Albany, New York
23 Years Earlier, May
Julia McCord had come to Albany to make peace with herself.
Peace with Thomas Bryant would never be possible. That much was clear.
She had taken to loitering in the lobby of Tom’s law firm, hoping to catch him on the way to lunch or court. She called him so many times that he changed his phone number. She banged on his apartment door, only to have it opened by a sleepy-eyed guy in his forties who worked third shift and growled that “the other guy had to move because some chick was climbing down his throat.”
Julia prayed that Tom would run to her and say it was a mistake and the court will reverse our surrender and we will be the family I promised.
She took to chalking again, abstract pictures of a baby with big eyes and open arms. She used the walkways of Tom’s life to display her dream. The sidewalk in front of the courthouse. His assigned parking space in his firm’s building. On the side of his mother’s apartment building.
She welcomed rain because the pictures would wash away, and she despised the sun because the compulsion to draw her baby—her Destiny—would itch in the tips of her fingers.
As the months passed, Julia imagined her daughter with her first tooth, and then three more, jawing on toys. Maybe starting to crawl and clinging to her adoptive mother so she wouldn’t tumble.
When Tom threatened her with a restraining order, Jeanne intervened with tough love and a sleeve of cookie dough. She had to spoon it into Julia’s mouth, alternating cookie dough with fudge sauce and some stern words.
“You’ve become a stalker,” Jeanne Potts said. “You need to move on, Jules, before you get arrested. And I know just the place. IronWorks Ministries is looking for someone who can paint.”
Julia’s brain buzzed with sugar. “Walls or pictures?”
“Both. My cousin said they need a jack-of-all, someone who can help renovate their activity space and teach some enrichment classes for the kids. They offer minimum wage and room and board. It’s better than jail, Jules. Because that is where you’re heading.”
“I want to go back to Nahant,” Julia said.
Jeanne wrapped her arms around her. “Go to Albany for the summer, see what you can do to help.” The day after finals Jeanne borrowed her father’s SUV and drove Julia the length of the Mass Turnpike, across Vermont, and into Albany.
IronWorks was a consortium of churches that ministered to children in gang neighborhoods. The director, Reverend Paul Woodward, hired college students to help renovate the granite mansion the city had given them, to make lunches and scrub pans, to teach a variety of skills from dance to math to art. The consortium wanted to do it all. Day care. Tutoring. Sports teams. Living and enrichment skills. Counseling, and more counseling, and emergency shelter. So many needs to be met.
Julia prayed her own needs would flake away like dead skin.
Dark clouds rolled over the city, thunder rattling to the west. Spring storms, something Julia knew well from the plains of Oklahoma. She had a full class for Young Adult Art. A misnomer, to be sure, because no one older than eighteen was allowed in the IronWorks house before 6:00 p.m. In the evenings, they shuffled the young ones home for supper, cleaned up the day’s mess, and reopened the doors at night for older teens to hang.
Julia’s strategy was to present narrative art as the key to making it in video games or graphic novels. The boys had endless visions of blasting heads or impaling hearts. Liz Sierra, a grad psych student, assured her that as long as the dead bodies didn’t resemble any of the living under the IronWorks roof, they’d go with it.
Better to get it out on the page than on the street.
The girls preferred to make fashion sketches, with enough enthusiasm that she lobbied Reverend Paul to add pattern making and sewing to their programs. In her third week at IronWorks, Julia observed thirteen-year-old Sasha designing maternity clothes. “These are for me,” the girl said. “In six months.”
Julia held her tears until the kids had put away their supplies and gone out to the main room for pizza. Then she went into the supply room and cried. Children having children. That’s what her mother tagged her with, as if she were little more than a girl playing with a doll.
For the first time, Julia considered that her mother may have been right.
“Hey there.”
Someone had come in behind her, and in a moment of insanity, and maybe unreleased anger, she swirled around and shoved the intruder. He staggered out into the art room and fell on his backside.
He held up his palms. “Is it safe to get up?”
“Of cour—” Stop staring, she told herself. A ridiculous command, because who could turn away from eyes so winter blue? His hair was blond and his face angelic, despite being built like a Cowboys linebacker.
He stood, brushed off the back of his jeans. “I’m Andy. Andy Hamlin.”
Julia took his outstretched hand. “Julia McCord. I’m the art teacher and whatever else Reverend Paul needs me to do. Are you a volunteer?”
“Paid staff, just in. Onboard to do some pastoring.”
“You’re a pastor?”
“Someday. I’m a divinity school grad. With my social work undergrad, Reverend Paul thought I could help in bridging with parents. The whole Stephen Ministry thing, linked to what y’all do here at the Works.”
“We,” Julia said.
“Huh?”
“What we do at IronWorks. You’re part of that now.”
He grinned. “Well, I guess I am. Thanks for the welcome.”
“Anytime you need a good shove,” she said, “I’m happy to oblige.”
23 Years Earlier, June
Rain pelted the roof in sharp bursts. The power had gone out and with it, the air-conditioning. The attic room Julia shared with four other girls was steamy and thick. Her friends were stone-cold asleep, even in this heat. Julia lay awake, listening to the storm, anticipating each burst of lightning.
Surrounded by kids and staff, she filled her days with physical labor and mental gymnastics. At night, she might cry silently—only for a minute—until collapsing into exhausted slumber.
Not tonight. Tonight her skin ached with loneliness.
Jesus, take this, Julia prayed, even as she traced Andy Hamlin’s face in her mind and then with her finger on the sheet. Trying to quiet her mind long enough to fall asleep wasn’t in the realm of possibilities. She pulled on a pair of shorts and crept down to the foyer. A safety bulb burned red in the stairway; otherwise the house was in darkness. When her skin ached like this, the only mercy was the chalk.
If only it weren’t raining. The pavement of the basketball court had been poured last week and presented a literal blank canvas. What if she chalked in the storm? The colors would run and make something she hadn’t intended. That could be the best art of all.
With her luck, she’d be struck by lightning.
Thunder erupted, rattling the windows before the night settled back into driving rain.
Focus. Focus on what God has given you. Maybe she could draw something on the dry-erase board. Swirling colors, night shades in deep purple with slashes of yellow. The challenge of making something unique and subtle with markers appealed to her. She’d have to mix, of course, difficult by flashlight—if she could actually find one. And then she’d have to wait for the light of day to reveal what was crafted by night.
Now there’s a rotten spiritual metaphor for you.
Four steps to her left, into the room that held multiple services: Art. Study. Dance. Even yoga. Who was in here last? She had no desire to maim herself tripping over a chair. Wait for the lightning—see what it revealed.
Open space, chairs and tables folded against the wall. Thunder followed, and darkness. Reverend Paul had trained them for every kind of situation, including needle sticks, drive-bys, and hostage taking. How had he forgotten the simplest of preparation?
Where did he keep the flashlights? The kitchen was the likeliest place. She could cross the front room and then inch her way around the table in the dining room. Or she could go back to bed like a sane person would do.
“The nature of love is to create,” Madeleine L’Engle wrote.
Is it still love if it has no recipient? Is it still love if the one created in love is then ripped away? Was expressing what God could create through her enough to qualify as love?
Like Reverend Paul, it seemed God had forgotten to supply Julia a light for the darkness.
She charged forward, crossing the room in quick strides. Into the dining room, hand brushing the backs of chairs. Through the swinging door, into the kitchen and—
—into someone.
She screamed and he wrapped his arm around her waist and put his hand over her mouth to stop her shriek and said, “Hush. It’s just me. Andy.”
As he took his hand off her face, she smelled cinnamon. “You okay?” he said.
“Are you okay? Good grief, I screamed loud enough to wake the dead.” She leaned against him because he showed no inclination to let her go, and she thought, The dead in me is waking up, and it’s a fearsome thing.
“I am so sorry,” Andy said. “I was just hungry. You?”
Starving. “I was looking for a flashlight.”
“Spooked by the storm?”
“No. I wanted to . . . it’s silly.”
He slipped his arm away. “Tell me.”
“I wanted to . . . draw something on the white board. It’s what soothes me.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Find me a flashlight.”
“Seems to me you can’t draw and hold the flashlight at the same time.”
“Probably not.”
“So let me hold the light,” Andy said.
23 Years Earlier, July
The nights stretched into days and the days into nights. The whiteboard art became a game for the kids and the staff and sometimes inspired them in class. Julia would slip downstairs in the middle of the night and Andy would be waiting for her with the flashlight.
Always the flashlight. Somehow it made the art more mysterious and less in the artist’s control. Julia would swirl the colors, let them speak for themselves. She drew what the kids knew. The snarling cat that the hoops kids wore on their team shirts. The oak tree that shaded story time. Comical pictures of lawn gnomes standing on the front porch, looking at statues of kids on the lawn.
Anything was possible those nights because somehow Andy made it so. When the work was done, they’d sit in the kitchen for fifteen minutes, drinking orange juice and eating toast. They would say good night without a single touch because even on the calmest, starriest nights, they felt the lightning under their skin and knew—without a single word—that they had pledged to let Jesus calm the storm.
Julia told him how she grew up in Oklahoma. Mom was a school teacher. Dad owned a parts store for farming equipment until he decided he wanted a jazzy sports car and a girl to hang on his arm and disappeared into the Northeast. She explained her course of study at Mass Art and her two summers at Nahant that made her skilled in painting, plastering, wood refinishing, hanging crown molding.
Andy was from Georgia, the son of a pastor of a large church and since I’m the only child, I had a lot of spotlight time. His mother was nice, he said. Active at church and the local YMCA where she fought to keep the Christian in the mission without being pewjumping, Bible-thumping obnoxious. He did undergrad at Kansas State, played football, thought NFL was his future until he wrecked his knee and then the NFL didn’t think much of him. Seminary was a fallback, something to do while he got over his football dreams.
Falling in love with Jesus was a shock and a delight.
“And IronWorks?” Julia asked. “Why so far north?”
“I had to get out of the establishment, try something new.”
Something in the tightening of his tone made her say, “And what else?”
“I have some personal things I needed to get away from,” he said.
So do I, she thought but she couldn’t tell him. Not about her shame, or her loss. She gave him the noncommittal anything I can do?
“I’m married,” he said.
“What?” Her stomach went into free fall.
“Married isn’t the correct designation. Not now.”
“Are you saying . . . she died?”
“I’m saying she and I died. My wife is divorcing me. I signed everything she asked me to. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for her to get the paperwork done. It’s a terrible thing. My parents are crushed and hers are not happy, but they see how this is wearing her away.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Julia McCord. Do you always apologize for nothing?”
“It’s rarely for nothing. Is repentance bad?”
“Forgiveness is better. That’s what I’m learning here at IronWorks.”
“So who needs to be forgiven, you or your wife?” The word seemed to bounce on the walls and echo back—wife wife wife.
“We all expect the world to be one way and, when it’s not, we get confused, then angry, and then resentful. It started early with me, the preacher’s kid who was supposed to hit hard in football and turn the other cheek the rest of the time. Katie and I looked great on the surface. So clean-cut, scrubbed in the blood of our parents’ faith. We wanted purity and wanted the other stuff too. We realized we could only enjoy the other stuff . . .” He shrugged. “. . . if we got married.”
“You can say the word, Andy. I won’t melt if you say sex.”
“Pathetic, huh?”
“So why Albany?”
“The failure of my marriage felt like a failure of my father’s ministry. He swore it wasn’t but we are—I should say, he is—all about families riding out the hard times. And Katie and I just couldn’t manage. She knew coming into the marriage that I wanted a ministry someplace like IronWorks. It doesn’t pay, of course, but I said we were young and we’d have time for that later. She wanted to be a traditional pastor’s wife, and my dad’s church had an opening she wanted me to jump on. I didn’t want to have to follow in every step my dad made. I want to follow wherever God is leading me.
“I thought she was clear on that. Suddenly I was this terrible disappointment to her. She starting nipping at me. E-mailing me job postings. Telling me about church opportunities where we could have a parsonage and a car allowance. Play missionary on the weekends, she said.
“And I started nipping back. Where’s your vision for God’s hand in our lives? I would ask. And that would wound her because she didn’t see what I did. It was like night”—Andy grabbed the flashlight and pressed it against his chest so the light formed an eerie circlet over his heart—“without any safety light or flashlight or even one flickering candle.
“The louder she got, the more silent I was.”
“Women hate that,” Julia said.
“I know that. Now. It was intolerable for both of us, so she kicked me out. I went to my parents and they sent me back to her. She said I was wasting her time. She couldn’t in good conscience be the one to keep Saint Andrew—that hurt the worst—from where God was calling him. I slept on a mat in the kitchen until I found this opportunity.”
“Are you communicating at all?”
“It’s a lost cause. Sometimes we make stupid mistakes and God gives us enough grace to manage to live with them. Other times I guess God is merciful enough to let us move on.”
“So what happens next for you?”
Andy reached out, took her hands in his. So big, so warm in the summer night. “I want to redeem my mistake by being with someone who shares my vision. I want to know real love. Do you understand, Julia?”
“Yes,” she said and let her lips brush his.
23 Years Earlier, August
Stolen kisses. That’s what Julia thought their midnight forays were.
Not stolen from God because they were doing God’s work. These moments where their lips pressed together and she felt his heart beat against hers and knew how close they were to being one—these moments felt like a little sliver of heaven.
How many times did he tell her that she understood him like Katie could not? How many times did he tell her that she was the angel of his healing, the inspiration for him to move forward in ministry and deeper into the Father’s heart?
How many times had he kissed her and made her feel completely loved without making love? Tom had mixed sex into their equation so quickly that Julia had never had the opportunity to sort out emotions and decisions. This summer was different than the last two.
This summer was right.
In the middle of August, Reverend Paul found a sponsor to send all five basketball teams to New York City for a Friday night street tournament. This required emptying the house of staff to act as chaperones and gatekeepers. Julia and Andy volunteered to stay behind for any emergency needs in the neighborhood.
Reverend Paul called an hour later to say they left the soccer nets set up and could you bring them down and also spray for yellow jackets in the fencing on the east side of the court?
“Which one of us is doing yellow-jacket duty?” Andy said.
Julia laughed. “I did a ton of it during our renovation work. I’ll do it.”
“I’ll hold the ladder.”
“You’re quite the holder, Andrew Hamlin. Hold the flashlight. Hold the ladder.”
The stars were out by the time they finished killing hornets, cleaning up soccer equipment, fishing Nerf balls and Frisbees out of the trees. A warm breeze had picked up, rustling the leaves and cooling their sweat-soaked clothes. Sheltered from the street by the granite mansion and the sweeping front lawn, the back play areas were quiet.
Andy had turned off the spotlights on the basketball court so Julia could spray the various wasps nests without rousing them from slumber. Creatures with nothing but instinct, they would not move from their poison-soaked environment and would be dead by sun-up. The only light came from a distant bulb on the back porch.
“Another good deed in the service of IronWorks,” Andy said.
Julia used the hose to wash her hands, gave him a quick spray. “Yeah, I do good work.”
“Hey, look what I’ve got.” He dug into his back pocket, handed her two pieces of chalk.
“Oh, so you’re the artist now.”
“You’ve been itching to do something on the court. Now’s your chance.”
“I don’t know. I don’t even have an idea.”
Andy lay down on the court, a gray shape in the darkness. “Draw me,” he said, spreading his arms as if he were about to make a snow angel.
“This is crazy,” she said.
“Crazy is often the place to start.”
She bent down and drew an outline of his arm. Amazed at how he had such a strong body—a football player’s body—and such a sweet temperament.
She traced carefully, moving up his forearm, using blue chalk that fit the color of his eyes. She shifted, groaned. “The pavement is biting into my knees. Maybe I should go change into long pants.”
“No. Wait. Just . . . sit on me,” Andy said. “I can take it.”
Julia knew she should go inside, grab a towel or maybe find an old stack of newspapers to kneel on. But she swung her leg across his body and settled herself on his abdomen. She leaned forward so she could trace his neck, then the side of his face.
Leaning all the way so she could reach the top of his head.
Blanketed by stars and night breezes, she stayed there, feeling his chest rise and fall beneath her, her self-control evaporating like chalk dust in the rain.
23 Years Earlier, August
All those stolen nights, when IronWorks lay in darkness, perhaps Jesus slept too.
Three weeks later Julia took a pregnancy test.
She slipped to her knees in the bathroom, test strip still in hand, and bowed her head to the cold tile, praying, I know it’s not perfect but please bless this child, bless us. Please, God, hear my prayer.
She hadn’t meant for this to happen, of course. When Andy asked about protection on that first night, she said she had just finished her period and all would be fine. That’s what she believed, or at least, decided to believe.
After that, he carried a condom in his pocket, blushing because he had to hide them from the guys he shared the bunkroom with. Too late, Julia now knew.
Each time they had been together, Andy said he wanted this forever. When Julia prodded for a definition of forever, he said that the divorce paperwork was moving through the system and they needed to be patient.
She knew immediately how she would tell him. The staff would be gone again this coming weekend. She’d sneak out to the basketball court and chalk a tiny corner, just for him. A simple picture—her hand, his hand, and between them, a dark-haired, blue-eyed baby. The Midnight Chalker would come full-circle, and Baby Doe would live on in Andy’s son.
The grief redeemed, the promise reborn.
But for now, Julia had kids coming soon and easels to set up. Today was the day they’d have their first full-sized blank canvas. She washed her hands, brushed her hair, and came downstairs with that queasy flutter in her stomach and a bounce in her step. The doorbell barely registered when it rang.
When she heard a woman’s voice, she thought, One of the kids’ moms. They always rang first as if this were still the mansion it once was. When she heard Andy’s voice, she felt a pang, trouble at home for someone.
Julia eased her way into the foyer, saw Andy embracing a young woman with sun-streaked hair, holding her as if a single breath would tear her away. Someone’s mother—so young, but they often were. Someone’s mother in deep distress. Until she realized the woman was laughing and crying at the same time, and Andy with her.
“Excuse me,” Julia said, stepping back.
They turned and stared at her, Andy’s face flushing to the roots of his blond hair. The woman pawed away her tears, then extended her hand and said, “Hi, I’m Kathleen Hamlin. Andy’s wife.”
“Oh,” Julia said, fighting for composure. Fighting for breath. “Visiting from Georgia?”
Katie tipped her head to the side. “I’ve been in Uganda. Volunteering for Village2Village. I wasn’t due back for another few weeks but . . .”
Andy stood behind Katie now, pleading eyes. Giving Julia a little shake of the head.
“. . . the government pulled my visa. No reason given, but they do that sometimes. So I thought I’d surprise Andy.” Katie smiled. “We agreed to do separate missions this summer. I didn’t know how much I’d miss him.”
A strong cramp seized Julia’s stomach, a fist around her uterus, and she thought she would miscarry on the spot. Take him, Jesus, because all I can give this child is disappointment and shame.
The pain passed and she mustered the breath to say, “Welcome home” and “Please excuse me because I’ve got kids coming any minute.” She backed into the art room and stood among all the blank canvases, her hands itching for chalk. When the kids came, she took them outside and told them to fill the court with whatever they wanted and so they did—with fanciful and adventurous and sometimes bloody images.
These would draw a reprimand from Reverend Paul and a deep hosing because it was one thing to draw your pain on something small enough to show Dr. Liz and talk about it. It was another to announce on the pavement that dreams always died in bloody and awful ways. So Julia commandeered her piece of the pavement, the outline of her and Andy’s love long gone but the image of that night tattooed in her knees and hands. She drew Baby Doe for the last time and then folded him into a closed flower and prayed that God really would engrave him on the palm of His hand.
She found Reverend Paul, told him she had a family emergency and was so sorry that she had to leave. She accepted his offer of a ride to the bus station. Andy caught her as she was packing.
“Let me explain,” he said.
“There was no divorce,” Julia said. “And I was a fool.”
“I cared for you,” Andy said. “I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about Katie.”
“Let me make that decision for you. Good-bye.”
While waiting for the bus to Boston, Julia called Jeanne. “Please, can you help me?”
Jeanne said of course with no questions asked.
Julia rode the four hours in silence, with one thought. It is not Andy’s son. It is my daughter, and I will name her Hope because God will surely give her what I cannot.