Elizabeth turned the piece of bubble gum over in her hands and said, “So I was right. What the Old Man does for you is tougher than it appears.”
“Thought I really messed up with that little girl,” I said. “And who knows, maybe I did. I never saw Jordan again. I asked the Old Man about her, but he either didn’t know or wouldn’t say. I’m thinking he didn’t know. Thought angels knew everything.”
“Maybe they just know what they need to get the job done,” Elizabeth offered.
I would have raised an eyebrow at that if I’d had one. “Still seems strange that someone like you could be pegged as a believer.”
She sat in her chair and regarded me, measuring her words before she dared to speak. I knew I’d asked Elizabeth before what she believed and what she didn’t as far as matters of the spirit, but she had deflected my question and I had allowed it. It was a curiosity then and nothing more, the equivalent of asking her where she grew up and where she had gone to school. But as our time together grew, I was beginning to understand that rather than simply wanting to know, I had to know.
“I can’t imagine anyone being a counselor and not believing in God,” she said. “But faith’s a funny thing. I’ve talked with people who have come in here with all the belief in the world and lose it, and I’ve had people come in with no belief at all and find it. Hospitals are like that. They concentrate all of life’s big questions into one point and force you to confront them.”
“Which is why you’re here,” I said.
“Right here,” she answered.
I looked into the box. The only two items remaining were a golf tee and the key chain Elizabeth had asked about earlier. Whether I admitted it or not—whether I hated it or not—an end was coming. I would have to tell Elizabeth everything, and then she would leave. A tiredness gripped me. I remembered a nature show the Old Man and I had watched once about a group of Komodo dragons hunting an ox. The ox had been bitten by one of them but managed to escape into the jungle. Its wound grew and festered as the dragons followed, waiting for its strength to finally give way. That finally happened three weeks later on the edge of a swamp. The ox sat motionless, watching as the dragons circled ever closer. In the end, it couldn’t even cry out in pain when the dragons began to feast. I felt like that. Tired and surrounded by hungry dragons I couldn’t hope to beat away.
“So it’s your professional opinion that everything that’s happened to me, from then until right now, has all been done with a higher purpose in mind?”
“Between us?” she asked. “Yes. That’s not exactly what proper counselors would say, I suppose. Maybe not what they should say. But yes, Andy. There is something greater here. I think life is drowning in purpose. I think everyone’s life is. You simply have had the blessing of a clearer vantage point.”
“It doesn’t seem clearer,” I said.
“It will. You just need the courage to find it. That means talking about what you’d rather not.”
I looked into the box again, then to the pile of trinkets on my lap—my life vomited out in front of me, lessons I was supposed to learn but obviously hadn’t. All our lives we longed for a purpose, a reason for more than simple existence, but for our pains and sadness also. Worse than the death of the body was the death of hope and faith. We all wanted to matter, and the nagging feeling that our souls were mere accidents rather than part of something larger than ourselves was the root of all human despair. Yet just as frightening as the thought of not having a purpose was the thought of having a purpose you felt incapable of fulfilling.
“I’m tired, Elizabeth. My heart is tired.”
“Then let me carry you a while,” she said. “I know there are two things left in that box. Let’s do the easiest one.”
I took Jordan’s piece of bubble gum from her hand and placed it on my lap, then reached into the box. I was careful not to touch Eric’s key chain, which wasn’t hard to do considering it was just that and the tee left.