by Roger Bruner
I whistled a couple of lines from “Victory in Jesus.” He remained silent. Maybe he was thinking about the beauty and aptness of the prancing metaphor. Or maybe he was praying.
I began singing that glorious final stanza from “It Is Well with My Soul.” I’d heard that the author wrote it after his entire family drowned at sea. What faith.
Dad hadn’t said anything else. I started singing again … a different song.
“All those who wait upon the Lord shall have their strength renewed.
They will walk and not get weary and run, but not run down.
Yes, they’ll walk and not get weary and they’ll run, but not run down.
They’ll walk and not get weary and they’ll run, but not run down,
And they’ll rise up on wings like eagles and fly.
They’ll fly. Yes, they’ll fly. They will fly.”
Then I did some joyful and thankful praying.
Dad and I must have been more preoccupied on the way down than we realized. We reached the bottom of the mountain and crossed the span of fallen rocks without noticing how sharp and slippery they were. I didn’t know what walking on water felt like, but we must have floated across the rock slide.
Or did we prance?
chapter fifty-five
I shouldn’t have been surprised at the good things that had taken place during our stay in California. After all, God had been in charge. Not us.
He’d helped us deliver a number of insiders from the claws of the devil himself (I couldn’t help thinking of Chappy that way, and I didn’t feel guilty about it). He helped us lead several men—including Alfredo—to Christ. He helped us to lead many of the insiders to greater levels of commitment. And if those things weren’t enough evidence of God’s power, He convinced me to quit feeling guilty about Mom’s death.
But healing still hadn’t taken place between Jo and Aleesha, and that remained heavy on my heart.
“Dad,” I said as we walked around the building to the front of Graham’s apartment, “this has been such a great week … a magnificent week …” My tone of voice must have betrayed my hesitation.
“But …?”
“Jo and Aleesha are further apart than ever.” “I’ve been praying for them.”
“Me, too, but I feel like I ought to be able to draw them together.”
“I know what you mean, baby girl. One of the hardest parts of growing up is accepting the fact that some things are beyond our control.”
I reached over and squeezed his hand. He turned the doorknob with his other hand and gave a “ladies first” bow.
“Hello, Graham,” I said.
Dad glanced around the living room. “Where are Jo and Aleesha?”
“Climb mountain. Together. Look you. Go wrong way.”
We understood the what and where parts easily enough. What took five minutes of hard labor, though, was deciphering the fact that Jo thought our directions were so bad we’d end up miserably lost. Figuring out why Jo thought that proved impossible.
“That doesn’t make sense, Graham,” Dad said. “Rob gave me these directions earlier in the week.”
He handed Graham the paper. After glancing at it, Graham said, “Correct. Goes to top. Some good. Almost safe.”
Of course, it’s correct, old fellow. We wouldn’t have made it to the top and back again if these directions had been bad. You’re spot-on about “some good” and “almost safe,” too. I could’ve lived without those rocks at the base of the mountain and that final push, uh, pull to get over the top, though.
“Not best way. Hard. At bottom. At top.”
Now you tell us, Graham.
I looked at Dad and rolled my eyes. Why’d you ask Rob for directions and not Graham? Then I started giggling. Would Graham have written directions the same way he talked? If so, we might never have reached the back of the hostel.
Dad appeared to be deep in thought, and I didn’t want to disturb him, but I’d just had a lightbulb moment. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my down jacket. Nope. Not there. I unzipped it and pulled the paper out of my shirt pocket.
“Aleesha found these directions at her place at the table this morning. Her name was on the paper. Since she’d changed her mind about mountain climbing, she gave them to me. But you already had directions, so we didn’t need these.”
Dad reached for the paper. After reading a sentence or two, he shook his head. “Nothing like ours.”
“Aleesha assumed Rob had written those directions. But if he didn’t, who did?”
Dad handed the paper back to me.
I looked at it for the first time and gave a low growl. “Jo’s handwriting.”
“Why would she …?” Dad said and then stopped.
“Wait. Jo told Aleesha to get lost the other day. You don’t suppose she decided to make sure it happened, do you? To get Aleesha literally lost, I mean.”
I hoped I’d have all sons when the time came. Girls could be too catty, too vengeful, and too hard to figure out. I knew plenty about that last characteristic. I didn’t understand myself yet, and I couldn’t understand Jo, either.
“I can’t imagine her doing something that dumb,” Dad said.
I narrowed my eyes in disapproval. He might as well have cussed.
“I know, Kim. We always taught you not to use the word dumb. Well, I’m sorry, but if she did something this dangerous, it was dumb.”
My head bobbed in agreement. “But shouldn’t we do something about Jo and Aleesha?”
“Why bother? When they reach the top and don’t find us, they’ll come back down.”
“But they’ll use the wrong directions, too, won’t they? I mean, they’ll have to if they want to go the way they think we went.”
Dad was speechless. He reached out for the directions, glanced at them and sighed, and then passed the paper to Graham, who looked over them briefly.
“Bad,” he said. “Dangerous. Go after.”
“Oh, great,” I said. I didn’t share Graham’s sense of urgency, and I really didn’t feel like going back outside, much less climbing the mountain a second time that day. Would my
feet blister again? “We’re both exhausted.” “Starving, too,” Dad said.
I started to say “Mmm” in agreement, but my stomach growled so loudly I didn’t bother to.
Graham walked to the refrigerator before we could ask for his help, pulled out a variety of sandwich fixings, and busied himself making us some lunch.
“At least we have bad directions to follow,” I said. “Let’s just hope and pray we can find our way back—assuming we locate Jo and Aleesha.”
“The insiders will have to understand that I used my message preparation time to rescue two foolish and vengeful teens. Tonight’s message is special. I’ve been working on it all week, but it’s not finished.”
Duh. We’d been back five minutes, every muscle in my legs and back was screaming in protest against a return trip up the mountain, and we hadn’t even sat down yet. I remedied that mistake first—or would God view it as a sin of omission?—and Dad followed my lead. I’m not sure I sat down in the usual sense as much as I let every part of my body ooze into the chair. I hoped I could get up again. I was afraid I’d morphed into a human jellyfish.
Whipping up a pair of sandwiches for each of us took Graham only a couple of minutes. One was bologna and mayo, the other peanut butter and jelly. Both on healthy, whole grain bread. I smiled our thanks when he handed us our lunch.
My blessing for the food was extra short, but—even so—I noticed Dad had already taken a bite out of his first sandwich. A huge one.
After practically swallowing our sandwiches whole, Dad and I looked at our empty plates and sighed. The food would perk us up some, but we still weren’t in the best shape for going back out. Although Jo and Aleesha might not be that far
up, they’d been gone … how long? Graham hadn’t said.
Long enough to get into trouble, though. Serious trouble. My face prob
ably had as many worry lines as Dad’s.
Graham handed each of us a bottle of water. Dad opened his and started to drink. I was glad I wouldn’t become a forty-something for a number of years. In the warmth of Graham’s apartment, Dad fell asleep with his lips still around the mouth of the bottle.
“Kimmy. We go. He sleep. He prepare. When wakes.” What choice do we have? “Leave note?”
Now why hadn’t I thought of that? I searched the room for paper. No luck. “Have paper? Pen?” I said to Graham. No! Am I starting to talk like you now?
He disappeared in the direction of his bedroom and returned with a spiral-bound notebook and a ballpoint pen.
Graham and I—I scratched out “and I”—Graham, Kim. Up mountain. Need find girls. If I was going to talk like Graham now, I might as well write like him, too. Like he talked, anyhow.
Outside again and feeling nourished and refreshed by the water and the sandwiches, I started walking toward the familiar field of fallen rocks.
“No,” Graham said, putting his hand on my arm to restrain me. “Easier way.”
Bless you, Graham.
He pointed to Jo’s paper, which said something about starting at an area seventy-five feet to the left of the rock slide. Had she unwittingly made the beginning of her misdirections better than Rob’s? Of course, he hadn’t known about the rock slide.
Graham seemed to know Tabletop Mountain better than most people know their spouses after years of marriage.
I wondered if he’d grown up in the area. I decided to ask. Knowing Graham, I’d get one of several possible responses …
o A yes or a no
o A grunt that could mean either yes or no
o A response that didn’t seem to answer the question
o A response I’d die of frustration or old age trying to figure out
o No answer at all
I was betting on … one of them. Any one. I giggled at my indecision, and Graham turned and looked at me. Whatever his family background, he must not have grown up in a household of females.
“Did you grow up around here, Graham?” “No.” Hmm. That was the least expected response. “You know this mountain so well.” “Climb often. Since …”
I looked him in the eye. Not harshly. Not impatiently. I didn’t care how hard he was to communicate with. He was precious in God’s sight, and I’d grown to love him, too. He turned and kept on climbing. After scrambling to catch up, I gave him a big hug. Although he seemed hesitant to accept it, he didn’t struggle to break free.
“Graham, I love you.”
I couldn’t see if he was crying. The tears in my eyes blurred my vision too much.
“Love … Kim.” Then he hugged me back.
chapter fifty-six
Somewhere else on the mountain … I gasped as a sudden gust of wind blew the unfolded paper out of my hand. “That’s it, Aleesha. We were lost before. Now we’re really lost.”
“That’s what we get for following bad directions. Where’d you get those, anyhow?”
“You don’t want to know. But ours was a duplicate of the ones Kim and her dad were using.”
“You make me exercise like this, get me lost and almost killed, and then you won’t answer a simple question?” “It’ll just make you mad, Aleesha.”
“I’m already mad. What kind of spoiled white girl trick is this, anyhow?”
“Hey, what’d I do to deserve that?”
“To deserve what?”
“Being called a ‘spoiled white girl.’”
“I didn’t call you that. I just said a climb like this with what you knew were bad directions seems like the kind of thing a spoiled white girl might do.”
“Oh.”
“You ought to know by now I’m no racist. If I’m superior, it’s because God made me that way. As an individual, not because of my color. And what if I had called you some kind of white girl? You are one, aren’t you? You don’t have some other skin color hidden under all that makeup, do you?”
“All what …?” I touched my face. “No, of course not. I mean yes, I am.”
“Then I’d be accurate calling you a ‘spoiled white girl’ if you were spoiled and if name-calling didn’t go against my principles. Which it does, I hasten to add.”
“Whatever.”
“And whatever is the origin of those directions? I’ll just get madder if you don’t tell me.”
By then, we’d climbed up on a flat rock that overlooked the steep, so-called pathway we’d just come up. And down. And around and around.
Although we were only a third of the way up the mountain, I felt like I’d been climbing all day. We’d probably circled the mountain three times by now without going one foot higher.
“I don’t want you mad at me, Aleesha. Not any longer. I don’t like it.”
“That works two ways, girl. I don’t like having you mad at me, either.” “Truce?”
Aleesha nodded and held her right hand up palm out while I stood there with my hand outstretched. She compromised and bumped knuckles with me, and we both giggled.
We sat down on the rock several feet apart. Facing one another.
“So I can be honest without making you angry?” I wasn’t about to take any chances.
“If I haven’t bit your head off yet, I probably won’t.”
“I can take that as a promise of self-restraint?”
Aleesha shrugged. “Whatever.” Was I imagining things, or did she wink?
“Do you remember when I told you to get lost?”
“Uh-huh.” Aleesha wrinkled her forehead in a way that made her dark skin look especially ominous.
Do I dare to continue? “Did you believe I meant it?”
“I believed you were angry.”
“Did you expect me to make good with my threat?”
“That was no threat. Not even a promise. You were letting off steam. I understood that.”
“So you didn’t expect me to send you up Tabletop Mountain with a set of made-up directions hoping to get you good and lost?”
“I am not angry.” Aleesha said in a slow, strained tone of voice with a break between words. “I am not angry.” That time went a bit faster and louder. “I am not angry.” Her voice hadn’t reached shrill yet, but it did the final time. “I am not angry!”
“You’re not?” Kim always said I had a tendency to take things too literally at times. I took a chance this wasn’t one of them. “Then I don’t need to apologize for purposely getting you into this mess? I mean, God’s punishing me by letting me get hopelessly lost, too.”
“And what’s He punishing me for, girl?”
That one got me. I didn’t respond for several seconds. And then not for another several seconds. “For stealing my best friend and not understanding how I felt about it.”
Aleesha leaned forward on one arm. She resembled Rodin’s The Thinker. If The Thinker had been a female sitting on a rock instead of a man who looked like he was sitting on a—
“Kim is big enough for both of us,” she said, bringing me out of my gross, mental comparison-making.
“She is not,” I said instinctively. “She’s super petite. We couldn’t even both hug her at the same time.”
Whoops! Am I being too literal?
“Haven’t you ever heard of a family hug, Jo?”
“A group hug, you mean? Of course, but my parents and I have never had one.”
“Humph! What kind of family do you have, anyhow?”
I could barely keep from tearing up. “I’ll tell you about that later.”
“Okay. But back to family hugs … group hugs. You think any two people even try to hug the same person—all of that person, I mean?”
I shrugged.
“The answer is no, my dear Miss Jo. So a three-way hug—ergo, a three-way friendship—among you, Kim, and me ought to work great. Each of us gives up a little bit of Kim, plus we get part of each other, too.”
“That makes sense. You really are …”
&
nbsp; “Go ahead and say it, girl. ‘You really are smart.’”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Huh? What then?”
“I was going to say, ‘You really are just as lost up here as I am, aren’t you?’”
We both started giggling.
“I don’t know where Kim and Mr. Scott are,” Aleesha said, ignoring my question. “But I have a feeling they don’t need our help nearly as much as we need theirs.”
“So what do we do?”
“Let’s look for a path over there. You see where I mean?” Aleesha pointed to a slight opening between two bushes.
We slid down from our rock, and I sprinted toward the bushes with Aleesha close behind.
“It goes downhill,” I said. “Shall we?”
“If you want to see Alfredo one last time before we go home, I’d suggest trying it.”
Aleesha broke out into a rambunctious version of “Victory in Jesus” as we began what I hoped would be our final downward trek. I was so enthralled with her singing I stopped for a moment to listen.
And Aleesha was so caught up in her own singing that she rear-ended me. “Better get those taillights checked out, Jo.”
When Aleesha got to the chorus, I joined in. Although
I’d never been much of a soloist, I was great at making up harmonies for practically any song. Tenor or alto.
Although the trail ran downhill for a little way, we soon reached a decision point. Once again, which way?
“Lord, show us the way,” Aleesha prayed. “The right way. We can find the wrong way on our own.” She cocked her head skyward as if expecting God to shout detailed directions or maybe issue a small pillar of clouds for us to follow. “Guess He wants us to use our heads this time,” she said when God failed to offer any visible or audible help.
After flipping a coin, we checked behind one unlikely looking bush. Sure enough, not only was the way visibly clear for a number of yards, but it also went downhill at a gentler slope than the short path we’d just run out of. Feeling encouraged and, uh, victorious, we resumed our singing.
