Leaving Fishers (11 page)

“She’s okay now,” Dorry said.

“Oh, Dorry, I feel so bad for you. Do you want me to come over and pray with you?”

Pray—that’s what she should have done, she realized belatedly. For a second she longed to have Angela with her, being compassionate and telling her what to do, what to feel.

“Is your father there? We could pray with him, too, give him comfort—”

That clinched it. Dorry couldn’t imagine Angela praying with her father. She could picture his skeptical frown already. “No, no, you don’t have to come,” Dorry said.

“I’ll call the prayer chains, though. Did anyone tell you Fishers has twenty different prayer chains? By ten o’clock, your mother will have eighty people praying for her. We’ll make sure she gets through this.”

I
want that,
Dorry almost said. Instead, she murmured, “Thanks.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Angela said. “But Dorry, you have to tell at least your father about being saved. Or you won’t be.”

“I will,” Dorry promised.

Angela finished with a prayer over the phone. After she hung up, Dorry continued holding the receiver up to her ear, listening to the dial tone. “God?” she whispered. “Can you make Mom
better? Do I have to tell my dad about things?” The phone hummed. Dorry sighed and hung up, not sure why she was acting like God would talk right back. Angela made it sound like that’s what He did for her.

Dorry took the phone back to the kitchen. Her dad was still watching TV in the living room. Heart pounding, she went and sat on the couch beside him. “Dad? I was—”

“Can’t you wait for the commercial?” he growled.

Obediently, Dorry waited until the actors in police uniforms were replaced by a commercial for Ex-Lax. “I was—I mean, I kind of had a religious experience at the retreat. We were wrong, at Bryden Methodist. I wasn’t baptized right. But I was this weekend, so I know I’ll go to heaven now—” She knew she wasn’t saying things right. At the retreat, Pastor Jim had told of people being saved hearing about someone else’s conversion. Dorry thought the way she had started, her story wouldn’t save a flea.

Dorry’s dad was looking at her the same way he would look at a used-car salesman. “What do you mean, you weren’t baptized right? After your mom spent three weeks on that christening gown you had to wear—”

“But it wasn’t my choice, see? I had to consciously,
uh, accept Jesus and ask Him into my heart. . . And I had to be dunked, not just sprinkled—” Dorry didn’t add that it had been in a swimming pool.

Dorry’s dad was shaking his head anyway. “What are you talking about? What church is this?”

“Fishers of Men. It’s wonderful.” Dorry knew she was supposed to invite him to join, too, to pray with her and assure his own eternal salvation. But she didn’t know how to say it, so she just stopped talking.

Her dad’s TV show came back on with a burst of sirens and gunfire. He turned back to the TV. “Look, I’ve got enough to worry about right now. Don’t bother me with this stuff, okay?”

“Okay, Dad,” Dorry said obediently. She went back to her room and flopped down on her bed with the homework she’d neglected all weekend long. She’d done it. She’d told her dad. Angela would be proud. God would be proud.

Dorry just felt foolish.

Chapter

Eleven

THE CALLS BEGAN FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER.

“We pray for Reenie Stevens, that God will heal her and cradle her spirit in His arms,” the strange voices said over the phone, one after another.

They came at five-minute intervals, as if everyone in Fishers had synchronized their watches and signed up for a certain time.

“Who’s that?” Dorry’s dad growled after the fifth call, the fifth time Dorry picked up the phone and then said nothing but, “Hello?” and “Thank you. Good-bye.”

“Just some people from my, uh, church,” Dorry said. “They’re praying for Mom.”

Dorry’s dad grunted. Dorry picked up the phone again. “Hello,” she said. “Thank you. Good-bye.”

Each call warmed her like a small ember. She didn’t recognize any of the voices, but these people cared about her mother. She was touched that they called. She was touched that someone, probably Angela, had bothered remembering Dorry’s mother’s name. Dorry must have mentioned it sometime over the weekend.

The phone rang again. “Hello?” she said. “ . . . Thank you. Good-bye.”

Dorry lost track of the number of calls. She was beginning to feel overwhelmed. On the couch, her father was clearing his throat and coughing in ever-louder expressions of disgust. Finally, in one call where the voice sounded vaguely familiar, there was a pause after Dorry said “Good-bye.” Dorry didn’t hang up.

“Uh, Dorry? This is Lara. We’re not supposed to do anything except pray, but I just wanted you to know how sorry I am.”

Dorry hadn’t seen much of Lara since the first Fishers party. “Thanks, Lara,” Dorry said. She wondered if Lara was still a kleptomaniac, or if she’d reformed again.

Dorry’s father was suddenly right behind her. “I don’t care if that’s God Himself,” he said. “You tell those people to quit bothering us.”

Dorry felt stung. She was trying to decide what to do when Lara said quietly, “I heard that. I’ll tell the others just to pray amongst themselves, not call. See you at school. Bye.”

Dorry hung up. She glared angrily at her father, but his back was turned so the effect was lost. She wasn’t a good glarer anyway. And under her anger was a little relief. She didn’t want to spend the whole night answering the phone either.

Back on the couch, her dad flipped through the TV channels. “We’ve got to keep the phone lines open, in case there’s news from the hospital,” he said.

That was the closest he’d come to an apology, Dorry knew. Once when she was about six or seven, he’d accidentally driven his pickup over her pink Barbie bicycle. The way he’d apologized then had been to tell her that he’d never thought the wheels were attached right anyway. But at Christmas there’d been a new bike under the tree.

“You could have told me,” Dorry grumbled now. She went back to her homework. The phone didn’t ring again.

The next few days Dorry felt like she had two entirely separate lives. Part of the time, she all but lived at the hospital, spending endless hours by her mother’s bed. She got used to the nurses constantly interrupting, the automatic blood pressure cuff inflating and deflating on her mother’s arm, the trays clattering outside in the hall. It would have been unbearably boring if it hadn’t been so terrifying. They kept a heart monitor on her mother, and Dorry couldn’t keep herself from watching it. What if its soothing pulse of green light turned into one long streak? What if its low, steady beeping turned into a sudden, high-pitched
screech? Dorry had seen that happen thousands of times on TV She knew what it looked like when people died. It was always a relief to walk out of the room, out of sight of the monitor. Yet Dorry clutched an almost superstitious belief that as long as she watched, the monitor and her mother’s heart would go on as usual. So she never wanted to leave.

In her other life, Dorry barely thought about her mother. She answered people’s questions automatically, as briefly as possible. In her other life, she was a Fisher.

“You’re doing so well,” Angela raved at lunch on Tuesday. It was just the two of them, because Dorry was having her first discipling session. “I can tell you’re going to be one of the best new Fishers.”

Dorry squinted at Angela. All she’d done was correctly answer a list of test questions: Who is your savior? Why did you need to be saved? Angela had given her the questions and answers to memorize the day before. It was no different than memorizing the Bill of Rights for American history.

“Maybe you’ll even be ready for an E Team soon,” Angela said.

“A what?”

“I’ll explain some other time. We have too much to do today.” Angela took out a sheet of
paper. “How much time have you spent praying since yesterday?”

Dorry thought back. She’d gone straight from school to the hospital, and stayed there until visiting hours ended. Then she’d gone home and studied, because she had an algebra test. She had done her bedtime prayers the way Angela had told her, only quicker. But she’d slept too late to pray in the morning.

“Ten minutes,” she said, though it had probably been only five.

“Oh, Dorry,” Angela let out a great sigh of disappointment and put her pen down. “You need to pray at least an hour every day. How can you expect God to give you the time of day in heaven if you won’t even give him one twenty-fourth of your time on earth?”

Dorry thought that sounded like a Pastor Jim line. It worked. She felt guilty.

“Maybe it was fifteen minutes,” she said. “I had that algebra test, and then with my mom in the hospital—” She wanted to say she’d sort of been praying in the hospital, hoping so fervently that her mother would get well. But she didn’t think Angela would count that.

“Dorry, Dorry, Dorry.” Angela was shaking her head. “Do you believe that algebra is more important than God?”

“Of course not. But—”

“And I’m not saying you shouldn’t visit your mother in the hospital, but you know Jesus did say, ‘He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.’ Matthew 11:37. Dorry, Fishers has to be the most important thing in your life.” Angela wrote something down on her sheet of paper. “You must pray at least an hour and a half for the next five days to make up for this. Okay?”

Dorry bit her lip, holding back rebellious words—Who died and left you in charge? What right do you have to tell me what to do?—but she knew the answers. She’d just repeated them for Angela. Jesus had died. Angela was her discipler. Angela knew what Dorry had to do.

“Okay,” Dorry said.

“Good!” Angela rewarded her with a smile so radiant it could have been an angel’s. Then she turned back to her paper. “Now, what sins have you committed?”

“What?” Dorry said.

“What sins have you committed?” Angela asked again. She spoke slowly, as if Dorry was a foreigner who had trouble understanding English. She tapped her pen on the paper. “We have to keep track of your progress as a Fisher, and one way to do that is for me to write down all of your sins at
every discipling session. I give a number to each sin depending on how bad it is, and then we can see how your numbers go down as you become more faithful.”

“Like grades,” Dorry said.

“Sort of.”

“Don’t I get any credit for doing good things, too?”

“Of course.” Angela nodded. “You’re expected to do virtuous acts, especially for unbelievers, so they see the error of their ways. But first—you have to tell me your sins.”

Dorry looked around. They were smack in the middle of the cafeteria, with other kids on either side. She’d noticed them sneaking strange looks at Dorry and Angela as it was. “Here? Can’t we go somewhere more private?”

Angela looked to her right and to her left, as if noticing for the first time that they weren’t alone. “God’s opinion of you is the only one that matters,” she said, then shrugged. “But you’re new. We can move, if you want.”

They shifted to a section of table with several empty chairs on each side. Dorry felt like confessing quickly, before anyone else sat near them, but she hesitated again. “Who else sees what you write down?” she asked. She didn’t want Brad knowing all the bad things about her.

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Angela asked, with a ripple of laughter. “Oh, Dorry, I thought you trusted me more than that.”

Dorry remembered that she hadn’t really let herself fall during the trust exercise. But that was before she was saved.

“I promise you,” Angela said. Tour secrets are safe with me.”

“Like Catholics having private confession?”

“You can think of it like that,” Angela said.

Dorry looked into Angela’s perfect blue eyes, and still hesitated. What counted as sin? If she had, say, picked her nose, would she have to confess that? She’d never tell Angela something like that. Never.

“Let me help you,” Angela said. She took out a new piece of paper and wrote “Categories of sins” in bold, looping letters at the top. Then, down the side, she wrote: “Pride, greed, sloth, selfishness, sins of the flesh, disobedience of God’s will, worship of false gods.”