by John Herrick
The congregation had remodeled the room since Jesse left home. He strolled along the aisles. Toward one corner of the room, he located the third row from the back—the area where, at sixteen years old, he and other classmates had hung out during services. From these seats, near another set of doors at the corner of the room, he and his buddies had sneaked outside during services for a smoke along the side of the building, an implied dare for a late arriver to catch them.
Anything to distance himself from his identity as the preacher’s son.
Jesse took his time as he wandered up the center aisle across thin, tan carpeting, the industrial type. He made his way past rows of chairs, their frames the color of charcoal, their backs and seats padded with material the color of merlot. Large, fabric-covered rectangles hung along the khaki walls to help absorb sound. Overhead hung a series of track lighting, both general lights and spotlights aimed toward the main platform, which sat at the auditorium’s forefront.
Jesse ran his fingers along the wood paneling of the platform before he climbed a trio of steps that led to the top. Speakers loomed overhead, pointed down toward the auditorium’s chairs, and balanced an impressive set of feedback speakers that sat on the platform’s floor for the band’s benefit. On the platform, behind a series of microphones, a collection of instruments sat: a keyboard, drums encased in a plexiglass cubicle for sound absorption, electric and bass guitars, and a small set of percussion instruments. Chuck believed church should be a celebration. And Jesse had to admit, he loved it when the music got loud and sent the room into vibrations.
Jesse sat down on the platform, dead center, the position from which Chuck started his preaching—started being the key word, as his father tended to roam back and forth when he spoke. To Jesse’s recall, Chuck took pleasure in walking down the platform’s steps and interacting, like a good friend, with members who sat in the front rows.
Jesse peered out into the sea of chairs before him, which numbered close to one thousand, packed during worship services but empty in this serene moment. How intimidating, yet invigorating, the view had appeared to Eden and him when this building first opened. During the week, when the church was empty and they’d gotten bored, he and Eden used to jump off the platform to see who could land the farthest. A slew of similar memories, random and minute, now rushed through his mind.
Jesse could recall the day they broke ground where this room now sat.
“Soon this empty plot of land will be filled with people,” Chuck had whispered to him at the time, his father’s heart in a clear ache for random individuals, faces Chuck had yet to meet. “People who hurt, who seek answers in their lives. People who need what you have.”
On his feet again, Jesse now sauntered over to his right, where he ran his finger along the wall that bordered the back of the platform area. At its far edge, he reached the baptistery. This was a large, tiled tub in which a minister immersed people in water during baptism, a symbolic gesture that illustrated a Christian’s death to sin and new life of salvation. Jesse ran his hand along the sparkling teal tiles.
He was thirteen years old during his own baptism. One of the first to step into this tub, he had waited until a Sunday when the schedule showed an assistant minister would perform the ordinance—his wait an act of independence on Jesse’s part, even at that age.
Although Jesse had seen others undergo baptisms, it proved a pleasant surprise to him when he himself stepped down into the waist-deep water: It felt cozy, like a warm bath. At nine years old, Jesse had become a Christian and affirmed the decision at his baptismal moment. As an assistant minister gripped Jesse’s hand, he guided Jesse backward into the water, which engulfed Jesse with fresh abandonment, and pulled him up again. The immersion itself took about two seconds, but right away Jesse knew he’d underestimated its impact. As he emerged from underwater, broke through the surface, he felt the water sweep over his face and chest. Inside him, a sense of radiance seemed to dawn, an acute awareness that he had undergone a biblical ritual and had exhibited obedience to God. He found himself overcome by peace—a stark contrast to the frustration and confusion that developed in the following years. But on the day of his water baptism, he felt like he had begun afresh all over again. From young Jesse’s perspective, that moment had belonged to God and him.
Jesse had sensed God’s smile on him that day.
So when did everything change? When did Jesse start to retreat?
He couldn’t pinpoint a particular day or event that triggered his withdrawal, but he knew the change had been gradual. Circumstances blended together as he entered high school. Jesse grew angry. And then came his relationship with Caitlyn, followed by confusion when they discovered she was pregnant.
Coaxed by the creak of a nearby water pipe, Jesse snapped out of his reminiscence.
He walked down the platform’s stairs, headed down a side aisle of the auditorium, and turned off the lights.
CHAPTER 39
Wind, cooled by the temperature of the water, swept over the surface of Lake Erie. Jesse felt invigorated as its gusts rustled through his hair. Mid June proved balmy with minimal humidity and temperatures in the low eighties where he lived further south, but here in downtown Cleveland, as he overlooked the lake, the air brought to mind a Canadian summer.
Jesse and Drew sat side by side on a park bench a few feet from the lake, watched sailboats drift along and pedestrians gravitate after some downtown shopping. Distanced from the ocean, his perpetual west-coast tan in a fade, Jesse felt at home again. Before him, lazy waves danced along the endless horizon as he basked in the sun. He listened to the lapping water as it nudged against its concrete perimeter.
They had grabbed a to-go sack of burgers, fries and sodas—Drew reminded Jesse that in northern Ohio, people called the beverage “pop”—from a fast-food outlet down the street. When finished, they threw the trash away and Jesse reached into his backpack.
“All righty, ready to get some cool pictures for your room?” Jesse asked.
Drew bounced on the seat once before he caught himself in his outburst of childhood innocence.
Jesse hadn’t used his camera since his journey home from L.A., in those days following the suicide attempt. Eager to introduce his camera to a positive turn of events, he held it in front of his son.
“This is a digital camera,” Jesse began, “but many people still like the natural side of a film-based camera. If they wanted to take shots of slow-moving objects on the water, they might load it with film that will advance at a speed of 200 since the camera’s not mounted on a tripod. That way, the picture won’t be affected as much.”
Drew gave him a quizzical look, as if Jesse had just recited a page from Plato’s journal. Okay, so I’m not an expert parent.
Jesse stifled a laugh and clarified his words. “For fast action, you’d use fast-speed film. For slow action, you’d use slower stuff. But this is digital, so we’re safe.”
“Gotcha.”
They approached the barrier above the water. Jesse handed the camera to Drew, who, without hesitation, pointed it toward the closest sailboat and peered through the lens.
“You see that rectangle that shows what your picture will look like?” Jesse said. “Do you want to know how the pros line up their shots to make them look cooler?”
“Yeah.”
Jesse pulled a pen from his pocket and drew a tic-tac-toe frame on the palm of his own hand. “It’s called the law of thirds: You take that rectangle you looked at and, in your head, divide it into thirds, top to bottom and left to right, so it ends up looking like tic-tac toe.” Jesse drew a dot at each of the four spots where the vertical and horizontal lines intersected—the four corners of a square in the middle of the frame. “These four points are where the thirds meet together. They’re the strongest places in your picture. When you line up your shot, pick out the one thing that you want to be the main object in your picture, and try to position it at one of those four points. So if you wanted to take a pictu
re of a sailboat, that would be the thing you’d put there. The boat is traveling right to left; so to make it look like the boat has made a lot of headway, place it toward the left; to make it look like it’s on a journey, place it toward the right.”
Drew responded with an exhale of confidence, one that lingered between understanding and the thrill of a kid in the company of an adult who made him feel significant. He aimed the camera to take a few practice shots of a boat, one with a green-and-yellow sail that flapped in the wind. As Drew pointed and clicked, Jesse could tell he’d gotten the hang of it. He showed Jesse his latest attempt.
“That’s great! Move it a little further to the left—give the boat a chance to catch up to your focal point by the time you click the camera.” Jesse checked the next shot. “You’ve got it, bud! We’ll select the best one and blow it up to poster size for your room—a Drew original.” He patted his son on the back.
As Drew took additional shots, Jesse tilted his head back and took a deep breath of the scent of rich water. Compared to the Pacific Ocean and its hectic, surfer-speckled waves, Lake Erie’s two-foot waves looked like ripples of serenity. They glimmered beneath the sun.
Another scarlet drop fell. Jesse watched it land on the railing.
“Oh my gosh!” Drew said. “Are you okay? What’s wrong with your nose?”
“I’m okay, bud.”
Short of breath, Jesse feigned normalcy for Drew’s sake. He didn’t want him worried. But for a moment, Jesse felt as though he couldn’t regain his breathing. His heart rate increased. He reached behind, stumbled backward a few feet to the bench, and sat down. Jesse tried to pretend this was all a simple inconvenience. On his brow, a sweat broke forth, but it dried and cooled him like rubbing alcohol in the lake-kissed breeze.
“Is that blood?”
“No big deal; just the humidity.” Drew wouldn’t know any better.
A minute later, Jesse’s body returned to normal—his body, not his concerns. Stress, that’s all, he convinced himself. This would not defeat him. Not during his time with his son.
Jesse took some deep breaths, relieved when the event ended. He inhaled through his nose deeply to prevent an escape of further drops. After another minute to relax, he noticed Drew, who still stared at him. Jesse decided to distract Drew’s attention from what he’d just witnessed. Caitlyn couldn’t hear about this.
He nudged his son. “So, what would you be doing on a Saturday if you weren’t here?”
With a shrug, Drew said, “Not much. Maybe play on the computer.”
“What about your friends from school? Wouldn’t you hang out with them?”
“I don’t really hang out with anyone.”
“How about your friend Ryan across the street, the one I saw you shoot hoops with one day?”
“Ryan’s parents are divorced. He visited his dad that night. He’s only there maybe once a week.”
Jesse flipped through his past chats with Drew. “You mentioned you went to a baseball game in Akron with a friend and his dad—how about that friend?”
“That was Ryan too.” Drew fidgeted with the camera. In search of intriguing buttons he could push, Jesse figured. “Mostly I hang out with my mom.”
“You and your mom get along pretty well, huh?”
“Yeah. Plus, I don’t like to leave her alone much.”
That sounded odd. “Why not?”
A soft-spoken Drew gazed at a wayward seagull that must have taken a wrong turn and ended up on the wrong shoreline. “I don’t think she’s too happy.”
“What makes you say that?”
“A few years ago, I got home one day and thought I heard crying come from my mom’s bedroom, but I couldn’t tell for sure. So I walked over to her room real quiet and peeked in, and I saw her sitting on the floor against her bed. It was her—she was the one crying, but she tried not to make any noise.”
Jesse leaned closer to capture each syllable. “Why did your mom cry?”
Although the incident had made an obvious impression on Drew’s memory and caused him discomfort, he seemed open to talking about it. Maybe he needed someone to confide in.
“I don’t know what was wrong,” Drew replied. “I asked her, but she said it was nothing. Then she looked at me and smiled, but she still looked sad. I think she just tried to make me feel better about it.”
Jesse didn’t know what to say. He ached at the thought of Caitlyn weeping. “Does your mom cry a lot?”
“Not anymore.”
“What did you do when you saw her crying that day?”
“I rubbed her shoulder to try to make her feel better. She asked me to sit down by her, so I did. Then she gave me a hug and kept holding on, real tight.” Drew set the camera aside. “I don’t ever want her to be sad like that again, so after that day I decided to stay with her as much as I can because I know that makes her feel better.”
“Does she know that’s why you don’t leave her often?”
“No.”
Jesse chewed on this a moment. “And you said she never told you why she cried that day, huh?”
Drew shook his head. “All she said was, ‘I’m sorry you couldn’t meet your dad. For some reason, I always believed you would.’”
Thunderstruck, his ache doubled on Caitlyn’s behalf, Jesse covered his head with his hands. All these years, and he’d had no idea. If he’d known about Drew’s birth, would Jesse have tried to take care of them? Jesse had no idea.
Then Jesse remembered Drew beside him. He looked over, relieved to find Drew hadn’t noticed his reaction.
“Why do you think your dad wasn’t around for you?” asked Jesse.
The boy’s eyelashes fluttered once, his eyes moistened. He must have gone through hell all these years, but he held his composure. Not a tear escaped. “He would be here if he could. That’s what Mom says, anyway.”
Jesse yearned to tell Drew the truth here and now: His dad sat right beside him on this bench. Instead, he chose to respect Caitlyn’s timetable.
Back on his feet, Drew took one more picture and halted. He examined the display on the camera. “It’s full.”
In a daze, Jesse came to. He dug into his backpack. “I’ve got another memory card for you.” And then, for a moment, he stopped his search to gaze up at his son again. He watched Drew examine the camera and, in all likelihood, rearrange the settings to render it as challenging as a Rubik’s Cube to reconfigure. But Jesse didn’t care.
As he gazed closer, Jesse bit his lower lip to suppress a smile.
His son had his nose.
CHAPTER 40
Dressed in T-shirts and shorts, Jesse, Caitlyn and Drew spent the entire day downtown at The Flats for a Fourth-of-July celebration along the Cuyahoga River, where Drew had a blast. When the three of them returned to Caitlyn’s house that evening, Drew darted to his bedroom.
“Mom, I’ll be right back! I’m gonna get the bottle rockets you bought me!” Drew shouted on his way down the hall. Before long, he must have gotten distracted him in his room, because he didn’t emerge.
Exhausted, Jesse and Caitlyn hauled themselves into the kitchen.
“Would you like some iced tea?” she asked.
When he took her up on the offer and thanked her, she told him she would meet him outside, so he wandered out to the patio alone. Underneath a deepening sky, Jesse settled into a plastic chair and marveled how, even past nine thirty at night, daylight still lingered. Jesse had never figured out if these summer daylight hours existed because Ohio sat further north than other states or due to its position within the time zone. But during the Ohio summers of his youth, he’d cherished the final glimmers of early July light until they faded into history around ten o’clock.
Soon Caitlyn made her way outside with two glasses of iced tea. She handed him a glass. “You won’t believe this.” With a touch to his arm as if to share a tidbit of inside humor, she said, “I stopped by Drew’s room, and he’s conked out on his bed. He must have lied down for a minute
and fallen asleep.”
“Busy day. I’m sure he’s wiped out. One thing’s clear: You and I no longer have the energy of a ten year old.”
“Half the time I fake it to keep up with him.” Caitlyn pulled a chair beside his and began to sip her lemon-jolted tea. Finally able to relax, she leaned back in her seat and drew one leg up against herself. “Do you think that makes me a bad mom?”
“Of course not.”
Unintentionally, and ever so discreet, Jesse glanced over at Caitlyn’s sun-kissed leg, not more than a shadow in these minutes before twilight. In times past, he used to caress her leg and, in a shared joke, would try to find the solitary freckle hidden inches above her knee.
Wait, what am I doing? Jesse shook himself out of the memory.
Then again, that freckle—it always made her chuckle when he searched for it.
Jesse leaned over and brushed his knuckle against the bottom of her calf in a featherlike motion. “The freckle, if I remember.”
And sure enough, she responded with that same laugh he relished, just like she used to. “Still there.”
“What did I name it?” Jesse scrunched his mouth in concentration and sifted through the lush soil of their mutual past.
Caitlyn rolled her eyes. “You named it Judith. Don’t remind me!”
She giggled more, and this time he joined her. When the laughter died down, Jesse paused and recalled another detail.
“Wait, I gave it another name later on, didn’t I?”
Yes, he had. And in truth, though he pretended otherwise, he had not forgotten. Now Caitlyn leaned her head back at the memory.