If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1)
Page 31
Tammy weighed her words during a two-second pause and then said them anyway, in spite of the hollowness she heard in them. “Maybe he didn’t really mean walking on water,” she said. And the “maybe” grew larger after she said it.
Adam sensed the faith limits his mother still felt throttling her soul, and didn’t want to challenge those further. “Maybe,” he said.
He yielded to her tug, allowing himself to be the little boy again, kept warm by his mother. They walked to the rustic wooden stairway up the sandy cliff toward a warm and welcoming home.
A Vigil of Thanksgiving
Sara Claiborne cried for hours the night she heard the news. The next morning she started up her Toyota Corolla and drove south until she reached the hills above Malibu, winding down toward the shore on the last fumes of gas. Only the cruelly impaled grief imbedded in her heart kept her from worrying about how she was going to pay for gas to get back up north to her apartment.
When she found the house at the address listed for Beau Dupere on one of the protest Web sites, she found no protestors. One broken sign leaned against a split rail fence across the road from the house, but there was no one left to hold that sign or to shout or chant.
Sara had to park a quarter mile past the house and walk back, however, because of the crowd. Strangers hugged her when she paused to look at the medical records they held up in protest of a murder, and in testimony of a life surrendered. Mothers, with children grown now, still remembered the doctor’s diagnosis of a slow painful death for their boy or girl. X-rays, charts, and test results witnessed to the suffering. Tearful smiles told about the healing.
Moving slowly, listening to one and then another tell the story of their own healing, or that of a friend or parent, Sara drifted into Anna Conyers. They hadn’t spoken since that day in Oakland, both forgetting their promise to stay in touch.
Without hesitation, Anna ran into Sara’s arms and they stood together crying. The cheerleader hugged the reporter and they both knew that they weren’t crying for Beau, but for themselves and for the family, and for the world that suffers every day in sickness and in pain.
A bulwark of flowers had already accumulated against the white wall next to the gate. A flickering crowd of candles surrounded that fragrant and colorful memorial. Dozens of people just stood looking at a large photo of Beau that someone had planted in the middle of the wall of flowers. The wind covered the sound of sobbing, but could not conceal the curses and screams when grief became too much to contain inside a lonely mourner.
Anna and Sara stood arm in arm at the memorial, watching a man lead a young woman, perhaps his wife, away from the silent vigil, her cries and questions opening vents in souls all around her, grateful that she said the words that they had thought, that they too had felt.
Or Just Wading In?
Maggie looked over the cliff, down to the beach, and found Adam where she suspected he would be. She could see the wind rearranging his straw-blonde hair from above, the brightness of his head contrasting with the steely dark of the water. He stood at the water’s edge for a full minute while she watched. Then he started out over the waves. From where Maggie stood, it seemed that he was actually doing it this time, as if he had found a place where the surface of the water was as solid as the stone tiles on which she stood watching. After several steps on top of the waves, he finally fell through the surface to the bottom, wet now up to his waist.
Adam threw his hands into the air, and Maggie could hear his shouts over the waves and wind, all the way at the top of the cliff. He jumped up and down and spun, splashing water with his hands and feet in celebration.
The swells on the ocean rolled toward the shore, looking like long limbs sliding under dark satin sheets. Taking a deep draft of the salty air, Maggie sighed, turned away from the distant scene of celebration and shook her head. With her face the same stony mask that she had worn at the funeral, she headed back to the house, beginning to plan her departure from this place.
An Answer
Dixon Claiborne stood in his office, looking at the letter in his hands, a mile-wide smile on his face. On the professional letterhead of a large church in a burgeoning young city an hour away, he had the offer for which he had been waiting.
The month before Beau Dupere’s funeral—that event in another universe that Dixon had only visited once—he had received an invitation to come preach at a big, prosperous church. He knew that invitation was the equivalent of a major league tryout. And he had preached his best sermon ever, full of emotion, full of scriptural revelation and practical application. It was a touchdown, to return the metaphor to a more familiar field of play.
Ten or more meetings and two months later, he had the offer in his hands. He laughed. He punched the air, and said, “Yes!” in that squeezed sort of voice one uses to shout a celebration without alerting the neighbors. He would have to tell Connie soon, but not today, not right away. His awareness of his secretary outside his office door helped stop him from dancing a jig in the middle of the carpet. Instead, he uttered a spontaneous thanksgiving.
“Thank you, Lord!” he said, forgoing any formalities, such as reverently folded hands. “I know I don’t deserve this. And I know this is by your grace,” he said, confessing magnanimously out of his joy. “I’m counting on you to help me all along the way,” he said, dropping his hands to his side and shaking his head in wonder.
“I will help you, and I will also show you some new things.”
That two-pronged phrase rose up so clearly in Dixon’s head that he turned around, as if he might find the speaker sitting at his desk. He stopped, standing statue still, only his eyes moving, his gaze rolling across the room, both high and low. Had he actually heard a voice? Or, maybe it was just a random thought that bounced through his brain. He usually didn’t hear voices, and most random phrases just bounced past without catching his attention, without sending that electric charge up his spine.
What was the message? He tried to remember. “I will help you . . . I will show you something new,” he thought, trying to reconstruct it.
“Did you say that, Lord?” he said, his voice clenched, a haunted feeling growing inside.
He jumped as his cell phone rang.
The ring tone was from Sara’s favorite song. His daughter was calling.
When Dixon had preached the first time in that big new church, Kristin and Brett accompanied him, solidifying his résumé for the potential employer. Sara’s absence would have been easy enough to explain, she was college-age now and the school year was underway. But no one asked, of course. They didn’t know Sara, nor did they know about her escape into scary new territory, at least scary for Dixon. Of all his insecurities, the questions Dixon feared most in the interviews were ones about why his daughter hung out with people who spoke in tongues and claimed to have healing powers. Those fears bordered on paranoia, he knew. But that didn’t keep them away.
That he had survived the vetting process, been invited back to preach a second time, and now held the offer letter in his hand, felt like grace to calm his fears and ease his suffering at the revolt of his daughter.
He and Sara had talked a few times over the last several weeks, but Dixon was surprised to see her face on his phone, his grown up girl calling him in the middle of his work day.
He tapped, “Answer Call” and raised the phone to his ear. “Sara?” he said, surprise tuning his voice.
“Dad?” she said. “I know this is gonna sound strange. . .” She paused, as if trying to decide whether to continue.
“Yes?”
“Well, I think God wants me to tell you something. I think He wants me to tell you, ‘Yes, I did say that.’”
Dixon again stood bronzed to the floor. He might have even stopped breathing.
“Dad?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice clamped and breathless.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Did that make any sense to you?”
“Uhhh, yeah.”
Sara breathed relief into the phone. “Good. I guess I’m not just imagining this one.”
“This one?”
“Yeah, at school I’ve been learning about hearing God’s voice, and giving others messages from God sometimes.”
Someone inside Dixon’s head distinctly said, “But we don’t believe in that.” Since Dixon was having trouble engaging his voice, however, all he said was, “Okay, thanks.”
Sara said, “Love you.”
Dixon echoed that sentiment.
And they ended the call simultaneously.
All Dixon could think was, “What if God really did say it?”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The biblical quotation in Beau’s Oakland sermon is from I Corinthians 2:1-5, in the New International Version, 2011.
Thanks to Kathy, who gave suggestions to make this next book better.
Thanks again to Erin Brown for teaching me a lot about publishing a novel.
Thanks to Dave, Cheryl and Valerie for reading an advanced copy and helping me fix some broken pieces to the story.