Emerald Windows (20 page)

N
ick was just leaving to get his own lunch when he found Brooke still sitting in her car, slumped over her steering wheel, weeping into the square of her arms. Opening her passenger door, he got in beside her. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Tell me.”

Brooke shook her head. “I…can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” he whispered.

“I met Roxy’s boyfriend,” she said. “Her married boyfriend…and his pregnant wife.”

Nick moaned, sat back, and closed his eyes.

“What is she trying to do?” Brooke went on. “Follow in my footsteps?”

Nick looked up at her, struggling for the answers she so sorely needed. “Maybe it’s not what you think,” he ventured. “Maybe there’s not really anything going on. I’ve been watching her today, and she doesn’t seem like the home-wrecker type. She’s withdrawn, and…almost shy. Sonny keeps trying to flirt with her, and she honestly doesn’t seem to know how to respond to it. Not like someone who’s had all that much experience with men.”

“Oh, Nick,” Brooke cried. “She practically admitted it. Said we both had promiscuity in our genes!”

“Ah, so that’s it,” Nick said. “So it’s time to turn the tables and make you out to be the one who has to defend herself, huh? Sort of takes the focus off her, doesn’t it?”

“That’s not what she’s doing!” Brooke said. “She really sees me that way!”

“Then she doesn’t see you at all,” he returned.

She dug for a tissue in her purse, blew her nose, and wiped at her tears. “We’ve got to go back in there,” she whispered. “We have work to do.” She got out of the car, and Nick followed.

“Brooke, when are you going to realize that I was the teacher? It was me they blamed most. I was the villain.”

“Neither of us should have been the villain. We didn’t
do
anything.”

He let her get a few steps ahead of him, then finally said, “Maybe I did.”

She turned around, stricken by the confession. “What, Nick? What did you do wrong?”

“I let myself fall for a student.”

Brooke caught her breath, and turned to face him fully. It was then that she saw Roxy from the corner of her eye, standing motionless at the corner of the building.

And she knew that her sister had heard the confession, as well.

CHAPTER
   

B
ROOKE TRIED TO KEEP HER FRAYED
emotions in check for the rest of the day, but they were too sharp and jagged, too fresh, too extreme. Pain and anger swirled through her head like a drug as she worked in a solitary corner of the room, but in its wake came the sweet, burning sting of Nick’s words. He had fallen for her when she was in high school. Somehow, in ways Brooke didn’t begin to understand, that made everything look different.

Roxy had ended up walking home, after all. When Brooke got home, she went straight to Roxy’s room. “Look, Roxy, I know you heard what Nick said today.” The speech she’d mentally worked on all day rolled off her tongue, her tone quiet, hesitant. “I want you to know that it’s the first I’ve heard of it too. But it doesn’t change anything. No matter how I felt about him or he felt about me, we didn’t do anything wrong back then.”

“And I haven’t done anything wrong, either,” Roxy whispered, staring dully out the window.

Brooke wet her lips and tried to keep her voice even, despite the anger reviving inside her. “You’ve gotten involved with a married man.”

She saw Roxy’s bottom lip quivering and knew she was about to cry again. “You don’t know anything about it.”

Brooke dropped wearily into a chair, counting out her breaths until she could speak without reproach. “Then tell me,” Brooke pleaded. “Don’t make me guess. Do you love him? Is that it?”

Roxy uttered a harsh, cold laugh that only made her seem more distraught. “Love has nothing to do with it.”

Brooke focused her astonished eyes on her sister, desperate to view the world as Roxy did, just long enough to understand. “Then what is it?”

“It’s power,” Roxy said, meeting Brooke’s eyes directly, injecting all her energy into every word she uttered. “That’s what it’s all about. And if you can feel better about what happened to you in high school by believing that Nick Marcello was in love with you, fine. But the plain simple truth is that he had power over you, and he used it. That’s what men do.”

Brooke gaped at her sister, fresh, futile tears in her eyes. “How did you get so bitter?” she asked on an incredulous whisper. “Where did you get such a distorted view of things?”

“From watching my big sister,” Roxy said simply. Then, leaving Brooke to deal with that pronouncement alone, Roxy went into the bathroom.

Paralyzed, Brooke sat in Roxy’s room for a moment, staring at the air. Her parents were in the kitchen, no doubt, brimming with a million questions about Roxy’s first day at St. Mary’s, full of a million unspoken reservations about both of their daughters working with Nick. Brooke couldn’t face that tonight, not when Roxy’s words had scraped deeper into already bleeding wounds.

Brooke slipped out the back door and got into her car, not certain where she would go. After a while, she found herself cutting back through town, toward St. Mary’s, the only place she was sure she could be alone.

Since the side door could only be unlocked with Nick’s key, she parked on the street and went to the front door to use her own. The door opened and closed with an echoing thud, and she smelled the familiar scent of sawdust and paint, of dust and mortar.

Brooke made her way to the middle of the large, dark room and sat on a drop cloth crumpled there, crossing her legs and peering up at the boarded places where her windows would go when they were finished. Would she and Nick really be able to impart truth in colored windows?

But truth was such an abstract term, she thought miserably, rubbing her eyes. Roxy’s truth was that there was no such thing as love—only power. But love was what
gave
one power. And that was Brooke’s own truth.

She looked up at the front of the building, where the pulpit had once been.
Is there another truth, God? Is there truth in those windows we’re doing? Does it make any difference?

Her heart swelled within her, as if trying to give an answer. But still the questions came.

“I don’t know if I believe in you,” she said out loud as tears ran down her cheeks. “I don’t know if you’re really even there. But if you are, I could sure use some peace. You must be big enough to help me with some of these problems, God. If you’re real, then surely you’re powerful enough for that.”

The front door opened, and she jumped. Swinging around, she saw Nick standing in the doorway, enshrouded in shadows. “Brooke?” His voice was tender.

“Nick. You scared me.”

“I decided to come back and get some more work done. I saw your car.” He let the door close behind him. “Are you okay?”

Brooke looked down at the drop cloth beneath her. “I had another round with Roxy,” she said. “I just needed to think.”

Nick went to the wall and turned on one dim light near Brooke. She found herself in a soft yellow circle, surrounded by darkness. Slowly, he stooped down in front of her. “So, you’re
not
okay.”

She shook her head. “No. I’m just a little…depressed…about my sister, and my parents, and your family, and Abby
Hemphill…” She looked up at him. “Roxy heard what you said today…”

“I know she did. I’m sorry. But it was true, Brooke.”

Her heart swelled and shifted as it had when he’d said it earlier. “And I had a fierce crush on you,” she whispered tragically. “When do we stop paying for that?”

Nick sat down on the floor next to her and draped his wrists over his knees. Slowly, he drew in a deep breath. “I was twenty-four years old. You were eighteen. I never made one inappropriate move toward you.”

“If I had only known,” she whispered. “I thought you would never forgive me for making you lose your job.”

“Forgive you?” he repeated. “Brooke, there was nothing to forgive. Getting fired from that nice, safe teaching job was probably the best thing that could have happened to me, because it forced me to use my talents. If I were still teaching, I may have never taken that plunge.”

She looked at him, marveling at his peace. “How do you do it, Nick? How do you find peace in terrible things? How do you make something good out of something bad?”

“Because I believe that everything that happens is for a reason. I believe that God is running this show. I believe that no matter what happens, He’s going to make it work for good.” His eyes locked with hers. “You could have that kind of peace, Brooke.”

She shook her head. “If I have to get it from God, I don’t think I can. I don’t know God like you do.”

“But He knows you.”

She looked at him, struck by the idea that the Creator of the Universe knew or cared about her. She was so small. And if God was really there, He would have to be so big.

“How do you know that He even gives me a thought?” she asked.

“It’s in the best-known Bible verse. ‘For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten son.’“

“That didn’t have anything to do with me,” she said.

“Brooke, it had everything to do with you.”

She looked down and remembered the prayer she had prayed just before Nick came in. She had asked for peace. Now Nick was trying to give it to her.

Was this an answer from God, or just a coincidence? After all, she had been the one to bring up the idea of peace to begin with.

Still, she had asked, and the next thing she knew, there the answer was.
For God so loved the world…
The thought of that, in itself, did promise peace. If she thought God loved her, what peace that would be.

But some part of her couldn’t believe that.

“If you want to know Christ, all you have to do is ask Him.”

She looked back up toward the area that would hold the pulpit, as if she could see God there. “Maybe someday I will.”

When she glanced back at Nick, she saw the disappointment in his eyes as he gazed down at the floor. Somehow, what she’d said had been wrong. “What is it, Nick?” she asked.

“I just…want you to have peace now,” he said. “I want you to have all the things that I have. I want you to know the fullness I feel.”

“Fullness?” she asked.

“Yes. As opposed to emptiness. I want that for you, because I care about you, Brooke. Promise me,” he said. “Promise me that you’ll think about Christ. Promise me you’ll consider what I’ve said. And that you won’t wait.”

She nodded. “I will.”

He swallowed, then sighed, and got to his feet. “Let’s go get some work done, unless you want to go home.”

“No, we can work,” she said.

But as she followed him into the workroom, she felt as dismal as she had before. Nothing had really changed.

CHAPTER
   

T
HE TELEPHONE AT THE MARTINS’
house rang at nine-thirty, but Roxy, who had been alone in her room for most of the evening, didn’t answer it. She was busy turning the pages of the scrapbook she’d kept as a little girl, searching the joyful faces in the cracked and faded photographs for a sign of the happiness she had known before Brooke had left home.

Her one-time hero worship of her protective big sister had been a fantasy. Brooke could no more protect Roxy now than Roxy could have protected her seven years ago.

Her mother knocked on her door and stuck her head in, interrupting her reverie. “Telephone, Roxy. Someone named Sonny.”

Roxy frowned and looked at the extension on her bed table. “Sonny? What does he want?”

Her mother smiled. “I guess he wants to talk to you.”

Roxy cast a beseeching look at her mother. “No. Tell him I’m not here.”

Her mother stepped into the room, still smiling, as if she had caught her shy, awkward daughter on the threshold of her first budding romance. “I’ve already told him you’re home. You know, with that attitude it’s no wonder that you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night. Now, answer that phone.”

Roxy watched her mother leave the room. Reluctantly she took a deep breath and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Yo, Roxy, it’s me. Sonny.”

Roxy sighed impatiently. “I know. What is it?”