They Almost Always Come Home (29 page)

“Mr. Holden, we’re happy to report that the paramedics jumped
the gun a little. Oh, sorry about the bad choice of words. They were
a little premature in their assessment of your daughter’s condition.
Lacey isn’t dead. Far from it. In fact, she’s behind those doors right
now teaching the nurses how to jump rope with IV lines. Man, that
was a close call.”

“She’s not . . . not dead?”

“Nope. Our bad. Hope we didn’t scare you.”
“She’s alive?”

“That’s pretty much what ‘not dead’ means, Mr. Holden.”
“And she’s not injured?”

“Funniest thing. Well, not
funny
funny, but you know.”
“No. Tell me.”

That would have made a great Bible story, wouldn’t it? Twelve-year-old girl fatally wounded in school shooting lives to tell the story. Doctors baffled by remarkable return from the brink of death.

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But while Greg ripped out his insides praying, “Please, God!

Spare her life!” she died.

Not a temporary death. The real thing. Forever.

By the time Libby arrived at the hospital, the doctor had

already pronounced a time of death and pulled a hospital sheet over Lacey’s face. Libby ripped the sheet back with a look that shouted, “How dare you risk suffocating my child!”

Lacey’s lips were cold and blue. Both parents bent down to

kiss their only daughter as they stood on opposite sides of the hospital gurney. Their child’s body already bore the trademarks of a mannequin. Stiff, unyielding, unresponsive, lifeless.

“Why didn’t she qualify?” Greg remembered debating with God.

“Excuse me?”

“Why wouldn’t Lacey have qualified for a miracle? Why couldn’t

she have been raised from the dead like Jairus’s daughter or the
Shunamite’s son?”

“Qualify? That’s not how it works.”

“Was it me, then? Is it my fault? Did I not qualify to have my

prayers answered?”

“Greg, My son—”

“No platitudes, please. I need to know why those other people

received what they asked for and I didn’t.”

Greg had broken down at that point, one of the few epi-

sodes of weakness in a lifetime of testosterone toughness. He cried over Lacey’s death and over the fracture in his relation- ship with a God who had never given him any reason not to trust Him.

He figured it was about time that he formally apologized for

seeing it as a fracture, not a bridge.

And what was this—this new challenge, however tempo-

rary? Another bridge? A thorn? A cross?

Or a twisted way to tell him to give up the last of his

passions? His marriage was all but buried. His daughter danced

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beyond his reach. His job required life support. And now he’d lost what he most needed in order to pursue photography. His sight.

How far could he travel on
in
sight?

********

With his forearms resting on his knees, Greg sat on a rough- barked log and stared at the relentless blackness. The effort to try to see fueled a persistent headache. But giving up trying seemed tantamount to admitting defeat. Unthinkable.

He was startled when something brushed across his cheek. He turned toward where he assumed it landed. The leaf or pine needle or feather or bug or whatever it was would remain an unknown unless he felt compelled to search for it with his hands to confirm its innocuous nature. What was the point? “Day and night are the same to You, aren’t they, Lord? They’re the same to me now too. For You, it’s all light. For me, darkness. Ever-present darkness.”

Greg supposed it didn’t matter if it were day or night at the moment. He would sleep when he was tired and eat only when hunger forced him to deplete his meager supplies.

He thought he’d been so smart to leave his food pack with the canoe and take a minimum of food in his daypack when he blazed a trail through the woods in search of a waterfall named Lacy. It wasn’t a surprise to find the remnants of a waterfall but no active flow. The stains of water left their imprint on the rock face, but nothing remained that he could touch or photo- graph or hug to his heart. Like his own Lacey.

So smart. Just a few food items. How long would he have to make them stretch?

What made him grab his tent when he abandoned the canoe and food? The last things he needed for a short jaunt to snap

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a couple of photos were his tent and sleeping bag. Given the choice, should he have chosen the food pack instead? Staying out of the elements and having a place to sleep sounded good. But the idea of starving to death in the comfort of his tent offered no comfort.

When the rain started, he’d been grateful for a roof overhead.

Now it promised only deeper darkness—and little more.

He pushed himself up from the log and shook off his

lassitude. Could he use that word in a sentence?
His
weariness
and diminished energy grew into full-fledged lassitude.
Rehearsing vocabulary words could only fill so much of his day. He’d have to find a worthwhile way to occupy himself while he waited for deliverance.

Recite Scripture? Days ago, he hungrily devoured what he

read in God’s Word. The black ink on the white pages spoke with an almost audible sound, a Voice reassuring him of The Presence despite how things appeared.

Only what lived on the fleshy walls of his heart and mind

could speak to him now. Too few words. Too late to commit more to memory. Too late for a lot of things.

Where was his solo trip notebook? In his clothing pack. He

felt his way to the tent. He let the flap hang loose as he patted his way around the interior in search of the pack. His hands found the pack and searched its surface. Belts, buckles, straps, zippered compartments. His mind oriented him to the scene invisible to his eyes. This one? No. One compartment lower on the right side of the pack. Yes. There it was.

He sat back on the tent floor, removed the pen from its

nest among the spirals and flipped the notebook open. His fingers moved over the pages, searching for one without the subtle indentations that let him know he’d pressed his pen into its wood fibers. When he regained his sight, he might laugh at where he’d started writing and at his distorted pen-

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manship. At the moment, all that mattered was writing, get- ting the words—God’s words—recorded. As if that mattered to a sightless man.

After a minute with his head bent over his work, Greg chuckled at his folly. Without eyes, he could write lying down with his paper on his stomach if he wanted. He didn’t need to see, but he could feel the words scrolling onto the page. He resisted the easy ones—“For God so loved the world . . .” “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want . . .” “Behold I stand at the door and knock . . .”—certain he could bring those familiar verses to mind without thinking later on when he’d exhausted himself trying to dredge up other passages of Scripture he knew he ought to know.

The sound of the pen tip on the paper soothed him as he wrote.

“The godly man does not fear bad news nor live in dread of what may happen. He is settled in his mind that God will take care of him.” Psalm something or other. Living Bible paraphrase.

“Be strong and take courage.” Joshua or Deuteronomy or one of those books.

“I will never leave you nor forsake you.” New Testament, he was fairly certain. Or was it?

“Thou wilt keep in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.” King James. Sunday school memorization contest when he was in fifth grade and the family next door hauled him to church with them—to his dad’s chagrin.

“Faith is the evidence of things unseen.” The book of Hebrews. Chapter twelve, if he wasn’t mistaken. Or was it eleven? “The evidence of things unseen.”

When had those words meant more than now?

A wolf howled somewhere in the distance. The echo drifted on the air currents. Greg’s prayers hitched a ride.

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G
reg stretched the kinks out of his arms and shoulders and back. His wrist rebelled against his efforts to loosen the cramp from the writing marathon the “night” before. He’d slept with the notebook in his other hand. Before he closed the cover and slipped it into his breast pocket, he bent up a bottom corner of the last page on which he’d written. When he thought of more verses, he’d know where to start.

Crawling out of the tent, he was greeted with radiant

warmth on his face. Sunny day. Good to know.

He lifted his face toward the direction the warmth was

strongest and opened his eyes, straining for a hint of light to reach his retinas. Nothing.

A low growl quickened his heartbeat. His pulse settled almost

instantly when Greg realized it came from his empty stomach. He’d have to eat something. Part of a fruit leather? He’d divide it in fourths. A little for breakfast. More for lunch. Some for supper. And he’d save the rest for tomorrow’s breakfast.

First things first, though. Bathroom break.

Without thinking, he lifted his left arm to check the time.

Just like a sighted man would. He slipped the pointer finger of his right hand under the watchband and prepared to fling

39

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it toward the flashlight graveyard when it occurred to him he had a ropeless method of finding his way back to camp. The alarm on his watch.

It took some finagling to set it up by feel only, but Greg managed to configure the watch to beep, a sound he’d found annoying before he lost his sight.

He set the watch on a flat rock near his feet and shuffled into the woods, arms extended, memorizing the position of the trees and roots. When the sound of the beeping grew too faint to hear, he backed up a couple of paces. That was far enough. When he was done with his morning routine, he followed the sound of the beeping until it was right underfoot again. He lifted the watch and kissed it before slipping it back onto his wrist. “Good boy,” he told it.

Sparky hadn’t been near the friend his watch promised to be. It needed a name. Taking a cue from the biblical method of naming characters like Isaac, whose name means “laughter,” and Ishmael, whose name means “God hears,” Greg christened his watch, “In His Time.”

Certain elements of his memory were razor sharp in this land of photogenic light and shadows. He recalled that Hagar, a woman rejected and condemned, adrift in her own wilder- ness experience, reached out to the Almighty and called Him “The God Who Sees.”

“My Lord. The God Who Sees.”

He spread his arms wide and invited the sighted God to walk him through his wilderness.

********

Suicide.

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He chewed the last mini-bite of fruit leather, using his

tongue to dislodge a piece that got stuck between two molars. He needed every morsel.

Suicide
, he thought again. The idea of finding his way back

through the twist of woods to his canoe, then back across the remote lakes to one that was more well-traveled spelled certain suicide. The exertion of the trip didn’t frighten him, nor did the fact that he couldn’t keep his normal pace. The journey deal-breaker lay in the impossibility of finding his way with- out the benefit of sight.

Willingness, he had in abundance. But his internal GPS

system was missing a key component. Sight. Hard to triangu- late without sight.

The danger of wandering deeper into hopelessness kept

him imprisoned at his camp.

“Secure the perimeter,” he told himself and any woodland

creatures listening in. “If I’ll be here a while, I need to make it as safe as possible, as convenient as possible, and easier for someone to find me.”

He drew a slow breath. It didn’t imply a lack of faith if he felt

he needed a more permanent camp setup, did it? He’d gladly abandon it all at the first sound of a search plane. Or another human voice. “Hey, buddy? You okay? Need help?” Sweet words.

The only ones he could imagine holding greater sway for

him? “Greg, I love you. From the depths of my heart. We can make this marriage work.”

********

Rolling and tugging, crawling when necessary, Greg moved

a series of downed logs and soccer-ball-sized rocks to form a two-foot-wide runway leading from camp to the water’s edge.

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When finished, he stood tall and felt his way down the slope, tapping first one side then the other with his feet.

When he reached the water, he lowered himself to a rock- bench. He stripped down to his underwear, grateful for the penetrating warmth of the sun. His workout hauling logs invig- orated him. He lifted one arm, turned his head, and sniffed. He couldn’t see. But he could smell. And he did.

He left his socks on. What a sight he must have made. The socks provided some small protection against the uncertain lake bottom.

Small rocks no more threatening than a pebbled pool lined the approach. Good. Sand would have meant greater difficulty in scooping drinking water. He had no choice. He’d have to risk water-borne diseases like Beaver Fever and drink straight lake water. His filtering kit rested comfortably and unused in his food pack underneath his stashed canoe.

Greg slapped his forehead with his palm. He should have filled his canteen with water before his open air bath. Now he’d have to wait for any silt to settle after he climbed out or look for another route to the water’s edge, farther away from his Jacuzzi.