it, in one way or another. That’s just the place and time we live in.” He sipped his grapefruit juice and resisted smacking his lips at the satisfying tang.

  “You remember Betty Timmerman?” Beau said. “You know, the gorgeous blonde that used to do those swimsuit photos and videos.”

  Randy swigged his beer and set it down, nodding. “Oh, yeah. Whatever happened to her?”

  Beau smiled. “She got healed and decided to keep her clothes on after that. She was active in a church down in Anaheim, last I knew.” He raised his eyebrows, checking to see that he had caught Randy’s attention. A nod from the wiry actor, assured Beau of his audience.

  “She had been diagnosed with breast cancer when she was only thirty. Imagine a famous swimsuit model with breast cancer. There’s all kinds of issues that she’s struggling with, like what’s gonna happen to me? What am I worth? Some serious questions. So, out of desperation, she comes to one of my meetings at that church down in Anaheim, about five years ago. I actually didn’t know who she was when she came up front to get healed, I didn’t even know that she had cancer. I just got this feeling that this woman’s life was about to change forever. All I had to do was put a hand on her head and call out the healing, and she started to vibrate and bounce like a little kid’s windup toy. After a few seconds she went over backward, taking out a half dozen surprised folks behind her.” He stopped to laugh.

  Randy laughed too, but still restrained his amusement compared to Beau. He found Beau’s whole attitude toward these things completely baffling.

  “She came to as the meeting was winding down, her makeup all smeared and streaked, her hair matted and wrecked. And she told me who she was and what had happened to her. It wasn’t just the healing from breast cancer, it was this intimate encounter with a God that wanted to love her and care for her no matter what she did or who she was. She got up off the floor believing all that because of the healing, but it was just the starter.”

  Beau took another swig of juice and started into the tortilla chips, scooping mango salsa from a tray of three varieties of chunky red sauce. Randy looked away, scanning the other people at the restaurant, as a few more showed up for lunch in the middle of the day. Beau could see his jaw muscles pulse and his neck muscles tighten. With so little body fat, Randy couldn’t hide his tension.

  “Yeah, well.” Randy started and then lost momentum for a second. He grabbed a couple of twisted pretzels and popped them into his mouth, finishing his thought over his own crunching. “I kinda got freaked out myself when I saw that hand healed. I mean I was close enough, and just sober enough, to see the swelling go down in like a second.” He swore again. “That was some serious CGI sorta stuff. But it wasn’t. It was real. And I could tell how real it was by the way Bondo acted too. I mean, Mr. Tough Guy was like trying to keep from crying in front of everybody, like a half dozen women he’d been to bed with and all that.” He stopped and shook his head, afraid to say more.

  Beau sat back, he took a deep breath. Though Randy couldn’t see it, Beau closed his eyes for a few seconds. Then he delivered his message.

  “Randy, God has been after you all your life, from the time you went to Sunday school with your sister, at your grandma’s church, to the time you freaked out at that Ouija board in middle school, to the time you had a bad acid trip and thought you saw the Devil himself. And God is still after you. He knows about whose fiancé you slept with last night and he knows what you’re gonna do tomorrow. But he doesn’t just know all that stuff about you, he really cares.”

  Beau and Randy had been acquaintances, and almost friends, for several years. They met at the hottest parties and some Hollywood fundraisers. But Randy had never told Beau any of those details about his life. In fact, he hadn’t told anyone, that he could remember, about any of those things, including his infidelity just last night.

  Randy sat frozen in place. His mind focused now on a shivery sort of vibration that had started at the top of his head and had just reached his feet. He was sure he couldn’t move, but didn’t have the will to test it. He swore again, and then started crying audibly.

  Beau looked around and prayed for a wall of protection so Randy wouldn’t get distracted by what anyone around them might think. A famous drinker and seven-time drug rehab veteran, it probably looked like Randy was meeting with his sponsor. Beau knew Randy was in a fragile state and wanted to protect his dignity and minimize his vulnerability, as much as possible. Only supernatural intervention could explain a dozen restaurant patrons not noticing an A-list actor sobbing at that corner table, with that other guy reaching a hand for his shoulder and praying aloud.

  Finding the Exit

  When Dixon and Kristen finally arrived home after ten-thirty that Friday night, they found Sara waiting for them in the living room. Was it parental intuition? Did Sara have a thought-bubble over her head that said she wanted to talk about something important? Somehow, they knew that their cheerleader daughter had a serious agenda when she greeted them from the blue Belshire fabric couch, wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt.

  Dixon grinned at his lovely girl, perhaps in an effort to soften the impending blow. Kristen chose a counter-offensive approach. “What are you looking so serious about, young lady?” An edge of rebuke sharpened the tone of that question.

  One thing that Sara had learned by the age of eighteen was that she need not fear her parents. Her father practically worshipped at her feet, and her mother was all bark and no bite. The same people-management skills that guided her to the head of the cheerleaders helped her maneuver between her mom and dad. Though she knew she would never get everything she wanted from them, she also knew that she could speak her mind, even if it offended them. She knew this, in spite of the fact that she had very rarely tried, and certainly not about an important matter of faith.

  “I found out something at the party tonight,” she said, sliding her feet off the couch and down to the floor. The couch fit her perfectly. She could place her size-eight feet flat on the floor and her lower back still conformed to the lumbar supporting cushions.

  “Yeah, what was that?” Dixon said, lowering himself into his recliner, directly across from Sara. Kristen had taken up a post next to the hallway door, her arms crossed over her chest, one foot planted, the other tilting back on her high heal.

  Sara pushed a wisp of golden hair off her forehead and looked squarely at her father. “Jenny Washington’s mother was dying of cancer until last summer. It was really far along and the doctors had given up.”

  Neither of her parents anticipated this preamble to the conflict for which they had braced. But the past tense verbs in this opening statement left them even more bereft of clues about the purpose of this discussion.

  “They’re Catholic, you know, and their church was praying for them. But finally, they went to a healing service up in Redwood.”

  Now Dixon and Kristen could clearly see the eighteen-wheeler rounding the bend, headlights blazing, barreling right toward them.

  “She was completely healed. The doctors said they couldn’t explain it. Th
ey had scans from before and from after and they said there was no way that they were from the same woman, except they knew it was the same woman ‘cause they were there when the scans were done.”

  Dixon’s mind wandered a bit, thinking that, if Sara applied herself, she could make a pretty good lawyer.

  Kristen pulled him back into the beam of those approaching headlights. “Well, dear, tell her why that doesn’t change anything.” She turned toward Dixon with a mixture of her hard-faced defensive posture and an embryonic shrug waiting in her tight shoulders.

  This prompt for a command performance may sound like something certain wives commonly do to their husbands, but Kristen normally wasn’t like those wives. That she threw the floor open to Dixon so forcefully, reflected how uncomfortable she was with answering the implied question lodged between the well-publicized meeting, starring her husband, and the healing story about Mrs. Washington. On the other hand, she felt confident that Dixon had an answer ready.

  Looking at Sara the whole time, seeing his wife only peripherally, Dixon said, “Oh, I know. I’ve read and heard lots of those stories. In fact, there are so many of them that I think you can’t just say that it’s fake, or that it’s some kind of group hysteria where people just think they’re getting healed.”

  Now Kristen began to slump, her crossed arms loosening, her tight lips parting. Here came another preamble that left her feeling as if she was churning her feet, trying to find a place where the water was shallow enough for her to stand.

  Dixon took a preacher’s pause, for effect, checking that the desired impact had landed on both women. Then he said, “And really, that’s what’s most disturbing about this guy.” This turned his response more to his wife’s satisfaction, though she still couldn’t have finished this thought for him. “You see, if he was faking the healings and just taking people’s money, then we’d just say he was a fake and a thief. But there may actually be something much more . . . ah . . . disturbing here.” He had considered the word “sinister,” but was trying not to pour all of his cauldrons of burning oil at once. Seeing his audience still poised for his big conclusion, he said, “It’s much more disturbing to think that a guy like this has some serious spiritual power, ‘cause we know that power’s not from God. So that leaves us just one possibility.”