“You are doing me a great favor by covering this story,” Willow said, as she pulled away, nodding to a guard who was about to remind her of the rules for touching visitors. “And I believe you are also learning some things from these questions that you should pursue for yourself, gifts God has given you, gifts that it’s time for you to accept and begin to practice.”
Anna listened intently for a few seconds when she recognized those words stirring a deep feeling in her. She also recognized a connection with things people at her church had already said.
“Thanks. That means a lot coming from you,” Anna said, finally.
And You Visited Me
Alone again in her cell after another cellmate came and went, Willow settled back into her monastic life. Cricket had been released on a technicality, which she attributed to Willow’s prayers, and Grace had been granted bail after her preliminary hearing.
With Cricket and Grace now gone, Willow felt the pain of her confinement more tightly than any time before. Standing in her cell after another inconclusive phone call from Kellan, she sighed voluminously for one so slim. She tugged her heart away from the fear that justice would never find its way to her.
That night, just before lights-out, Willow lay in her bunk as usual, reading and praying. Focused on the inner voice of God to which she constantly returned and by which she constantly tuned herself, she thought she heard a sound beneath her. A splash of excitement ran up her back. She could feel someone move slightly on the lower bunk. Rolling quickly to look down, she saw two legs sticking out, as if someone sat below her. Those legs weren’t wearing the standard issue jail uniform. She knew it wasn’t another prisoner, somehow snuck into her cell. Then she discarded her second thought, that it was Jesus, just as he had visited her in her bedroom at home.
Poking her head further over the edge she looked at the foreign body that had invaded her cell. When she reached the rumpled, ruddy face of Bobby Nightingale, she swore in a hoarse whisper.
Laughter rumbled from beneath her as Willow laid her head on the edge of her bunk, her eyes closed.
“I knew you had it in you, kid,” said her uninvited guest, referring to Willow’s escaped expletive.
Bobby Nightingale looked to be somewhere between forty and sixty years old. His playful vitality favored the lower of those two numbers, his broken fingernails, red leather skin and scarred face favored the higher.
Willow had met him only once before, and knew of him as a man who had experienced more miraculous phenomena than anyone she had ever heard of. Those experiences included being transported supernaturally from one place to another, like Philip in The Book of The Acts of the Apostles. She had heard stories of, and met a number of other people, who had witnessed similar divine transportation.
Bobby Nightingale was apparently having one of those experiences just then.
“Why are you here?” Willow said, immediately regretting blurting what sounded like a rude question.
Bobby didn’t flinch. “ ‘Cause all your angels are busy fightin’ the whole U.S. government to get you outta here, of course.” He laughed, a laugh that could have either been insane or hilarious. Either way, Willow couldn’t tell the extent to which he as joking.
Before she replied, Bobby popped another joke. “Actually, I was so desperate to get a prophetic word from you, I got myself arrested and thrown in here.”
Willow had caught up now. “And the miracle is that they believed you’re a woman,” she said, pulling her head back and sitting up in her bed. She was wearing just a t-shirt and underwear, so she wasn’t going to climb down to greet her guest.
Bobby laughed hard, making no effort to disguise his presence in the women’s section of the Palos Heights city jail. He climbed off the bunk and leaned casually against the opposite wall, facing Willow. He smiled at the red creases made by her sheets on her fair skin, all the paler for it being winter and Willow being confined indoors all day.
“Are you here to tell me jokes?” Willow said with a smile. She was mostly joking herself, but wouldn’t discard the possibility that God sent Bobby there just to cheer her up. In her mind, that wasn’t out of the question.
Bobby sobered up. “Well, when he told me I was comin’ here, I assumed it was ‘cause you needed some company. My thought is that you been prayin’ by yerself too long and God wanted me to have a little prayer meetin’ with ya. He’d’a’ sent someone you know better, but none of them are ready for a trip like this, I guess.”
Willow was fascinated in multiple directions at once. But the first thing that came to mind was, “What about transporting me outta here with you?”
“You assume I’m leaving? No, I think this looks pretty nice. I may stick around.” He winked at her, and chuckled like an old motor winding down.
Willow knew Bobby had spent much of his life on the streets, sleeping in a car if he had one, or in an abandoned building, uncounted nights. He wasn’t kidding about the accommodations, comparing them to what he had seen in slimmer days.
Ignoring the joke about staying, however, Willow moved on to another question. “Did some of the people I know refuse when offered the opportunity?” she said, referring to what he said about them not being ready for miraculous transportation yet.
Bobby laughed. “I don’t think so. Papa knows what us kids can take, without asking. On the other hand, I suppose some might have had the thought pop into their heads, and just assumed it was too many science fiction movies that inspired it, not the spirit.”
Willow pondered that for a moment. Then she responded to another thing Bobby said. “So what are we supposed to be interceding for, do you think?” She had an idea, but wanted his honest answer.
“Oh, I leave that to you. That’s closer to your realm than mine,” Bobby said.
Willow loved the way that Bobby spoke to her as a peer. He assumed things that she understood immediately, and every glance and smile said, “We are not alike, but we are both in this one hundred percent, and both have authority and power to make things happen. I’m as willing to rely on you as I am for you to rely on me.” Her conversation with Lila about finding a man worth marrying zipped through her mind. She boosted it on past.
Willow offered her answer. “For its own good, the government has to allow that there are sources of knowledge beyond what their investigations can discover. We can’t have prophetic insights disabled in the fight against pain and death. We’re on the same side.”
“Sounds right to me,” Bobby said. Then, without further arrangements he started talking to someone not visible in the room.
“So, Papa, did she get it right? Is that what we’re bringin’ today?” And they both paused to listen for the answer.
A chill ran down Willow’s back and Bobby wriggled his shoulders at exactly the same time, clearly feeling the same confirmation.
“Alright, Father,” Willow said. “I accept your assignment, and I release freedom and acceptance for your truth, for your words, your revelation, even at the highest levels of law enforcement. I accept, for all of the prophetically gifted brothers and sisters, courage to take the risk, and willingness to see into the messiest messes people are making around the world.”
“Umhm, umhm,” Bobby said with resonant conviction in his agreement. “Yeah, that’s the thing. I feel it. Yep! Let it come!”
Though she didn’t spend much time worrying about it later, Willow couldn’t tell at the time whether it was just her or whether the entire jail cell was rocking for a few seconds, as she and Bobby connected with what God was sending, and received it for people all over the world, people they knew and people ten thousand miles from where they would ever be.
They remained silent for nearly minute, neither one strained by the silence. The spirit alive in each of them recognized the same spirit in the other, and that familiarity allowed them complete comfort with each other. Sometimes words aren’t necessary.
Bobby took a deep breath. “You passed the test, kid. You know Papa want
ed exactly what you prayed, but you didn’t have the authority to pray it until you submitted to this nonsense.” He gestured as if to include the whole story of Willow’s spurious arrest in the walls of that cell.
“It’s so generous of him to send you in here to be with me. He’s so good to me.” Willow leaned forward and reached out her arms.
Bobby knew an invitation to a hug, and guessed Willow’s reasons for not leaving her bunk. He stepped up to the edge of her bed. Not as tall as Lila, it was an awkward hug for Bobby, but very welcomed by both of them.
The exchange of smiles was a bit more uncomfortable than the joint authoritative prayers had been, however. Willow was not the only one who had devoted her life so thoroughly to spiritual things that she had missed some of the refinements of human social interaction.
Bobby cleared his throat as a transition. “Well, this is where we find out if I was just kiddin’ about staying on here.” He chuckled like a grandfather at Christmas. He looked at Willow and adopted an attitude of uncertainty, his lips askew and one eyebrow raised. “What happens if I can transport in and can’t transport out?” he said, nodding slowly.
“I think you can do it,” Willow said with a peaceful smile. And with that, Bobby waved at her once and disappeared.
A Little Romance
During that week before her next hearing, Willow’s mother visited. Only Claudia knew the irony of that visit. She had left Kansas to flee the influence of relatives who frequently landed in jail, among other infamies. Claudia had always refused to visit her cousins or nephews when they spent time in the county jail. And she grew so tired of them that she eventually moved to be nearer her daughter, who she assumed would be a better influence on her.
Claudia claimed to understand the difference, to sympathize with Willow’s cause, but Willow felt that her mother was hanging back, waiting to judge what had happened, as if she needed the federal court system to assure her that her daughter was a person worth knowing.
Throughout her life, from the time she could formulate the thought, Willow had known that she couldn’t trust her mother to always be on her side, or even to sympathize with her. That recollection, rubbing up against Willow’s conversation with Lila about the vacuum of romance in her life, revived a memory from when she was fourteen years old, before her life turned into hell on Earth.
Always too awkward and distracted to be very popular in school, Willow still managed to catch the attention of boys as soon as they started paying attention to girls in general. For reasons she couldn’t even guess, Willow often attracted the lingering gazes of older boys. Something about that felt dangerous to her when she was twelve and thirteen, even then doubting the wisdom of getting in cars with sixteen-year-old boys. But, by the time she was fourteen, Willow began to soften her resolve against climbing into a souped-up car with one of the latest crop of new drivers.
Kevin Miller was a kid whom Willow had seen in church on the irregular visits she made to the white clapboard building near the end of Main Street. Two years older, Kevin would generally be in a different Sunday school class, even if multiple grades were combined in the little church, because those combined grades generally were divided by gender. Willow watched Kevin from a distance back then. Her mother had stopped taking her to church by the time she was eleven, so Willow attended even less often, and saw less of Kevin.
When she was thirteen, however, Karen Sterling invited Willow to a youth rally to be held in their little church, and Willow liked Karen, even though they weren’t good friends. Karen’s motive for inviting Willow had more to do with winning points for her team in some attendance contest than with a desire to spend time with Willow.
The contest succeeded, in that it packed so many teens into the church building that they had to share seats, and chairs had to be added behind the pews and in the aisles. With no intent on her part, as people shuffled and squeezed into available space, Willow ended up squashed against Kevin Miller. Their row was so tight that Kevin had to reach his long arms over the backs of the chairs on either side, there being no room for the shoulders of everyone sardined into those seats. An arm even loosely around Willow would not have been allowed under normal circumstances in that church. But the organizers were celebrating their abundance of attendees and not paying heed to more mundane concerns, including fire codes.
Throughout the meeting—singing songs from an overhead projector, listening to an imported youth speaker, and counting up what team won the attendance contest—Willow was aware of the warm presence of Kevin Miller pressed against her. She noticed it more than the presence of Valerie Cates on the other side of her. As far as she could tell, Kevin seemed to enjoy it as well, only feigning annoyance at such a tight crowd. Whenever he did sigh, or try to wriggle for a more comfortable position, Kevin looked to his right, where Dennis Schultz’s round little body was squashed against him.
The disadvantage of this awkwardly forced proximity, however, was to kill normal conversation. On the other hand, Willow didn’t normally have extended friendly conversations with boys, so a normal conversation was an unfamiliar phenomenon to her, anyway.
By the end of the evening, Willow felt sure that Kevin knew that she liked sitting so close to him, and equally sure that he had communicated the same to her, though the dialog consisted more of furtive glances and of tentative sighs than actual words. But, as soon as the meeting ended, Kevin seemed to disappear. Willow had no idea how or why, whether intentionally escaping her, or preoccupied by some other obligations. At school, over the following days and weeks, Willow tried to make eye contact with Kevin, whenever the opportunity arose, and he never avoided her. But the relationship didn’t get off the launch pad that year.
As her figure began to fill out a bit, a phenomenon that was noticeable only in relation to her stick-like figure during her preadolescent years, Willow had to more aggressively fend off the attentions of older boys. They seemed attracted to her serious face and exotically blue eyes, on top of her girlish body that was just beginning to hint of approaching womanhood. That she was not known to be a prudish religious type, fed the assumption among the boys in school that Willow would let them explore more than her mysterious personality.
In October of her freshman year, this attention had raised Willow’s anxiety level to the point that she tried to stay home from school as often as possible. She did, however, attend the homecoming football game that month, persuaded by her two best friends at the time, Lisa and Marleen. Later in her life, Willow could barely remember anything about her friendship with Lisa or Marleen. She only remembered that later Marleen had to drop out of school to have a baby, and Lisa moved away when her parents divorced. What she did remember clearly from that football game was the way Kevin Miller rescued her from a dark and dread fate, which she couldn’t even imagine at the time. Later, she would appreciate that brief season of innocence, knowing it was best for that fourteen-year-old girl to not know what might have befallen her.
Rick Downs and Mike Davis had been teasing and stalking Willow throughout the game. During half-time, she got separated from her friends behind the bleachers and felt the strong grip of both boys, one on each of her arms, tugging her behind the concession stand. Though Rick and Mike were popular boys, Willow was more frightened of what they would do to her than tempted to gain popularity by trying to please them.
As Willow began to escalate her protests, Rick and Mike both checked to see who might have noticed. Simultaneously, they let go of her and stepped a whole yard away from Willow when they caught sight of Kevin Miller bearing down on them with aggressive intent in his eyes. Kevin was bigger and more athletic than either of the other two boys, a member of the varsity basketball team and a working farm boy. But size is not all that wins such confrontations. The attitude of her rescuer, forehead down, eyes locked and fists clenched, won the day.
“You guys get lost,” Kevin said, his voice loud and commanding.
If they had been more insightful and less terrified,
the other two boys would have realized that Kevin’s wide eyes and extra loud voice betrayed his fear. But his two rivals saw his display only as intimidation, and lacked the courage to test him.
After her deliverance by Kevin’s hand, Willow felt even shyer. She knew she owed Kevin something but wasn’t sure what. How to interact with men or boys had baffled her for years. Her father had moved away when she was four years old. Neither of her grandfathers had played a role in her life, and her mother’s brother was often gone, in prison as she learned later. With no brothers of her own, men and boys remained a dark mystery to her. But Kevin had reached into her world and she thrilled at his invasion, at the same time that she instinctively sought distance.
When Willow felt Rick and Mike release her arms, she immediately pivoted around behind Kevin. After seeing his rivals off, Kevin turned to check if Willow had simply run away. Finding her wide-eyed and breathless, waiting behind him, pushed a grin onto his face, in spite of all the social weight leaning toward keeping aloof and unmoved, even in pursuit of a girl. As only young teens can, they walked together toward the football game without approaching within a yard of each other.
Willow said a simple, “Thanks.”
Kevin replied in kind. “You’re welcome.”
To Willow, he didn’t sound bold or triumphant, perhaps even striking a shy note himself. What do you do, after all, once you’ve freed the maiden from the dragon? Little boys never practice that part, unless, of course, little girls get involved in their game.
A follow-up move, however, did occur to Kevin after they waded into the crowd flowing from the concession stand toward the bleachers.
“Save me a seat?” he said. He turned his feet back toward the concession stand and the smell of fresh popcorn on that cool autumn night. When Willow nodded slightly before renewing her pace toward the bleachers, Kevin knew he had won the day. Popcorn and sodas would serve to celebrate that fact.
The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2) Page 13
