Tears welled in my son’s brown eyes, and for an instant he looked so much like his father that it could have been Karl standing there, years ago. When Karl was a young associate pastor, he was so passionate about his work that his cheeks were sometimes wet with tears as he spoke in front of the youth group. After the past year, it was hard to believe that any of those emotions were real. How could a man who really took the Bible to heart, who wanted to serve God, develop a sense of entitlement that allowed him to steal from the college, lie to his family, maintain a secret life, disappoint scores of people who were counting on him, leave his own son behind?
Maybe Karl was calling because something had happened between him and Delayne – a breakup, a fight. Maybe she’d left him. Maybe he’d lost his new job. Maybe he was on the skids, and calling me was some sort of reflex reaction.
The idea was appealing in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I found myself savoring the thought of Karl’s pain like something delicious.
He deserves it. He has it coming. He has at least that much coming. Let
him see how it feels to have everything cave in on you, to be rejected, to have
everything you’ve planned fall apart.
On the other side of the coin, the one I didn’t want to examine, was Dustin, teary eyed, red-faced, filled with worry, filled with love for his father, even after everything that had happened. Anything that hurt Karl would hurt him.
“All right, calm down.” I reached out and held Dustin’s upper arms, rubbed my hands up and down the cold skin there. “I’m sure it’ll be okay. What, exactly, did your dad say?”
Dustin sniffled, swiping a hand across his nose. “He said that Grandpa died.”
“Grandpa . . . what?” My father’s face flashed through my mind, but then I realized that, if something had happened to my father, Meg or my mom would be calling.
“Grandpa Henderson?” Karl and his dad had been on the outs since his father sold the North Dakota ranch that had been in the family forever and used the money to help Karl’s younger sister out of a financial crisis. Karl felt that he’d been cheated out of his inheritance. For a while, I’d tried to heal the breach, but then I’d given up, let time go by. I’d prayed that they would reconcile but never stepped up and done anything to help those prayers along. Dustin hadn’t seen Karl’s father in six years. Karl’s father probably didn’t even know we were divorced. Now Dustin would never see his grandfather again.
I pulled Dustin into a hug, and he melted against me, sobbing. Before the inheritance spat, he’d been crazy about his grandpa. He was Joe’s only grandchild. I shouldn’t have let anything come between Dustin and Grandpa Joe. I should have insisted that Karl be the bigger man, for our son’s sake. I should have taken Dustin to North Dakota myself. “I’m sorry. Sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”
“I should’ve gone to see him.” The words came out in a sob, almost unintelligible. “I should’ve gone to . . . gone to . . .”
“Ssshhh.” I stroked his hair, rocking him back and forth as if he were a little boy. “None of this is your fault. Honey, none of it’s your fault.” It didn’t matter whether it was Dustin’s fault or not; he was the one hurting over it. “Grandpa knew you loved him. He loved you so much. Oh, he loved you so much.” Tears filled my eyes, and my mind was awash with grief, with so many years of shared history – Karl’s, mine, Dustin’s. Over time, countless intricate threads had come to bind our families together, our marriage growing outward like a spider’s web, silken ties taking in friends, acquaintances, church members, family. It was so hard now to know which should be severed, which should be preserved, which could never be repaired.
I led Dustin to the sofa, sat down with him, pulled a blanket over the two of us, and held on until he’d cried himself out. Finally, I walked back to his bedroom with him, sat on the edge of the bed as I would have in the past. Some nights we’d spent forever talking about his day before saying good-night prayers. Then I’d watched him drift off to sleep, safe, secure, in good hands. God’s hands.
Tonight it seemed as if he were all alone. I’d robbed him the same way Karl had robbed him of his relationship with Grandpa Joe. Because of my own pain, because of my anger at Karl, at former friends and acquaintances who’d spread hurtful rumors and turned their backs on me, because of my disappointment with my life, I’d shoved God not only out of my world, but out of Dustin’s. I’d been so certain that a perfectly smooth, perfectly predictable, perfectly blessed life was my rightful inheritance for having been a regular churchgoer, a volunteer, a devoted mother, and a good and faithful servant. When the road turned rocky, I was angry that I’d been robbed of what I deserved. What I was owed. I was like one of those spoiled kids Mart talked about – the ones who had everything and took it all for granted.
It wasn’t fair for me to let my resentments spill into Dustin’s life, to cause him to wander alone through the toughest time he’d ever known. I was cheating him. I was cheating myself.
“We should have night prayers, huh?” I whispered, my voice shaking with emotion.
He nodded, his eyes still closed, his dark lashes matted against his cheeks. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “Can we go to church this Sunday?”
Church. Mart had mentioned Sunday at Lakeshore Community Church. If we went there, we’d undoubtedly run into him. I wasn’t sure what to say or how to handle the situation between us now. “Maybe we’ll go in Cleburne. Bonnie at the office has been trying to get me to visit there. She says they have a lot of activities for young people.”
Dustin shook his head, turned his face sideways into the pillow to wipe fresh tears from the corner of his eye. “I want to go here at Lakeshore. I want to go with Reverend Hay and Mart.” At some point during the week, Dustin and Mart had come to be on a first-name basis.
“We’ll work something out,” I whispered. “Let’s just say a prayer about Grandpa Joe now and . . .” I swallowed hard, dug down in search of some measure of grace, and finished the sentence. “. . . and for your dad.”
Dustin opened his eyes, studied me as if he were trying to decide whether I meant it. If he could find the answer to that question, he could let me know it, because I wasn’t certain myself. I only knew that I wanted to ease my son’s pain and that I didn’t want him to someday end up in Karl’s position – regretting the fact that he’d severed a relationship and finding that it was too late to do anything about it.
Dustin and I said good-night prayers, and then I left him to rest. It was after twelve, but he could sleep in tomorrow. Maybe we both could. Maybe I could go to bed, wake up in the morning, and find that today was only a dream – that everything was as it had been before. Maybe tomorrow night I would watch the cove, and Mart’s boat would come drifting up to the dock, the same as always. The fantasy was tantalizing, but dangerous. In reality, what Mart and I had was just a risky game of let’s pretend – stolen moments that had always been destined to collide with real life. What did I think was going to happen? How in the world did I think it would end?
It was just a fantasy, a dream
.
It was never real.
I wasn’t the woman who ran through the grass in the moonlight. I didn’t have the courage.
Even so, I went to bed, closed my eyes, and slipped into the fantasy. I imagined Mart stepping onto the dock, taking me into his arms, his eyes smiling at me in the moonlight. He didn’t speak. He only leaned down and kissed me, no complicated questions between us. . . .
A noise outside the house woke me with a start. I jerked upright, the leaden feeling in my body letting me know I’d been asleep for a while. I was cold. Outside the bedroom window, the night had turned foggy, a dusting of high clouds blotting out the stars.
I heard the noise again – the muffled sound of a radio playing and a car engine idling in the driveway. I glanced at the clock. Who would be outside our house at three in the morning?
A pulse fluttered softly in my neck, and I clutched a hand over my throat as I stood up. Anyone trying to rob the place wouldn’t drive up with the radio playing. Maybe someone was lost – coming home from a wild night at some local watering hole and confused about which house this was.
As the song ended, I recognized the last verse. I knew the voice that rose to a crescendo on the final note. It was my son’s. Dustin and his father had recorded that CD with the church youth group just a few months before Karl’s secrets came to light. The kids sold the CD in the foyer, raising money for a mission trip to build houses in Mexico. Since it was Dustin’s first year to travel with the youth, Karl and I were planning to go along as chaperones. I was hoping that the quiet time away from all the demands of the college would give us a chance to talk. There had been so much distance between us. While I was going about the business of our normal lives – charity work, PTA meetings, flower beds in the spring, fall carnival in October – Karl seemed to be pulling further and further into himself, excusing himself from more family events. I was glad when he and Dustin worked on producing the youth group CD together.
By spring break the truth had come out, the reason for the distance between us became clear, and our lives were in shambles. We’d fallen from grace with no soft place to land.
Why would Dustin be out in the driveway playing that CD in the middle of the night? Had he awakened, thinking about his father? Maybe he didn’t want to upset me, so he’d gone out there?
Pushing my hair out of my face, I got up and went to the living room, thinking vaguely that I should have put my hair in a ponytail. It would be hard to comb through in the morning. The wind had whipped it into wild tangles while I was on the lake with Mart.
Mart . . . The way I’d ended things steamrollered through my mind, compressing one set of thoughts indiscriminately into another. Mart deserved better than a few babbled, cryptic excuses and a quick fleeing of the scene. He hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d more than led him to believe that I was ready to . . . get involved with someone. With him. He’d only taken the natural next step.
Perhaps that was one of the things that bothered me. It was so easy to lean on Mart, to slip into his arms, to bring him into our lives and allow him to fill the empty space. But Dustin and I needed to learn to stand on our own, to become a family unto ourselves, to be healthy and complete, and then someday, maybe it would be time to expand that picture. Right now we were too needy, too vulnerable, too confused, too fragile. I couldn’t risk another failure, another heartbreak – Dustin’s or my own. We were still broken in too many ways.
Another song started on the CD as I opened the front door and peeked out. The cab of Taz’s truck was dark, the windows covered with nighttime condensation. I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside.
I’d reached the end of the front walkway before I realized there was a car behind the truck. Karl’s car. The secondhand one he’d bought after we’d sold almost everything of value to cover legal bills and the lump sum of cash he’d agreed to pay the college in order to avoid prosecution. I moved toward the car, the music pressing my ears, loud enough to disturb the neighbors, even though the houses were far apart. The dome light was on, the engine still running. Karl was slouched over the wheel, his hands clasped atop it, his thick hair, longer than I remembered, falling over his fingers in disarray.
The moment was surreal, unbelievable, like it was part of a dream. Any minute now I would wake and reprimand myself for allowing him to invade my subconscious mind. I felt as if I were watching from above – seeing a dark-haired woman move around the car, lean close, knock on the window.
Karl jerked upright, looked at me through the glare of streetlamps on the glass. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot, his cheeks wet. He seemed gaunt and pale, his skin translucent in the dim light. A vein was pulsating in his temple. I flashed back, thinking of the times I’d sat in the corner of his classroom, watched the vein pulse when he covered the finer points of theology. I could picture him now, his forehead red with vigor, his eyes filled with passion and indignation, with faith and devotion.
Now his eyes were hollow. Nothing larger seemed to occupy them. There was only emptiness strewn with shattered pieces of self. Part of me gloried in it. Finally he was as wounded as I. Finally he knew what it was to be broken, lost, alone in the middle of the night. Why had he come here? What did he want?
I motioned for him to roll down the window, and he reached for the switch, pinching his free hand over his eyes.
“From the Inside Out” spilled into the darkness, a little girl’s voice singing in the foreground, the youth choir behind her. The girl was McKenna, Delayne’s eldest daughter. Karl’s stepdaughter now.
Venom coursed through me like bile, burned in my throat. “Turn that off. It’s the middle of the night,” I hissed. “What are you doing here?”
He drew back, seeming confused about the source of the music, as if he’d forgotten it was playing. Fumbling with the buttons, he managed to still the sound, then sank against the seat, as if even that small action had exhausted him.
“Why are you here?” I wrapped my arms around myself, the damp night seeping quickly through my pajamas. The words echoed down the silent street, louder than I’d meant them to be.
He drew a breath that seemed to come in jagged pieces. “I couldn’t . . . think of where else to go. I was headed to North Dakota for the . . .” His eyes closed tightly, his face compressing in pain, his lips drawing back in a grimace over clenched teeth.