Love Is More Than Skin Deep (A Hidden Hearts Novel Book 4)

by Mary Crawford

  “I did try to warn you that I have several occupational hazards,” I tease.

  Shelby pops another French fry in her mouth as she leans back in the wrought iron chair and crosses her arms and waits for me to speak. “I’ve got to hear how you think math is going to save me from skin cancer,” she challenges.

  “I don’t know that math is going to do any of that. However, breaking your problem down into small pieces might make it easier to handle. For example, you said that you don’t have anybody in your life that cares about you. I happen to know that that’s wrong. Jade and Rogue are very concerned about you. Come to think of it, so am I. By my count, that makes at least three of us and I bet by the response that you got a few weeks ago at the shop that there are probably several more people who care about you. That number doesn’t even include the people that you went to school with or the people that live near you, or the people that you’ve worked with —”

  “Mark, what kind of person you do think I am?” Shelby exclaims shaking her head in disbelief. “I can’t take advantage of people like that. I don’t know these people. I just wandered into Ink’d Deep a few weeks ago to get a tattoo. These people don’t know me from Adam. They certainly don’t owe me anything,”

  “What if they want to help?” I argue.

  “Why would they want to do that?” she counters. “People just aren’t that nice — unless they want something.”

  “What if they were?” I press.

  Shelby grows quiet for a moment before she answers, “I don’t know that I could trust that.”

  “Shelby, I know you don’t know me very well, but I have reason to believe that we have many connections between our souls. Can you find it in yourself to trust me?”

  I inwardly cringe as the words come out of my mouth, I don’t know what I’m actually saying, but that doesn’t stop me. I watch as an expression of disbelief crosses her face and then something akin to resignation follows.

  Finally, she’s slowly nods as she responds, “I don’t know why I’m even saying this, but I think I can trust you.”

  I’M STILL NOT SURE what happened to me that night. One moment I was having an existential meltdown next to a couple smelly dumpsters, and the next minute my life was being systematically put back together by the singularly best-looking man I have ever seen in my entire life. He didn’t even seem to notice that I was a sniveling mess of snot and tears. How he could’ve missed that, I’m not exactly sure. In retrospect, I’m just glad he didn’t make a big deal out of it.

  It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. I went inside Ink’d Deep to wash my hands and by the time I was done, it appeared that several people had a committee meeting about me and essentially sorted out my entire life. Some people might have taken exception to that level of planning — but at this point, everything is out of my control and I am grateful that anyone actually cares enough to step up and do something to help me.

  Apparently, Jade’s parents want to do some traveling and they would like someone to live on their property. They’re willing to let me live there in exchange for me keeping an eye on their pets and plants while they’re gone. It seems almost too good to be true — there must be a catch. When I ask Jade about it, she just quietly smiles and says, “I went through a dark stage as a teenager. Some of the posters are pretty creepy, you’ll probably have to redecorate my room.”

  If that weren’t enough, Jade’s mom, Diamond, told me about some volunteer opportunities at the library where I would be able to use my teaching degree. When I expressed concerns about my ability to work consistently because of the cancer, Diamond just hugged me and said that they would work around whatever schedule I was able to work. It’s not the job that I wanted, and it’s not a paid opportunity, but it’s better than moping around at home watching game shows and soap operas. It’s the first time since I got my diagnosis that I have hope that I might have some semblance of normalcy in my everyday life.

  I look across the car at Mark as he weaves his way through traffic. “You didn’t really have to do this, I could’ve caught the bus or something,” I comment. “I thought you had a trial today.”

  “I did, but the docket got rearranged because the other side is bringing in an expert witness and they weren’t available.”

  “What happens when I have an appointment and your schedule doesn’t get conveniently rearranged?” I challenge.

  “I’ll figure something out,” Mark answers with a shrug. “I have to do that all the time with Ketki. It comes with the territory of being a single dad.”

  “But… Mark …argh,” I sputter with frustration. “I’m not your kid. I’m some random stranger you literally picked up off the ground, you don’t have to do all this for me,” I argue.

  “Shelby, I can’t explain it, but I need to be here. Since the first time I saw you at Ink’d, I knew you’d be in my life.”

  I curl away from him and face toward the door. His words frighten me — they are too much like the words Josiah Frachcett used to lure my parents away from reality. I know that too many sweet words, charm and charisma can cost lives. I might be deathly ill, but I’m not stupid enough to fall into that trap. I won’t be gullible like my parents; I’ve come too far. I’ve worked too hard. I cannot be like the little girl I once was.

  Just then, the car ahead of us abruptly stops. Mark throws his arm out to shield me from the dashboard. It’s a sweet gesture but, completely unnecessary. I am a compulsive seatbelt wearer. I spent too many years being bounced around in the back of a bus to forgo the luxury of being secure in my seat.

  Mark takes a good look at me after we are stopped in traffic. “What’s wrong? You’re extremely pale — are you feeling ill?” he asks, his voice laced with concern.

  It’s a funny thing about living on the edge of not knowing whether you’re close to dying. You get a little braver and tend to say the things that you might not otherwise say.

  I blow my bangs out of my eyes as I respond, “I guess you can say an unhappy trip down memory lane caught up with me for a second.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Mark.

  “I’d tell you, but I think we’re probably almost to the hospital and it’s going to take more time than that.”

  Mark sits up a little taller in the driver’s seat and cranes his neck. He turns to me with a frown as he reports, “I hate to break it to you, but I think we’re going to be here for a little bit.”

  “Oh no, what about my appointment?” I fret, as I nervously shake my Diet Mountain Dew. The ice melted long ago. Now I’m just fidgeting.

  “As backed up as the freeway is, I suspect that the personnel at the hospital already knows. You can call them and let them know to be sure.”

  “I think I’ll do that,” I offer. Unfortunately, when I try to call the doctor’s office, I hear nothing but a busy signal.

  Mark sees my frustration and he just takes my drink from me and makes a motion for me to hand him my phone. “Relax, no one is going anywhere fast. I think we’re going to be here for a while. They will understand; if you’re late, chances are, some of the doctors are going to be late too. I wouldn’t worry about it; If you can’t get through, you can’t get through.”

  "The last thing I can afford to do right now is pick up charges for an appointment I don't attend.”

  “Look at this place. It’s like a parking lot. If the hospital tries to bill you, perhaps a letter from Hunters Crossing will set them straight. It’s likely that dozens and dozens of people won’t be able to make their appointments. You won’t be alone. If I had to guess, I would say that a fair amount of staff won’t be there either.”

  I run my hands through my hair and take a sip of my drink before I turn toward him and try again to explain, “See, that’s just it Mark. You can’t fix this with poetic, charming, powerful, preachy words. This is cancer. Today, I take one more step toward figuring out whether this crap is going to kill me. Do you get that? Kill me. As in dead, d-e-a-d, de
ad. You can’t sweet talk my cells into behaving. The damage is done. All those idiotic trips to the tanning beds and the time I spent baking myself on the beach — don’t you think I feel stupid now? All I wanted to do was fit in as a teenager and now there’s a really good chance I’m going to die for my choices.”

  “Shelby, how many opinions have you gotten, does this guy even know what he’s doing? Have you consulted the top expert in the field? You can’t know this yet. Maybe he’s a quack. You have to think positive about this. I know Jade’s mom has worn through a set of rosary beads praying for you.”

  “Sorry to break it to you, Counselor, but for me the jury is still out whether I believe in church or in prayer and all that jazz. All I’ve seen it do is create death and destruction. If other people want to believe in all that stuff, more power to them. I’m not sure all that stuff is for me.”

  It’s clear that Mark isn’t prepared for the tone of my voice. His eyes are wide and he just blinks as he absorbs the pain and vitriol I’ve been storing up for days.

  I’m on too much of a roll to stop now, so I continue, “As far as whether I believe the doctors about the diagnosis; just look at me compared to you. Do you see what I see? I am a walking poster child for risk factors for skin cancer, from my light hair and eyes to my skin, which is several shades paler than yours. When I was younger, I never used sunscreen. My parents didn’t believe in it. They thought that it blocked the vitamins from the sun and when I became a teenager, I actually thought that getting a ritualistic burn at the beginning of every summer was a good thing because it would encourage me to tan later. In high school, my friends and I would use baby oil to increase the chances of burning ourselves.” My speech trails off as I run out of steam.

  “I’ll admit that those factors don’t sound ideal, but you don’t know the whole picture yet. Cancer treatment has come a long way in recent years,” Mark argues. “You’re young and otherwise healthy, right?”

  I groan as I respond, “Thanks for reminding me. I just turned twenty-eight last week. I’m not even thirty years old yet and I might have to plan my own funeral. Doesn’t that just suck monkey balls?”

  “Oh, look at you..still in your twenties. I feel positively ancient. I just hit thirty-five a couple months ago. Everybody in my office wants to throw me an over-the-hill party,” he teases, before growing serious. “Actually, it does really suck. Cancer is terrible, regardless of how old you are. I’m sorry that you’re even having to deal with this. We should be having a huge graduation party for you, not heading to the doctor.”

  I blush as I admit, “Would you believe that the little impromptu celebration at Ink’d Deep was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a party?”

  Mark’s eyebrows raise in surprise as he asks, “Really? You didn’t even have parties as a kid? Everybody has parties as a kid — not even Chuck E. Cheese?”

  I shake my head as I answer, “No, my parents had some rather unconventional beliefs. At first, I think it was just a matter of poverty, but then, as their belief-paradigm began to shift, more and more things that you’d normally associate with childhood began to fall away.”

  “What do you mean?” Mark asks, moving the car forward a few feet before he has to stop again.

  “I have vague memories of starting out in a pretty normal house, but it didn’t stay that way for long,” I start to explain. “I know we used to walk my big sister to school when my mom was pregnant with my little brother. I remember running home from school and my mom trying to cover her head with newspaper.”

  “It’s funny what we remember from our childhood, isn’t it?” Mark remarks.

  I nod as I continue my story, “Then something happened and my dad stopped working. He bought an old school bus and we started moving from town to town in the bus. My dad was a pretty good handyman and he used to get jobs here and there helping to remodel people’s homes. Something occurred during Owen’s birth and he seemed to struggle from the start.”

  “Wow, that must’ve been tough,” Mark comments with sympathy in his voice.

  “I was pretty little, I didn’t know what was happening, really. I just knew that Owen was more like one of my play dolls than a real baby. In the beginning, he didn’t even cry much. Suddenly, my parents went on this epic quest to fix Owen. My dad stopped working altogether and we just traveled from church to church looking for prayer services and revival meetings. Sometimes my sister Savannah and I would have to walk around the town asking people for things to eat. Of course, back then I was so little I thought it was like a game of hide and seek. I wasn’t old enough to understand the social implications of what I was doing, but Savannah—she’s five years older than I am—understood that we were basically panhandling and she was never okay with that.”

  “Where is your family now?” Mark inquires as we pull up into the parking garage.

  “I honestly don’t know. I haven’t heard from my parents in years, and it seems like my sister dropped off the face of the planet.” My voice drops to a whisper as I add, “Owen is buried somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia. They just left him far behind because we didn’t have a permanent home.”

  “What you mean? You just graduated from college —weren’t they there? Shelby, what happened to your brother?”

  I look around at our surroundings and calculate the amount of time we have until we reach the door. There really is no way to put my life story into a nutshell, but the look of intense curiosity on Mark’s face tells me that he’s not going to let this go anytime soon.

  “You’ve probably seen people like this on the news—you may have even seen my parents—I don’t know. A lot of people don’t even remember how crazy it was back during Y2K, but my parents went absolutely nuts. I told you that they were going from place to place trying to find someone to fix Owen. Eventually they settled for this charismatic preacher— a cult leader, really— named Josiah Frachett. He was exotic with a foreign accent. He could speak several languages — or at least pretend to with enough bravado that everyone believed him. He was suave and debonair and he could recite the Bible with astounding ease; he made it sound like lines of poetry.”

  “Your parents didn’t know about Jim Jones or Heaven’s Gate?” Mark asks incredulously.

  “I honestly don't know what they knew back then. Reverend Josiah kept members of the congregation from talking to outsiders and sometimes each other. The longer my family followed The Righteous Universe Calling, the more bizarre the ministry became. He taught them to be afraid of all books, magazines and television — especially the news. All medical intervention from the outside was forbidden because Reverend Josiah began teaching that the world was going to end in the year 2000 and that in the kingdom of God, He would want our bodies unsullied by the hands of mankind.”

  Mark visibly winces as he softly inquires, “Your brother?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. Savannah had the most responsibility for him, but he was always pretty weak. It could’ve been a seizure, an allergic reaction or maybe even an infection. I think that if we had gotten him some proper medical help, he would have lived. Anyway, it was the beginning of the end of our family. After Owen died, my family could no longer hide from the authorities and they came in and took me away. Apparently, Savannah was old enough to make her own decision. To this day, I don’t know what that decision was. My parents elected to stay with the Righteous Universe Calling. I wasn't even allowed to go to Owen’s funeral. Suddenly, I was alone in the world.”

  Mark shakes his head in disbelief as he comments, “That’s terrible. No child should be left alone in the world because of a parent’s poor decisions. I’m sorry you lost your brother; that must’ve been awful.”

  “It was really hard on Savannah and me. My parents had pretty much left the raising of Owen up to us after they got involved with Reverend Josiah. We felt really guilty that he died, but we didn’t have the tools to save him because we weren’t going to school and didn’t have any access to the information we
needed to keep him safe.”

  “I’m surprised that your parents weren’t criminally charged for negligent manslaughter in the death of your brother,” Mark declares angrily.

  “Perhaps with today’s social media, more would’ve been done, but you have to remember this happened sixteen years ago. There just wasn’t the public pressure to pursue it. The authorities chalked it up to a religious decision and once they decided I was safe and my sister was old enough to fend for herself there was no motivation to take things further. After my parents disappeared back into the streets with Reverend Josiah — they just let the matter drop,” I explain with a shrug.

  “Aren’t you angry that there was no justice for your brother? That just doesn’t seem fair,” Mark argues. As I watched the passion flare in his eyes, I can see why he’s probably such an effective attorney. I can almost see legal arguments forming in his mind as he asks me questions. It’s fascinating to see how quickly he’s jumped to my defense.

  I sigh as I admit, “I’m finding very little seems fair in my life.”

  When we finally made it to the hospital and Mark stops to wait for the gate to go up at the parking lot. He pulls his sporty little car into a spot and throws it into Park. He walks around the car and opens the door for me. When someone’s car alarm goes off in the parking garage and scares me, he puts his arm around my shoulder and soothes, “Immokalee, easy I’ve got you. It was just a really loud car horn.”

  Given my notorious love of freedom, his arm should feel more like a trap and less like a warm embrace. Yet, as I snuggle closer to his side, I’m in no hurry to leave the cocoon of his rock-solid presence.

  I PLAYED A LITTLE FOOTBALL in high school. As an attorney and a single dad, I consider myself to be pretty tough, but after that visit with the plastic surgeon, I realize I’ve got no idea what it means to be tough. I can’t even fathom the idea that Shelby was planning to do this by herself. Had the medical office not put the brakes on her plan, she was planning to drive herself to her appointment — or more precisely, she was planning to ride a bicycle. As I watch her restlessly sleeping in the passenger seat, I am glad I was my usual insistent self. Sometimes, pushy works.