Epilogue
JUNE 2018
PAIGE
Some people say Momma will never write again, but I know they’re wrong. She says I’m the one with grit, but she has it, too, in a soft and gentle Momma kind of way. She has a strong desire to tell the world more about her struggle with depression and her discovery of a deeper kind of grace.
I think it will happen.
After an initial drop in readership, the sales of her novels picked up again. Momma, true to her word, started a fund to provide money for people struggling with mental illness who could otherwise not afford help.
Henry passed his GED last month and has been accepted to college. He and Libby will both be attending the same online university. Jase’s face crinkles into this great mass of dimples when he explains that his parents are going to college from jail and from an apartment.
Charity Mordant got life in prison. She pleaded insanity, but the jury figured she had plenty of wits about her to torment Momma with letters for fifteen years and push her toward suicide and then plan the murder. And I think Detective Blaylock discovered a lot of other pretty horrible things she had done.
Nick Lupton had several aliases. When Detective Blaylock finally tracked down his different identities, he had a list of crimes long enough to keep him in jail for thirty years. But since he was the one to confirm Charity’s hiring him and his hiring Henry, plus giving the detective the names of other people he’d worked for, he got a plea bargain down to twenty years.
At Henry’s trial, nine months after his arrest, his young lawyer did a fine job of arguing his case and got his sentence moved from life in prison to twenty years, for which Henry and Libby were extremely grateful. In the meantime, Henry studies in his cell and leads a “Jesus study for sinners.” Every time he says that, I smile.
A person’s brain works differently after a traumatic head wound. Day by day we see incremental progress, but Momma will never be the same. “That’s a gift,” she says, and then she smiles a lopsided grin, but I read deep-down gratitude in her eyes. Sometimes Daddy will swoop her up and onto his back, and she closes her eyes and stretches out her arms, like she’s trying to capture the whole Mediterranean Sea in her grasp, and she laughs. Long and hard.
The doctors say it’s the brain injury that’s changed Momma. Her mind is just as sharp on the inside, but she expresses herself differently on the outside. We let the doctors think what they will. The nurse practitioner, the one who whispered hope to Momma on the hardest days and told me to keep my mouth shut and listen to Dr. Moore, well, she knows as much as I do—as we do (Hannah most of all, with her faith that never faltered)—that it’s not just the brain injury.
We all look at life differently now. Henry taught us that. He was never afraid to ask the questions that no one else dared to ask, about hypocrisy and judgment and especially how Momma could write books of transformation and grace without really receiving those things for herself.
She receives them now. After all the years of struggle, of the dark hole in her head, as she puts it, she embraces life in a new way. As a gift. She will spend every ounce of energy helping others who are locked in depression, who have dark, even suicidal, thoughts, find hope.
I receive things differently now too. I came back from my rabbit trail about a year ago. Drake never pushed me, neither did Hannah or my parents. I just walked into it gradually as I watched Momma and Henry and others I love navigate their faith journeys.
Mostly, I guess Drake was right. Jesus wooed me back.
You listen to Momma’s story, and it’s sad and even tragic, but there is a silver lining of hope that enshrouds it like clouds hovering over the deep and varying shades of dark in the mountains. “Spiral up to hope,” Momma says in a voice filled with awe. “Spiral up to love. Spiral up to grace.”
I’m in college, majoring in English lit with a minor in creative writing. I’m doing college in three years. I’m in a hurry, I guess. I have a wedding to plan. Yes, I’m twenty, but in some ways I’m much older. And poor Drake, he’s been waiting for me for a long, long time.
Next year Drake and I will say “I do” in the tiny little chapel on Bearmeadow Mountain with our families around us, even Aunt Kit. Drake will be dressed in a tuxedo with tails and I will be in white with my hair piled high on my head and Momma’s Huguenot cross around my neck. Daddy will walk me down the aisle, teasing me and then pecking me on the cheek, and I’ll read a thousand expressions of love on his face. Hannah will stand beside me with a cascade of roses. And Momma will be sitting in the front row, petting Milton and wiping her tears and dreaming up another story as only dear Momma can do.
