This Side of Salvation

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  “I’m tired of their judgments. Those people look at us like we’re crazy.”

  “Not all of them. When we first started going there and people found out about my graffiti, some of them judged me. But they got over it.” I set the milk on the counter instead of adding it to my cereal, then went over and sat next to her. “I have a question. Promise you’ll answer honestly?”

  “I’ll answer the best I can.”

  That sounded more honest than a promise of honesty.

  “Sophia says the righteous will be Rushed, but why would she think I qualify after the things I’ve done? I spray painted ‘God Sucks’ on the side of a school bus. I replaced the baby Jesus with an Elmo doll in the church nativity scene.”

  Her brow creased. “That was you?” I nodded, and Mom took my hand. “David, you wouldn’t have lashed out at God if you didn’t love Him.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “When your brother died, you were angry at God. We all were. It’s natural. But instead of turning away, you struck back. At least you respected Him enough to shout at His face.” Her cool fingers tightened on my wrist. “And finally you repented, like the prodigal son. God celebrates the returning sinner more than the righteous person who never left.”

  “It’s not fair,” I told her. “People who never screw up in the first place should get bonus points.”

  “Grace doesn’t work that way,” Mom said. “It’s all about faith. You have it.” She let go of me. “And Mara doesn’t.”

  This shocked me. “What? How do you know?”

  “I see it in her eyes when she looks at the cross. I hear it in her voice when she prays. She goes through the motions. All the good behavior is worthless without faith.” Mom lifted her coffee cup with both hands, as if it was heavy, but didn’t sip. “If we can see into her heart, so can the Lord.”

  “Didn’t Jesus say we should forgive people seventy times seven times?”

  “But one has to ask for forgiveness,” Mom said. “Mara just wants to be free of us.”

  Because Dad is sick, and you won’t help him. I couldn’t take the thought of Mara leaving us, leaving me alone with them.

  I got up and went into the hall, to the table by the front door where I’d left my baseball glove. I carried the glove into the kitchen and set it reverently on the table before my mother. “I gave this up for you and Dad. So he’d better have been telling the truth about getting help.” Please say it was all just a test and I can go back to the team. Say you’re proud of my faith, but you just can’t make me give up everything that matters to me. Please.

  She rubbed circles over her temples with her thumbs. “He’s trying very hard.”

  I yanked my chair around to face her and sat down hard. “No, Mom, he’s not trying. Why should he? We haven’t stopped him, we’ve just learned how to avoid him. Like when he was drinking.”

  “He got over that, thanks to the good Lord. Your father hasn’t touched a bottle in years.”

  “He doesn’t need the bottle when he has the Bible.”

  “Of course not, it—” She stopped as she realized what I was saying. “Don’t you dare compare his faith to—to that disease he had. Don’t you dare.”

  I put my palms out in pacifying mode before she could go ballistic. “Mom, I’m not saying it’s the same thing.” Actually, I was, sort of. “It just feels like it sometimes.”

  “If you say so.” She slowly pushed the plastic bag toward me. “These were in the kitchen trash can last night.”

  The bag was from the drugstore, I noticed, not the grocery store, and it wasn’t empty after all. In fact, the shape and color of the condom box inside was all too familiar.

  “Uh.” Heat swept up my face with the speed of a wildfire.

  “Your father said he found them in your jacket pocket and threw them away. He said those things are for tomorrow people.”

  Of course. When there’s no tomorrow, pregnancy and STIs are irrelevant. I didn’t want to know which Bible verses he employed to make that point. “I haven’t used them. The box isn’t even opened.”

  “David, listen. Don’t have sex. But if you do, for crying out loud, use those.” Mom glanced at the bag I was now clutching. “Promise?”

  I should’ve asked her if she believed in the Rush the way Dad did. I should’ve played divide and conquer. If there was a drop of sanity between the two of them, it dwelled in her brain. I should’ve searched for it.

  But my mother and condoms were in the same room, and that had to change.

  I leaped to my feet and headed for the stairs. “Promise.”

  • • •

  I waited until Mom left the house to go grocery shopping before I ate breakfast. Afterward, I went back upstairs, where Mara’s bedroom door was shut tight, with Florence + the Machine blaring behind it.

  I knocked hard, right over the NO DORKY LITTLE BROTHERS ALLOWED sign.

  “What?”

  I opened the door to find her sitting at her desk, laptop open. “I’m coming in.”

  “Are you illiterate, or did my sign fall down?”

  “I’m not little anymore, Mar.”

  She waved me in. “Bring the sign so I can edit it.”

  I pulled it off her door, accidentally ripping it almost in half. “Sorry. Here.”

  Mara took a thick Sharpie from her Air Force Academy mug and crossed out the world “Little” on the sign.

  “Mom says you don’t believe. Not just in the Rush but . . . at all.”

  “Busted.” She carefully taped her sign back together. “Guess I’m a sucky actress.”

  I felt supremely stupid. “You fooled me.”

  “Because you’re a dork, remember?” She tapped the sign. “You want to believe the best about everyone. Or at least what you think is the best.”

  “But when you sing, you sound, I don’t know, holy.”

  “It’s the only time I feel holy. Music is great at making you believe in things that aren’t real. That’s why love songs are so popular.”

  I thought of the playlists Bailey and I had made for each other over the last six months, and the one I made for her before we started going out. How much of our feelings were real, and how much had been musically induced affection?

  No, that was a paranoid way to think. I couldn’t let my faith in everything evaporate.

  “Aren’t you worried about what’ll happen when you die?” I asked Mara. “What if you end up in hell? Won’t you feel sorry?”

  “No,” she snapped. “Because if I were sitting up in heaven knowing that people were suffering for all eternity and there was nothing I could do to help them? That would be the real hell.”

  It seemed logical but made me feel like a jerk. “Sounds like something Bailey would say.”

  “I don’t know why she puts up with you. You’re not that cute.” Mara turned back to her computer. “I am sooooo ready to get out of this house.”

  With every minute, this Abandoning felt less like something I was doing, and more like something that was being done to me.

  “Fine. Just what we need, someone else leaving. We can be the incredible shrinking family!” I stalked out of her room and into my own. But before I could close my door, Mara followed me in.

  “You should get out too,” she said. “Go be a baseball star at some faraway college.”

  “I can’t do that to them! They need me. They need us.”

  “They’re destroying us. And while you’re busy worrying about them, I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m fine.” I sank onto my bed, feeling claustrophobic with her standing between me and the door.

  “You’re this close to cracking.” She held her thumb and forefinger together, with no space between their tips. “Maybe you should go to grief counseling.”

  “I did, remember? We finished.”

  “Did you get a ‘happily ever after’ certificate? Because I didn’t. In fact, I’m pretty sure they said to come back whenever we needed to.”
r />   “It’s probably a whole new grief group now. I’d have to tell my story all over again. I can’t even tell Bailey.”

  “I get that. You had it worse than any of us. But what about a regular counselor, with no group, just one-on-one?”

  “Those cost money. Dad needs it more than I do.”

  Mara threw up her hands and turned to face my open doorway. “I hate that Mom and Dad never talk about John. I hate that they leave his room the way it was.”

  “And with the door always shut.”

  “It makes the hallway so dark.” She picked up my A-10 fighter jet model from the top shelf of my desk.

  “Plus it—it makes it seem haunted, like he could still be in there.”

  Mara raised an eyebrow. “Do you check to make sure he’s not? Like when you were little and you had to look behind shower curtains for vampires?”

  “Werewolves. Geez, Mara, everyone knows vampires are allergic to running water.”

  She laughed. “You may not be little anymore, but you’re still a dork.” She stroked one of the A-10’s ghost-gray wings.

  “Be careful with that. It’s more fragile than it looks.”

  “Sorry.” Mara set down the plane, centering it on the shelf. “If John were here, he’d be laughing at this whole Rush thing.”

  “Probably. But if he were here, they wouldn’t be . . .” My voice trailed off as a horrible realization hit me.

  “They wouldn’t be preparing for the end of the world,” she finished. “Are you okay?”

  I pressed my feet flat against the floor to stop the world from tilting. “I think I get it now. I can see it all from inside their heads.”

  “That’s a scary perspective.”

  “Listen. If John were alive, Mom and Dad would never have fallen for the Rush.”

  “Because they see it as instant grief relief.”

  “Right. But the Rush isn’t only about no more suffering; it’s also about salvation. So maybe to them, his death made our being saved by the Rush possible.”

  She drew in a soft gasp. “You mean, John dying was part of some divine plan?”

  “They’d say he died so that we might live. Our souls, at least. But I guess only if we’re Rushed. Otherwise, his sacrifice is in vain.”

  “No.” Mara covered her face. “How can they even imagine that?”

  “They probably think it gives his meaningless death some meaning. Finally.”

  “David, his death wasn’t meaningless! He died trying to save someone’s life.”

  “Someone who didn’t want to be saved.”

  “Doesn’t matter. He’s still a hero for trying.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “No, I wasn’t. But I know that John would want us all to live.” As she left my room, Mara added over her shoulder, “And not just our souls.”

  CHAPTER 27

  NOW

  Ezra invites the three of us into his cavernous, immaculate kitchen, gives us sodas, and heats up the toaster oven for Bagel Bites.

  “I asked not to be taken.” He scoops dry dog food from a tin into a stainless steel bowl. “Someone needed to keep an eye on Grandmom. She’s in early stage Alzheimer’s, so I go over there every day to make sure she’s okay. But mostly I wanted to stay for Molly.”

  Sitting at his feet, the dog tilts her head at the sound of her name.

  “So you had a choice?” Bailey asks him.

  “Right, because I’m eighteen. Eve didn’t know where they were going. They wouldn’t let us inform any kids, in case they blabbed about it to their friends.” Ezra frowns into the sink as he turns on the water. “She wanted to stay even more than I did. Her sixteenth birthday is next week. She has a million friends. She was just made co-captain of her field hockey team.”

  “Is this the same Eve who was in Math Cave?” I ask him, remembering the antisocial wallflower from last year.

  He gives me a level look. “She’s developed. It’s one reason my parents wanted to take her away.”

  “How much do you know about this place they went?” Mara asks him.

  “Everything, I think, other than where it is. No one knew the coordinates except Sophia and the people who literally helped build it.”

  “Like our dad,” I told him. “And by the way, we have the coordinates. We’ll give them to you if you tell us what you know. Fair exchange?”

  “Hmm.” Ezra adds warm water to the dog dish while Molly paces next to the kitchen island, claws clicking on the stone floor. Then he stirs the food and puts the bowl into a holder about a foot off the ground. We wait, not so patiently, for his answer.

  Finally he turns to us as the dog begins to eat. “I’ll do it. I’m worried about my sister.”

  • • •

  “It’s called ‘Almost Heaven.’ ” Ezra opens his laptop on the kitchen table. “Which makes me think it’s in West Virginia. Because of the John Denver song?”

  Bailey laughs. I make a mental note to look up the reference later. “It’s actually in upstate New York.” That’s as much as I’m willing to give Ezra until he dishes out more information.

  “Ah, that makes sense. Check this out.”

  He shows us a photo of a wooden lodge on the edge of a lake. In the foreground is a rickety dock with a motorboat tied to it, and to either side sit smaller buildings. But in the background . . .

  “Gorgeous mountains.” Bailey leans in, her long braid falling between herself and Ezra, who manages to keep his focus on the screen. Good boy. “Can you e-mail us this picture?”

  “Yeah, but I’ll print it too. You should have a hard copy—there’s no cell phone service or Internet up there, just one satellite phone for emergencies. That’s how remote this place is, according to Dad. He took this picture on his phone, then I snagged a copy over the Wi-Fi when he came back, without him knowing. Up top.” He raises his hand for a self-congratulatory high five, which no one dispenses.

  Ah, there’s the Ezra we know and don’t love.

  “How many can stay at this place?” Mara asks him.

  He lowers his hand. “About a hundred and fifty. I’m not sure if it’s full yet. No roads go there, so they have to transport people in batches by boat or floatplane.”

  “No cars or cell phones?” Bailey says. “Sounds like heaven.”

  “Almost. Hence the name of the place. Mom said Sophia’s followers have been building it for years.”

  “Our dad’s been helping them since October,” I tell him.

  “You’ve all been helping them.” Ezra glances at me, then Mara, who looks as confused as I feel. “Right? Because our family has, and it’s not fair if everyone isn’t making equal sacrifices.”

  I lean in, gripping the back of his chair. “What do you mean, ‘sacrifices’?” The word reminds me of Sophia and all I gave up.

  “We used to go on cruises every year. I was Harvard-bound.” Ezra looks at Molly, who’s curled up on a blue memory-foam orthopedic dog bed. “She needs hip replacement surgery, but we can’t afford it now.”

  “Wait.” Mara slaps the table beside Ezra. “Are you saying our families have given them money? That’s where my college funds went?”

  “So you did contribute. Good.”

  This revelation leaves me speechless. No wonder we got so poor so fast. Funds had been tight since Dad lost his job more than a year ago, but I’d noticed that the stinginess shot up big time after my birthday. Which was exactly when they met Sophia.

  The situation is becoming clearer, but my mind is still fumbling for some basic truth behind it all.

  Of the three of us, Bailey is staying calmest. “Ezra, what were you contributing to? What exactly is Almost Heaven?”

  “Kind of like a commune or one of those crunchy hippie retreat centers where everybody pitches in to support the place—cook, clean, build. You get the idea.”

  Bailey frowns. “Why all this drama for a church retreat? Couldn’t they just say, ‘Hey, we’re taking off for a week. Be back soon’?”r />
  “You don’t get it,” Ezra says. “They’re not coming back. This is where they’ve gone to disappear until the Second Coming.”

  I stare at him. Bailey covers her mouth, then grasps my hand. I must look like I’m about to fall over. It sure feels like it.

  Mara sinks slowly into another kitchen chair. “All this time they knew there was no Rush. How could they lie to us like that, for months?” Her voice catches on a near sob.

  “They did it to all the kids,” Ezra says. “But wait—you guys aren’t eighteen yet. Why aren’t you two with them?”

  “We weren’t home,” I manage to croak out.

  “So you missed the bus, literally.” His little chuckle fades quickly. “Sorry.”

  I close my eyes for a long moment. Don’t freak out here. We need answers. But all I can think about is walking into Mom and Dad’s room and seeing their flat, lifeless facsimiles lying in bed.

  At least that thought gives me another question for Ezra. “Did your parents leave their clothes behind?”

  “They left a lot of clothes behind. There were strict limits on what they could bring.”

  “No, I mean, did they leave clothes together in an outfit to make it look like they’d been taken?”

  He laughs. “No. Why would they do that?” He figures it out for himself. “Oh, to make people believe the Rapture happened. My parents knew I wasn’t exactly going to shout it from the rooftops that they were gone. So there was no one here to fool.”

  “What about other Rushers?” Mara asks him. Her breathing is near normal again and her eyes are dry. “Did you meet any of them? Do you know where we can find them?”

  “No. I wasn’t invited to the meetings. Hey, if you do go to Almost Heaven, don’t tell them I gave you all this intelligence. My parents might get in trouble.”

  “We won’t tell.” Her eyes narrow in anger. “Besides, I have half a mind to let Mom and Dad rot in that place, so we can get on with our lives.”

  Part of me agrees with her, and envies Ezra for being old enough to live on his own. But the Deckers’ house feels so huge and empty. I never thought I’d miss the sound of my dad shuffling around, or his Bible-verse spouting, or my mom’s off-tune hymn humming.