by Lisa Henry
“I’ll stay here at the camp,” Nate said, opening his eyes again. He lifted his head and met his father’s solemn gaze. “I won’t let my phantoms prevent me from doing God’s work.”
His father reached out and caught his hand. “I’m glad.”
Nate swallowed. “Did you mean what you said to him? About not forgiving him?”
That worried him, deeply. Not for Jason’s sake, but for his father’s.
His father cleared his throat. His eyes shone with tears. He squeezed Nate’s fingers between his own. “Sometimes I am a very small man. We all have our phantoms.”
“You should...” Nate drew a shaking breath. Felt like he had no right to offer his father any guidance, but his dad was a good man. He deserved a clean conscience, not a black stain on his soul because of Nate’s sins. “You should ask God’s help to let go of your anger.”
His father regarded him silently for a moment. Then he smiled, just as a tear slid down his cheek. “Will you pray with me, Nate?”
“Yes.” Nate’s heart swelled. “I will.”
Chapter Five
There was a strange car outside Rose’s house when Jason got back. When he opened the front door, he could hear voices from the kitchen. He let the door slam in the frame.
“Jason?” Rose called.
He went through to the kitchen. Kristin Tull was sitting at the table, her long fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee.
“Jason,” she said, nodding. Her smile seemed a little forced, and her eyes a little bright, but Jason had never been able to get a good read on her. Half the time, watching the sermons that the church broadcast online, it looked like she was biting back some sarcastic comment. The rest of the time she looked as serene as a cave-dwelling mystic who’d found the secret to life.
“Hello, Mrs. Tull.”
“It’s good to see you in one piece.”
Jason almost laughed. Right. Of course it was. He schooled his features. “It’s good to be in one piece.”
Her smile faded a little.
Nate was her son, no question. He was built along the same skinny lines as his mother. Not an ounce of spare fat on either of them. Kristin’s features were sharper than Nate’s though. The wrinkles in the corners of her eyes and the lines at the edges of her mouth didn’t do anything to soften her features. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but, with a fresh wardrobe and a stylish haircut, she might have been striking. As it was, she didn’t quite seem to fit the mold of a reverend’s wife.
When the scandal had hit, her response had seemed out of sync with the reverend’s and Nate’s. She’d made no secret of wanting to go after Jason. Of wanting blood. One afternoon, Jason had caught a local news interview with her where she’d claimed to have come around to her husband’s stance. No legal action would be taken against Jason. “In our church, we preach forgiveness,” she’d said. “And I intend to honor that. I hope Jason Banning has a good life, full of large blessings and only the smallest heartbreaks. I hope he learns and grows and becomes a better man and journalist than he has shown himself to be so far. That is what I hope.”
He’d remembered those words because they’d seemed somehow stilted and yet completely sincere. She’d wanted to crush him, and she’d made an uneasy peace with the fact that she couldn’t. He’d remembered those words because, unlike the reverend’s they’d caused him pain without anger. The first stab of true regret.
“Kristin bought my groceries.” Rose crossed from the counter to the table, and eased herself down into a chair.
“Thank you,” Jason said. “But I can get Rose’s groceries from now on.”
Rose snorted into her mug.
“I’m sure you can,” Kristin said. “But since I’ll still be popping by for my morning coffee, I might as well pick up a few things here and there.”
Jason stared at her for a moment. Her pleasant tone hid a will of iron, that was for sure. And while Jason sure as hell didn’t want anyone from the church in Rose’s house, it wasn’t up to him. Not at all.
He sat down too, taking the weight off his leg. “Well, I suppose I can’t stop you.”
Kristin raised her eyebrows. “No, I suppose you can’t.”
Rose sat between them, smiling a little to herself, and Jason suddenly imagined Kristin and him as the angel and the devil on her shoulders, vying for her soul. Except he wasn’t sure which was which. He hadn’t been sure for a while now.
Getting his leg almost blown off, then spending months in hospital and in rehab had given Jason a lot of time to think. More time than he knew what to do with. He’d thought a lot about how close he’d come to death. About the number of people who’d have said he deserved it if he had died. He’d wondered what Nathan would think.
He’d assumed Nate hated him, but that wasn’t true, was it? Nate didn’t hate him. Nate had tried to fucking thank him.
That wasn’t normal.
That wasn’t right.
Nate was broken.
And that made Jason feel like a worthless piece of shit.
Kristin stood up, and for a moment Jason thought she was going to leave. He was relieved. Then, she began to unpack the grocery bags on the counter, opening and closing Rose’s cupboards like she had some sort of proprietary right. She stared out the window into Rose’s back garden.
“You need that tree cut back, Rose. If that comes down in a storm, it’ll land on the roof.”
“Yes, I know.” Rose sipped at her coffee.
Kristin pulled a pack of cookies out of the grocery bag and came and sat at the table again. “I’ll ask some of the people from the church to come along. We’ll have a working bee.”
Jason kept his voice even. “My aunt doesn’t need your charity, Mrs. Tull.”
Kristin regarded him curiously, her eyes so like Nate’s that Jason felt a wrench in his gut. Her thin mouth curved up into a tight smile. “Well, how are you going to manage on your own, Jason? I can’t picture you climbing a ladder, can you?”
Rose put her hand on his forearm. “Jason.”
Nothing else. Just his name. Jason looked at the knotty veins on the back of her hands. She was old suddenly. This vibrant woman, so full of life, was old now. And sixty-eight wasn’t that old. You saw people in the news all the time. Eighty-year-olds running marathons, swimming for miles. Those mad old guys from the Second World War still doing parachute jumps. They were old, and they were still going. Rose though, was frail. Tired. Run down.
“Well, it feels a little like I’ve got the flu all the time,” she’d told him on the phone after she’d been diagnosed. “I don’t feel so bad, but I’ve got no energy.”
Jason was no stranger to death. He’d seen it at its worst, ripping people from the world suddenly and violently. This was different though. He wasn’t sure death was something he could live with, day in and day out. Wasn’t sure it was something he could share a house with while it stole Rose away by degrees.
He’d tried to push Rose for more information in the beginning, without coming straight out and asking. So, how long have they given you?
She knew what he was angling for anyway. “I go in every month and they check my blood. I could go for years yet before I even need treatment. My doctor says chances are I’ll die with this, not of it.”
Except at her last appointment, the doctor had mentioned chemo. So there was that to look forward to now.
Shit. The last thing Rose needed was Jason driving away the people who’d been around to help her while he was overseas. Jason just couldn’t help resenting them. He was sure Kristin Tull was only sitting at this table now, smiling at him, so that she could feel morally superior. So that she could spit on him from the high road. People like the Tulls didn’t do God’s so-called work for the heavenly reward alone. They did it so they’d be lauded for it here and now.
Jason might have been a hypocrite, but at least he fucking knew it.
Kristin tore open the packet of cookies and held them out.
Rose he
lped herself to one.
Jason shook his head, his mood sour. The more she showed her smile, the more he was sure it was smug, self-satisfied. The fucking Tulls. A part of Jason wanted to shock her, to wound her. Hey, Mrs. Tull. I had my dick in your virgin son. He could be as hateful as they thought he was. Another part of him—the greater part—knew that he couldn’t wound her any more if he tried.
What he really wanted was for the Tulls to hate him, so he didn’t have to waste all his energy hating himself.
The reverend did. The reverend fucking loathed him. He’d seen it.
“Saw Nathan today,” he said, and Kristin’s smile vanished. “He looks good.”
“Jason,” Rose said again.
“He goes by Nate now, he says.”
“That’s right,” Kristin said.
“Since when?”
“Since you know when.” A tightness in her jaw.
“Interesting.” Jason reached out and snagged a cookie. Bit into it with a satisfying crunch. “Fresh start, I suppose. Moving forward and all.”
“Jason!” Rose dug her fingers into his forearm.
Kristin rose, smoothing her hair back, tucking stray wisps behind her ears. “I’ll come and visit again tomorrow, Rose, if that suits.”
“Thank you for the groceries, Kristin. The money’s in the jar on top of the fridge. I haven’t been to the bank in a while either, so I might be a little short. I’ll get my checkbook.”
Kristin put a hand on her shoulder. “No, don’t worry about that. We’ll fix it up later. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Then she was gone. A moment later the front door closed.
“How much do we owe them for the groceries?” Jason asked. He stood up, keeping one hand on the back of his chair until he was sure he could trust his leg to take his weight.
“The receipt will be in one of the bags.”
Jason limped the counter and shook out the bags. “I don’t like being in that fucking church’s debt.”
“Kristin is not that fucking church!” Rose snapped. “She’s my friend. Her and Tim have been good to me, even after everything.”
Jason snorted. “You mean even after I fucked their son.”
Rose went so still that some part of Jason was suddenly terrified, and he wasn’t even sure why. She met his eye. Her gaze wasn’t angry, but there was something hard in it. “Is that what you think you did?” she asked quietly, her voice wobbling slightly.
He couldn’t turn away, but he wasn’t sure he could stand to look at her a moment longer. He felt bodiless, like he was suddenly nothing but the guilt and shame he’d tried so hard to keep out.
Rose continued to gaze at him steadily, and Jason was scared, so fucking scared, because he couldn’t feel his skin, couldn’t move the muscles he wanted to move. The only physical sensations he felt were the throbbing of his leg and a rising sickness in his gut.
“You didn’t ‘fuck him,’” Rose said, not flinching from either the crass language or the fear in Jason’s eyes. “You violated him. Jason, what you did was—” she hesitated only a second— “predatory.”
The nausea was like nails in the pit of his stomach, a thousand small sharp aches rising and turning to pure heat in his chest.
Rose’s hand fluttered by her throat. “Did you know some states have rape by fraud laws? Did you know that before you did what you did?” She blinked rapidly. “Did you know I called a lawyer in Seattle and had to ask about that? That I had to make sure that what you’d done wasn’t legally rape?”
The pain seared Jason’s throat. He couldn’t speak.
“And morally, Jason? God.”
He’d seen people on the internet call him a predator. A rapist. A criminal. Bad enough coming from strangers online. But for Rose to say it…
He was a kid again, and someone was telling him something impossible, something that hurt so much that for a second it didn’t have weight or temperature or shape. A pain so pure, it was like feeling nothing at all. Then he was at a funeral, a “celebration of life,” two large, smiling photos on easels, people in brightly colored clothes reading poems, singing. Rose’s hand on his shoulder. His gaze on the photos. On smiles blinding in their emptiness. It didn’t matter that almost no one was wearing black, because black was all he could see. And in that blackness, betrayal took root.
The world has done me wrong.
It has hurt me.
Taken from me.
That feeling needed no light to grow.
Rose shook her head. “God, Jason, I know what you think of that camp and I know what you think of the church. Isn’t that what people always say? Oh, wouldn’t it just serve that man right if he had a gay kid! Wouldn’t that be ironic? Wouldn’t he just deserve it? Well, Nate never deserved to be put in that position.”
“Reverend Tull is a fucking bigot!” He clawed his way out of that coldness, that terror, and rallied his defenses once more. But every lie he’d ever told himself was on fragile legs now, too weary and sick to follow him much farther.
Rose held his gaze. “Reverend Tull is a man with opinions different than your own.”
“Who brainwashes kids into thinking they can pray away the gay.” He painted over the shame with anger, and it almost worked. The heat of his rage flared up against the coldness of his terror.
“You know I don’t agree with him, and you know I don’t agree with that camp,” Rose said firmly, “but what you did to Nate was wrong. I still remember the kid who came out to me, shaking and pale like he thought that suddenly I wouldn’t love him when I knew the truth about him. And I know how hard it was for you to tell me, in private. Nate didn’t get that chance, did he?”
“Goddamn it, Rose!” Jason shoved the grocery bags up against the back of the counter. Rose’s pottery canisters—tea, coffee, sugar—rattled together. “I don’t need to hear this from you too!”
Pretty fucking hard to storm out when he could hardly walk.
“Who else are you hearing it from, Jason?” she called after him as he lurched out of the kitchen and into the hallway.
Jason bit back whatever bitter reply he was going to make.
His conscience.
He was hearing it from his fucking conscience.
And they both knew it.
He didn’t know how to tell her how fucking furious it made him, that he’d ever trembled in front of her, that he’d ever let her and all the other straight people of the world have that power over him—the power to decide whether to accept him, whether to keep loving him. The reason injustice persisted was that the oppressed did exactly that—begged the mercy of their oppressors, begged for the privilege of standing in that circle of power…
Shit.
What the fuck?
Rose was on his side.
She wasn’t an oppressor. She was his family.
But the very fact that there was overlap…that’s what killed him about the situation with Nathan. Nate. Seeing Reverend Tull with his arms out, seeing how Nate hesitated, wanting to go to his father, receive comfort from the man who was fucking abusing him. Saying play my game, play it my way, and you can have love. You can have a place in this family, this community.
I did it too. The thought was there and then gone. Reverend Tull wasn’t just a man whose opinions were different from Jason’s on some arbitrary level.
He was wrong.
That Rose couldn’t see that made Jason feel so…defeated.
I’m tired of burning with this much anger.
I’m tired of watching people who’ve been stepped on their whole lives lie down in the dirt and beg for more.
I’m just plain fucking tired.
Nate sat on the end of the little dock with his feet in the water. He squinted at the sunlight reflecting on the surface of the lake, and waved at two of Leanne’s girls as they turned in a slow, confused circle in a canoe.
“You’ve got to paddle on both sides!” Leanne shouted out to them.
Laughing, they capsized.
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The rest of the kids were further out, floating lazily in the water or, in Richie’s case, trying to hit the others with a wet tennis ball. Leanne was supervising from her vantage point on the pontoon.
The only kid who hadn’t gotten all the way in was Isaac.
“Aren’t you going in any deeper?” Nate called to him.
Isaac was standing in the shallows, holding the legs of his boardshorts up, looking hunched over and unhappy. “I don’t like swimming.”
“Well, it’s supposed to be fun.” Nate’s heart went out to the kid. Isaac was still wearing his shirt. Maybe it wasn’t swimming he hated, but his body. He was taller than the other kids, and heavier, and carried himself like he was trying to squeeze into a space he just wouldn’t fit. “If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to. Water’s pretty nice though.”
Isaac wrinkled his nose. “Are you coming in?”
“Okay.” Nate tugged his shirt off and then used his arms to push himself off the end of the dock. The water was cool. Nate ducked his head under, then broke the surface again. He wiped his hair back, pointed his toes so he could reach the bottom of the lake, then turned back and grinned at Isaac. “Come on!”
Isaac regarded him hesitantly for a moment. Then he turned around and pulled his shirt off, bundling it up and throwing onto the shore. Keeping his arms crossed in front of him, he lumbered into the deeper water, the tension only leaving him once he could sink up to his neck.
“Told you it was nice,” Nate said.
Isaac smiled hesitantly but didn’t meet his gaze.
The lake wasn’t the place to talk about anything serious, but Nate really wanted to figure out what was going on with Isaac. He didn’t want to be here, so why was he? Reverend Tull always said the kids had to be willing to come here. And while there were degrees of willingness–Tyler and Steven were absolutely not ready to seek help—Isaac was more than dubious or resistant. He was totally miserable.
He really needed to ask Leanne about Isaac’s interview.
And ask Isaac about what he wanted from this experience.