by Arlene James
“You don’t know,” he said gently, “because Mom and Dad never complained about me.” Tucking the photo into a pocket, he grasped her by both shoulders. “Pip, why do you think you wound up in boarding school?”
“I—I don’t know.” But it was something to think about, a way to fix her attention. “T-to get an education.”
Gordon shook his head. “It was to protect you, to insure that you didn’t make the mistakes that I did.”
“No, you were just a little high-spirited,” she insisted.
“Rebellious,” he corrected. “Always getting into trouble, running with thugs. You remember the Thai gangs. I was particularly intrigued by a bunch called the Red Dagger.” He chuckled lightly. “It was rumored that you had to kill someone to get in. I’m not sure it was true, but I told myself that I was willing.”
“Gordon, you could never hurt anyone,” she admonished, holding herself together with that familiar tone and attitude. He smiled at her in that grateful, protective, indulgent way of his.
“Probably not,” he admitted, “but I so hated being different that I almost convinced myself that I could. When Mom and Dad found out I was hanging around with the Red Dagger bunch, they shipped me off to boarding school so fast that my head was spinning. You were, what, three and a half, four years old?”
Piper nodded, remembering well how she’d sobbed when he’d left them. A winsome thought curled her mouth into a self-deprecating half smile. “I never minded the idea of boarding school because I always thought you’d be there. When I found out you wouldn’t be, I was so disappointed.”
“I know. Mom told me. Why do you think I spent all those weekends with you?” Gordon looked down and said in a soft, agonized voice, “I used to tell Asia that he was as important to his brother as you were to me. That was one of the reasons he tried to slip out of the house that night.”
Suddenly plummeted back into the chasm of loss, Piper shook her head. “No, no, that can’t be right.”
“He was following his brother,” Gordon explained gently. “Thai had slipped out that same way a little while earlier. He was going to meet some boys who are known around school as bad kids, boys we’d forbidden him to hang out with, and Asia wanted to stop him without his mother and me finding out. He left a note saying that he was going to your place. I guess he figured you could help him find Thai and talk him out of doing anything stupid.”
Piper closed her eyes, barely able to take it all in. “Poor Thai,” she whispered. He was almost as guilty as she.
“Unfortunately, Thai is lighter than his brother,” Gordon said calmly. “When Asia tried to climb down the ivy trellis as Thai had done, it gave way.”
She covered her ears with her hands. “Oh, no.”
“He hit the decorative lamp in the yard on his way down,” Gordon told her matter-of-factly. “It was a freak accident, Pip, just two stories and a wrought-iron gas lamp on a pole. The thing was no bigger than his head.”
Piper cried out. How unfair! How cruel! Why would God let something like that happen? But no, she couldn’t escape her guilt that easily.
“He didn’t have to die!” she wailed.
“It was nobody’s fault, Pip,” he argued gently.
“You don’t know what I did!” she gasped, trembling head to toe.
“You tried to save his life,” Gordon insisted.
“I ordered them to take off the collar! I made the decision to incise instead of going through his mouth! If I hadn’t done that the convulsions wouldn’t have dislodged the bone shards!”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know it! I read the coroner’s report!”
“Including the part that said his neck was broken?”
“Yes!”
“And the part that said the concussion alone was enough to kill him?”
Piper blinked at him. “What?”
“All the medical personnel said that you couldn’t have known how severe the concussion was. The doctor suspected it, but even he didn’t know for sure until after the coroner made his report.”
He was probably dead when you popped that collar.
When, not because.
Was it possible that she wasn’t responsible?
No, of course not. That would mean God had allowed her sweet, good nephew to die.
“I didn’t even know it was him!” she cried. “I didn’t even recognize my own nephew. He was on my table in my cube and I didn’t even know!”
“There wasn’t time,” Gordon argued. “His face was lacerated and horribly swollen. You were preoccupied with trying to save his life! How can you blame yourself for that? Oh, Pip, forgive me for not realizing what you were going through until it was too late!”
Piper reeled back. “Forgive you? You lost your son! I should have saved him. It was my job to save him! I’m the one who doesn’t deserve forgiveness. I’m the one who—” What? she wondered wildly. Unable to think clearly anymore, she turned and would have fled if Mitch hadn’t suddenly sidestepped into her path and seized her by both shoulders, shaking her none too gently.
“Who on earth do you think you are? The one person in the world whom God can’t forgive? What is it that makes you so important? Do you really believe that because you’re Ransome and Charlotte Wynne’s daughter that even God measures you by a higher standard than everyone else? Talk about arrogance! And believe me, I know arrogance when I run into it. I’ve bumped up against my own often enough!”
Piper blinked. “What?” Mitch, arrogant? Not the Mitch she knew. But maybe that was the point.
“I once thought I was the savior of every unfortunate soul who stumbled across my path,” he told her sternly. “I was more understanding, more generous, more forgiving, more just, more everything than the next defense attorney. Then a drunk driver plowed into my wife’s car and killed her on impact, and I blamed myself because I had once defended that drunk driver in court! I had made a career of defending the indefensible. My wife was dead, and it was my fault, period.”
“Oh, Mitch.”
“It didn’t matter to me that I hadn’t even gotten him off the first offense.” Mitch drew back and rubbed one hand over his face, the other going to his hip. “The guy served a year and even went through counseling, but he was a drunk. I couldn’t lay it all on him. And I couldn’t blame God. What was my faith worth, ultimately, if my God is not a God of love who always has my best interests at heart? It couldn’t be just an accident, and it couldn’t be for anyone’s benefit, so someone had to be to blame, and that someone had to be me.”
“But you didn’t do anything wrong,” Piper said, believing it wholeheartedly.
“I know that now,” he agreed, “but at the time I had to be guilty because focusing on my guilt kept me from facing my wife’s death.”
Piper jerked as if he’d struck her. Was that what she was doing, hiding from loss, from grief, by punishing herself?
“My in-laws finally made me see how arrogant and pointless that was,” he went on. “Do you know, they went to see that drunk driver in jail to forgive him, and to make sure that he knew God was willing to forgive him, too? It took me three whole years to forgive him because first I had to forgive myself. Only then could I really grieve. Everything before that, all the tears and recriminations and self-punishment, was a waste.”
Piper closed her eyes. That couldn’t be true. That would mean all the tears she had shed thus far, all the agony and worthlessness she’d been feeling were for nothing.
“Real guilt—not always the consequences, but the guilt—can be dealt with in an instant,” Mitch was saying. “You realize what you’ve done wrong, make up your mind not to do it again, and confess it to God.” He snapped his fingers. “Over and done with. Doesn’t even exist anymore.”
She opened her eyes hopefully at that. The Bible did say, quite clearly and repeatedly, that God not only forgave but forgot confessed sin, and yet her repeated confession had brought her only deeper sorrow. She’d started to think that s
he was unforgivable. Was it possible that she’d confessed imaginary sins?
“False guilt,” Mitch went on, “is conjured up out of emotion, and until we’re willing and able to face those emotions and get to the real reasons for it, we’re just stuck with it.”
Piper lifted a hand to her eyes, realizing that she had been blind to the real problem all along. She hadn’t grieved. She hadn’t let go of Asia at all. Instead she’d clung tight to guilt, anything that could keep her from facing the truth, the pain of actual loss. It hit her like a fist to the solar plexus then, literally doubling her over.
Both Mitch and Gordon were at her side in an instant. Strong, loving arms enveloped her from every direction. She began to weep as she had never wept before, not even in these past painful weeks, but this time she didn’t even try to fight it. Instead she let the horrible realizations wash over her.
Asia was gone from this world. She had spent his last moments in it with him—working to keep him here, even though she hadn’t known it was him. Despite her best efforts and for reasons she couldn’t begin to understand, God had taken Asia anyway. She would never again walk into her brother’s house and see Asia’s smiling welcome, never listen to him carefully working out his concerns, never make him laugh or hear him pray or watch him grow to maturity. Never.
Not in this life.
She screamed, anguish wrenching the sound from her chest, and for some time afterward she didn’t know anything other than the comforting strength of those supporting her.
Eventually she realized she was being guided, aware only of the supportive arms about her and the strong, solid shoulder upon which she rested her head. Awash in grief, she heard voices in quick, stilted conversation but couldn’t register the words. Carefully coaxed, she moved her feet in mechanical response until she had reached her own apartment and was lowered tenderly into a sitting position.
She wept for a very long while—it seemed like days, but turned out to be only hours—cocooned in a comforting embrace and hateful loss, until at last the shell began to crumble and awful clarity began to return.
“Asia,” she gasped, at last grasping the finality of his passing.
“I know, I know,” Gordon said, appearing at eye level and taking her hands, “but he did what he set out to do, Pip.”
“Thai?” she asked shakily, her concern for him suddenly as strong as her grief for Asia.
“Is going to be fine,” Gordon assured her. “He’s had a rough time of it, but he’s getting help.”
Feeling immense relief at that, she briefly closed her eyes. “I’m glad.”
“Pip, I know he accused you that day,” Gordon said gently, rubbing the backs of her hands with his thumbs, “but he didn’t mean it. That was his own guilt talking. He desperately needed someone else to blame.”
“I know,” she whispered brokenly.
Gordon reached up to clap a hand around the nape of her neck. “Sis, please believe me, none of us ever dreamed that you took him seriously or even that you blamed yourself. I did hear what you said about having the collar removed, but I guess I thought that was just your effort to absolve Thai of his own guilt.”
Her chin began to wobble. “All I could think about was that being Asia in there and my not even knowing and not being able to save him and if I’d made the right decisions and how would I go on without…”
Gordon pulled her upper body forward into his arms. “Oh, Pip, I’m so sorry.”
“No, no. You’ve done nothing.”
“I didn’t see how alone you were in your grief, how you blamed yourself.”
“You were grieving, too.”
“I still am. Part of me always will, just as part of Thai will always feel responsible for what happened to Asia.” He set her back then, looking her squarely in the eye. “But we all understand, even Thai now, that God allowed this to happen for a reason. Thai believes that out of this must come a great purpose for his own life. He’s just waiting for God to show him what that is.”
A great purpose, Piper thought, and her gaze turned automatically to Mitch, who sat at her side. Somehow she’d known that was where he’d be, that those were his arms in which she’d found refuge, his shoulder upon which she’d leaned, cried. It seemed entirely appropriate. Mitch, after all, had found purpose in his life due to loss, and so would Thai, and so must she. So must they all.
“Maybe you could talk to him,” she suggested hopefully.
“I would be honored to,” he replied thickly, “but Thai already has an excellent counselor in his corner.”
“But you have personal experience.”
“So does Thai’s counselor, honey. It’s one of the prerequisites. Besides, I can’t tell Thai, or you, what God’s purpose is in this. No one can. But I promise you that it exists, and that it will be enough to sustain him and you, even to bring joy again eventually, though I know you can’t conceive of such a thing just now.”
“It almost seems wrong to think about joy at a time like this,” she conceded.
“Well, it isn’t,” Gordon assured her. “Just as there is a joy that surpasses understanding, so is there a joy that abides where joy cannot exist, a joy entirely of God and our personal relationships with Him.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Mitch said, “but living to God’s purpose is never easy. I’m not sure it’s even supposed to be, because if it were, we’d just become complacent about His guidance.” Mitch looked to Gordon again and added, “Your letter is a case in point. I knew there was a reason I found it, but finding anyone connected to it seemed impossible, even after the airline agreed to help. And then I let—” he glanced at Piper “—personal considerations get in the way, though maybe that was the entire point.” He shook his head. “All I know is, God works these things out, not me, and the only thing more difficult than living to God’s purpose is not living to God’s purpose.”
“Your letter,” Piper whispered to her brother, stricken. “I didn’t even read it.”
“That’s okay. You’ll read it when you’re ready.”
“Maybe you’d like to read it now,” Mitch suggested gently. “I’ll get it for you if you’ll tell me where it is.”
She wiped her face with both hands, a fruitless exercise, as the tears had slowed but wouldn’t yet be stemmed. Still, the gesture felt strengthening somehow. “Top right drawer of the bureau in my bedroom.”
Mitch nodded and rose, moving silently into the other room. Gordon smiled compassionately and swept a hand over her head in a familiar gesture of affection.
“I’m so sorry that I didn’t see the shape you were in sooner, Pip. You were such a rock for the rest of us, and we let you down.”
She shook her head, chest shuddering with an in-drawn breath. “I thought I’d let you down, and I was sure you all knew it.”
“Believe me, that was the last thing we thought. When I heard that you’d sold your car and were giving things away, I couldn’t imagine what was going on. You weren’t answering the phone or the door. By the time I realized that you were leaving town, you had completely cut yourself off from the rest of us. I was so worried, and then in the middle of a long, restless night, I felt this impulse to write down everything I wanted to say to you.”
“And here it is,” Mitch said, reappearing with the letter, including the crumpled middle page that he’d returned to her.
When she’d found the letter pinned to her front door that day, she’d simply stuck it into her handbag unopened. Then as she was searching for her boarding pass at the airport, she’d come across it again, and for a moment she’d yielded to the impulse to read it, but once she’d slit the envelope with her fingernail, removed the sheets inside and thumbed through them, panic had set in. She’d hastily tried to stuff it all back into the envelope, but she’d wound up with the pages out of order and at least one of them folded separately.
Apparently she hadn’t gotten it back in the envelope at all but had tucked it loose, with the envelope containing the
other sheets, into the outside pocket of her purse. It must have slipped out as she was on her way to board the plane. She remembered now that some guy had tried to talk to her in the gangway, but it was noisy in that confined space with everyone rushing to get on the plane. It had seemed an inappropriate time to stop and chat, so she’d pretty much ignored him. She wondered now if he hadn’t been trying to tell her that she’d dropped something.
As she took the envelope into her hands once more, she knew that she hadn’t been meant to read the letter until this moment. God had other purposes in mind when He’d had Gordon write down these words all those weeks ago. Surely it was no accident that Mitch, of all people, had found the sheet of paper on the ground that day. Feeling her first moment of real strength since her nephew had passed from this world to the next, Piper unfolded the pages and began to read.
Chapter Fourteen
“My darling sister,
“I was almost twelve years old when you were born, and you were but a couple of years younger when God gave us Asia. You have both always been miracles to me, the baby sister I had stopped expecting to have, the son I only dreamed of having. You were such a little thing when Mom and Dad shipped me off to school, and I was far too manly at fifteen to admit how badly I was going to miss you. It was selfish of me to be so glad when they decided that you should have an American education, too.
“As a father myself at that point, I understood the sacrifice that Mom and Dad were making on your behalf and had made earlier for me. You don’t know how often I’ve thanked God that He did not require such sacrifice from me! I never dreamed what He would one day require or imagine that I could survive what He would ask of me. And yet, God remains all goodness, and I will not only survive but thrive. I really believe that now, and why shouldn’t I?
“What a gift Asia was and is! Just the thought of him is almost too painful to be borne just now, but our love of him will surely never subside, and will one day be, not a cross to bear, but a cherished joy. His memory will sustain us until that time, and that’s why it is so important that we not forget. The pain makes us want, in its depth and rawness, to do just that, but to forget our dear boy would be to rob us of all the delights he brought into our lives.
