Zac followed her to an alcove at the back of the store, a corner framed with, of course, more bookshelves. On an old library cart, Tiana had stacked about thirty books.
David emerged from the stockroom. A smile warmed his eyes when he saw them. “I knew it was inevitable.”
“Because it’s a great idea.” Tiana grinned and turned to Zac. “I can’t take credit. I saw it on a bookstore-ideas thread online. I can’t believe we’ve never tried it before.”
They got to work and soon discovered an assembly line expedited the process. Zac cut squares of the thick brown paper and lengths of twine for decorative bows, which Tiana insisted on. David wrapped, and Tiana tied the bows and wrote messages in black marker. She embellished her capital letters with curlicues. Read Me at the Beach! Read Me with a Friend! Read Me to Chew on Some Deep Ideas! Read Me Late into the Night! Read Me and Laugh!
“These books are mostly new,” David said.
“Several are big sellers from the nineties,” she said.
“The nineteen nineties.”
“Oh, for the love. If you want to wrap a Dickens or a Twain, fine. I’ll write Read Me with a Dictionary.”
“Aye, indeed, that’s what these young ones would have to do.” The brogue that had been weaving into his words over the last hour now fully cloaked them.
Tiana rolled her eyes. Then she leaned over and kissed his mouth.
David startled back from her. “Ach, we’re in public, love.”
“I’m public now?” Zac waved the scissors at them. “Carry on. I’ll gallantly look away.”
David gave a huff. “I’d wager you’d not find it fitting either.”
“I’ve told you, old man. The calendar’s not the only way I’m younger than you are.”
Tiana’s laugh was like chimes.
After a while, silence descended, and with it the burden of the last week. The regulator on the wall ticked on and on, seconds gone he’d never get back. The fact usually did not faze him, not with endless seconds before him. Strange that he’d noticed clocks twice today, or maybe not so strange. In the past month, five longevites had come to their final seconds. His scissors rasped against the packing paper, clinked as he snipped each length of twine. Tiana’s marker made hushed sounds against the packages as she wrote. No one but Zac seemed to feel the weight in the absence of their voices.
A minute before he would have spoken, Tiana looked up. “How was it today, Zac? With Finn and Rachel?”
“It was good. It was …” How to summarize? “Finn made peace.”
“Will we see them again?” Tiana said.
“He said he would keep in touch. Cady’s been silent. For now I just have to wait and hope. And pray, I guess.”
“What about Rachel?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I’m going to be her family, but I …” Can’t be her lifeline. Can’t cut her loose either. And middle ground had always been beyond him.
“If she’ll stay local, we’d like to help her,” Tiana said. “We’ve talked it over.”
“Really?”
David nodded.
Zac tipped his head to the ceiling and closed his eyes. “Thank you. Really, you have no idea. I was …”
“Stewing?” Tiana said.
“Out of my depth.”
“So would anyone be, alone,” David said.
A long sigh poured from Zac, a substitute for words. He sat a moment, brimming over inside. At last he looked at David, who had continued wrapping books. Zac owed on a promise.
“About the cure,” he said, and David went still. “We looked at what’s left. There’s a vial of the serum—the original stuff. The last vial left. She could use it to turn a mortal.”
Tiana and David didn’t even glance at each other. It was true, Zac plainly saw: they had both closed the door on that possibility for her, and they weren’t tempted to reopen it.
“Or,” he said, “she could use it to try again. For a cure that would allow the aging process but not force it into the body’s systems immediately.”
“So it is still possible,” David whispered.
“She burned almost everything, David. Yeah, she can keep trying, but she expects it would take years for a result, any result. And it might not be the one you want.”
The man’s hands slipped, dropped the novel he was wrapping. It slid to the floor beside him. He didn’t pick it up. His chest heaved with a labored breath.
Tiana was watching him. “Basically, we don’t have a definite answer now any more than we did before she burned everything.”
“Right.” Zac had to tell them the whole truth. Nothing else was fair. “We might be looking at a longer time frame now that she has formulas to rework.”
“Okay. Cool.”
David pushed to his feet. “I’m sorry. Please excuse me a moment.”
Tiana watched him go. Looked down at her hands and set aside the marker as if it were too heavy for her.
“Tiana?” Zac said after a long silence.
She sighed. “This is what I was saying earlier.”
“Should I go after him?”
“Would you?”
Zac got up and headed the direction David had gone. He found the man kneeling behind the checkout counter, voice too low to be heard more than a few feet away, the brogue thick as Zac had ever heard it. He stepped closer.
“Ach, please, Lord God. In Thy mercy, provide this cure before her life is far spent. Grant me this mercy, I beg Thee. But if Thy will be something else, grant me strength to trust the plans Thou hast for us. I confess I lack that strength tonight.”
To intrude on such a prayer felt worse than sacrilegious, but to watch his friend in pain and do nothing was worse. Zac knelt at his side and remembered David doing the same for him, at a time of distress so great it was all Zac could do to keep the haze from taking him.
David looked up from his bowed posture. Tears stood in his eyes, dripped down his face. “It was too heavy for me. I had to give it back to Him. Again.”
“Again?” Zac said.
“Ach, I’ve given it to Him countless times, but then I take it back.” He scrubbed his face and looked past Zac, down the aisles of shelves. “It worries her.”
“Because she loves you.”
“Aye, she does. Such a woman loves me. ’Tisn’t easy to grasp. And I’d wed her tomorrow and most gladly, if I could know I’ll not have to—” His words broke in a fresh surge of tears that he swallowed back. “I cannot bury my Tiana. Too much strength left me with the other losses. To endure another—I cannot.”
“David …” Zac sighed.
“I apologize. This isn’t what you came for tonight.”
“You don’t owe me an apology.” He sat back on his heels and appraised his friend. “Didn’t peg you as a crier, though.”
David’s laugh was broken but real. “Ask Tiana; she’ll have many instances to report.”
They stood together, David a little feeble at first, as if the storm of his emotions had drawn on his physical strength.
“Look, man,” Zac said. “I wouldn’t survive it either.”
David bowed his head.
“It’s why I haven’t been with a mortal since my wife died in 1892. I clung to Moira because I couldn’t lose her that way. We tore each other to pieces, but it felt safer. Screwed up, I know, but that’s me. Goodbyes wreck me too hard.”
Too hard to speak of his boys at all. Maybe Simon knew him better than he wanted to credit. In his antique Bible packed away in a box in Denver, the death blanks were empty. He’d lacked the strength to write any of them down.
“So I can’t speak to this.” Sorry, Tiana.
“I well understand.”
Their pace back to Tiana was slow, as if David had more to tell him before they reached her hearing. Or more to listen to. What else could Zac say?
He did have one thing. “At least you’re giving it to Him every time you take it back. I never did that with Moira. I just held on with everything i
n me.”
Until now. Today had proved it: Zac had let her go. He wished he knew when. Maybe it had happened back in 1985, and he’d denied it even to himself until today.
Another slow nod, and David halted mid-aisle, meeting Zac’s eyes, studying him hard. Listening. As if this were helpful. Well, okay.
“Look, man. If the cure doesn’t work out, and if Tiana quits this place before we do …”
The tall frame shuddered, but David held his gaze.
“This time you won’t be alone. And it does make a difference. Believe me.”
“I do,” David said. “And I thank you.”
They said no more until they reached Tiana. She studied both of them as they resumed their places in the assembly line and took up scissors, paper, and books. After a few minutes, she nodded to Zac, and he nodded back.
Then her marker stilled as she studied him. “You’re cutting with your left hand now.”
“Huh?” He looked down at his hands. He was. He shrugged. “I’m ambidextrous.”
“I knew it. I’ve seen you write with both, haven’t I? I thought I was losing it.”
He grinned. “Multitalented stunt guy.” Then sobered. “In an 1860s schoolhouse, lefties got smacked with the ruler until you switched dominance.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Superstitious,” he said. “I was stubborn enough to write with my right hand at school and my left hand at home.”
“Of course you were.” She resumed writing, finished the phrase she’d started, then pointed her marker at him. “You and I have unfinished business.”
“Oh?”
“Something you wanted to ask me. You might not remember now. It was at lunch after the barn collapse.”
“Oh, that.” He cut another square of paper. “I was going to ask you to pray for me.”
“Hmm.” She penned a swirling underline of the last word she’d written and set the wrapped book aside on the “finished” pile. “Did you think I wasn’t?”
It did seem a needless request now. “I don’t know what I thought. We could chalk it up to broken ribs and hunger and whatnot.”
“That works.”
“I suppose it had to do with your breaking silence,” David said.
Zac looked from him to Tiana and back again. “You two don’t forget a word I say, do you?”
“What’s family for?” Tiana’s smile held a hint of mischief. Oh yeah, they’d been discussing him at length.
His face heated. “I—well, I’m home. You know, in the formerly prodigal sense.”
Tiana’s eyes grew shiny. “Tell us, Zac.”
He did. He stumbled for words a few times, which for him was strange and humbling. He tried to convey how desperate the night in the barn had been and how God had spoken to his soul. He tried to convey his struggle to talk to God and how the struggle waned with each day. He wasn’t ready to talk about the reburying of Colm, but he’d get there soon.
He tried to convey the enormous debt he ought to owe. At that point he set aside the scissors, his eyes too misty to cut straight.
“But you know you don’t owe it?” Tiana said.
“Yeah.”
“Just making sure.” She smiled.
“I know truth. I always did. I just decided not to live by it anymore.”
“What brought you back?”
“I don’t know.” He picked the scissors back up, blinked a few times, and resumed cutting. “I know there was no part of me interested in turning around before … well, before Colm was found out. It felt like a community evil, what he’d been doing. Like I could see what God thought of it. How it grieved Him.”
Ironic, really. He’d been unconcerned with his own evils for most of his life by then. He tapped the scissors on his knee and shook his head.
“I’m a mess, guys. ‘Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,’ except I wasn’t acknowledging the wandering. And I wasn’t exactly wandering either. I was running full out.”
Tiana sat with a wrapped book in her lap, marker poised in her hand as if she’d forgotten she was holding it. She had written Read Me and.
“I just wish I could undo it.” Words were pouring now. Zac gestured with his right hand, still holding the scissors. “I wish I could be some guy finding Him for the first time, you know? Instead I’ve read the entire Bible more times than I can count and I still ran away. All those years I knew what I was doing. I wish I could erase that crap. Have a clean slate with Him.”
Tiana blinked as if he’d just said something monumentally stupid.
“What?”
She shook her head.
“Well, what?”
“Zac,” David said, “what do you think the cross is for?”
They weren’t hearing him. “I know, salvation, I know that, but—but I kept on knowingly, and accusing Him, and …”
“And what? You wore Him out?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
Tiana sat back on her heels, arms folded, waiting.
“I spent a century in rebellion, okay? I just wish it could be … gone.”
“Really,” she said. “East from west gone?”
“Well, I … I …”
“Zac,” she said, and her voice had gentled. She reached past David’s place in their assembly line and touched Zac’s arm. “You’re being ridiculous.”
He blinked. He looked to David.
“Aye, indeed you are. Our centuries are like a day to Him. The psalmist tells us so. In fact, he says a millennium, which I doubt you or I will achieve.”
Zac looked down at the scissors in his right hand, the curled fingers of his left. His will rose up in him, resisting. Because he was an idiot.
But even that, his Father did not hold to his account.
“It’s gone, friend. It’s finished.”
“Finished.” His eyes burned. Such an obvious thing, but without their words he might have taken another hundred years to put it together.
“And as long as you’re wishing for what He’s already done, you’re neglecting to thank Him for it.”
“Yeah.” Zac swiped a hand under his eyes. “Okay.”
“You might want to try a different hymn when you’re bogging down.” Tiana finished writing on her book: Enjoy the HEA!
“The what?” Zac said.
“Happily Ever After. And no, that’s not a spoiler; it’s a genre indicator.”
“Hey, no judgment here.”
She set the book aside. “I’m thinking of a hymn I’ve heard recently. The solo piano version. Several dozen times.”
David waved his hand in a cease-and-desist motion. “Wheesht.”
“Mm-hmm. ‘The Love of God.’ Maybe you need to sing that one for a while, Zac. ‘To write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry. Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.’”
Zac cut the last square and set the scissors aside. “I, um … Thank you. Both of you. I know I’ve been hard to live with.”
“We’ve been worried,” Tiana said. “We just wanted you to talk to us.”
Zac ducked his head. “Sorry.”
“No. This is finished as well.” David’s voice was quiet and firm. “You’ll not carry it around with you. Only commit to putting away the facade you value so much.”
A broken laugh escaped him. “With you people dogging me, I won’t be able to maintain the facade even if I want to.”
“Good,” Tiana said.
He swallowed hard. No crying on them. But if he had to, they’d stick around for it. And they’d stick around after. He knew that much. He grimaced when a tear fell without his permission, but then he gave leave to another.
“With you here, I don’t want to, and I don’t need to.”
FORTY
He left his phone’s ringer on in case Rachel needed him. In case, against all odds, Lucas called. But his sleep was interrupted only by aching ribs and fear of encountering the behemoth. If he didn’t sleep, he couldn’t
dream. An idiotic and unsustainable strategy, but at this point his adrenal system was calling the shots.
At 5:00 a.m. he gave in. He got out of bed, switched on the light, and muttered nonsensical curses until his eyes adjusted. Then he checked social media, resolved not to stay online more than thirty minutes. His post had been shared fewer times than the bookstore pic, but it was being seen and gathering comments. Sweet comments, supportive comments. The denigrators were there but not many. Maybe he could, after all, keep the respect of most.
If he still had work to do for them, among them, then that mattered. He shut his laptop with a smile. He’d do a video soon, after he had managed at least one full night’s sleep.
Only one thing to do at five thirty in the morning. Only one thing he wanted to do. He got into his workout clothes, grappled with his shoelaces, and finally gritted his teeth and bent double to tie them. He sneaked past Simon asleep on his couch. No overnight movie marathon this time; the guy was done in.
Under the conditions of the Life Buoy, Zac knew better than to walk out without a word. He found a scrap of paper and a pen.
I’m out on the dunes. Can’t sleep. Adrenaline, nothing unusual, part of the cycle. No reason to worry. See you for breakfast.
Z
He left the note by the coffee maker and drove out to the park.
Standing at the base of his dune, he nearly gave up before he started. He was in no shape to achieve the smallest hill, much less the summit where his favorite copse of trees nodded their silver-leafed branches to the lake wind.
Well, he was going up there anyway.
Normally the climb took him twenty minutes. Today his time was doubled. Sweat was pouring down his back by the time he reached the halfway mark.
But up there, with his trees and his sky, he could rest. His chest would open all the way, allow the hurts of everyone he cared for to seep from within him like a lanced sore.
He made it to the top with his right hand pressing his side, his feet dragging over the sand. Thank goodness no one else would be here at this hour. Dawn rose over the trees far below, bathing all in pink radiance. Zac looked down the slope at the few cars in the blacktop lot, bug-sized. He stood hunched another few moments, enjoying the triumph, but he needed to sit. He trudged toward his little grove. He would watch the sun come up. He would watch the morning turn the sky blue.
From Sky to Sky Page 32
