In Search of Eden (4 page)

“You're still here,” he said, smiling, softening the impact of what might have sounded like criticism.

She nodded but couldn't seem to move or speak.

He sat down on the pew in front of her. He seemed to hesitate.

“Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

She paused for a moment and looked down at her hands. “I don't know what to ask,” she said. “It feels overwhelming.”

“It can feel overwhelming if you've never heard any of it before. Tell me,” he said gently, “where are you on your spiritual journey?”

She felt a tear slide down her cheek, to her mortification. She wiped it away furiously. “I guess my spiritual journey never got out of the starting gate. I think I got on the wrong track. But I'm making good time,” she said, lifting her face with the hint of a smile.

He smiled back. “Someone wise once said that if you've made a wrong turn, the best thing to do is to go back to the last time you were sure you were on the right road. Go back to where the mistake was. I think that's what Jesus meant when He talked about repentance. Turning around and going the other way.”

She nodded, her thoughts rushing too fast to examine.

“When would that time be for you?” he asked.

She blew a stream of air out of pursed lips and shook her head. She flicked her eyes past his and focused somewhere up near the ceiling. “Back when I was a kid, I guess.”

“Was there a fork in the road back there?”

“You could say that.”

He waited, obviously thinking she would say more.

“There's no way I can go back and undo it.”

He shook his head. “Maybe I used the wrong analogy. I'm not talking about anything
you
have to do. God will take you
right where you are. It's not about you getting yourself ready for Him. All you have to do is give yourself to Him. If anything needs fixing, He'll do it.”

“What do you mean, ‘give myself to Him?”'

He looked past her shoulder for a moment, then smiled slightly. “I think the simplest way to explain it is to tell you what my Sunday school teacher told me when I was five years old. Just open your heart's door and say, ‘Jesus, come in,'” he invited softly. “He'll tell you what to do next.”

Dorrie's eyes filled with tears. The minister waited quietly. “You don't have to understand everything,” he said. “I didn't for many years. In fact, I've done some things I'm not proud of at all, even since I've known Him. But God honored my prayer and I grew in my understanding. And He's a forgiving God. A God of second and third and hundredth chances.”

She looked directly into his eyes and nodded; then she picked up her coat and stood. “Thank you,” she said. “I need to think.”

“Of course,” he said. She waited for some kind of ultimatum or pressure, but none came.

“My mind feels too full,” she said. “I need to let some of this digest.”

“God bless you,” he said. He stood and held out his hand. She held out hers. It was a brief, firm clasp; then she turned and went on her way. She looked back once and he was still watching. He held up a hand and she did the same in return.

Dorrie made the short walk home quickly. She had left the television on—she didn't like to return home to a silent house— and reruns of sitcoms were playing. She flipped through the channels and finally turned it off, then back on again after the loudness of her thoughts disturbed her. The talk with the religious speaker had upset her. She had the feeling that something menacing was gaining on her, something she must not face at any cost. She
thought about going to bed but knew she would not sleep. She felt a mixture of love and anger and loss and bitterness that was too heavy to dream away.

She went to the table, but she was too upset to work on the drawing. Instead, she took out her book, half scrapbook, heavy on the scrap, and half journal. It was getting thick. And such a mess. The pages were warped with glue, pictures of anything and everything she might someday want to share with . . . someone. They were cut from magazines, taken from her own camera, sketched or drawn by her, arranged around snips of articles, quotes, things she'd read and wanted to pass on someday. And interspersed here and there was an entry written by her. She paged through it quickly.

There was a picture cut from a magazine of a winding road heading off toward green hills. There were a lot of pictures of children, at every age and of every description. And other things, as well, that caught her fancy. An old postcard of huge trees in Oregon ten times the width of a man, proven by the man standing beside it. There was a Christmas card, a black-and-white photo of a park bench covered with snow and a red cardinal perched in the tree behind it. There were pictures of houses where she might someday want to live, drawings she'd made of gardens she might someday want to plant. The cover of an Annie Oakley comic book she had loved as a girl was pasted beside a photo from the fifties she had found in an antique shop of two mothers pushing their babies in strollers. And last, the one she had pasted in yesterday. She had found it in an old copy of
Reader's Digest
in the teachers' lounge at the school. A picture of an iceberg floating in black water, only the tip protruding, the vast mass of it under the dark water, all the more dangerous for its invisibility. She blew her nose, turned to an empty page, and wrote:

December 14

Today is your birthday. You are eleven years old. I don't know where you are, even who you are, but I want
you to know that you are in my heart, as you always have been. I only caught a glimpse of you, and even that was stolen, for you belonged to someone else already. You were dressed in white, so I don't even know if you are a boy or a girl. I touched your hand, and your fingers opened and closed around my own. The hardest thing I have ever done was to let them go.

I have thought about you every day since then. I pray your life is happy and blessed. I pray you can find it in your heart someday to forgive me. . . .

She kept writing, the tears flowing and wiped away while barely noticed, the pressure in her heart easing as the words flowed onto the page.

By the time she had finished writing, she knew, of course, the remedy for what ailed her. It was the usual cure. The one she employed whenever things like this came up. She would reinvent herself again. After all, as her aunt Bobbie was fond of saying, a change was as good as a rest. And that was what she needed. A change.

She needed to forget about kids. To put them all out of her mind. It was taking the substitute teaching job that had brought all this up again. That and the silly decision to go and hear the religious speaker.

She would not go back to being playground attendant and crossing guard at the school on Monday morning. She thought of Roger and the others and felt her usual steam-rolling regret. But she could not do it. She would call and leave a message that she would not be back.

She felt a little better once she'd made the decision. It always took pressure off to change the scenery.

She began reading the want ads. She would find another job. One that had no small people to tug at her heartstrings. No warm little hands slipping inside her own, no small faces to leave such a gaping hole in her heart when the inevitable parting occurred.
There would also be no one religious telling her she needed to change her life. What had she been thinking? She began getting ready for bed, putting the pastor's kind, earnest face out of her mind.

chapter
3

D
avid Williams was lost. He held the directions from the church in Maplewood where he had delivered his seminar back to the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. The street names were a blur in the meager illumination from the map light in the rental car. He shook his head. He had never been good at directions. But there was hope ahead in a familiar sign. He pulled into the Starbucks, got a cup of coffee and reorientation, then found his way back to the highway. Sure enough, the landmarks the clerk had described were just where she'd said they would be. He leaned back, relieved. He was on the home stretch now. There were only a few more miles to the airport, and he was making good time. It ought to be fine unless there was a crowd at the car rental counter. He patted his lapel where his electronic ticket confirmation was tucked along with his picture ID and the car rental agreement. He took out his cell phone and called home. It was sweet to hear his wife's and daughter's voices. He'd been gone only a week, but he missed them. He checked his watch. He would be back in Virginia in a little less than three hours. He would sleep in his own bed tonight.

He turned his attention back to his driving. The roads were
icy. A flurry of snowflakes pelted the windshield, their rhythm relentless and hypnotic. He thought about the book he was writing, about finding the heart and keeping the heart. All that remained was the last chapter, but it would be the summation, the charge, the call to battle, the map to the entire quest. He thought of his own journey toward that goal and remembered with regret the wrong turns he had made. Would he do any differently, he wondered, if he could turn back the clock, or would he still take what he wanted and leave others to pick up the pieces? He thought of his brother. The distance between them seemed as vast and cold as an icy continent. He did not know how to begin to span it. He prayed and felt the comfort and assurance of forgiveness he always received. He sighed, turned on the radio, and found the local classical station. His troubled thoughts eased, and his mind became a comfortable blank as he drove, the only sound the rhythmic thump of the wipers, the snowflakes mesmerizing as they floated down.

He came out of his reverie suddenly, attention focused but puzzled. It was an odd sensation, for one part of him was still listening to violin music and planning the last chapter of his book, and the other part was trying to understand what it meant that a set of eastbound headlights was coming toward him in the westbound lane.

Why did people say there was no time to stop? he wondered. There was too much time, stretched-out time. You could live an entire life in the seconds it took a small sedan to slide, brakes locked, across a hundred feet of slick highway. He was experiencing that lifetime pass now with an odd sense of objectivity, as if things were not real. He had the strange sensation of time hanging motionless, suspended, and in that drawn-out space David watched everything. He saw his coffee tipping from the cup holder, saw the white cardboard cup, the mermaid logo, the dried brown dribble marks down the side, all in vivid detail. He saw the amber liquid arc through the air, and as if from very far away, he felt the searing heat join his other bodily sensations—the tense
pressure of his leg upon the brake pedal and the stiffening of his arms against the steering wheel. There had been no warning. Another incongruity. No horn sounded. No siren. Nothing at all but this event now unfolding. His car began to spin as he stood on the brakes. The movement was oddly graceful, and he noted things passing by—the dented metal guardrail streaked with tire marks, the hillside covered with snow-frosted trees, the staggered line of matched headlights, which had once been following behind him but was now coming toward him in that same slowmotion dance. Life should have sirens, he realized.
Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus,
and suddenly, as the grill of the oncoming vehicle met the driver's side of his car, the seconds became seconds again instead of hours. Events piled atop one another in a crushing heap, lights too bright, screeching, roaring, tearing screams of metal upon metal, metal dragging on concrete, metal into flesh, jagged glass, searing pain, then nothing at all.

chapter
4

NEAR ABINGDON, VIRGINIA

T
he Baby Ben alarm clock by Joseph's bed went off, the shrill ring jarring the morning stillness. He reached across and turned it off. He had awakened without it, as usual, even though he set and wound it faithfully every night in case he should oversleep. He shunned the electric models. He didn't like to depend on batteries or electricity. There was no reason for him not to be at his post just because the power went out, and that was not an uncommon occurrence up here on the mountain in winter. He was prepared. He had a woodstove for heat and plenty of lanterns and kerosene lamps. And his truck could drive through anything.

He set down the clock, got up and pulled on a pair of jeans and a warm shirt, then went to the kitchen. He measured out a generous portion of coffee and filled the metal coffeepot with water. Flick emerged from his bed beside the banked woodstove and greeted him with a few swishes of his tail. The wood planking under Joseph's feet protested as he went about his morning routine. It was simple and rarely varied. There was no newspaper here; indeed, the mailbox was a mile beyond, where the lane met the graveled road, all but impassable in the winter except by four-wheel drives. Then he picked up his mail at the post office. There
was no television. His nearest neighbor was five miles down the mountain. He didn't know if he was lonely. There was the dog. And he saw plenty of humans every day as he worked. Besides, he didn't think along such lines anymore. He did his work and then drove the winding roads to his home. It was quiet here. He could rest.