A long breath eased from between his lips, one that seemed to come from the bottom of his feet. “That’s not all.”
The whisper of a gentle wind off the lake played in the tree branches behind them. Elizabeth made a slight turn in her chair and met his eyes. “I know.”
He hesitated for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re sitting here thinking about Luke, wondering where he is and how come he isn’t here. Knowing that wherever he is, he knows it’s Labor Day…knows he’s missing our picnic, but that he’s chosen to stay away all the same.” Her voice was calm, steady. Soothing, the way it always was. “And you’re thinking about Erin and Sam leaving tomorrow.”
He stared at her for a long while. How many times had he sensed this bond between them, known for certain that she truly was part of him and he a part of her? Elizabeth could read his thoughts, his heart, as easily as he could read hers. And no matter how far apart their daily dealings took them, they always returned to this…this not knowing where she stopped and he began. This quiet place where oneness wasn’t something they tried to find but rather simply was.
A slow chuckle sounded in his throat.
“I’m right.” It wasn’t a question. She turned and looked at Cole, Maddie, and Hayley chasing each other in the gentle surf.
“Perfectly.” The laughter faded and he studied his wife’s profile. “Where do you think he is?”
“I’m not sure.” Unshed tears made her eyes glisten in the waning afternoon sunlight. “With Lori, I guess.”
They were quiet for a moment. Elizabeth was right, of course. Luke had to be with Lori, maybe at some club event convincing himself that his family was no longer worthy of his attention.
After a long while John let his eyes lift toward the sky. “God—” he hesitated, sensing the very real presence of the king of the universe—“wherever our boy is, please bring him back to us.” His voice cracked when the weariness within him was more than he could bear. “We miss him so much.”
Luke’s biggest revelation of the week took place in a rental car twenty minutes out of Bloomington.
Until then, he could hardly believe the changes that had happened in his heart this past week. He and Reagan had talked for hours that first night, while he held Tommy and tried to convince himself he was really in New York City holding his son and talking with the only girl he’d ever loved.
They’d agreed on almost everything. That they’d been foolish to let so much time pass, that she was sorry for keeping her pregnancy from him, and that no matter what happened next, they never wanted to be apart again. They’d even talked about getting married.
The thing that remained a struggle for Luke was the idea that God had allowed the tragedy of September 11. He and Reagan went round and round on that, and always she said it was simply her father’s time to go. Same with the other people who died. All people have a last day on earth, and that was it for the people in the Twin Towers.
But Luke was still troubled.
Why bother to pray if God was going to do his own thing anyway?
They’d agreed on something else. That Luke needed to make things right with his father, needed to come clean with him about what had happened between Reagan and him in the hours prior to the attacks on America. And he needed to tell his parents about the baby.
“Are you afraid?” Reagan asked him two nights ago. “To see them…after so much time?”
“A little.” They had been sitting side by side, with Tommy lying across both their laps. “I’ve been such a jerk.” He’d gazed at her eyes and wondered how he’d lived without her for so long. “What if things are never the same again?”
“They will be, Luke.” She leaned close and kissed him on the cheek. “I know your dad, remember? Things will be fine. But you need to go to him.”
That conversation moved Reagan and him to get on her family’s computer and book another flight—this one round-trip to Indianapolis.
He’d landed an hour ago, rented a car, and was now headed for Lake Monroe. Suddenly traffic slowed and narrowed to one lane. Ahead he could see two fire trucks and at least two ambulances. The flash of lights told him that something bad had happened. Maybe even something deadly.
One car at a time made its way past the area. As Luke pulled up close enough to see the accident, he caught sight of the car. It was an SUV of some kind, lying on its side, crushed almost beyond recognition. Two other vehicles were pulled off to the side, both with serious dents, but less damage. To the side of the SUV, three people huddled together, all of them weeping. At that moment one of the ambulances pulled away, sirens blaring.
That’s when something else caught Luke’s attention, and he glanced toward the other waiting ambulance. Two paramedics carried a stretcher toward it, but they weren’t in a hurry. Luke saw it more clearly then. His eyes grew wide; his heartbeat quickened. On top of the stretcher was a body.
A covered body.
Luke swallowed hard and filed past in the stream of traffic, but when he was a mile up the road he pulled off at a gas station, parked his car, turned off his engine, and dropped his head against the steering wheel. When he closed his eyes he could see it: the totaled car, the paramedics with the body suspended between them.
Just minutes ago the person on the stretcher was driving down the same road Luke had been on. Heading to an afternoon barbecue or telling stories to the family as he drove down the highway. Maybe he’d been to the lake with friends or on a business trip. Or maybe he’d merely been out to the store for a bag of groceries or a can of paint. Whatever his reason, he couldn’t possibly have known that in the blink of an eye he’d be lying on a stretcher, dead.
The image played again and again in Luke’s mind, and it occurred to him that he’d seen it somewhere before. Fire engines…ambulances…paramedics. Covered bodies on stretchers.
Then he remembered where.
On TV footage after September 11. Body after body after body.
Slowly, with other cars coming and going past him, the realization grew in Luke’s mind. Not a news flash exactly, but something that hadn’t hit him quite this way before. Ever since the collapse of the Twin Towers, he’d been blaming God for not coming through.
But for the person in the crushed SUV, today was even more tragic than September 11. That person’s day of reckoning, of tragedy and terror, happened on a sun-soaked highway late in the afternoon of a beautiful Labor Day. The person’s last day on earth.
Tragedies happened every day: murders…rapes…car accidents. As Reagan said, everyone had a last day, a time when their hours would be over and they’d be called to judgment. Luke gripped the steering wheel and lifted his head enough to look out over the dashboard.
Suddenly Luke’s realization hit full force: God hadn’t hijacked the planes that day. He hadn’t flown them into the World Trade Center or encouraged the terrorists to do so. What God had done, Luke realized, was give each person free will. Not so much freethinking, but the freedom to make choices—either good or bad, right or wrong.
He closed his eyes again and remembered something his mother had told him in the weeks after he left home. The Hound of Heaven wasn’t about to let him go easily. Luke blinked, and in a flash the events of the past few days screamed at him. Had his mother been right? Was God the one who’d been chasing him all those times when he couldn’t find peace?
God, are you there? Are you…are you mad at me?
A car squealed out of the gas-station parking lot, but when the sound faded, Luke felt something stir in his soul. A voice even quieter than a whisper.
Son, I have loved you with an everlasting love. Return to me. Return to your first love.
Once, a lifetime ago, thoughts like those would have echoed loudly in Luke’s heart, making him certain God was there beside him, talking to him. But now…was it his imagination? Wishful thinking, maybe, or a beacon of contrived light to help him find his way through the dark?
A dampness gathe
red at the corners of Luke’s eyes. How could he return to God when he’d made such a public mockery of the faith he’d been raised with? His family, his father had honored his choice to set out on his own, to explore the options a fallen world offered. They’d honored him and loved him even while he made plans to cut them out of his life completely.
He hung his head. God, I’m pathetic. The worst son ever. I’m not even sure I remember how to love.
Return to me, my son.
Luke blinked his eyes open and looked around. The voice had stirred in the private places of his heart, the places that hadn’t forgotten—no matter how much his mind had willed him to forget—what it was to love God.
Not only did God exist, but he hadn’t given up on Luke Baxter. Even after every horrible thing Luke had done to leave God behind.
A Bible story came to mind—something from a sermon he’d heard on the radio long before his world turned upside down. Jesus was talking to his friends after many of his followers had turned away. Tension must’ve filled the air as Jesus looked at those who remained and asked simply, “Will you go, too?”
Peter’s answer rang through Luke now—even after such a long time away from the Bible: “Where would we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.”
Hadn’t that same dialogue played out across America this past year? Wasn’t Christ’s question to his followers the same one indirectly posed to all of America on September 11? With so many across the United States already turning away from God, Jesus might as well have peered at his followers through the veil of smoke over New York City and said, “Will you go, too?”
Some—Kari and Ryan, Peter and Brooke, even Ashley—answered the way Peter had thousands of years earlier. “If ever I needed God it was after September 11,” Brooke told him once. “Faith helps everything make sense.”
But others…
Luke’s chest ached and he sat up. He relaxed his hold on the wheel and stared at his hands. How could he have run from God? What was he thinking? That somehow he’d find something more stable, more comforting? That peace and perfection and answers to the evil on earth might exist in something other than faith in God? Why hadn’t he had the rock-solid belief of Kari or Ryan or his father?
Or Peter…
Luke’s eyes widened. Peter. Simon Peter—the one who so firmly looked Jesus in the eyes and declared, “Where else would we go?” was the very same man who would deny Christ hours before his death.
Not once, but three times.
Peter—the one who swore that all the others might scatter, but he never would—was the one whose voice Jesus heard when he came into the courtyard after being beaten…the voice denying he’d ever known Jesus.
Understanding wrapped itself around Luke like a blanket. Peter knew he could turn nowhere but toward Jesus, yet barely a season later he blatantly denied Christ in front of a crowd of people. The very same way Luke had done this past year. Time and time and time again.
Lord, forgive me. What have I done?
A hundred memories screamed at him, times when he’d counted himself among those most doubting of God, those outright against God. He winced as he remembered arguing against the Creator for his class project, the one he’d worked on with Lori. There he’d been, proclaiming the benefits of humanism and encouraging others to think for themselves, not to believe the faith of their families.
So strong was the stance he’d taken against God that he’d taught himself to dislike everything about his past, his faith, even his family.
An image of the last time he saw his father flashed in his mind. He could hear himself, almost as clearly as he must’ve sounded that day in Lori’s apartment, yelling at his father, ordering him to leave, demanding that he mind his own business and stay away.
Just as clearly he could still hear his father’s reply: “I’ve always loved you, and nothing…nothing you do could make me stop loving you. When you’re ready to come back, I’ll be waiting.”
“Dad…” He whispered the word, but it banged around the inside of his car like a scream for help. “Dad, I didn’t mean it.”
Luke felt a stabbing in his heart, a pain as raw and gripping as if God himself were squeezing it, wringing out the anger and unbelief and bitterness. The pain was worse than anything Luke could remember, but it was something else, too.
It was freeing.
He closed his eyes. God, I’ve done everything wrong, broken every promise I ever made to you…to my family. But I understand now. I do. There’s nowhere else I want to turn. You hold my future, God. Please forgive me.
Almost immediately the tightness in his heart eased, and he felt a dawning on the horizon of his soul. It was a feeling he recognized, one he hadn’t known for a year but that he’d never forgotten.
The feeling of forgiveness.
Forgiveness and newness, hope and a second chance. They suddenly loomed as big as all his tomorrows strung together.
He savored the feeling. Then finally he started the car engine. The best part about the story of Peter was that for all his early boasts of strength and for all his dismal denials, God never gave up on the man.
And now Luke was sure that even after the debacle of the past year, God had not given up on him either.
Luke pulled out onto the highway and thought about the Baxter annual Labor Day picnic taking place at the lake. None of them knew he was coming, and if they were angry at him, it would be his own fault. But maybe—just maybe—they cared enough to give him another chance. He’d know soon enough.
Lake Monroe was ten miles down the road.
Life had already ended, but still Ashley was forced to go through the motions.
Walking along the beach at Lake Monroe. Playing Frisbee with Cole. Building a fort of twigs and rocks and leaves with Maddie and Hayley. Offering to help her father with the barbecue. All of it a series of disjoined actions, completely robotic. As though someone had scraped out her heart and soul and mind, and replaced them with enough mechanics to go through the motions of life, but nothing more.
Ashley sat on the shore and watched Kari and Ryan, hand in hand, standing with their feet in the water. They would be married in just three weeks, and then Kari’s storybook life could continue as though it had never been interrupted.
What about me, God? Who will be there for me?
A recent memory of Irvel played in her mind. The woman had been sitting on the edge of her bed smiling, nodding her head.
“What is it, Irvel?” Ashley stepped into the room. Irvel’s blood pressure was still unstable much of the time, and Ashley had wondered if the woman was having a seizure.
But Irvel had turned to her and grinned. Then she waved like a little girl looking at her mother from her place at the kindergarten table. “Hi. Guess what?”
“What?” Ashley had come closer and put her hand on Irvel’s shoulder.
“Hank’s here with me.” She raised a shaky hand and motioned at the pictures adorning her wall. Pictures of Hank. “He loves me so much.” She gave a happy shake of her head. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
Ashley thought about Landon and swallowed an ocean of sorrow. “Yes, Irvel. Hank is a wonderful man.”
Ashley had assumed she and Landon would find their way into a relationship like the one Irvel had shared with Hank. But now…now Ashley’s future seemed as ominous and empty as a city parking lot at nightfall.
In the midst of the terror she felt about her future were a handful of lies that made her feel disconnected, even more like some kind of machine with a key in her back. When she first returned home from Paris, she’d been adept at keeping secrets. It had been her way of surviving. But not anymore, and the things she wasn’t saying were making every moment an effort.
She’d known about her positive blood test for weeks, and still only Landon and Luke knew the truth. Her parents, Kari, Cole—even her doctor—didn’t know yet. She simply hadn’t found the strength to tell them. Doing so would make her situation so much more real. Her an
nouncement would start a clock ticking, the one that would count down the days until she either responded to treatment or fell victim to the virus.
And the secrets welling within her were hardly relegated to her blood test only. No one else knew that she’d contacted the Wellingtons in New York City and told them she wouldn’t be bringing them any more art. She explained only that she needed to be closer to home, more focused on her private life. A local gallery not far from the university would handle any paintings she might sell.
Also, she was keeping quiet about Luke. No one knew that he’d moved in with her and Cole—though she suspected Cole would say something any day. The others didn’t know anything of Luke’s son or the fact that he was in New York City with Reagan.
Everything about her life was a lie, and all of it so monstrous she wasn’t sure how to begin to tell the truth. But however it happened, the truth had to come out. She couldn’t live like this much longer.
“Mommy, play catch with me!” Cole came tearing down the sloping grassy shore, a softball in his hands. “Let’s do the dropsy contest. We have to beat our record.”
Ashley lifted herself from the shore and dusted off the back of her shorts. Dropsy meant they’d count the number of times they caught the ball without either of them dropping it. Their record was twenty-two.
“Okay.” She was dying inside, but she grinned anyway. “We haven’t broken it all summer, but maybe—”
Cole tossed the ball to her. “One.”
She caught it and flipped it back to him. “Two.”
They kept up the pattern, and Ashley let Cole count by himself. She was too busy thinking about the biggest lie, the thing that most affected her heart: the idea that she and Landon were still together. Only she knew the truth.
They were finished. Forever.
Landon had honored her wishes. He hadn’t called her or made any contact since she left Manhattan. Obviously, as difficult as it had been for him, he’d thought over her situation and agreed that breaking up was the most sensible thing to do. He was a thousand miles away, so a friendship was out of the question. Besides, they could hardly pretend to be friends after tasting love, after knowing the strength of their feelings.
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