Lost in Dreams (34 page)

We sat down on the rock several feet apart. Facing one another.

“So I can be honest without making you angry?” I wasn’t about to take any chances.

“If I haven’t bit your head off yet, I
probably
won’t.”

“I can take that as a promise of self-restraint?”

Aleesha shrugged. “Whatever.” Was I imagining things, or did she wink?

“Do you remember when I told you to get lost?”

“Uh-huh.” Aleesha wrinkled her forehead in a way that made her dark skin look especially ominous.

Do I dare to continue?
“Did you believe I meant it?”

“I believed you were angry.”

“Did you expect me to make good with my threat?”

“That was no threat. Not even a promise. You were letting off steam. I understood that.”

“So you didn’t expect me to send you up Tabletop Mountain with a set of made-up directions hoping to get you good and lost?”

“I am not angry.” Aleesha said in a slow, strained tone of voice with a break between words. “I am not angry.” That time went a bit faster and louder. “I am not
angry.”
Her voice hadn’t reached shrill yet, but it did the final time. “I am not angry!”

“You’re not?” Kim always said I had a tendency to take things too literally at times. I took a chance this wasn’t one of them. “Then I don’t need to apologize for purposely getting you into this mess? I mean, God’s punishing me by letting me get hopelessly lost, too.”

“And what’s He punishing me for, girl?”

That one got me. I didn’t respond for several seconds. And then not for another several seconds. “For stealing my best friend and not understanding how I felt about it.”

Aleesha leaned forward on one arm. She resembled Rodin’s
The Thinker
. If
The Thinker
had been a female sitting on a rock instead of a man who looked like he was sitting on a—

“Kim is big enough for both of us,” she said, bringing me out of my gross, mental comparison-making.

“She is not,” I said instinctively. “She’s super petite. We couldn’t even both hug her at the same time.”

Whoops! Am I being too literal?

“Haven’t you ever heard of a family hug, Jo?”

“A group hug, you mean? Of course, but my parents and I have never had one.”

“Humph! What kind of family do you have, anyhow?”

I could barely keep from tearing up. “I’ll tell you about that later.”

“Okay. But back to family hugs … group hugs. You think any two people even try to hug the same person—all of that person, I mean?”

I shrugged.

“The answer is no, my dear Miss Jo. So a three-way hug—ergo, a three-way friendship—among you, Kim, and me ought to work great. Each of us gives up a little bit of Kim, plus we get part of each other, too.”

“That makes sense. You really are …”

“Go ahead and say it, girl. ‘You really are smart.’”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Huh? What then?”

“I was going to say, ‘You really are just as lost up here as I am, aren’t you?’”

We both started giggling.

“I don’t know where Kim and Mr. Scott are,” Aleesha said, ignoring my question. “But I have a feeling they don’t need our help nearly as much as we need theirs.”

“So what do we do?”

“Let’s look for a path over there. You see where I mean?” Aleesha pointed to a slight opening between two bushes.

We slid down from our rock, and I sprinted toward the bushes with Aleesha close behind.

“It goes downhill,” I said. “Shall we?”

“If you want to see Alfredo one last time before we go home, I’d suggest trying it.”

Aleesha broke out into a rambunctious version of “Victory in Jesus” as we began what I hoped would be our final downward trek. I was so enthralled with her singing I stopped for a moment to listen.

And Aleesha was so caught up in her own singing that she rear-ended me. “Better get those taillights checked out, Jo.”

When Aleesha got to the chorus, I joined in. Although

I’d never been much of a soloist, I was great at making up harmonies for practically any song. Tenor or alto.

Although the trail ran downhill for a little way, we soon reached a decision point. Once again, which way?

“Lord, show us the way,” Aleesha prayed. “The right way. We can find the wrong way on our own.” She cocked her head skyward as if expecting God to shout detailed directions or maybe issue a small pillar of clouds for us to follow. “Guess He wants us to use our heads this time,” she said when God failed to offer any visible or audible help.

After flipping a coin, we checked behind one unlikely looking bush. Sure enough, not only was the way visibly clear for a number of yards, but it also went downhill at a gentler slope than the short path we’d just run out of. Feeling encouraged and, uh, victorious, we resumed our singing.

When we reached the next decision point, we climbed up on a rock to rest.

“So tell me about the life of a famous actress-to-be,” I said.

“They say
actor
now regardless of gender. And since I’ve already done some acting, the ‘to-be’ part doesn’t fit, either. I do have a life, though, but you need to tell me about the life of a middle-class Juliet first.”

We chattered on like a couple of squirrels for thirty or forty minutes. We did some deep sharing. Sharing and bonding like we’d never done before. And we prayed together again.

“We really need to find the next part of the way down,” Aleesha said. “It’s mid-afternoon now. I wouldn’t want to be up here after dark.”

“I see one possibility.” Pointing to my left, I said, “There.”

Aleesha pointed the opposite way. “There’s another.” Everything else in sight was clearly too steep or too rocky to climb down.

We scrambled down from our perch and moved carefully

to the first small opening. Pulling several branches aside, we found ourselves gaping at a steep drop just a few feet from where we were standing. I inhaled a nervous gasp as Aleesha pulled me away from the bush and let the branches snap back into place.

“We would have been on an undesirably fast track down if the ground had given way while we were standing so close to the edge,” Aleesha said. The perspiration on her face glittered in the sunlight.

I don’t know when I’d ever breathed so hard. Although I hadn’t come anywhere close to falling over the edge, I’d never been in such a dangerous position. How could I have been … the way my overprotective mother had always treated me? The same mother who had just deserted my father and me to go live with a younger man.

“Maybe the other one …?”

We hadn’t moved two feet when Aleesha held her arm out to stop me. “Do you hear that?”

“What?”

“Be quiet for a minute.”

I listened hard. I finally heard it. A rustling sound. Moving. Coming closer.

“Kim? Mr. Scott?” Aleesha’s voice came out just above a frightened whisper. Nobody responded. The noise stopped for a few seconds, but then it resumed.

“Come on, Kim,” I said. My voice was so shaky I hoped I could be understood. “Trying to scare us isn’t very nice.” We heard a slight movement in the underbrush several feet from where we were standing. Was the wind blowing some branches or …?

“Are there any bears up here?” I said. “Or wildcats?”

I wondered how my mom would react to the news that a wild animal had eaten me while I was out mountain climbing,

but my thoughts focused more on how painful being eaten alive would feel. I fell to my knees and barfed. Big-time.

Aleesha and I raced to see who could scramble back up the rock first. I wished I’d had an eye in the back of my head so I could guard my back. I half expected an elephant to tiptoe through the bushes. “Do you suppose we’ll be safe here?” I asked while we scooted as far back on the rock as we could.

“I don’t know.”

“What if”—I shuddered at the thought of our unknown adversary—”what if it can jump this high?”

“Or climb.” I threw my hand over my mouth. “That’s how
we
got up here. We’ll be goners.”

The branches parted slightly. I couldn’t hear Aleesha’s screams. I was too busy screaming my own head off—at the first sight of a pair of furry black feet.

M
iss Kim,” Graham said while waiting for me to catch my breath. We were almost a third of the way up, and my feet, legs, and back were killing me. If I had any new blisters, I couldn’t feel them over my variety of other aches and pains. “Your guilt. Okay now?”

“Yes, thanks. I had a great talk with my dad. Seems we both felt responsible for my mom’s death this past August, but everything turned out okay. He learned she wasn’t listening to either of our voice messages when she lost control of the car.”

He gave me the strangest look. I should have realized he wasn’t a cell phone kind of guy. Not that my response would’ve made sense anyhow.

“My guilt,” he said. “Not okay.”

Huh? I had to think for a few seconds about what he was trying to say. That’s right. He’d said something to me last week about guilt. His and mine, but he hadn’t said anything else since.

Sure, Graham was on the odd side, and he was a bit somber even for someone who must have lived a mighty tough life, but what could that harmless old man possibly feel so guilty about? And how was I supposed to answer him? What did he want me to say?
Lord?

“Not okay. Not now. Not ever.”

“God can forgive anything,” I said. After just four months of anguishing over unnecessary guilt, did I really think I could make Graham feel better with four simple words? He was a Christian—probably had been one a lot longer than I had—and

apparently quite a student of the Bible. He already knew about God’s willingness to forgive. And His desire to.

Then, too, I was comparing grapes and grapefruit. I’d finally learned I hadn’t done anything I needed forgiveness for. If not for that, my guilt would still be plaguing me, and I might have ended up feeling as hopeless as Graham. While I couldn’t imagine Graham doing anything terrible, he might have earned his guilt. And he might have suffered with it a lot longer than four months.

“God forgives. Dead person no.”

Piecing those words into something coherent took only a few seconds, but I wasn’t sure I’d done it correctly. “God can’t forgive a dead person?”

He shook his head no. His mouth tightened in frustration—like a non-English-speaking immigrant who’s desperate for help and can’t make himself understood.

“God can forgive, but a dead person can’t?”

He nodded.

The pain on his face kept me from laughing at the obvious truth of his statement. Besides, I thought I understood what he meant. I’d recently wanted—I’d needed—my mom’s forgiveness, but she was no longer able to give it to me. Was that where Graham was coming from?

“Somebody has died, and you need his forgiveness?” The mist in his eyes answered my question. “I don’t get it. Did you have a falling-out with someone who died before you could ask his forgiveness?”

He looked away. I hoped my bluntness hadn’t scared him into silence, but he was the one who’d started this conversation. And he’d chosen the topic. Did he want me to listen to a confession of some kind?
Graham, I can’t forgive you for something you did to someone else. But I can still listen. I have two ears
.

Using the same prompt Aleesha once used on me—the one I’d recently used on Jo—I said, “The time you don’t feel like talking about something is probably the time you most need to.” That sounded … it had felt like the right thing to say.

Graham turned to face me, although he didn’t look me in the eyes. “Miss Kimmy. You safe.”

“Of course I am, Graham. I’m with you, and you know this mountain forward and backward, top to bottom. I couldn’t feel safer if I were sitting on your living room couch.”

“Not hurt. You.”

“No, I’m not hurting.” I stretched and purposely let out a painful moan. “Except for a body full of worn-out muscles, I couldn’t feel better.”

“No. Not hurt you.”

“Oh, you’re not going to hurt me? I wouldn’t think so.” I thought for a moment. I’d been dying to tell him this, but I’d been too much of a coward. Maybe the time had come. “Graham, I’m—I hope you don’t mind—I’m adopting you as my grandfather. I never knew my own granddad. I need one sometimes, and you’re the one I’ve picked.”

The hardness on his face softened, and he wiped his eyes on his coat sleeve.

“I’m serious,” I said. “I’ll send you birthday and Christmas presents. I’ll—”

“Hurt someone. Old.” I must have looked confused. “Old hurt.”

Why was he ignoring what I’d just said? My words had obviously moved him.

“You hurt somebody else?” Although I was getting better at understanding him, I couldn’t imagine where he was going with this.

He hung his head. I could barely hear him say, “Kill.” “What? You killed somebody? Like in a war? You were

a soldier?”
You’re too old for Iraq or Afghanistan. Vietnam, maybe? I read about that war in school
. He shook his head.

“In an accident? You killed someone in an auto crash?”

He shook his head again. I’d never seen such tension in one man’s face. He finally got it said, though—”Killed. Anger.”

I hope my mouth didn’t fly open as far as I’m afraid it did. “You killed someone in anger?”

“Prison. Thirty-five years.”

You were incarcerated for thirty-five years? No wonder you treasure every sunrise now
. “You’ve been out six months?” He nodded. “Six. Maybe seven.”

The pieces were falling into place now. He’d remained in the area because he didn’t have a family or a home to return to, although I was just guessing at that. Maybe he didn’t have enough money to go elsewhere. I couldn’t imagine he’d be eligible for Social Security, since he hadn’t worked in thirty-five years. Getting a non-strenuous job that provided a place to live must have been a real blessing.

Who could blame him for staying away from our services? What man in his right mind would want to set foot in that place again after such a lengthy incarceration?

But if that was true, why had he come with us in the van those two times? What did he do the first time while we were worshipping? He hadn’t stayed in the van; we saw him get out. And why attend last night’s service after avoiding all of the ones that preceded it? Or should I have been wondering why he didn’t come to the earlier ones?