by Alana Terry
“Good-bye, Jo,” he whispered.
She opened the truck door, forbidding herself from crying. There would be time for that later. A hot bath, a long cry, and a full night’s sleep. She didn’t look behind when she heard Kurtis’s truck pull away. She knew when she went into the witness protection program her entire life would change, but she had no idea how heart-wrenching the process would be. Four years later, she was still a mess, still grieving Raphael, mourning her lost life. Still wishing she could be Lacy again.
She sighed as she entered her apartment. She never bothered locking her door. That was one Glennallen habit she had picked up right away. Drisklay would probably force her to sit through an hour-long rant if he knew, but this one small act of defiance encouraged her. A small trace of the carefree, rebellious Lacy still remained.
She didn’t see him sitting at the dining room table until she was only three feet away. She screamed.
“Lacy? It’s me.”
Blood drained from her face. She reached out for something to hold onto for balance.
“Raphael?”
Chapter 5
HER BODY COULDN’T DO anything but stare. She had rehearsed this very second so many times since Drisklay and his team relocated her up here. She had imagined how it would feel, the initial surprise, then the shock giving way to euphoria. She had pictured herself running to him, envisioned that first embrace spanning so many tumultuous years. The pain would wash away like marker lines on a dry-erase board.
Instead, she froze in the middle of her own apartment.
He stood. He looked different. Older. Had she aged that much, too? How could she tell? Drisklay hadn’t allowed her to take any photographs with her. Too dangerous.
“What are you doing here?” Her breath came in shallow spurts. “How did you find me?”
He ran his fingers through his hair. Glanced around nervously. Let out a chuckle. “Ever since the accident, I’ve been dreaming of this day. Praying I would find you.” He laughed again. The sound was out of place. “I think the only word to call it is a miracle.”
She squinted. Was it some sort of hallucination? His face was older, with lines across his brow she had never seen before. His chin was puffier, as if he had put on excess weight, but his voice was the same. Her eyes might deceive her, but her ears couldn’t. “It’s really you?” She hardly dared to breathe, as if a hard exhale might blow him away into vapor. She still hadn’t taken a step closer.
“I was wondering the same thing.” His eyes lit up with dancing joy. “I was riding along the Glenn, and I was thinking about something nice and cold to drink, wondering what that ice cream place had, and I looked in the window, and it was you. I tried to blow it off. My mind’s played that trick on me dozens of times. But I came back around, and it really was you. I was sure of it.”
She heard his words but was unable to string them together coherently in her mind. “How did you get here?”
“Well, I watched for a minute and knew I was either going to make a huge fool of myself or else I was going to always wonder if God really had answered my prayers after all these years. I had already told him if you were with someone else, if you had found someone nice to settle down with, then I didn’t want to stand in the way. You know, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife and all that stuff. But then this girl was walking down the road, and I asked her if she lived here, and when she said she did, I pointed through the window and asked if she knew you. And she said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s Jo. We work together at the daycare.’ So I told her I was your brother and that I was here to surprise you for your birthday but I forgot my phone where I had written your address. So she pointed me to your apartment. And I took a chance sounding stupid, but I asked her if you had a roommate or anything, and she said no, you lived there alone. And well, I’m telling you it took me forever to make up my mind. I could have just left you a letter or something, and I nearly did, but then I started to worry that maybe it wasn’t really you. Or maybe you had moved on and I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if you got my note or if there had somehow been some mistake. And I prayed, and I really felt God speaking to me, like he was saying, Son, you’ve been asking for me to bring her back into your life for these four years, so what’s the problem? Don’t you trust me to take care of the details?”
He was winded from his speech. His eyes sparkled, but Lacy knew him well enough to detect the nervousness behind all that excitement. Even now, she longed to run to him, to forget the trauma of the past four years. Instead, she could only manage saying, “You’re in Alaska?”
“Just visiting,” he answered. His eyes darted around her room.
She felt naked. Exposed.
“I decided to take the summer off to bike around the country, and I thought to myself, I’ve never been to Alaska. I should get on that. I’m coming back from two weeks up and down the Richardson. Biked from Tok all the way to Fairbanks. I’m on my last stretch now. Heading back to Anchorage tomorrow.”
“You’re leaving?” She heard her own voice quiver.
He stepped forward. She waited. Expectant. He came up slowly. Took her clammy hand in his.
“I thought you were dead,” she whispered.
“It’s a long story. Right now, I just want to look at you. I can’t tell you how long I’ve dreamed of this day. I never really thought ...” He swallowed. “I’m not sure I ever believed in miracles until now.”
“You’re religious,” was all she could think to say.
“So much has changed these past four years. So much.” He brought her hand close to his face as if he might kiss it. He leveled his eyes. “But one thing is the same. I have never stopped loving you.”
She pried her hand away, wondering how different this meeting would be if she were wearing Kurtis’s engagement ring.
Raphael gave a little chuckle. “I know it’s insane. Really, I do. If I hadn’t given my life to Christ and had faith that he can do the impossible, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. Look, I know you’re a little freaked out. And we have a lot of ground to cover. I just ... I’ve been waiting for you for the past four years. And now that I’ve found you, it’s like I want to sweep you up in my arms and transport us back to four years ago and never drive down that ...” He cut himself off short and started over. “Transport us back to when we were happy. Happy and young and madly in love and dreaming those crazy dreams for our future. Remember? We were going to backpack Europe and visit all the art museums and come home to our studio and spend our weekends watching shows on Broadway. Just me and my Lacy.”
It wasn’t until he said her name that she started to tremble. Nobody had called her Lacy in four years. Even when Drisklay telephoned to check up on her, he insisted on using her alias.
Raphael put both arms on her shoulders, as if that could stop her shaking. She was crying, his voice, his touch releasing a tidal wave of pent-up emotions and forgotten longings.
“I need to sit down.”
He held her elbow and led her to the dining room table, where Kurtis had proposed to her less than two hours earlier.
“Do you need a drink?”
She nodded faintly, hardly able to focus on his eyes anymore. He opened her fridge, pulled out the goblet of leftover cider. “Is this still good?” Without waiting for an answer, he poured it into a clean cup from the dishwasher and handed it to her. The drink stung her sinuses, but at least it cleared her dizziness.
“I guess I gave you quite a shock.” He smiled, that same mischievous grin she had fallen in love with another lifetime ago.
Finally she found her voice. “I just can’t believe it’s really you. I thought ...”
“You thought I was dead, right? Thought they killed me and dragged off my body to the wharf?”
She nodded. “But I still hoped ...” She didn’t have the strength to finish her sentence. Why couldn’t Raphael have visited Glennallen sooner? Why couldn’t she had bumped into him her first summer in this rat hole? If there rea
lly was a God, and if he really had led Raphael to her after all these years, why couldn’t he have done it way back then?
He sat down across from her. “There’s so much we have to catch up on. I don’t even know where to start.”
Neither did she. Part of her was afraid she would wake up and realize this was all a dream, her mind’s way of running away from Kurtis after he proposed to her earlier.
“So you’re working at a daycare?”
She nodded, the motion inviting another wave of dizziness.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s ok.” She didn’t want to talk about her job, the dirty diapers, dirty dishes, dirty noses that always needed wiping. She should tell him about Kurtis. She should mention it before ...
“Alaska, huh? It’s pretty up here, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” She took another sip of cider, wincing as the fizz burned her throat.
“Your hair’s longer.”
“Uh-huh.” As soon as she moved up here with her short pixie cut, she started growing it out to protect herself from the cold in the winter and the bugs in the summer.
“Jo, they call you, right?”
She stared at her half-empty cup.
He frowned. “You don’t look like a Jo to me.”
She should say something. Do something. How many times had she dreamed of sitting across from Raphael, pouring out her heart, telling him everything about the past four years of loneliness and isolation?
“Are you happy?” He asked the question so casually, but it punched her straight in the gut.
“Not really.” It felt strange to not have to make up lies, not have to spew out rehearsed lines handed to her by the folks at witness protection.
He put his hand on the table but stopped before touching hers. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too.” It was probably the most honest statement she had made in the past four years.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Her eyes threatened to brim over again. “Not really.” She forced a laugh. She hardly knew how to act like herself anymore. One day, she hoped she could look back on tonight and enjoy a full, long belly laugh.
Raphael sat back in his seat. “How about I do the talking then?”
She nodded, the heaviness already lifting from her shoulders a small bit at a time.
He ran his fingers through his hair. “Wow, this is harder than I thought. I don’t even know where to start. At the beginning, I guess. You want me to tell you about the accident?”
“No.” She hadn’t realized her voice would sound that forceful.
He fidgeted with his hands. Artist’s hands. Hands that were always painting or sculpting or photographing. She had missed them so much.
“Well, after everything that went down, they put me in witness protection. Same sort of thing as you, I’m assuming. New home, new name. It sucked. They had me working as a courier. Driving around some hunky-dunk Midwest town running deliveries for divorce lawyers and grumpy realtors. I hated it. Couldn’t meet anybody, couldn’t go anywhere. They even told me to stop my art.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “Of course, I didn’t listen. I sold a few photographs under a made-up name, but it was terrible. I’d spent the past eight years of my life building my portfolio, expanding my network. And now they wanted me to start over from the beginning peddling photographs at craft bazaars? I got low. Really low. It was like I was an actor and the producer just threw me into a different play, different setting, different lines, different cast, and no direction.”
Lacy wondered how many times she had used a similar analogy.
“Figured my only outlet was gonna be my art. So I went back to it for real. At first, I tried to disguise it. Make sure someone with a trained eye couldn’t link it to me. The old me. Do you know how hard it is trying to paint like someone else? It didn’t work. So finally, I decided if I couldn’t be a professional anymore, I’d at least paint for myself. Who knew? Maybe one day they’d tell me I didn’t have to be in witness protection anymore, and I’d have enough works to sell to set me up for a lifetime. You could always hope, right?”
Hope. It had been one of Lacy’s worst enemies during her first few months here in Alaska. Hope that it had all been some sort of nightmare. Hope that Drisklay would call and tell her it was safe to go home. Hope that Raphael would show up magically. Unexpectedly.
“Anyway, I got so depressed I actually ended up ... well, they put me in a hospital. Made me talk to a shrink and everything. But what can you tell a shrink, you know? When you’re supposed to be someone else, I mean. But one thing I talked about was being homesick. And the hospital psychologist, she had no idea who I was or where I was really from, but she made me write a list of why I should or shouldn’t move back home. And I realized the only thing keeping me away from Massachusetts was fear. I mean, can you believe it? You knew me, Lace. I wasn’t scared of anything.
“So I started to think. It made sense to keep my new name and whatnot, maybe not hang out in the exact same circles as before. But how bad could it really be, you know? The guys who’d given me the hardest time were both in jail. I suppose they might have had buddies or something ready to teach me a lesson, but what was I gonna do? Spend the rest of my life shuttling divorce papers around town? I moved back about a year ago. I’m living in Waltham now. Best choice I ever made.”
“And nobody’s bothered you?” Lacy asked. Was it really that simple? Could she really move back home, resume her old life just like that? After all of Drisklay’s dire warnings and morbid projections about what would happen if she ever returned? Was it really as easy as Raphael said?
He glanced around. “I started going to church. I guess that’s the one good thing that came out of everything. And I figured if God wants me to live, well, I’m going to live. And if not, at least I know where I’m headed, right?”
Lacy hadn’t thought about God much in the past four years, unless it was to blame him for letting her life take the unfortunate twists and turns it had. This was a new side of Raphael she wasn’t sure if she was comfortable with or not.
“Oh!” He smiled and leaned forward, eyes twinkling. “You’ll get a kick out of this. I’ve been going to Carl and Sandy’s church.”
“My foster parents?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “I wish you could connect with them again. I know they miss you.”
Her throat constricted. She had lost hours of sleep since moving to Glennallen trying to recall the exact sound of Sandy’s voice. With Carl it was easier, because if she wanted to she could download his sermons and listen to his confident, booming preaching at any time. But Sandy ...
“That’s neat you get to see them still.”
It wasn’t fair. If Massachusetts was safe enough for him, wasn’t it safe enough for her? She could have moved back years ago, forgotten the blasted mosquitoes, the unbearable winters that dragged out over half the year.
“You could come with me.” He stared so intently into her eyes she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or run away. “We could be safe together.”
No. No, this was happening too fast. It reminded her of swimming in the ocean once as a little girl when the undercurrent caught her in its black, deathly grasp. It tumbled her over so many times she didn’t know which way to turn to get to shore. For a few paralyzing seconds, she didn’t even know which way would lead her to the surface. To air.
Her cup of cider trembled in her hand, and Raphael picked it up and set it on the table for her. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to upset you.”
“I’m seeing someone.” The words rushed out automatically.
He didn’t speak right away, and she did what she could to fill the silence.
“He’s a trooper. We’ve been dating for over a year now. He has a little girl. She’s four.” Why was she saying all of this? Was it because she was afraid she might tell him about the ring, about the proposal, so instead she cluttered the empty
space with trivia?
Raphael licked his lower lip. He picked up Lacy’s cider cup, examined it mindlessly, and set it down again. “I’m glad you told me.” He forced a little smile. “I guess I shouldn’t have barged in here like this, and ...” He tousled his hair in both hands. “You must think I’ve been totally insensitive. I’m sorry, Lace.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes.
Raphael made a move as if to stand up and stopped. “Is it serious?”
She shrugged. “I don’t really know right now. It’s confusing.”
He glanced at the door. “Do you want me to leave?”
It wasn’t fair. After all the waiting, all the loneliness, the fruitless fantasizing, now here he was, and she didn’t know what to say. “I’m pretty overwhelmed, that’s all.”
He sighed. “I should have been more thoughtful. Geeze, Lace, you’ve been through so much already. I don’t want to make this harder for you. I listen to my Bible when I ride, you know. I’ve got it on audio, and just today I was reading about John the Baptist and how he says about Jesus, He must become greater, and I must become less. Maybe that was a message for me. I don’t want to stand in the way of a good thing. If God’s brought you someone who’s honest and solid and who’ll take care of you ...”
She never knew why she did it. She just couldn’t stand listening to him talking like that anymore. She had to make him stop. Either that, or he would do the noble thing and leave her to enjoy some sort of peaceful, lulling happily ever after with Kurtis. She bent forward and kissed him. He sucked in his breath while his lips met hers, and then he wrapped his arms around her, entwined his fingers in her hair. He tasted just like she remembered. If she had a thousand words, she could never express how much she had missed this.
They fell apart, both panting. “Wow.” He rubbed his head and repeated, “Wow.”