Cross Roads (33 page)

“You sure you don’t want to talk to him?” mumbled Maggie.

“I can’t!” responded Tony, resigned.

“How come?”

“ ’Cause I’m a coward, that’s how come. For all the changes, I’m still too afraid.”

She nodded barely but enough that he would know and sat down next to Clarence, who simply leaned over and in the guise of a hug, whispered, “Thank you, Tony, for everything. Just so you know, whatever was in that bag was destroyed by an industrial shredder.”

“Tell him thank you for me, Maggie. And please let him know what a good man I think he is. I’ll say hi to his momma, however that works.”

“I’ll let him know,” she returned.

The time had come and Maggie walked alone for the last time back to Tony’s room. “So no cats!” she stated.

“Nope, no cats, thank God,” replied Tony. “The will we left in the safe splits everything between Jake, Loree, and Angela. I got drunk one night and was listening to that Bob Dylan song, you know covered by that woman…”

“ ‘Make You Feel My Love’? Adele?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Well, I got all feeling bad and rewrote everything. Next morning, hungover and all, I still felt awful enough about myself to go and get it notarized. But then, like always, I changed my mind, you know…”

Maggie and Tony were by themselves as quiet descended, stillness breathing inside the ongoing and tireless repetition of machines.

Maggie finally broke the stillness. “I don’t know how to do this. Tony, my life is changed because of you, for the better. You matter to me, and I don’t know how to let you go, to say good-bye. I just know there is going to be this hole in my heart that only you fit.”

“No one has ever said anything like that to me. Thank you.” He continued, “Maggie, I have three final things that I need to talk to you about.”

“Okay, but don’t make me cry. I got nothing left.”

He paused slightly before continuing, “Maggie, the first
thing is a confession. Someday you might want to tell Jake something for me. I couldn’t do it. I really am a coward, but I… I just can’t, I’m too afraid.”

She waited while he was scrounging for words.

“My brother and I got separated and it was my fault. Jake always looked to me for everything and I was there for him, until there was this one family, this one particular foster family. From everything they were communicating to each other, and to me, too, I was certain that they were going to adopt. The problem was, they could only adopt one and I desperately wanted to be that one; I just wanted to belong again, somewhere.” Tony had never told anyone about this and was fighting the shame that lay beneath the burden of the secret.

“So I lied to them about Jake. He was younger and sweeter and easier to manage than me, so I made up all sorts of terrible stuff about him so that they wouldn’t adopt him. I sold out my own brother and did it in a way that he never knew about it. One day Children’s Services pulls up and they take Jake away and he’s screaming and kicking and hanging on to my legs and I’m hanging on to him like I really care, but Maggie, part of me was glad they were taking him away. He was all I had. I was destroying the love that I actually had for an imagination of belonging with someone else.”

Tony took a moment to collect himself and Maggie waited, wishing there was some way she could wrap that little lost boy in her arms.

“A few weeks later the family all gathers and asks me to be there. They announce that they had made a big decision and that they were going to adopt. But it wasn’t me they were adopting, it was a baby, and so the foster caseworker was coming by later that day to take me to another ‘wonderful’ family who was all excited about me coming. I
thought I knew what it was like to be alone, but this was a whole new lost.

“Maggie, I was supposed to be there for Jake, especially because no one else was. I’m his older brother, and he completely trusted me and I totally failed him; worse, I betrayed him.”

“Oh, Tony,” entreated Maggie, “I am so sorry. Tony, you were just a little boy yourself. I am so sad that you even had to try and make those kinds of choices.”

“And then Gabe comes into my life, and for the first time I am holding in my arms someone I actually belong to, and in that little boy I try to make it all right, but I couldn’t even hold on to him. I lost him, too. Angela didn’t have a chance. I was so terrified of losing her that I never even let her find a place inside my arms, and then Loree…”

He had spoken his heart, and now let his words hang in the air like a mourning fog, an unexpected sigh of an unburdened heart emerging and softly singing in the wake of his confession.

More silence as both waded through residual emotions. Tony finally took a deep breath and exhaled.

“Do you still have that little blue box?”

“Sure.” She pulled it out of her purse.

“I want you to give it to Jake. It’s the only thing I have from our mother; she gave it to me only a few days before she died, almost as if she knew she was leaving. She got it from her mom who got it from hers. She told me to give it someday to the woman I loved, but I was never healthy enough to love anyone. I can see that Jake has it in him, to love like that. Maybe he can give it someday to the woman that he loves.”

Maggie carefully lifted the top. Inside lay a small gold chain and a simple gold cross. “It’s beautiful, Tony. I’ll do
that. I’ll be hoping to see it around Molly’s neck one day. You know, just sayin’!”

“Yeah, me, too,” Tony admitted. “That would be fine by me.”

“And the last thing?”

“It’s the most important of the three, I think, and probably hardest for me to tell someone. Maggie, I love you! I mean, I actually do.”

“I know, Tony, I do know that. I love you, too. Crap, why did I even bother wearing makeup today?!”

“Okay, then, let’s not make this any harder. Kiss me good-bye and go join our family.”

“You want to know what you and Jake and your folks were enjoying in the picture?”

He laughed. “Of course!”

“I’m surprised you don’t remember. Your mother accidently poured salt instead of sugar into her coffee, and when she took a sip, she sprayed it across the room in a most unladylike manner, and right onto a woman dressed to the nines. Jake can tell it better, but you get the idea.”

“I remember.” Tony laughed. “I remember how it made my day! How could I have forgotten, especially when…”

“Good-bye, my friend,” whispered Maggie, tears spilling down her face as she leaned forward and kissed the man in the bed on his forehead. “I will see you again.”

Tony slid one last time.

T
he three of them stood on the side of the hill overlooking the valley that lay below. It was his property but barely recognizable. The river that had destroyed the temple had also demolished most of the walls. What once was burned over and devastated was now alive with growth.

Grandmother spoke. “Now that’s better! Much better!”

Jesus responded, “It’s good!”

What mattered in this moment to Tony was simply being here, inside the relationship with these two. There permeated in his soul an exhilaration and calm, a settled expectancy and wild anticipation clothed in peace.

“Hey,” he wondered aloud. “Where are your places? I don’t see either the ranch house or your…”

“Hovel,” grunted Grandmother. “Never really needed them. All of this is now a habitation, not just bits and pieces. We would never have settled for less.”

“It’s time.” Jesus smiled, stretching his hands into the air.

“Time?” asked Tony, curious. “You mean it’s time to meet your dad, Papa God?”

“No, not time for that. You already met him anyway.”

“I did? When did I meet him?”

Jesus laughed again and wrapped an arm around Tony’s shoulder. Leaning close he whispered, “Talitha cumi!”

“What?” Tony exclaimed. “Are you kidding me? That little girl in the blue-and-green dress?”

“Imagery,” added Grandmother, “has never been able to define God, but it is our intention to be known, and each whisper and breath of imagery is a little window into a facet of our nature. Pretty cool, eh?”

“The coolest.” Tony nodded. “So, what is it time for then? Will Papa God be there?”

“It is time for the celebration, the life-after, the gathering and the speaking,” answered Jesus, “and just to be clear, Papa has never not been here.”

“So now what?”

“Now,” said Grandmother triumphantly, “now, the best comes!”

If you have not read
Cross Roads
yet, you might want to wait to read this note until after you have—there are a few spoilers here.

The name Anthony Spencer originated with our youngest son’s game avatars. While characters tend to be composites of people I know, in the writing each begins to emerge uniquely. This is not true for Cabby, Molly’s son. He is wholly built on Nathan, the son of friends, a young man who died only a couple of years ago when his hide-and-seek game took him outside of the arena where he was watching the Portland Trail Blazers, and out into the freeway where he was struck by two cars. Nathan had Down syndrome. There is nothing in the character of Cabby that was not true about Nathan, even his favorite epithet and his propensity to “lift” cameras and hide them in his room. While I was working on this story, I was in constant conversation with Nathan’s mom, who provided me the details for the Cabby character. One afternoon she called me, explaining how one of our interactions stirred her curiosity and she went exploring through Nathan’s personal items that are in storage. Sure enough, inside his toy guitar case she found an unfamiliar camera. She turned it on and to her surprise it was full of
pictures of my family. Two years before Nathan died, he had been visiting our home and had “lifted” our niece’s camera. All this time, we thought she had simply misplaced it.

There are so many to thank. Nathan’s family, for allowing me the honor to write their son into a work of fiction. I hope I was able to capture both the simple wonder and some of the struggle that coexisted in Nathan’s heart and in all families that face the daily challenges surrounding handicaps and limitations of one kind or other.

I had a lot of help and input on the medical side of the story. My thanks to Chris Green of Responder Life; Heather Doty, a Life Flight nurse and trauma nurse, who was an incredible resource to me with the collapse scenario; Bob Cozzie, Anthony Collins, and especially Traci Jacobsen, who let me invade their space at Clackamas County 911 in Oregon City, Oregon, and ask all the questions I needed to in order to make that part of the story accurate. The nurses and staff at both Oregon Health and Science University (especially in Neuro ICU) and Doernbecher Children’s Hospital (especially in Hematology/Oncology), as well as friend and retired neurosurgeon Dr. Larry Franks.

Working on this part of the story introduced me to incredible people who are truly “in the trenches” of human hurt and crisis. Unless we are fortunate enough to know these folks in our personal lives, we don’t usually intersect with them unless we are in a place of loss ourselves. From first responders, fire, ambulance, police, 911, to medical staff, techs, doctors and nurses, these are special hearts who work behind the scenes and help us cope with the tragedies that invade our everydays. On behalf of all of us who forget you are there or whose presence we so often simply take for granted, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Thank you, Chad and Robin, for letting me write at
your beautiful refuge at Otter Rock, and for the Mumford family, who gave me similar space to work up near Mount Hood. Without you, this story would not have made it to the presses in nearly as timely a fashion.

Thank you to my friend Richard Twiss and the Lakota—if you’ve read this book, you already know how you helped me. We all need a Grandmother and a tribe.

We are rich in friends and family, and it would take an even bigger book to list them all. I am grateful for how you are woven into our lives and for your participation in our becoming. Thank you especially to the Young clan and the Warren clan for your constant encouragement. To Kim, wife and companion, our six children, two daughters-in-law, one son-in-law, and six grandchildren (so far), I love you with all my heart… You make my heart sing.

Thank you to all of you who read and shared
The Shack
and then let me into precious and sometimes incredibly painful places in your stories. You have graced me beyond measure.

Thank you to Dan Polk, Bob Barnett, John Scanlon, Wes Yoder, David Parks, Tom Hentoff and Deneen Howell, Kim Spaulding, the incredible Hachette publishing family, especially David Young, Rolf Zettersten, and editor Joey Paul, and the many foreign publishers who have worked so diligently on my behalf and been powerfully consistent encouragers every step of the way. Special thanks to editor Adrienne Ingrum for her essential input and encouragement. The book is better because of her.

Special thanks to Baxter Kruger, PhD, my Mississippi friend and theologian, and photographer John MacMurray, who have been constant support and critics (in the best sense of the word). Baxter’s book,
The Shack Revisited
, is the single best book written about
The Shack
.

Thanks also to our Northwest area family of friends, the Closners, Fosters, Westons, Graves, Huffs, Troy Brummell, Don Miller, Goffs, MaryKay Larson, Sands, Jordans, the NE folks as well as early reader/critics Larry Gillis, Dale Bruneski, and Wes and Linda Yoder.

I continue to be inspired by the Inklings, especially C. S. Lewis (better known to his friends as “Jack”). George MacDonald and Jacques Ellul are always good company. Love to Malcolm Smith, Ken Blue, and the Aussies and Kiwis who are forever part of our lives. Sound track to write by, supplied by a diverse group of musicians including Marc Broussard, Johnny Lang, Imagine Dragons, Thad Cockrell, David Wilcox, Danny Ellis, Mumford & Sons, Allison Krauss, Amos Lee, Johnnyswim, Robert Counts, Wynton Marsalis, Ben Rector, that trinity of old brilliant musicians Buddy Greene, Phil Keaggy and Charlie Peacock, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, and of course Bruce Cockburn.