The Book of James

THE

BOOK
of
JAMES

THE

BOOK
of
JAMES

ELLEN J. GREEN

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2015 Ellen J. Green

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

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ISBN-13: 9781477829813

ISBN-10: 1477829814

Cover design by Kathleen Lynch

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930023

Printed in the United States of America

Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin;

and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.

James 1:15

Nick was dead. The memories of the morning he was buried aren’t

strung together in my mind in one long, continuous chain, but

are more like a patchwork quilt stitched together loosely. Strange details remain vivid, like the fact that the sleeves on the simple black dress I had chosen were too long. They came down almost

to my knuckles and irritated me. I yanked the sleeves up all day, but each time, the material slid back down within seconds. And

my nose kept running, partly as a result of my nonstop crying and partly because it was cold outside.

I do remember the cold. It was early September, but the stiff

Portland air came in off the bay and poked at my face like needles, making my long wool coat feel like nothing more than a sweater.

I also remember the shiny surface of the casket. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still see the grain of the cherrywood as they lowered that polished box into the hole, with my husband inside.

One white rose was visible amid the dirt that had been scattered

across the top. I stared at that rose. People were leaving, but I didn’t watch them go. I sat there in my black dress and thin coat, with my runny nose, until a cold hand took my wrist.

2

ELLEN J. GREEN

“Mackenzie, are you ready to go now? Everyone’s gone back

to the house.” I looked up, always surprised by how tall Samantha was. She stood nearly six feet even in flat boots. Her blonde hair was pulled back tight; tiny tendrils had sprung free and danced in her face.

“He gave me white roses on my birthday last year, remember?”

I looked back at the grave. “I need a few minutes alone. To say

good-bye.”

“I’ll wait in the car with the driver. Take your time,” she said

softly, then turned and headed for the gate.

I squatted near the grave and stared at Nick’s coffin. I should

have felt overwhelmed by emotion. I should have felt something.

But despite my tears, I was numb. As if that black hole that would envelop my husband’s body forever was real y inside me. I was the black hole. Hollow, echoing, empty. That numbness followed me

from the grave all the way to the car.

Casco Bay’s gray roughness was a blur through the window on

the slow drive back to the house. I lifted my head to get a better look at the water. It was cold, dark, ugly. A ship hugged the harbor; fishermen dressed in various shades of rubber bustled about the

docks talking in huddles, loading and unloading crates of lobster and shrimp. At one time, the sight would have made me feel at

home, alive, content. Here was where I’d grown up, where I’d spent most of my thirty-one years, where I belonged. Hours upon happy

hours I’d spent in Old Port as a child, running past those docks.

Now, as the car sped by, the smell of raw seafood and the sound of seagul s fighting over bits of rotten fish and garbage nauseated me.

The harbor looked bleak, industrial, unwelcoming. The city hadn’t changed much at al , but over time, everything inside me had.

I closed my eyes and inhaled, determined to erase from my

mind that fatal drive to Boston, the argument we’d been having

when the truck slammed into us. Nick flying forward and then

sideways across me. My face hitting the airbag. Blinding light,

THE BOOK
of
JAMES

3

grinding metal, and blood. So much blood. Days later I would

wake up from the deepest of sleeps, screaming, still trying to wipe the feeling of Nick’s blood from my skin. That feeling would never leave me, I knew.

I glanced over at Samantha. She’d been quiet during the

ride; her eyes were partial y shut. Samantha had been my closest

friend for as long as I could remember, since kindergarten maybe, and had endured each blow in my life with me. Now she looked

exhausted, spent.

“It’s going to be fine, Sam,” I said.

She rubbed her forehead and nodded. “I’m sure it wil . But you

can’t hold everything in like this. It makes me nervous.”

My refusal to discuss the accident upset her. I’d tried, but I

couldn’t. The graphic details were mine and mine alone, and right now I had them mostly where I wanted them: tucked careful y in

an airtight compartment in the back of my head. Until I tried to

sleep—and then, like Houdini, they escaped and danced ghoul-

ishly before me, making me weep and scream until my voice was

hoarse. I could only control my conscious thoughts, and I refused to give up that teeny pretense of power over my mind.

There’d been no chance Nick would live. He had extensive

abdominal injuries and a crushed spine when he was final y

extracted from the wreckage. I didn’t need the team of doctors

with long, serious faces to tell me the truth. I knew it when I looked at Nick’s misshapen form connected to all those tubes and hoses.

I knew it when he started mumbling fragmented, morphine-

inspired confessions.

In the five years I had known him, he had been resolutely silent

about his past. Both of his parents had died when he was sixteen.

Family friends had taken custody and moved him to Maine to fin-

ish high school. I’d never pressed him for more details because I assumed it was all so painful.

4

ELLEN J. GREEN

I didn’t leave his side during those hours when they tried to

stabilize him before he was final y rushed into surgery. Each time he opened his mouth, I leaned in to try to untangle the whispers

that escaped on exhaled breaths.

“You have to go,” he mumbled. “Find the house. Don’t trust

them. None of them. No matter what, don’t trust them.”

He would drift off and then wake and begin again to describe

a stone structure and the woods that surrounded it, filled with

twisted paths and a swimming hole. He told me he could never go

back because something terrible had happened there.

“What? Where is this house?” I leaned close to catch his words,

wishing I could run my hands down his back like I’d done so often when he was tense or troubled. It always made him feel better.

“Promise you’ll go. On your mother’s grave.” He was breathing

hard, agitated.

“Shhh.”

His face was unrecognizable, his eyes two purple balloons. I

could see only a hint of a pupil through one of the bloody slits. “I want you to bury me here, in Maine. Not Philadelphia.”

I choked back tears. “Nick, you aren’t going to die.”

“Important. Someone will contact you. Go to Philadelphia. It

will all make sense. You have to go to the house. It’s the only way.”

“The only way to what?”

“As soon as they know I’m dead, they’ll come after you.”

“What are you talking about?” I squeezed his hand just as a

nurse appeared to wheel him to the OR.

In the end, my final moments with Nick were just a hash of

stories without endings. The house he spoke of had haunted him

in some way, if only in his dreams.

Later, the doctors told me that he had suffered severe inter-

nal injuries, and the concussion had likely impaired his thoughts, speech, and reasoning. But in those scattered moments, I had

THE BOOK
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5

felt closer to my husband than in all the moments that had come

before.

Maybe that was why his last words stuck with me. “They’ll

come after you,” he said, remarkably lucid. “Hurt or even kill you.

The only way to end this is to get to them first. Stay there. Find James.”

In the days following the funeral, I distracted myself by reading cheap mysteries from the used-book store. My eyes ran over the

words, but I didn’t real y comprehend them. I’d wake up in the

morning and immediately make a pot of coffee. Then I’d wander

back to my chair, mug in hand, and flop down with a book. Coffee

and Oreos were my sustenance. Those and an occasional Bloody

Mary, because it created a nice balance of salt and sugar in my

bloodstream and numbed whatever emotions made their way to

the surface.

Whenever I did get up, I would inevitably stumble upon rem-

nants of my life with Nick: a dirty coffee cup he’d left on a shelf; his belt carelessly thrown over the towel rack in the bathroom; the sneaker he’d been looking for tucked under the couch. The feelings I’d kept under control final y burst. Tears and more tears.

The thought of returning to work loomed over me, but I kept

putting it off. Every day, in the weeks following the funeral, I real y did think that before the day was over, I would call work and maybe just stop in for an hour or so. Not to actual y see any of the walk-in appointments at the Portland mental-health clinic, but just to sit THE BOOK
of
JAMES

7

at my desk, to smell the hint of disinfectant that was always in the air, to riffle through my old charts, and to talk to the colleagues I’d shared an office with for the past five years. But sometime around one in the afternoon, I’d give up the pretense and shuffle back to bed. I didn’t have the energy to do therapy with the disadvantaged and downtrodden. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t anyone

more disadvantaged and downtrodden than me right now.

One afternoon I passed by the mirror in the foyer and inad-

vertently caught a glimpse of myself. My wildly curly reddish hair jutted up every which way, defying gravity. Clumps were matted

to my scalp where I had slept on them. Purplish bruise-like marks spread out beneath each eye; the rest of my skin was the color of Elmer’s glue.

I pulled at one corkscrew lock. Hopelessly tangled. “I’ll never

get this out. I’m going to have to shave my head,” I whispered.

That revelation had just passed my lips when my front door

whipped open with such force that it hit the wal . Light poured

into my living room; I squinted and backed up. Samantha stood

there with the day’s mail in her hand. She looked almost superhu-

man with the light surrounding her and her body filling the door-

way. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a French twist. Her tweed suit was chic and formfitting.

I knew she’d show up. She always did. She’d been my school-

yard playmate, my sidekick, my al y against the world, my confi-

dant, and, in the end, my family when I no longer real y had one.

She’d been by my side in first grade when Tommy Evans pulled my

red curls hard and called me Ronald McDonald. She’d distracted

me with chatter during study hall and held my hand when my

mother was dying. Now here she was again when I was dying.

After the accident and the funeral, I had wanted to be alone.

I still wanted to be alone. Samantha gazed at me for a minute and then took a breath, trying to choose her words careful y.

8

ELLEN J. GREEN

“I came by to see you because I’m going on vacation tomor-

row.” She hesitated. “This can’t go on, Mackenzie. You did the same thing when your mother—”

“Don’t talk about my mother,” I snapped.

My years had never been measured by faded tal y marks on a

wal , but by the significant losses I’d suffered as a child. My grandmother died when I was nine, followed a year later by my cousin

Bobby in a motorcycle accident. He was only eighteen. But my

mother’s diagnosis of breast cancer, shortly after, had nearly been my undoing. The two years that followed were a nightmare of hospitals, surgery, and chemotherapy.

Cancer. The word doesn’t mean disease to me. It means grief;

despair; empty, aching, lonely sadness. It ripped my family apart and left nothing in its wake.

After her death, my father disappeared into himself and I hav-