Exodus (2 page)

3

AN ANNOUNCEMENT

Aria passed over three crock pots of baked beans on the card table the elders had set up beside her house. She gazed up at the two-story brick colonial with peeling white trim.

Home.

This house had always been home to her. She had grown up in this flaking old friend, played with Jenny down the street for as long as she had memories of playing with anyone. The neighborhood was filled with homes belonging to the people from these picnics, who had been a part of her church since before she was born.

The old church had been home, too, though. She missed the white wood building with the single bell in the steeple and the honeysuckle that grew under the windows—windows that opened to let fresh air in.

Aria scooped a large dollop of macaroni salad onto her paper plate, leaving room for a handful of potato chips and one sugar snap pea.

             
“I see you’ve got all your food groups,” Mr. Bob said. He shuffled down the length of the table next to Aria and dug into one of the crock pots with a big ladle. His bulbous nose hung low over his plate, which he was piling high with brown, soupy beans. His red neck was spilling over the edge of his collar again, too. Mr. Bob always seemed to have a red face and nose, like he was holding in a sneeze.

Aria stepped back to look up at him around his heavy stomach and shot him a mischievous smile.

              “I have to eat my vegetables,” she replied.

She picked up a second plate with a frosted brownie on it.

Balancing both plates in one hand and her punch in the other, Aria made her way across the lawn to where Jenny and Tara were perched on lawn chairs by the back flowerbeds.

It was a warm spring, and the tall hibiscus stalks were already starting to droop behind Jenny and Tara’s bare legs, which sprouted like pale stems from their shorts. Aria tried to pretend she was comfortable in her long-sleeved shirt, which she had worn to cover her arms again, but she was sweating.

              Aria smiled, but Tara turned away, even though Aria was sure she had seen her.

As Aria approached, she could hear Tara saying, “You know you could!”

Jenny giggled and tossed her long, dark hair.

             
“You could what?” Aria asked.

They both looked up at her.

“Um, you know!” Tara said cryptically. She raised one eyebrow and wiggled a speared piece of asparagus at Jenny.

Jenny giggled again.

              Aria gingerly placed her plates on the arm of a lawn chair that faced the house. “Yeah,” she said without smiling. She settled in to eat her brownie first.

She cleared her throat.

“What?” Tara asked.

I’m scared my dreams are going to hurt me and I want to know if God is real or if I’m crazy, and all you can do is giggle about asparagus!
Aria thought, her forehead flushing hot.

“Nothing,” she said. She finished her brownie and dug into the macaroni.

              “Yah!”

A sudden yell from behind sent Aria sprawling on the grass. Something had bitten her ankles like a snake. Macaroni landed on her back, and her brownie went face down into the lawn.

She whirled around to find Jimmy wearing her chair like a sombrero.

             
“Jimmy!” she yelled.

Phil Donagee, Mr. Bob and his wife Gail turned from their conversation across the lawn to look. Ms. Gail lifted her head out of her gray turtleneck, raising a pale eyebrow. She reminded Aria of a turtle that lived in Mrs. Coghill’s backyard pond down the street—always pulling his head up and down to check for danger.

              “Don’t hit me. I’m just a messenger,” Jimmy said with a grin.

             
“From whom?” Aria demanded.

             
“God! He wants you to know, Technicolor Dreamcoat, that you’re
crazy
!”

Jimmy danced in a circle with the chair on his head.

Aria rolled her eyes, but she looked around to see who was watching. Ms. Nancy was keeping an eye on them over her paper cup, but when she saw Aria looking at her she turned back to her conversation with Jenny’s parents, the Stauffins. They were wearing their usual khaki, Mr. Stauffin’s slacks considerably more sizeable than his wife’s.

             
Phil Donagee was still watching too, but he met Aria’s gaze and smiled. He snapped his phone shut and raised his cup of punch in a toast to their mutual love of sugary picnic foods. His square belly, which strained against his polo shirt, betrayed the fact that he had seen a lot more picnic food in his day than Aria, though his stomach was as solid as a tree from his days in the Air Force.

             
“Excuse me, everyone, can I have your attention over here?”

Pastor Ted broke the awkward lull in conversation by stepping up onto the deck and holding his arms up like Moses over the Red Sea.

“Everyone? Thank you. Jimmy, put that chair down! Okay.”

Jimmy crouched down under Aria’s lawn chair and backed out to kneel on the grass. He grinned once more at Aria, who crossed her arms and turned to glare at Pastor Ted. She winced with the pain of her cuts pressing into her sides, but tried not to show it.

Pastor Ted’s dark eyes held everyone’s gaze.

             
“I have some exciting news,” he said with a toothy smile. “As you know, we have been fundraising to save up a down payment on our new building, which just passed its final inspections. Well, we had enough to roll our construction loan into a mortgage, so the new building is ours!”

He twirled his hands and took a shallow bow.

              The church members tucked their plates into their elbows and clapped.

“God is so good,” Aria heard Ms. Nancy say to Jenny’s mom.

              “Yes, isn’t his favor a wonderful thing?” she replied with a bright smile.

             
But as Aria turned around she caught Phil Donagee grumbling, “And how are we expected to pay for the
rest
of the building?”

He saw her watching him again and shut his mouth. He dug into a slice of cherry pie so aggressively that his fork stuck through the bottom of the plate.

Aria heard her plate crack under the force of Jimmy’s swift kick. He ran off to raid the desert table with Tara’s little sister Lydia. But Aria’s eyes were still locked on Pastor Ted.

Why did my dream take place in our new church?
she wondered. She had not thought of that detail until this moment. But the tornado had ripped through the new church building, and there was something going on with the place. She could just smell it on Pastor Ted.
What is wrong with the new building?
she thought.

He was watching her, too. His arms dropped to his sides, and he scowled.

Aria glared back. Her skin crawled.

Why did I never notice how fake his smile is?
she thought.

Then fear hit the pit of her stomach.
What did Ms. Nancy tell him about my dream?
She felt naked and looked away.

Mr. Bob came up behind Pastor Ted and whispered something to him, causing him to finally look away and run his fingers through his hair. He nodded and smiled at the deck while Mr. Bob explained something, then followed him to where Aria’s dad was standing by the door to the family room.

Aria noticed her dad’s forehead was creased with unusually deep lines. He leaned against the house, ignoring the breeze mussing his sandy hair and picking furiously at the brick behind his back. Mr. Bob and Pastor Ted stepped into the house, and he escorted them inside with an outstretched arm.

An elder’s meeting during a picnic?
Aria wondered. Her dad was the treasurer, but he should have been flipping burgers at the grill now, not talking money.

I wonder if they really do have enough money,
Aria thought before turning away to get more food.

“Aria,” her mom called to her. “Your friends are going to play volleyball.”

“Why didn’t we set up the net in the back yard?” Aria replied with a hint of a whine.

“There aren’t as many people at the picnic this year, sweetie. We don’t need all the space in the front yard, so you kids get the run of it!”

“Fine. Keep the back yard. All you talk about is money,” Aria grumbled. She made her way around the house to the front. “No wonder people don’t want to come to church anymore.”

Aria dragged her feet through the grass on her way to the front yard, where the youth group boys were batting the volleyball over Tara’s head. Tara stretched her arm up as high as she could every time they threw the ball, screaming and laughing, but she couldn’t intercept it.

The boys paid attention to Tara. Aria was starting to realize that Tara’s blonde hair put her in a different category than the rest of the girls. She tucked her short dark hair behind her ear and joined the game that was starting in the middle of the lawn where they had always placed circles of chairs for the picnic.

Her mother had relaxed by the grill with Mr. Bob and Mrs. Stauffin and Phil Donagee in this spot the previous spring. They had laughed until their iced teas spilled, watching Aria’s father, grill tools still in one hand, drag little Bobby Sinchak out of the drink cooler by his ankles, still clutching one soda in each fist.

Just a year ago. Was that possible? Those were noisier, happier times, when neighbors dropped in on a whim and helped fry piles of pork chops, when Aria fell asleep to the clinking of glasses and murmurs of happy conversation that carried over long past dinner into the Indiana night.

It was before relations had started to turn cold between Aria’s parents and their friends, before Jenny’s mom had yelled at Aria’s mom after church. Aria couldn’t remember what she had said, exactly, but she remembered her mom’s answer.

“It’s everyone’s business how these revival meetings are managed,” her mom had replied, loudly enough for Aria’s friends to stop their game of tag around the refreshments table and stare.

The women saw their husbands watching them. They lowered their voices and turned to hiss at each other.

“You don’t
manage
God, Lily,” Jenny’s mom said.

“You
do
steward the blessings God gives you, though, and this revival thing is getting out of control!” Aria’s mom replied.

“Revival is a blessing from God!” Mrs. Stauffin raised her voice.

“Real revival, yes,” Aria’s mom shot back.

“Are you saying this church’s revival is fake?” Mrs. Stauffin gasped.

“You think it’s a sign of genuine renewal in the church when people roll around on the floor but then get up to live their lives without any change? God comes to bless his people, to change their hearts! To heal them! Not just to show them a good time and let them go on being their miserable old selves.”

Mrs. Stauffin had stood with her mouth hanging open while Aria’s mom quickly composed herself and left to greet other congregants with a tight smile.

And then there’s the money,
Aria thought.
What will happen if the people still attending the church can’t pay for the building? This revival was supposed to bring in more people.

Then a terrible thought struck her. What if that was all the revival was for? She had been through an extraordinary experience at the revival—one she hadn’t fully sorted out yet—but what if the original plan had just been to beef up attendance?

“Aria! Hit the ball when it comes over the net! Don’t just stand there dreaming,” Tara called to her. Aria turned to see the boys snickering through the net.

“Our serve!” the blond twins Jesse and Josiah said. They shifted positions for the next play. Aria blushed and hunched down to be ready to return the next ball.

4

A GIFT TO SEE THINGS

“I still can’t believe it,” Aria’s dad said.

Aria strained to hear her parents’ low voices from where she sat in the back of her dad’s gray Porsche, snug in her leather bucket seat on the way home from church.

“He was doing it the whole time under our noses!” her dad whispered fiercely. He thumped his hand on the steering wheel.

“I know. I don’t know what to do,” Aria’s mom replied. She tugged at her short dark hair.

Aria turned quickly to look out the window.

“We all see the budget,” her dad grumbled. “Just because I’m the treasurer doesn’t mean I see any numbers the rest of the church doesn’t see. He did this to all of us! And now that I’ve proved that I didn’t make any accounting errors like he claimed, he’s protesting that he must have made a mistake in ignorance. The gall of that man!”

I knew it,
Aria thought.
There’s something going on at the church. But it’s not the building. It’s the money again!

The elders were holding extra meetings during the week. Aria’s dad had come home from the last meeting with his shoulders slumping and had gone to bed early. But simply running out of money wasn’t any one person’s fault, was it? She wasn’t sure what, or whom, they were talking about, either.

Aria peered out the window at the houses they were passing. The world smelled like clothes drying in the dryer. Power lines sagged between each house and the utility poles by the road, where the garbage cans were pushed up against clumps of yellow daffodils.

Aria snuggled down into her sweater and enjoyed the comforting rumble of the car’s engine against her back. The weather had turned colder again, but it was still dry. She couldn’t remember a spring that had ever been as dry as this one. The church lawn should have smelled like freshly cut grass by now, but it smelled like paper, like nothing at all.

“It seems like Aria somehow saw this coming,” her mom said quietly. “But how could she? She’s just a kid. When she told me her dream I honestly thought I had just put her to bed after letting her watch a movie that was too scary.”

Aria’s dad shrugged and didn’t answer.

Aria gazed unseeing at her watery reflection in the window. She didn’t want to disturb either of her parents as the car came to a stop at the end of the street, a few pieces of gravel popping and grinding under the tires. What about her dream predicted trouble with the church budget? There was the church, and Pastor Ted, but—.

“If her dream really was a message from God, why did he tell her and not the rest of us?” Aria’s dad finally asked.

A message from God? That’s really possible?

The engine purred against her, but Aria found her hands shaking for a different reason. If her dream really had been from God, that would mean she had much bigger problems than a church family running out of money. She peeked into her sleeves again, and was greeted by her angry scars, many of them still healing.

That would mean I didn’t cut myself,
she thought.
Wouldn’t it?
She clasped her hands together to stop their trembling.
But then what happened to me?

“If something in church is rotten to the core, why warn a twelve-year-old and not the elders?”

Aria’s vision of the pulverized oak tree falling in the church yard replayed before her eyes. What was he talking about? Was something really rotten at church?

Someone believes my dream is a message from God,
she thought.
But why would God give me such a terrible dream? Why would he let me get hurt like this? Ms. Nancy said he wouldn’t.

I thought you were good, God. When that revival preacher prayed for me, I thought what I saw was real.

Her breath came shallowly as she waited to hear more from the front seat.

Finally, her mom spoke. “I know,” she said. “I think she has a gift to see these things.”

She paused.

“But we absolutely can’t let her get involved,” she whispered.

“What if she needs help, though?” Aria’s dad asked in a low voice, turning to look at her mom. “Shouldn’t we get her to talk to someone?”

“I have vivid dreams, too,” her mom replied crisply, “and no one has ever accused me of needing ‘help’… not to my face, anyway.”

“None of your dreams ever came true,” Aria’s dad said to the road ahead.

Came true?

Aria remembered the birds and shuddered. Her scars ached again, just remembering the blood. She hadn’t
shown
her parents, so how could they know?

They turned into their neighborhood in silence, cruising past the tall maple trees and waving willows that had been saplings when Aria’s parents had moved there fifteen years prior. They passed Mrs. Coghill’s blue bungalow, and the Stauffins’ stucco home across the shady street.

Aria loved walking through Mrs. Coghill’s garden. She grew hydrangeas and roses in front of the house, and she kept bubblegum on top of the fridge. Aria could still hear the water in Mrs. Coghill’s backyard pond slapping against the underside of the worn wooden dock—a perfectly relaxed memory of long summer afternoons.

“It was a dream come true to move to this neighborhood with our friends and start our own church,” Aria’s mom said. They rolled down the quiet street, past Mr. Bob and Ms. Gail’s house. “But what if it’s going wrong? What if this dream is really a nightmare?”

Aria sucked in her breath sharply and hoped they hadn’t heard.

Her dad clenched his jaw and gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.