Exodus (6 page)

10

WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT

“Mom, the oven is ready,” Aria said.

She hopped up onto the stool by the old oak kitchen table. The clock over the sink said three o’clock: her favorite time of the afternoon, when the warm sun fingered its way through the tree branches in the yard and danced on the yellow kitchen walls.

Her mom retrieved their matching red aprons from the pantry. She tied the ribbon of Aria’s apron behind her waist.

“There we go,” she said. She started to gather mixing bowls and spoons out of the cupboards.

Aria smoothed her apron over her knees and sat with her mixing spoon at the ready.

Her mom cracked some eggs into a bowl with butter and sugar in it and handed it to Aria. Then she stirred two pots of melting butter and sugar and chocolate. Aria listened to the wooden spoon scrape along the bottom of the pots. It took her back to those visits from Jenny and her mother when they ended up baking all afternoon just for the fun of it.

Aria dumped a bowl of sifted flour into her batter and worked it slowly, standing up on the rungs of the stool to get leverage as her mixture thickened into a dough. She watched her mom move around the kitchen. Was it her imagination, or did her mom move more slowly these days? Normally energetic and efficient, now she seemed tired all the time.

“Aria,” her mom finally said, “I think I heard you yelling in your sleep the other night, but it stopped before I could come check on you. Are you okay?”

Am I okay?
How could she answer that? She half expected the red static demon to coming walking into the kitchen any minute. How could she ever be okay until she figured out what was going on?

Aria traced her finger around the star cookie cutter on the flour-dusted tabletop.

“What happened? Did you have another dream?”

             
Aria’s hand closed over the cookie cutter. “Yes,” she said. “They never stopped.”

Aria’s mom looked at her with deep concern. “I wish I knew where all this was coming from,” she said.

The sunlight danced on the walls while Aria’s mom waited for her to respond.

             
“That preacher started it,” Aria finally answered her, “the one at the revival meetings.”

             
“I remember you being on the floor for a long time that one meeting,” her mom said. “What happened to you that night?”

One of the sugar mixtures began to boil, but she ignored the stove and crouched in front of Aria.

              “I don’t know.” Aria shook her head. “I just—.”

She started to cry. “I’m so scared, Mom!” Aria dove into her mother’s arms.

              Her mom hugged her fiercely to her chest. Aria’s body shook with sobs.

             
“It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay,” she said, petting her head. “I know these dreams are scary, but God would never let them hurt you.”

             
Aria cried harder. “He already did!” she wailed. “Mom, I don’t think any of us are safe.”

             
“What do you mean?” her mother said, holding her at arm’s length to look her in the face. “What happened?”

             
Aria slowly rolled up her sleeves. Her fading scars had left pink hash marks on her forearms. Some of the deeper cuts still glowed a fiery red where the scabs had fallen off.

             
Her mother gasped.

             
“What is this?” she cried. “Who did this to you?”

             
“I don’t know!” Aria replied. “I think it was demons, but I don’t understand how. They did this in my dream about Pastor Ted, but now I’m seeing demons when I’m awake, too, and I’m afraid they’re going to hurt all of us.”

             
“Oh my Lord, what is going on?” her mother replied.

“We’ll figure this out,” she added. “Just tell me what happened. What did Pastor Arny say to you?”

Aria could still remember what everyone had said. She would never forget….

“Without further ado, let’s give it up for our guest preacher, Pastor Arny!” her father had shouted, and Ms. Gail had clapped more enthusiastically than Aria had ever seen her clap before. Phil Donagee whistled through his fingers.

Pastor Arny was a short, stocky man in a white suit. He was light on his feet as he jumped up to the podium and took a long drink of water from a plastic bottle. He smiled a deeply tanned smile.

“How many of you talk to God every day?” he asked the rows of people packing the building to the very back.

“How many of you see angels and,” he dropped his voice to a whisper, “how many of you have been lit-er-ally transported from one place to another by the spirit of God?”

Ms. Nancy’s hand had shot high into the air at the beginning of his message, but now she slowly lowered it to her chest and looked around.

“I have good news!” the preacher shouted. “Good news of great tidings! The supernatural is supposed to be part of our everyday lives! This isn’t something that just happened once in the Bible and now it’s gone; each one of you can speak to God every day… and hear from him!”

A murmur went through the congregation. Pastor Arny seemed eccentric, but Aria wondered, could that be true? It made her heart leap with a sudden joy—and fear—to know she might actually be able to know God. What a thing worth seeking!

Phil Donagee stood up with his eyes closed and lifted his hands toward the ceiling.

As his sermon hit a crescendo, Pastor Arny shouted, “Release! Release your supernatural giftings and experiences on this congregation, oh Father God, and let them fully come to know the love you have for them—the desire you have to speak to them in the cool of the day!”

He swept his arm out toward the congregation, as if he were throwing open a window.

A shockwave seemed to hit the crowd. Phil Donagee reeled backwards into his pew and started to laugh. A woman next to him started to cry, and they fell into each other, knocking heads and falling to the floor.

“It’s all right, it’s all right!” Pastor Arny reassured the wide-eyed people standing behind them. “God’s just loving on his bride, the Church. People respond in different ways. Just focus on him; focus on the God who loves you so much that he numbers the hairs on your heads.”

Pastor Arny pulled the microphone from its stand near the podium, causing it to pop and whine. He stepped down off the stage and walked up to a thin woman in white pants who stood at the center of the first row. She had her eyes closed and was whispering a prayer with uplifted hands.

Pastor Arny lifted his hand to her forehead and pressed lightly. He said a quick, quiet prayer. The woman fell backwards like a bike with the kickstand removed. Two men behind her cushioned her fall into the pew.

Pastor Arny then moved across the front row, pressing lightly on the next person’s forehead, and the next, saying, “Come, Holy Spirit!”

All but two people in the row fell into their seats with their eyes closed.

He moved on to the next row. The people in the back watched the ones in the front fall against each other like dominoes.

Aria lowered her eyes when the preacher came to her. He lifted his arm above her. Then he stopped and looked a little more closely at her face.

Aria looked up. Just for a moment their eyes met.

“Well, hello there, little seer,” he said with a smile.

He then simply said, “God, activate!” and cupped the right side of her head in his hand.

She felt a weight on that side of her head—a warmth that ran through her like chicken soup—and she also crumpled to the floor….

             
“Oh, I see,” Aria’s mom said. She caressed her daughter’s tears away with floury thumbs.

She explained, “‘Seer’ is one of the names for prophets in the Bible. It used to be used to distinguish prophets who saw visions instead of hearing God’s voice audibly. Pastor Arny was trying to activate a prophetic gift in you.”

              “I don’t really get that,” Aria said, “but that’s when the dreams started.”

             
“Dreams that tell the future,” her mom said.

             
“Maybe.”

“More than you realize, I think.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that? What is going on?”

Aria’s mom frowned. “I wish I could tell you, sweetie, but—I don’t know. It’s not very nice stuff.”

She paused.

“Though I suppose God gave the dream to you for a reason. I don’t know. It’s just not kid stuff.”

“And this is?” Aria cried, lifting her arms to her mother again.

Her mother blanched.

“Okay,” she said, “I know how that sounds. Look: the grownups have some things to work out at church. Pastor Ted has been doing some bad things, and he’s not handling being confronted with that very well. In fact, he’s handling it very poorly, and—.”

She stopped mid-sentence.

“I don’t think I should tell you any more right now.”

“Why not? It’s my dream that started all this in the first place, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t I know why Pastor Ted is acting so weird, and why my dreams say he’s going to attack me? What if he did this to me somehow? How can I defend myself if you won’t tell me the truth?”

Aria’s mom sighed.

“He is already attacking you, sweetheart, but not like this.” She gently kissed Aria’s arms and pulled her sleeves down. “That’s what we’re trying to protect you from. Pastor Ted has been saying bad things about you, and since most people in the church don’t know about or understand your dream, they don’t have any reason not to believe him.”

“Why would he do something like that? I thought Pastor Ted was a good man!” Aria felt sick.

“He was, at one point,” Aria’s mom replied. “But your dream revealed some really bad things he was doing, and he’s trying to keep himself from getting in trouble. Your father and I are trying to sort it all out and make the other elders see what is going on, but Pastor Ted has turned into quite the slippery fish. We need solid proof of some of the things we have discovered before we can accuse him publicly. This could ruin him…
and
the church.”

“I still don’t understand why God would tell me about all of this,” Aria said. “What good am I doing with this dream? I don’t want to destroy the church!”

“It’s not your fault,” Aria’s mom said. “I’m just trying to learn how to handle this. Sometimes you’re more grown up than even the leaders of our church. Maybe that’s why God trusted you with this message. You’re pure enough to handle it, and you seem to have a special gift to hear his voice.”

“But I don’t speak God’s language,” Aria groaned.
This again.

“Yes you do, sweetie,” her mom said gently. “That’s why you’re having the dreams in the first place. And the Bible says God seals men’s instructions while they sleep: you don’t need to figure everything out. God can speak straight to your spirit and tell you what to do, even when you don’t understand his words.”

A weight lifted off Aria’s chest. Finally, she could breathe.

“That would be good,” she said, exhaling. “I just don’t want to miss anything important.”

“God loves you,” her mom reassured her. “He won’t expect more from you than you can handle. He knows we’re just dust.”

“I hope you’re right,” Aria said.

Her mom hugged her and then looked around to the stove. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “There goes the toffee.” She rushed to pull the smoking pot off the stove. “At least the brownies are okay.”

             
She poured batter into a bowl. “Why don’t you take some of our earlier batch of cookies to Jenny’s family while I finish up the brownies?” she said. She bit her lip. “Maybe we can talk some more later.”

“I guess,” Aria replied. Then she added, “Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for being good.”

Her mom’s eyes teared up, and she looked away. “Okay,” she said.

The wooden stool moaned against the floor as Aria pushed it under the kitchen table and exchanged her apron for a paper plate of cookies to take down the street.

11

A Prophet in Her Own House

Aria headed down the street to Jenny’s house. She enjoyed the warmth of the sun on her healing arms through her sleeves. Small children called to each other on the dry stubble of the park lawn across the road. She listened to their cries mix with the distant whine of an airplane far up in the pale blue sky.

Aria walked slowly, stepping over the cracks in the pavement, but soon enough she found herself in front of Jenny’s house.

She knocked on the front door.

Jenny answered.

“Hi,” she said. Jenny twirled a lock of her hair and began to chew it. She looked over her shoulder at the hallway behind her.

             
“My mom and I baked you some cookies,” Aria said, holding out the plate.

             
“Thanks,” Jenny said, but she didn’t take them.

             
“Can you come hang out?” Aria asked. She smoothed the back of her hair that was blown up by a sudden gust of wind.

             
“I—I don’t think so,” Jenny replied. She dropped her hair and looked at the floor.

“Why not?”

Jenny opened her mouth and closed it again.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to be your friend anymore,” she whispered.

              Aria was stunned.

But why didn’t you see this coming?
she berated herself.

“You terrible friend!” she yelled. “You always do what everyone tells you to do, except me. Why won’t you do anything to stick up for me?”

              “Who’s there, Jenny? What’s going on?”

Mrs. Stauffin emerged from the back room with a rush of stale air, wiping her pink manicured nails on her khakis. “Oh, hello, Aria.”

She put her hand on Jenny’s shoulder. Jenny seemed to shrink under it.

             
“You’re all terrible, stupid people!” Aria couldn’t stop herself now. “Here, take these cookies! I made them for you!” She held the cookies at arm’s length and shook them, loosening the edges of the yellow plastic wrap.

“Aria, do I need to call your mother?” Jenny’s mom threatened.

“I wish you would. Then at least one of her friends would be speaking to her!”

Aria hurled the cookies at Jenny and her mother, who winced and stepped aside. The cookies smashed into pieces on the hall floor. Gingerbread arms and sugar cookie legs skidded across the polished parquet flooring into the woodwork.

Aria ran down the porch steps, looking up just in time to see the blinds close in Mrs. Coghill’s front window across the street. Her eyes started to sting.

She ran around Mrs. Coghill’s house to the back yard and threw herself into the wood swing under the old oak tree.

The ropes of the swing jerked her backwards in response but then settled into a slow swinging motion out over the pond and back over the lawn.

The grass was greener at the water’s edge where the drought had pulled back the water and left a muddy ring.

“You’re all useless and I hate you!” Aria yelled at the silver-green poplar trees that rustled on the far side of the pond.

“Chick-a-dee-dee-dee!” called a bird from the branches. It was the sound of summer weather to Aria, the calls that heralded the season of evening cicada symphonies outside her bedroom window as she watched lightning silently whip the purple horizon.

The rhythm of the swing soothed her, and soon Aria became aware of the tinkling wind chime on the deck next door and the sun coaxing the white rose buds out of the bushes that lined the back of Mrs. Coghill’s house.

Make the bad people go away,
she prayed silently.

But a groan came up out of Aria’s stomach that she couldn’t contain anymore.
If they go away, I will be alone.

There was no solution; that was the terrible thing. What good was a dream that told the future if she couldn’t fix it?

              The crunching sound of shoes approached on the stiff, short grass.

“What’s happened, darling?” Mrs. Coghill stood behind her with her head cocked to one side.

              Aria slouched in the swing. She let out a hiccupping sigh.

“I don’t belong here,” she said. She scuffed the dirt under the swing with her shoes.
              “Do you want to talk about it?” Mrs. Coghill asked. She held onto the ropes of the swing and looked down into Aria’s swollen eyes.

             
“No,” Aria said.

Then she raised her head. “Mrs. Coghill, why is all this happening to me?”

“Why is what happening?”

“Why am I seeing demons in my own house, and why are my friends being so mean?” she said, gesturing across the street.

Mrs. Coghill sighed and massaged her lower back with one hand absentmindedly. “I don’t know, honey, but I will tell you this: things aren’t always what they seem. Neither are people.”

             
“Tell me about it!”

             
“But listen. I know you’re seeing scary things, but I don’t think that means God is letting the devil play with you. I think maybe it’s just a part of discovering this gift he’s given you.”

             
“What gift?”

             
“The gift of prophecy, darling.”

             
“Chick-a-dee-dee-dee!” the bird called again. Mrs. Coghill and Aria raised their heads to search for it in the branches of the tree.

             
“I’m not a prophet,” Aria replied, scuffing the ground again with her shoes.

             
Mrs. Coghill looked at Aria. “Aren’t you? Prophets don’t always wear camel skin tunics and eat locusts, you know. The gift of prophecy just means your ear is tuned to hear God’s voice.”

             
Aria considered that.

“But I’m listening! I’m begging him to talk to me. He’s not answering!” she said, her voice rising.

Mrs. Coghill continued, “Maybe your ability to see spiritual activity has you so overwhelmed you just don’t recognize his response. Demons tend to hog the spotlight.”

             
“What do you mean?” Aria gripped the rope swing and checked over Mrs. Coghill’s shoulder for any sign of the demon in the hoodie.

             
“When I started seeing evil spirits it was too easy to focus on them, because they love the attention. But have you ever seen an angel?”

             
“No.”

             
“Well, they’re there too; they’re part of the same spiritual reality. But you have to be paying attention or you’ll miss them.”

             
“I’ve seen them in daydreams,” Aria offered.

             
“Exactly, when you were relaxed and attentive.”

             
Aria swallowed a lump rising in her throat. Little waves from the pond started to lap at the underside of the dock, and she tried to count them to calm herself.

             
“I don’t belong here, Mrs. Coghill,” she said again.

             
Mrs. Coghill sighed and lifted her face toward the sun.

             
“You know,” she replied, “not all of us find our identity in a group.”

             
“What do you mean?”

             
“Well, I believe that a person’s name can be a prophetic indicator of what they will be like as they grow up,” Mrs. Coghill said, turning back to Aria. “Do you know what your name means?”

             
“An aria is a song.”

             
“Not just any song,” Mrs. Coghill said. “An aria is a solo, a song sung by one person in the middle of an opera. I think you are like your name very much in that way: in the middle of a crowd, you’re standing there singing a different song.”

             
“I just can’t take it anymore,” Aria said. She gripped the ropes of the swing and scowled. This time she wasn’t going to let things go. “I mean, why don’t they understand what I see? They were at the revival meetings too.”

             
“Maybe they didn’t see what you saw,” Mrs. Coghill said. She gave Aria a gentle push in the swing and stepped back stiffly.

             
Aria had thought that at least Phil Donagee had experienced what she had. She thought back to the revival meeting while she gently swung forward and backward, her hair trailing in the breeze.

“We will dance with you on streets paved with gold, the Bride of the King and the angels of old,” they had sung. Goose bumps had risen on Aria’s arms and legs, and she swayed with the congregation to the rhythm of the music.

              Aria had poked Phil Donagee’s shoulder to get rid of the electricity that was coursing through her body after running through a tunnel of people who all prayed for her with outstretched arms. She loved the feeling but just couldn’t contain any more of it.

Phil fell down instantly, shaking with laughter, when Aria touched him. He didn’t get up from the floor until the meeting was over, after which he winked at her and gave her a sheepish smile as the other elders “peeled him off the tarmac.”

Was none of that real?
Aria wondered.

It was real for her. She was pretty sure Ms. Nancy didn’t understand what was going on when she had danced and waved purple and gold flags with a goofy expression on her face. But Aria knew
she
had been different from that day forward. She had seen video clips of the future in her dreams before that day, but after that meeting was when things had really started to happen, when she started to dream in symbols and see things even when she didn’t try.

“You think I was the only one really seeing anything in that meeting?” Aria asked Mrs. Coghill.

“Oh, I don’t know, but people can get carried away in those gatherings. You can’t always tell who is having an encounter with God and who is just rolling around in hysterics. Being overwhelmed by a loving God and being overwhelmed by a desire to fit in can look kind of the same on the outside.”

“I don’t want to fit in anymore,” Aria decided. “I just want to love God—if he is who I hope he is.”

“That’s good… but I’m afraid that will cost you,” Mrs. Coghill said, looking past the trees to the horizon over the park. “It always does.” Her shoulders sagged, and the wrinkles by her eyes looked much deeper.

The bird had fallen silent, and only the whistle of a light breeze wove its way through Mrs. Coghill’s yard toward the grassy expanse in the distance.