The doctor said I could go home later that afternoon. Les picked me and my box of random crap up at the hospital portico. Even after less than a full day in the hospital, the outside world seemed overly bright and unnecessarily loud, and I felt disoriented and a little loopy.
Feeling loopy reminded me of one thing I wanted to talk to Les about. “Did you hear about my blood alcohol level?” I asked when I was all buckled in.
He nodded and started the engine, pulling carefully out of the lot.
“I didn’t drink. I mean, I did, obviously, but it wasn’t my choice. Sylvia wanted to make it look like I was driving drunk, so she poured tequila into me while Thomas and Rey held me down.” I had no reason to feel guilty. And I didn’t, I supposed. But I did feel soiled, in a way. Like I’d worked really hard to keep the floor clean, and then someone else came along and tracked mud all over it. Except it was me, not the floor.
Les didn’t say anything. Just nodded.
“I’m serious, Les. You can ask Viv.”
“She already told me.” He rolled his bottom lip through his teeth. “I’m glad you brought it up, though. I confess that when I heard you’d been drinking, I was disappointed.”
“Yeah, well, that’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. It’s not okay for me to be disappointed when you fall. Because we all fall. It’s my job to be there to help pick you back up; it’s not now and never will be my place to judge you – not the kind of judgments I made when I heard.”
“So what is it you’re always telling me? Confess and believe God when He says you’re forgiven? Practice what you preach, Preacher Man.”
He smiled, and either because I was feeling a little sentimental toward Les just then, or because the drugs were clouding my rational thinking, I decided to broach the subject that had been bugging me. “Can we talk about that?”
“About the drinking?”
“No, about the forgiveness part. You remember when I told you about that friend of mine, the one who was mad at me because I slept with her fiancée?”
He nodded as he turned onto the loop. “Sure, I remember.”
“It turns out, I didn’t. I thought I’d slept with him, and so did he, and so did she, obviously. But that guy Rick, the one in the car with us last night? He was the one who’d set that whole thing up to begin with. He told me that nothing had happened between Scott and me.”
Les gave me a brow-raised look.
“It was supposed to be a prank on Scott and Trisha. Come to think of it, it was probably less of a prank and more like a mean-spirited trick against Trisha, because Rick didn’t like her and didn’t want Scott to marry her. In any event, he stuck us in bed together and let us all think we’d betrayed Trisha. But we just passed out and nothing really happened.”
“That is low.”
“I know.” I had to remind myself that in the first place, it wasn’t my duty to judge Rick or anyone else. I’d certainly made enough mistakes, so I could understand the need for grace. And in the second place, he had brought Stump to me last night and stayed with us to help explain everything to the police. I think with his new marriage and family he’d made every effort to clean up his act, and I could easily empathize with someone who needed all the support they could get in that arena.
“But at least it’s nice to know what really happened.”
“Oh, man, I can’t tell you what a relief it is. I even called Scott and Trisha and told them because they’ve had to go through all this process of forgiveness and working everything out. They were ecstatic.”
“You did the right thing to tell them.”
“Thanks. But here’s the thing that’s bugging me.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I’m serious. In fact, this has kind of been bugging me for a while now. You know how you’re always talking about the spirit of God and how he filled your heart with joy, and you’re always walking in love and peace and all that stuff? How come that’s not happening with me? How come I prayed for forgiveness for doing that to Trisha, but I didn’t feel any real peace until I found out it never happened? What am I doing wrong?”
“I don’t know. What do you think you’re doing wrong?”
“Huh-uh, nope, you’re not doing that this time. I have a real question, and I want a real answer. You’re the one who brought me into this following Christ thing. You’re the one who made all the promises to me and told me how great it was going to be. I want to know what I’m doing wrong. How come my heart isn’t full of joy? How come I’m not so full of love for God I’m doing the dance of joy everywhere I go? How come I still feel like a loser ninety percent of the time?” I was getting wound up. I’d just meant to talk to him about the thing with Trisha and Scott, but in typical fashion, once my mouth got going, it didn’t want to stop. “What did you do that I didn’t do? Did I not say something right, not say the right prayer?”
“You said the right prayer, Salem. I was there. God’s not so much into semantics as He is into an honest heart. Did you have an honest heart when you prayed?”
“I meant it with everything in me.” That much I knew for sure.
“Then you’ve got it. You’ve got the peace, you’ve got the joy, you’ve got the forgiveness.”
I would have pounded my head against the dashboard if it wouldn’t have hurt so much. “But I don’t! I don’t feel joy! I don’t feel peace! Most of the time I walk around feeling like a big neurotic mess!”
We were pulling into Trailertopia now and I wanted to cry. Probably it was a combination of everything – the frustration I felt with God and with Les and the aftermath of almost being killed all coming together – but in any case I didn’t want to start bawling because then I’d never get out what needed to be said. I took a deep breath and forced myself to speak clearly. “I’m serious. What you promised me, what you have, hasn’t happened in my life. I would say it was because you are a more mature Christian than I am, but I know that’s not it because you’ve told me you felt different from the moment you said the prayer.”
He pulled in front of my trailer, killed the motor, and turned to me. “That’s right. I did.”
“You know what I felt? I felt fear. I felt worried that I was going to screw this up, too. I wanted to be happy, I wanted to feel something. But I have to tell you, Les, what was supposed to be the brightest moment in my life – and certainly in my Christian life – at this point it just feels like the moment when I first drank the Koolaid and tried to convince myself it was magic elixir.”
I turned toward him in my seat, leaning my head against the headrest. I waited for him to say something, but he just sat silently, looking like he was mulling it over.
“I mean, if I could see something in my life, some kind of sign that there really is – is some kind of power there, maybe I’d be more encouraged. This week has been so awful, and I prayed and prayed for some way to make things better. And each time I prayed, it was like, instead of getting a miracle, I was faced with another horrible thing I’d done, thrown in my face. Like Trisha. Like Tony. Then I almost got killed? What good is the power of the Holy Spirit if it can’t shield me from painful stuff like that?”
“And why do you think all these past mistakes came back up this week? Just the fickle finger of fate?”
I thought for a second. “Come to think of it, it feels more like the middle finger of fate.”
He mashed his lips together in the way that I’d come to recognize was him trying not to smile. “Salem, remember the story of Peter and Jesus on the shore after the resurrection? When Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him?”
“You know I do,” I said softly. That story was probably my least favorite story ever. There was Peter, feeling battered and beaten after the crucifixion, knowing he’d screwed up, knowing he’d betrayed Jesus when he denied knowing him three times.
So here comes Jesus, asking him three times if he really loved him. As if he was telling Peter, “I know what you did. You said you’d never abandon me, but then first chance you get, you deny me three times.” Like a bully, poking a stick at someone who was already on the ground. When Peter was at his lowest moment, Jesus stood in front of everyone and made sure all the disciples knew what had happened.
“I know how you feel about that story. But Salem, what if Jesus wasn’t doing that to rub Peter’s nose in his own mistakes? What if he did that because that was the only way Peter’s wound would ever heal?”
I wasn’t buying that, but since I couldn’t think of a clear reason why not, I just shrugged.
“Salem, you know the kind of things that grow in the dark. More dark things. Secrets, shames. Those kinds of things can’t survive in the light. You take a shame out into the light of truth, and it shrivels up. Jesus knew that. He knew he could have kept quiet, and the shame of Peter’s betrayal would have hung like a stone around his neck for the rest of his life. He knew how awful Peter felt, and he knew the truth of what Peter really was. Each time he asked Peter, ‘Do you love me?’ he was saying to Peter, ‘I know who you really are. I know you were scared, I know you panicked. I know you made a mistake. But I know what kind of man you really are.’ He wasn’t punishing Peter. He was holding up a mirror to show Peter his own true self. He was giving him a do-over.”
I blinked, feeling off-kilter. I felt the urge to hold on to my grudge against Jesus for this scene from the Bible, even as I recognized that it didn’t exactly serve me to do so. “You think that’s what this whole week has been about?” I asked. “A do-over, for me?”
Les shrugged. “Could be. Sometimes you gotta rip it off like a Band-Aid.”
I stewed about that for a while. I couldn’t really wrap my mind around it all. It had been so hard, facing all those awful memories. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I just wish I could feel some of that joy you’re feeling –”
“You know what your problem is, Salem? You’re spoiled rotten.”
I don’t know what I had expected him to say. But it sure as heck wasn’t that.
“And you’re lazy.”
“I – I am?”
“Absolutely. You expect God to do all the work.”
That couldn’t be true. And yet… “But isn’t He supposed to? I thought it was through his grace that I was saved –”
“By grace, through faith. His grace, your faith. Your faith in his grace. That’s where it’s falling apart for you. You’re not showing any faith. You want God to not just turn your life around, give you an eternity in His presence and a life with meaning and hope, but you want Him to come down and put a warm fuzzy in your heart so you can feel good, too.”
“But – but –”
He was mad. He didn’t sound mad. His voice was calm. But his eyes flashed and the more he spoke, the thinner his lips got. In the year I’d known Les, I’d said and done a lot of things that would have made most people mad, and he’d rocked along with that same steady smile and unflappable attitude. Apparently I’d hit his pet peeve: people who want a warm fuzzy from God.
“I could sit here for the next hour and tell you all the things God has done for you. I could list for you all the blessings you have. But for you it wouldn’t make any difference, would it? Because you’re still sitting safely in your chair, refusing to stake anything, refusing to believe.”
“I do believe –”
“What do you believe, Salem? That He’s there? So what! ‘You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that – and shudder.’”
He was quoting scripture. I knew that, because he got his I’m-quoting-scripture voice on.
“It’s not that –”
But he was on a roll now. “What you don’t believe is that he loves you. Despite the dozens of times in the Bible he’s told you he loves you, despite all the times I’ve told you he loves you, you refuse to believe.”
“I believe it, Les, I do. I just don’t feel it.”
“Big freaking deal!”
I’d never heard Les yell before. I almost swallowed my own tongue.
“So you don’t feel it. What difference does that make? Salem, only an idiot would prove things by what they feel. Remember how you used to feel like you could handle your alcohol? And remember how you used to feel better after you drank? Like you were more in control, like things were getting better? People feel things all the time. It’s a feeling, Salem. It’s not a fact. God’s love is a fact. And when you’re ready to quit playing it safe and believe that, despite what you feel, you’ll get what you’re looking for.”
He turned and jerked open the car door and got out. He reached in the back seat and tugged out the box of pictures and junk and stomped up the steps of my trailer’s front deck, dropping it by my front door.
I got out. I didn’t know what else to do. Obviously he was done with me. I wondered if I should apologize. But to tell the truth, I didn’t feel like it.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said as I passed him on the deck. “I appreciate all you do for me. I mean that, Les. I really do.”
I took the box inside and set it by the door of my prayer room. It took a good two hours for me to get over my mad at Les for being so rude to me. I didn’t even try to figure out if he had a point or not, I just railed inwardly about how unfair he’d treated me and how a person would never grow into a mature Christian if he was going to be their role model and bite their heads off whenever they had a question. I felt good and sorry for myself for as long as I could.
Frank brought Stump home, and that helped a lot. She whined and whimpered, and I whined and whimpered and I thought I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. I told her that Thomas was going to prison, and if she wanted, she could attend his sentencing hearing and give a victim impact statement about the scars she would carry for the rest of her life. Obviously this wasn’t a promise I would be able to keep, but how was Stump going to find out? It seemed to make her happy.
Actually, being home made us both happy. I never thought I’d be so glad to see my old trailer house, but after the past several days it was like a mansion to me. A mansion on wheels.
Les or his wife had brought over groceries while I was gone, and Frank and I made thick peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and I poured two big glasses of milk. In the back of my mind was the possibility that Trisha and I really would go to Fat Fighters together, and I doubted PB&J would be on the menu after that, so I thought I should enjoy it while I could.
Frank left after two sandwiches and one grudgingly given Star Crunch, and I breathed a sigh of relief with Stump snuggled up on my lap.
I scratched her ears and thought about that terrifying ride toward what could have been a horrible death. In a strange delayed reaction, I grew a lot more afraid than I had been at the moment. My heart began to pound, and my breath came short. I went back over every second of that trip, my mind straying to what could have happened, what might have happened if Viv hadn’t reacted, if things hadn’t turned out the way they did.
“Please, God,” I whispered, lost in a horrified trance, clutching Stump until she squirmed and grunted in irritation.
I blinked and shook my head. Crazy. I was safe now. I was begging God for something I already had, a prayer he’d already answered.
This called, I realized, for a real prayer of gratitude, an honest-to-goodness, on-my-knees prayer. I lugged Stump and her box into the prayer room and lit the candles.
Stump curled up in the box and fell asleep while I quieted my mind and tried to pray. My mind was a whirl of everything that had happened, everything I’d been struggling with, and everything Les had told me. I started off thanking God for saving us, for protecting me from Sylvia and Rey and Thomas, for seeing that all of us made it through alive. But my mind kept hanging on what Les had told me.
“Is that it, God?” I finally asked. “Is Les right? Is the love there and I’m just not letting it in?”
I crawled over to the box I’d brought in and pawed through till I found the picture of me at five years old. You never did want anyone to love you, G-Ma had said. Stubbornest thing you ever saw.
“But that’s not true!” I said to the picture. “Of course I wanted people to love me. What kid wants to keep people at arm’s length? What kid wants to distrust everyone they meet?”
I felt tears well for that poor little girl, who at five already knew too much about the ways people could hurt each other, could abuse trust and inflict pain. That little girl wanted love; she just didn’t trust it.
“God, I want you to love me, I really do. I want to believe it. I’m sorry if I’ve been blocking you out. I’m sorry if I’ve kept you at arm’s length. I never meant to, I swear it. It’s just hard for me to believe, I guess, because no one ever has. If you need a leap of faith, this is it. You say you believe me, so I believe it. As of right now, I believe it.”
I closed my eyes and swayed on my knees, willing myself to let my guard down, to open my heart and wait. I’d never felt so vulnerable. I felt a sliding away of a wall I hadn’t even known existed.
“FINALLY.”
I almost fell over backward. Then I thought, ‘Oh, what the heck,’ and I did fall over backward.
“Umm…God?” I thought, feeling like an idiot. Was that you?
He didn’t say anything else, though. He didn’t need to. What happened next kind of defied description, although thousands of people have tried to describe it. I felt awash, submerged, floating in love. I cried and rocked and blew my nose and laughed and cried some more. It was weird and goofy, and above all, it was real.
“What do you know?” I said in a wet, snuffly voice. “My heart is strangely warmed.”
Stump didn’t get it. She moaned and dragged herself over to the edge of the box so she should could lick my elbow, and I felt even more love. Love for her, from her, from God, for God, for everyone in this whole crazy world. My heart was so full I wanted to just lie there in the floor and soak in it.
I don’t know how long I lay there, but I have to say it was miles better than any binge I’d been on, any party I’d ever been to, better by light years than any experience I’d ever had. I lay there, feeling it. Finally feeling it.
So this was the love of God. No wonder Les got so excited about it.
Les. I crawled back up and rubbed my eyes on my shirtsleeve. I had to call him. What was I going to say?
I went to the bathroom and blew my nose. My cell phone rang and, of course, it was Les.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“That’s funny, because I was just about to call and tell you that you were right.”
“I was?”
“Yeah. Les, listen, I prayed and I believed and I…” I had to stop because the tears were back and I couldn’t get any words out. I cleared my throat. “Warm fuzzies!” I finally croaked.
“Oh, Salem,” he said tenderly. He shouldn’t have been so tender, because that sent me into fresh spasms.
He said a few other things but all I could do was sob and whimper and grunt occasionally. He told me to get some rest and he’d check back with me tomorrow. I hung up and cried again. I wondered vaguely if I should worry about dehydration, but it wasn’t as if I could stop it.
I set Stump’s box by the couch and lay down beside her, hanging my hand over the side so I could scratch her ears. She fell asleep and, after a while, so did I.
I woke up to knocking at the door. I’d been dreaming I rented a baseball stadium to tell everyone about how much God loved me. The place was packed. The more I tried to explain it, the more blank the stares seemed to get and the more enormous the silence became. And the more confused I became that I actually had something to brag about.
But when I woke up I remembered how I’d felt, and I thought, “Yeah. That happened.”
I checked the clock and seeing as how it was dinnertime, I figured it was Frank knocking to get another free meal. If I’d known Bobby was the one knocking I would have checked my hair before I opened the door.
He wore a yellow golf shirt and jeans, and his hair looked a little damp around the bottom, like he’d just gotten out of the shower. “How ya doing?” he asked.
“Not bad, considering,” I said. “Come on in.”
“I can’t stay, I was just in the area and I thought I’d check and see if you needed anything.”
“Nothing right now. Les has pretty well fixed me up.”
He stepped back onto the deck and I followed him. The sun was going down, yellow and purple streaks reaching far across the sky, black trees on the horizon. We stood silently at the rail and watched the darkness grow up from the ground, creep ever closer to us.
“So…you’ve had a busy week.” He turned toward me, one hip against the rail.
“I can’t claim I’ve been bored.”
He lifted his chin. “How about you give boring a try for a while?”
I laughed. “I’ll do my best, Bobby. I promise you that.”
“Good, because…” He trailed off, his eyes suddenly intense on my face in a way that stopped my breath in my throat. He lifted a hand toward my face, then settled it on the rail.
Because why, I wanted to ask. But I froze there under the strength of his gaze, wondering what he saw, wondering why he looked so intense, almost captivated. Wondering what he had to look so conflicted about.
“You look different,” he said finally.
“I feel different.” I shrugged. I felt again that swelling of my heart. It had made a difference even Bobby could see.
“Peaceful. Happy. That’s how you look now.”
I felt myself smile, and thought he’d described it perfectly. “You’re very perceptive,” I said.
“Well, I’m glad everything worked out for Tony the way you wanted it to.”
I blinked, lost for a second, then realized he thought that was why I looked different. I opened my mouth to tell him what had really happened, then remembered the dream about the stadium full of underwhelmed spectators and got scared. Instead, I shrugged. “Yes, well…I told you he was innocent. It feels good to be proven right.”
“We would have found the truth, you know.”
“I know.”
“Eventually.”
“Eventually. We’re both big enough to admit that I just helped speed things up a little.”
He gave me that crooked grin that used to send my heart soaring. Funny, you’d think I’d outgrow that by now.
“Yes, we’re both big enough to admit that.” He tapped the deck railing a couple of times and shifted his feet. “You did a good job, Salem. You really did.”
I didn’t know what to say because all I’d really done was be nosy, but at least I’d accomplished something. “So this is what it feels like to help people. No wonder you like being a cop so much.”
“Just leave it to us next time, okay?”
I saluted. “No problem. Tomorrow I go back to being the mild mannered dog groomer by day, and the mild mannered couch potato by night.”
“That’ll help me sleep better.” Again he tapped the railing and took a step back. “If you don’t need anything, then, I guess I’ll just head out…”
I nodded. “I’m fine. Thomas is behind bars, the fridge is stocked, Stump’s on the mend. Life is good.”
“Good, then I’ll just –”
Suddenly he was back, right in front of me, and his hand was lifting my chin and his lips were on mine. I was so shocked that for a second I wondered if it was really happening, but oh, those lips were so real, firm and soft at the same time. It was a long kiss, still and captivating and wonderful. It didn’t even occur to me that maybe I ought to pull away, not until the moment he did.
He looked almost as shocked as I felt, but a little defiant, too. Like he couldn’t believe he’d done that but, by gum, he’d do it again if he wanted to. He took a step back, his hands in his pockets.
“Ummm…” I said. “Did you just kiss me?”
“There’s room for doubt? It must not have been much of a kiss.”
“No, no, it was a good kiss,” I assured him. “Spectacular. It’s just that I have a really good imagination, and believe me, I’ve spent a lot of hours imagining you kissing me. And you know, I probably still have some meds in my system, so I had to ask in case it was just one of those…” I shut up.
He bit the inside of his lip. “So how was the reality, in comparison?”
“Far better,” I said. Although we’d shared some pretty amazing fantasy kisses, too. But reality was better. “There’s just this one thing…” Now, what was it? My mind was telling me I really shouldn’t be kissing him because… “Oh yeah. I’m still married.”
He had the decency to look a little embarrassed. “Oh, I know. I didn’t mean anything by that, of course. I just –” He took a few steps back. “I knew you’d always wanted me to do that, so I thought I’d throw you one.” He grinned to show he was kidding. Then he tripped over the top step and almost busted his butt all the way down the steps.
If he hadn’t made that last crack I would have probably tried to hide my laughter, but I didn’t. “Klutz. Trisha is so right about you. Huge ego.”
He bowed and then saluted as he walked back to his car. “Take care of yourself, Salem. I hope next time I see you it’s at the grocery store or something boring like that.”
“I told you I’d try. That’s the best I can do.” I watched him drive away, then stood on the front deck for a long time, watching the stars come out and feeling the kiss of Bobby Sloan on my lips.
THE END