It no longer felt like home.
That was the single, constant impression Charlotte’s Chicago apartment left her with as she rattled around the dull white box of a dwelling. A month ago she’d found the urban apartment dripping with character, but now it felt sadly ordinary. Impersonal, even, despite the fact that it still contained many of her personal belongings. Even the addition of Mo didn’t seem to liven up the place. How could a stuffed full apartment feel more vacant than a half-empty cottage?
When she’d pulled out of the driveway in Gordon Falls, she’d doubted the wisdom of that purchase. Now, back in Chicago, she recognized it for what it had become: her home. Sitting in her favorite chair in her Chicago apartment, she still felt uncomfortable and out of place. She wanted to be in Gordon Falls. She wanted to live in Gordon Falls for more than just weekends and vacations.
It didn’t seem possible—at least not any way that she could see right now. I want to be there, but there isn’t a job for me there. Is there one that I’ve missed? Lord, why are you opening a door so far away when You’ve knit my heart to Gordon Falls? Is it because I need to be away from Jesse? We’re not good for each other, even I can see that, but my heart...
Charlotte curled up under a lush afghan, welcomed Mo onto her lap and began to make two lists. One list held ideas for jobs she could do in Gordon Falls or one of the neighboring towns—“make do” jobs like marketing for the local hospital or some other company, office work or finding online work she could do from home. None of these felt at all exciting or motivating. The second list held all the arrangements—like finding a moving company or renting a storage facility—that would be necessary if she went to Vermont. Both lists left a sour taste in her mouth, and she abandoned the task in favor of knitting with Mo purring beside her until she dozed off.
The loud ring of the apartment’s landline phone woke her, clanging from the single receiver in the kitchen. She bumbled her way to the phone, the alarm of a middle-of-the-night call fighting with the fatigue of her difficult day. Mo tangled around her feet and she almost tripped twice. Her answering machine was kicking in by the time she lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
“Charlotte, what on earth are you doing in Chicago?”
“Melba?” How had her friend even known to call her here? She hadn’t told anyone she was leaving. She’d planned to call Melba in the morning, but she knew if she talked to Melba before she left, her friend would have talked her into staying over. She needed to be farther away from the cottage than the Bradenses’ house. “I decided to come to my apartment. What’s wrong?”
Charlotte heard Maria crying in the background. “I only tried this number because you didn’t answer your cell phone. Charlotte, it’s the cottage. One of your neighbors smelled the smoke and called the fire department.”
Charlotte fumbled for her handbag, knocking a tote bag to the ground and sending Mo scurrying back out of the kitchen. “The cottage is on fire?” Panic strangled her breath and sent her thoughts scattering. “The cottage?” she repeated, as if that would help the news sink in.
“I don’t know any details yet. No one knew where you were.”
She found her cell phone and saw three missed calls—two from Jesse and one from Melba, not to mention multiple texts from both of them. All within the past ten minutes. She’d set the phone to Vibrate during dinner with Jesse and hadn’t turned the ringtone back on. “I drove here earlier tonight.” Charlotte sat down on one of the tall stools that fronted her kitchen counter. “My house is on fire?” Tears tightened her throat. She couldn’t stand to lose something else. She just couldn’t.
“Not fully, and the guys have it under control. Clark said it was mostly just smoke but he called me when they didn’t find you in the house.” Her voice jostled as if she were bouncing Maria to try and soothe the crying child. Charlotte squinted at the cell phone screen to see that it was nearly 1:00 a.m. “I’m so glad you’re okay. I’ve been praying like crazy since I couldn’t reach you on your cell phone.”
“My house is on fire.” She couldn’t think of another thing to say. “My house. My cottage.” She began stuffing everything back into the tote bag she’d knocked off the counter. “It’ll take me hours to get there. Oh, God...” It was a moan of a prayer, a plea for clarity where none existed.
“What if you took the train? Maybe you shouldn’t drive.”
She couldn’t wait for a train. And she surely wouldn’t sleep anymore tonight. No, the only thing for it was to head back to Gordon Falls and pray along the way for safe travel. “No, I don’t think there’s one for hours anyway. I’ll call if I need help to stay calm, and I promise I’ll pull over if I need to rest.” My house is on fire. Her brain kept shouting it at her, making it hard to think. She was supposed to be the calm head in a crisis, the problem solver, but none of that felt possible now. “I’ll be on my way in ten minutes.” She reached into the fridge and stuffed the last three cans of diet cola—a faster caffeine source than waiting for the coffeemaker to brew—into the tote bag. Mo, in a move she knew no other cat owner would probably ever believe, calmly walked into his carrier as if he knew they were getting back into the car. “Call my cell if you learn anything more, okay?”
“I will. Stay safe, Charlotte. The cottage is important, but you’re more important than all of that. Don’t speed, and call me if you need me. I’ll talk to you the whole way in if you need me.”
The cell phone buzzed on the counter. Jesse’s information lit up the screen.
“Where are you?” his voice shouted over a lot of background noise, including sirens.
“I’m in Chicago. I just talked to Melba.”
“Chicago? What are you doing there? I went nuts when they couldn’t find you in the house.”
There was so much noise behind him. The thought of Jesse standing outside the cottage watching flames eat her house made it harder to fight off the tears. She sat down on the stool. “How bad is it?”
“Not as bad as it could have been. If you had been inside...” Someone barked questions to him and she heard him pull the phone away from his ear and answer, “No, no, I’ve got her on the phone right now. She’s in Chicago. Yeah, I know.”
“I’m coming.” She was desperate to see the cottage, to know how badly it had been damaged. The 160 or so miles between Chicago and Gordon Falls felt like a thousand right now.
“I would.” His voice was unreadable over all that noise. Did he say that because he would have made the same choice? Or was it so bad that she needed to be out there as soon as possible?
“Whoa, Sykes! Ouch! How’d that happen?” She recognized the voice as one of the firemen but couldn’t begin to say which one.
“Hey, not now, okay?” came Jesse’s quick reply. His voice came close to the phone again. “You be careful driving. Things are under control here, just try and remember that.”
What did he say just now? “Jesse, are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just rattled, that’s all. The cottage and everything. Call me when you get to the highway exit.” He paused before adding, “I’m glad you’re okay. Really glad.”
She heard emotion tighten his words and felt her own chest cinch with the awareness. “I should be there sometime before four.” She took a minute to breathe before she asked, “Jesse, what aren’t you telling me? Is the cottage gone? Just tell me now—I need to know.”
“The cottage isn’t gone. Looks like mostly smoke and water damage. I didn’t get close enough to know anything more than that.”
Not close enough? Jesse had been brought in on duty tonight. Why wasn’t he in the crew that went to her house? “But I’d have thought you—”
He cut her off. “Just get here. The longer we talk now, the longer it takes for you to get on the road. I promise, I’ll be here when you pull in and I’ll answer all your questions then.”
“But what—”
“Look, I’ve got to go. Please promise me you’ll drive safely, and you’ll pull off if you get sleepy.”
She had a gallon of adrenaline running in her veins. “No chance of that. I’ve got a bunch of Diet Cokes besides.” She had to ask. “It’s going to be okay, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
She wanted him to turn on the charm, to launch into that irresistible persuasion that was his gift, to sweep her up in that bold confidence he had, but really, how could he? A phone conversation in the middle of what might be a disaster couldn’t do that. The only thing she knew that could do such a thing was prayer.
“Jesse?”
“Yeah?”
“Pray for me? I know it’s not really your thing, but God will hear you anyway, and I’ll feel better knowing you’re asking Him to keep me safe until I get there.” It was a drastic thing to ask, but if this wasn’t a time for drastic measures, what was?
“I’ll give it a shot.”
That was all the foothold she needed. “Okay. Mo and I are on the way.”
“Wait...you have the cat with you?” He sounded surprised.
“Evidently he likes car rides.”
He pushed out a breath. “I had the guys scouring the neighborhood for the beast. I thought he was a goner, or at the very least ran away.” He actually sounded relieved. “Glad to hear he’ll live to torment me another day.”
Even on the phone, even faced with disaster, he’d managed to pull a smile from her—one just large enough to get her on her way. “See you soon.”
Every single bone in his body ached. His leg injury was down to a dull fire thanks to the pain medicine, but Jesse felt the sorry combination of wide awake and exhausted pound through his muscles and thud in his brain.
He should go home. It was feat enough that he’d hobbled all the way here on his crutches—it wasn’t that long a walk but still, that had to have been damaging. He should take himself back to his apartment and at least make an effort to get some sleep.
Only he couldn’t. He sat on the curb, his splinted leg sticking out in the deserted street atop his crutches in a makeshift attempt at “keeping it elevated,” staring at the cottage. He was trying to make the place feel like his cottage, striving to muster up the sense of ownership he’d privately claimed before Charlotte came along. It wouldn’t come. This was Charlotte’s place, and two things were currently driving him crazy.
One, that he needed to make it Charlotte’s perfect place—wonderfully, uniquely hers.
Two, that no matter what he told himself, no matter how “unserious” he claimed to be about that woman, he couldn’t stand the thought of her gone.
What had swept through his body when he realized Chief Bradens’s radio was crackling out orders for Charlotte’s cottage was sharper than fear. It was the bone-deep shock of loss. A loss that wasn’t about bricks and shingles, but the woman who’d come to invade his life. He’d told himself it was better to keep things cool, to play their mutual attraction the way the old Jesse would have done. Only he couldn’t. She’d done something to him. He’d told himself that his balking over her rental suggestion was just the legendary Sykes ego, a refusal to live in the house over some sore-loser impulse. That would have been a good guess for his personality a month ago. That wasn’t it, though—he’d bristled because he hated the idea of the house without Charlotte inside, even temporarily. Somehow he knew—had known since the beginning in a way he couldn’t comfortably explain—that she belonged there. Living there instead of her seemed just plain wrong.
Sitting there, feeling something way beyond sidelined, Jesse added two more items to the list of things that were bugging him:
Three, that he couldn’t help with the cottage. Normally, Jesse wasn’t the kind to rush in toward a fire. There were guys like that, firemen who were nearly obsessively drawn to a crisis, driven by an inner urge to save the day that made ordinary men heroes. He’d never felt that pull—until tonight. It buzzed through him like a ferocious itch that he could only watch from the sidelines. It gave him nothing to do.
Which brought up number four: Charlotte’s request that he pray. He could no more help her get here from Chicago than he could march into that cottage, and the sense of helplessness crippled him worse than his leg. The prayer she’d requested was the only thing he could do for her...but he wasn’t sure how. He was not a praying man. He wasn’t opposed to the idea—he took some comfort in the prayers Chief Bradens or Chad Owens or any of the other firefighters had been known to offer, and he found himself drawn to Charlotte’s prayers of grace over their dinners. Still, none of those people had ever directly asked for prayer from him. It was like being told to use a complicated new tool without being given the owner’s manual.
Only, was it complicated? Charlotte never made it look like anything more difficult than breathing. Prayer seemed to come to her like singing came to him—something that just flowed out of a person.
Singing.
Jesse searched his memory for a gospel song. He owned nearly every recording Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Bobby Darin ever made, not to mention Ray Charles and Smokey Robinson. One of them had to have a gospel song in there somewhere.
He couldn’t remember the title of the song, but his mind recalled Sam Cooke’s mournful voice singing, some song about Jesus and consolation. That’s what Charlotte needed. And so, after a guilty look around to see if there was anyone who could hear, Jesse began singing the couplets he remembered. Charlotte needed consolation to return to the assurance she’d first proclaimed to him: God is never late and He’s never early; He’s always right on time.
He kept on singing, letting the words soak into his own tangled spirit as he remembered more and more of the lyrics, letting the song undo the knots in his shoulders and the grip in his chest that wouldn’t let him breathe. Letting him know that it might not be a bad thing that he felt so bonded to her, and her alone. Slowly, he felt his own words form—not out loud, but like a sigh inside his head, a breath waiting to be exhaled.
“She knows You’re there, God. Give her consolation.” With something close to a grin, he switched the lyrics so that they were about Charlotte, about her knowing there was consolation. She ought to be halfway by now, closer to Gordon Falls than Chicago. Exhausted as he was, he felt his heart rate pick up at the thought of seeing her soon.
Why was he so frightened of being serious with Charlotte—why be scared of something that had already happened? Getting serious with Charlotte was no longer a proposition; it was a fact. A done deal, whether he was ready for it or not. I’ll sing you home, Charlotte. I’ll sing you prayers to bring you home.
He began improvising a little bit on the melody, stretching it out into long phrases he imagined could cross the miles between himself and Charlotte, bonding them further, reaching into that little blue car as it made its way through the dark. “Charlotte knows You’re there. She knows there’s consolation.”
Do I?
The question from somewhere in the back of his brain startled him so much he bolted upright. Do I know God is there?
It was the “know” part that brought him up short. He didn’t not believe in God, in the grace of Jesus forgiving sins. He liked to think God was around, working in the world. He’d certainly seen what it did for the lives of people he knew. But did he know, really know in the rock-solid way Charlotte seemed to? The way Charlotte would need him to? The way that offered the consolation he felt himself lacking?
It was then that the title of the song surfaced out of his memory. “Jesus Wash Away My Troubles.” It could not be coincidence that of all the gospel songs recorded by all the Motown artists in history, that was the song that came to him on this forlorn street corner in the middle of the night. You are. You’re there. Jesse felt the astounding sensation of his soul lifting up and settling into place.
He looked around, feeling...feeling what, exactly? Transformed was such a dramatic way to put it, but no other word came to mind. He felt lighter. Looser. In possession of a tiny bit of that peace of Charlotte’s that pulled him in like a magnet.
This was what made her the way she was. What made her able to ride through life with that indescribable trust that everything would work out in the end, and the courage to leap into situations without hesitation. It was the exact opposite of that drive he had, the one that made him plot and plan and scramble to bend life to his advantage. He’d never trusted that things would work out, because he’d never had anything to trust in. But he did now.
Consolation.
He felt consoled. Nothing in tonight’s circumstances had changed—the cottage was still a wreck, his leg was still broken, the next six weeks up in the air and all of it beyond his control.
Yesterday’s Jesse would be gnawing on his crutches by now. Tonight, he felt absurdly okay with it all.
All of it except the fact that Charlotte was not here. The sting of her absence, the bolt of ice down his back when he thought she might be harmed, the unsettling power of his need for her—those things weren’t consolation. They were powerful, a bit wonderful and a great big hunk of terrifying.
Okay, God, this is me, doing the prayer thing. No songs, not someone else’s lyrics, just me. And I’m asking You—begging You—to bring her home safe. Keep her head clear enough to drive or smart enough to pull over if she’s too tired. I’ll wait if I have to. But I figure You already know that I don’t want to. Just keep her safe, because I can’t. Not from here. That’s going to have to be Your department. You get her here and I’ll take it from there.
He sat there on the curb in the fading darkness of near dawn, listening to the steady drip of water off the cottage. They hadn’t soaked the house, but even a small fire like the one tonight called for a fair amount of water, and firemen never had the luxury of being careful with their hose. He sang all the verses he could remember from “Amazing Grace”—Aretha Franklin had a dynamite ten-minute version on one recording he owned—humming in the parts where he couldn’t remember the words. He was segueing into Ray Charles’s “O Happy Day,” feeling the beginnings of a second wind, when his cell phone rang.
He grabbed it like a lifeline, a gush of “Thank You” surging from his heart when he saw Charlotte’s number on the screen. “Charlotte?”
“I just got off the highway. I pulled over on the shoulder on Route 20 to call.”
Jesse was glad she was only ten minutes away. She sounded weary. “You’re almost here. I’ll be up by the floodgates, waiting for you.” He wanted to hold her, to give her every ounce of support he could before she saw the cottage.
She guessed his strategy. “That bad, huh?”
“No, not really. It’s all fixable from what I can see. But you have to be so tired.”
“I am. You must be, too. This was your second fire of the night and you weren’t even supposed to be on duty.”
Jesse saw no point in giving her the details yet. She’d see the crutches soon enough. “No worries, Miss Taylor. This is what I do. Get back on the road and I’ll see you soon.”
“Okay.” If she hadn’t already been crying, she was close to tears. Who wouldn’t be in her situation?
Jesse pocketed the phone, picked up his crutches and hobbled toward the floodgates humming “O Happy Day.”