She couldn’t remember all their names. Faces blurred in front of her as the travelers, gathered in the youth lounge, looked up at her. Some of them sprawled on faux leather sofas with wide cushioned arms. Several played foosball in a far corner.
“Come on in, join the party,” someone said.
Lee searched for a familiar face, someone she could ask. There, by the coffee machines—Juana of the broken dish. Lee steeled her nerve and crossed to Juana.
“Hi, Lee.” Her smile looked ready to bolt for cover.
“Marcus isn’t in our room. I thought he might be here, but …” But he had been exhausted less than two hours ago.
“Oh, right. Will took him outside or something.”
Will? “I don’t understand.”
“Hey, Will!” Juana beckoned to a slim ponytailed redhead who looked to be in his twenties. “Where’s Marcus?”
“At the park.”
They must have a friend named Marcus. Lee kept her tone level. “I’m speaking of a new arrival, a fugitive. Brown hair and eyes …” Five-foot-eleven, muscular, broad shoulders … She cleared her throat. “He was injured recently. He’s … thin.”
Will nodded. “Yup. Marcus Brenner.”
He was waiting for her confirmation. “Yes.”
“He said he wanted to be outside for a little while, so I got one of the wheelchairs from the closet, and then he asked if there was a park somewhere. It’s not even a ten-minute walk, so I took him over there and gave him my cell number in case he needed anything, and for whenever he’s ready to come back.”
The room spun, but a deep breath steadied it. “Marcus shouldn’t be outdoors at this time of day.”
“He told me he got sick awhile back. But he said he’s okay now.”
Of course he did. Lee clenched her teeth.
“Are you Lee?”
“I am.”
“Yeah, he said you might come looking for him.”
“If he wanted to tour the park, why didn’t he text me?”
“Well …” Will shrugged. “He said you’d been traveling a few days, close quarters and stuff. And you could both use a break.”
True, under normal circumstances. “What direction is the park?”
Juana was moving away from the conversation. Before Will could answer, Lee turned to her. “Thank you for your help.”
“No problem.”
“And I apologize for damaging your property.”
Juana blinked, then gave a small smile. “I know you didn’t mean to.”
Intention was irrelevant. The dish was broken. Lee tried not to stare at her. “I … thank you.”
Before the moment could become more awkward for either one of them, Juana gave a quick nod and walked away.
A few minutes later, Lee slipped on her ivory jacket, pocketed her phone, and set out. Will’s directions were easily followed, and soon she strode up the dirt path to enter the public park. Dusk would fall soon. She had to get Marcus back to the church.
She ignored the playground and processed the rest of her options. Will wouldn’t have taken him far from the entrance. Picnic tables sat at random in a small clearing, and she walked from one end to the other, but he wasn’t there. Her chest began to tighten. She texted him. I’m at the park. Where are you?
She sat on a bench and waited. No response.
Anything could have happened to him.
She headed for the nature path. Marcus would have been drawn to the canopy of trees over the wood-chip walkway.
The park must not close at dusk, because this path was already lit on both sides with small globe lanterns, hanging by chains from three-foot shepherd’s hooks. Should she call out? Lee fast-walked, peering ahead.
A wheelchair stood in the grass, several feet to the left of the path. Empty.
Lee ran.
His voice reached her as she neared. “And for the Bible. I didn’t think Violet would still have it. And for the food tonight. There was so much.”
Where was he?
There. Lee froze.
Marcus lay a few feet from the wheelchair, his right arm under his ribs, his face toward the ground, his left arm keeping him raised mere inches above the grass. His good knee bent slightly. His other knee held none of his weight.
“And for the water. And the ice cubes. And the beds. And the blankets. And for the windows in the church. For the light. God—” His voice broke. “Oh, God, all the light everywhere.”
A quake began in Lee’s feet, spread up her legs.
“I—I think that’s everything from today, Jesus.” Marcus coughed, and his arm tightened against his side. “Thank You for it.”
She marched off the path, and her feet made barely a swish in the trimmed grass. He gave no sign of hearing her. Lee stopped a few feet away, relaxed her shoulders and clenched her hands.
“Get up,” she said.
Marcus jolted, pushed up on his good knee. “Lee.”
“The ground is cooling. You’ll become chilled.” Her voice sounded digital and dead.
He leveraged up from the ground and knelt with all his weight on one knee. “I’m staying here.”
“You completed your list of gratitude. You’re ill. You need to come with me.”
“No.”
“Fine.”
She wasn’t going back to the church. She would take the last of their money, walk to a hotel, and go to bed. He could shiver out here all night in his devotion to God, and in the morning he would shiver with fever, and Violet and Heath and everyone else would pray for God’s will, and when Marcus was dead in the ground they would speak of heaven and God’s will. She walked back to the path and followed it out of the trees. A cricket’s chirp silenced to her right as she passed it.
She reached the edge of the path and stopped. Behind her, many yards distant, a slow crunching of wood chips came not from footsteps but rolling wheels. The sound stopped often, then restarted.
She turned back and met him past midway. He panted, arms and body straining.
“Have you thanked God for the wheelchair?”
Marcus stared up at her, the waning light throwing a shadow over half his face. “What?”
“For the phlegm that clogged your lungs and the pain every time you had to cough it up? For the boot that kicked your ribs until they broke? After all, how could you comprehend being rescued from Mayweather unless he first beat you nearly to death?”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Don’t do this.”
“I’m only calling on you to be consistent. Bow your face to the ground and thank God for the Holocaust, Marcus. Thank God for every time a child has been molested. Thank God that I was attacked and raped in a parking garage.”
He closed his eyes. “Lee.”
Deep in her chest, something pricked. But if she tried to find it, identify it, control would be lost. “Do you want to pace while you try to form a response? Stand up and pace. If God isn’t cruel, He won’t let your knee give out.”
Marcus gripped the arms of the wheelchair and leaned forward. “Stop.”
Heat poured through her body. She felt nothing, because logic had regained the upper hand. Marcus wouldn’t be able to refute her words.
“This isn’t about me,” Marcus said.
“Clearly, it is.”
“This is you. And God. Just like always.” His eyes burned into her, steady, unflinching.
“No. We’re discussing your determination to thank a God that left you to be—”
“He did not leave me.” Marcus pushed halfway out of the chair, both feet on the path.
“You were—”
“No. You listen to me.”
His gaze held hers, and the prick became a pang. The heat, the words, sputtered in her chest.
“God was there. Every minute. With me.”
“And prevented nothing.”
Marcus slammed a fist against the arm of the chair. “No. Hate God on your own. Spit in His face every day for the rest of your life. But don’t you use me for your new excuse.”
Use him? Her pulse throbbed. “I know you. And I know God should have spared you.”
“You don’t know anything about it. Anything. You weren’t there.”
He pushed the rest of the way to his feet. He swayed, then steadied. He stared down at her from his full height, the first time he’d stood over her since … before. His shoulders hunched, the shirt hung on his frame, yet his physical presence wasn’t diminished.
The heat inside Lee, fueling the words, sputtered a final time and went out. “I would never use you.”
“Then stop throwing pill bottles and looking at me like I’m dying.”
“You were.”
“Stop blaming God for the things people choose.”
Lee’s insides hollowed. Nothing left.
His body folded down into the wheelchair. “Will said he’d come get me.”
She couldn’t move.
“You can go,” he said, as if his first dismissal hadn’t been clear.
She nodded. She set off away from him, toward the exit. When she reached the gate outside, sporadic traffic sounds whirring past the tree line, she veered left into the woods.
The trees grew denser here, untrimmed. No lanterns, no wood chips. Fireflies winked around her, some near, most distant. In her hollowness, Marcus’s words ricocheted and resounded. His grip on his God had been strengthened. It didn’t make sense.
And how could such a rift grow between them that he would permit a stranger to see his weakness before he let her help him?
You attacked him.
The prone reverence. The sacrifice of pain. The halting, verbal exposure of his heart.
She had charged roughshod over all of it and then mocked it, her blood boiling so high she couldn’t see Marcus at all and didn’t care to. Lee sank to her knees among the old wood and green leaves. Her stomach balled up.
“Why?” she whispered.
A firefly winked beside her hand. The leaves high over her head whispered back. She shivered. The park was growing colder. She should have left Marcus her jacket, at least to cover his chest. But she hadn’t thought of that, either.
“Was it emotion?” She gripped her shoulders with the opposite hands. “He said I’m angry.”
Was she angry?
A roaring in her ears and a wash of red over her vision rocked her forward. “I wound him. Always him, the deepest.”
Perhaps the dark confinement had taught him not only to hold more tightly to his God but also to hold less tightly to her. Perhaps she had, minutes ago, ended ten years of friendship without seeing it. And she could not blame him. She could only blame herself.
“Stop blaming God for the things people choose.”
“I won’t,” she whispered. “I’ll blame You endlessly. I’ll hold You responsible.”
For all the sins of the world.
“Yes.” She pushed to her feet and leaned her head back. “You stand by. You do nothing.”
Except walk onto the stage and pay for the damages.
“It does not absolve You.”
No, Lee, it absolves you.
Her shoulders prickled. That was only a thought of her own mind. Nothing more. But a shiver was racing along her spine. She backed against a tree.
“You …”
It was not God Who wounded Marcus just now. Her own blind rage had done that. But consistently, logically, she could not accept the guilt of one action without accepting …
All of it. She ducked her head. If God was not responsible for the sins of the world … if she could not hold court over God and morally judge Him … and the image of that flashed in her head with such clear foolishness: she, Lee Vaughn, hitting a gavel and shouting out a sentence and still calling Him God, still claiming His omnipotence though He stood before her acquiescent to her ruling.
She pushed away from the tree. “You should have …”
The words died in her throat. She could not make decrees that bound Him.
So His decrees bound her.
Lee locked her knees. Drowning. Guilty. And God, everywhere, inescapable, pure authority like white fire.
Her knees gave out. Her arms covered her head. I see You. And I can’t bear it. Lee huddled but couldn’t be small enough. He saw her, too. She shook, hands tight against her sick stomach.
“Talk to God.”
I can’t, Heath.
But something else prodded her, too. Speak.
“I am guilty. Of too many things.”
It wasn’t enough. She choked. She curled up until her forehead touched the grass. She held her barren belly.
“I killed my daughter.”
Tears.
“She thrashed and stopped. She died inside me because I chose her death.”
The tears fell into the grass. She lifted herself a few inches from the ground, and more tears fell onto her knees.
Her stomach settled as the tears drained out of her. She sat up and leaned against the tree. Bark pressed into her spine. Around her, fireflies danced, crickets resumed their music, and a chilling wind gusted like a long-pent breath, then died back down.
“If …” She strained for a deep breath. “If I asked for absolution … would You give it to me?”
Of course, Marcus and Violet and Heath—everyone—would tell her to ask. Would tell her she’d never be denied. But none of them knew the selfishness that curled in the deepest pit of her. None of them knew that her hand had willingly signed for her baby’s death. None of them knew how she’d railed at God, when she spoke to Him at all, over the last twelve years. And for the last four months.
“I don’t see how You could possibly pardon me at this juncture.”
Lee strained to hear, to sense, but nothing prodded inside her. The fire of Him had receded. Was that her answer?
“It’s only reasonable, I see that.” But a desolate pain wormed into her chest. “I suppose this ends our … encounter.”
For a moment, she couldn’t fill her lungs. Her eyes burned. For her own condemnation? She hardly deserved tears. She forced the deep breath and pushed to her feet. She would return to the church. To Marcus. If he would allow it.