Vacationing with her mother would have seemed a crumpling and cramped prospect in earlier years, one justified more recently as she became reacquainted with her waxen-souled mom, who strained to straddle the desire to remain unquestioned and independent along with the urge to control and criticize her offspring. But Willow had heard clearly that she should sail the Caribbean for ten days with her mother and receive the solar charge of the time away from pressure, pain and prison.
Standing in line at Denver Airport, ten days later in a long, snaking queue of strangers dressed for a whole range of seasons, they awaited their security screening. Claudia fidgeted so much that Willow began to think that her mother would be flagged as a suspicious traveler, perhaps concealing explosives in her poufy white hair. Though she rarely spent extended time with someone so nervous, Willow knew how to keep the tension from soaking into herself. What she didn’t know was what to do or say to help her mother relax. When she prayed for an answer to that question, all that came to mind was to set the example and hope that her own languid demeanor would infect her mother.
Claudia had been saving for a vacation, but Willow still had to cover a large fraction of her mother’s expenses. She didn’t mind. Taking care of her elderly mother was a given now; all that remained were the details.
“I really do appreciate you takin’ me along like this,” Claudia said, after Willow prayed for her increased peace.
Willow smiled, thinking gratitude was an answer to prayer.
But Claudia continued. “I just hope you’re not gonna get tired of me before the whole thing’s over.” A cloud crossed that beam of sunshine.
Still smiling, Willow said. “Well, it’s a big ship. We don’t have to do everything together. We’ll just go day by day and do what we each want, together or apart.”
The average daughter would probably have tried to reassure her mother that she would not get tired of the old girl. But Willow assumed that Claudia was projecting her own fear—fear that she would get tired of being with Willow. Though, like your average mother, Claudia was very unlikely to say it that way.
“So, if you’re hard to find, I’ll know you had enough,” Claudia said, in that tone which seemed to reserve the minority possibility that she was just kidding. Willow knew Claudia had serious concerns, thus the fidgeting.
Just as Willow expected, on board the ship, they discovered ways to have time together, as well as time on their own. Part of the motivation to stick together arose from repeated experiences of various men trying to endear themselves to each of the single women. As a pair, they felt less like vulnerable prey.
Without great forethought or calculation, Willow discovered a rhythm that lulled her restlessness and soothed her scars beyond the promises of spas and resorts, and even cruise lines. In the morning, Willow would rise from her narrow bed beneath the bulk of the shuttering, shifting ship, in the total darkness of a cabin with no windows, and would sneak free of her mother’s orbit into the brightly lit and tropically decorated hallway, on her way to a brisk walk around the promenade deck, two flights of stairs above her. Finding time alone was as simple as rising forty-five minutes before Claudia. Reuniting for breakfast fulfilled the purpose of traveling with her mother.
The second day at sea, they settled down at a small table on the aft deck, under a giant awning that blocked direct sun later in the day and tunneled the wind from the sea across them in the morning. In that mischievous wind Willow had to surrender her straw hat and place it on the chair next to her. Claudia just screwed her white, floppy hat down tighter.
The two women had acquired the last visible empty table on the full ship during breakfast rush hour. An extra chair, however, attracted a hopeful inquiry from a woman in her sixties with short blond hair, cut like a helmet made of feathers. The morning wind ruffled those feathers as she stood next to their table taking one last doubtful look around the deck.
“I wonder if you wouldn’t mind me joining you?” she said in a distinctly Australian accent.
Willow glanced at Claudia before answering. “Not at all. Pull up a chair.”
That Willow had booked a cruise proves the degree to which she had overcome her nurtured tendency to see all strangers as dangerous, or at least dubious. Having gotten this far, she wasn’t inclined to retreat into her natural shell, though she did allow that her mother might not be so gregariously inclined.
“Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I was about to try eating standing up,” said the woman with a teasing laugh.
“I’m Willow, and this is my mother, Claudia.” Willow nodded to their guest and then toward her mother.
“I’m Jeanie,” said the guest. “From Canberra, Australia.”
“I thought I recognized the accent,” Willow said, before returning to her fruit plate.
“Yeah, hard to hide. You American, then?”
Claudia spoke up, “Yes. From Colorado these days.”
“Oh, it’s so beautiful there.”
“I visited Australia once,” Willow said. “I thought Sydney and the coast north of there were beautiful.”
“Yeah,” said Jeannie. “I love the coast. We get there as often as we can.”
“You married?” Claudia said, noting the plural pronoun in the previous statement.
“No, actually, I was thinking of me and my mother. We travel together lots. I’m here with my kids just now, taking this big trip to the other side of the world for a change. But normally I travel with Mum. She wasn’t up to the long flight up here.”
Claudia nodded as she crunched into a hash-brown potato patty.
Willow replied after looking up briefly. “I’m thinking you were married once, and there was a tragedy in your family that was just too much for your husband.” She looked at Jeannie more intensely now.
The Aussie was staring with her fork three quarters of the way to her mouth. “How did you know that?”
Claudia piped in, a modicum of pride in her voice. “Oh, she can do things like that, tell you stuff about your life that you never told her. It’s her gift.”
Though it was a bit crude, Willow was grateful for Claudia’s explanation. It freed her to stay with the meat of her message.
“He blamed you for the loss of your son,” Willow said. “And you accepted the blame more than you should have. The boy was adventurous, that wasn’t your fault.”
Jeanie tried to gracefully return her fork to her plate but banged it and let it clatter against the table. She looked like she was going to ask something, her eyebrows hunkered into a question-mark, but the impact of what Willow was saying overwhelmed the oddity of her knowing so much about Jeannie’s story.
“Oh, my.” Jeanie covered her mouth with both hands. Her wounded eyes latched onto Willow as they filled with tears. “You’re so right. We encouraged Roger to be adventurous, to not be afraid of things. His father did that even more than me. How could it be my fault?” A purging verse of sobs followed. Now she held her whole face in those shaky hands.
Willow unrolled a white cloth napkin from an extra set of silverware, tugging it free from its origami folds and pressing it against the back of Jeanie’s near hand.
“God holds none of that against you, not Roger’s death, not accepting the blame, not fighting with your husband. You are completely free, Jeanie.” Her low and comforting voice carried the authority of certainty, as Willow brought peace into the turmoil that her words had awakened.
“Oh, my God,” Jeanie said, her voice muffled by her hands and now the addition of the napkin. She repeated that exclamation over and over.
Claudia was very aware of the awkwardness of Jeanie’s public display of emotion. People passing them and folks at nearby tables were glancing toward the three women and then suddenly finding very fascinating things to look at elsewhere on the deck. Willow stayed focused on Jeanie, reaching a hand over to grasp one of her wrists. Claudia was just glad it wasn’t her making such a scene.
As Jeanie began to recover control, a woman
in her thirties approached the table holding two plates full of breakfast. She seemed to have forgotten breakfast, however, staring instead at Jeanie.
“Mum? Are you all right? What’s happened?” she said in an accent similar to Jeanie’s.
Jeanie looked at her daughter-in-law just as one of her granddaughters pulled up behind her mother.
“Gramma?” said the ten-year-old girl with a blonde ponytail.
Jeanie laughed at the looks on their faces. This actually accentuated her daughter-in-law’s look of concern, her light eyebrows digging deeper toward her bright blue eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I just had the most extraordinary experience.” Jeanie looked at Willow, trying to remember her name.
Willow guessed the problem. She had let go of Jeanie’s arm already. She turned toward the daughter-in-law and introduced herself and her mother.
“Willow was telling me about my life, more clearly than I could have told her about it myself,” Jeanie said.
“How’s that?”
Now a man and two boys joined in the little chorus forming around the table. All of them tanned to the color of caramel apples, with yellow or golden hair, looked like a living genetics lesson. With the family gathered, Willow and Jeanie took turns explaining what had happened.
After her initial concern, her daughter-in-law seemed intrigued and the children all made fascinated sounds, as if Willow were one of the entertainers on board, doing her act at the breakfast table.
Claudia’s heart swung from fear and shame to pride, as her daughter received those awestruck looks from the Australian family and a handful of eavesdroppers at nearby tables. By that time, a larger table had cleared, not far away from where Willow and Claudia sat. All eight of them migrated in that direction, squeezing together to revisit Willow’s revelation and generally get to know each other.
Without intending to, Willow repeated this means of meeting new people several times during the first few days of the cruise. At lunch it was one of the crew members, at dinner a couple from Toronto. The next morning it was a woman smoking on the promenade deck as Willow took her morning walk.
The first time she paced passed the stout woman with a dark tan and short black hair, Willow thought she might have something to tell the middle-aged passenger. The next time around the walking track, the woman was still there, though finished with her cigarette. Willow stopped her brisk walk, stretched while leaning against the varnished wood railing and then introduced herself to the woman. Her name was Bianca. She was from Spain originally, but now lived in Florida.
“Bianca, I think I have a message for you, from God,” Willow said, a half smile on her face, as if allowing her listener to not take her too seriously. It was an unconscious look that had evolved over the years, in an effort to reduce the intimidation of someone telling you that God wanted to say something.
Bianca just stared at Willow, so Willow proceeded to tell her what she thought the spirit was revealing about a decision she had been postponing and the way God was leading her. The entire message included only three or four sentences, concise and directive.
Again, Bianca stared without comment.
“Does that make sense to you?” Willow said, as interested in feedback as anyone would be.
Bianca nodded. “Yes,” she said.
During introductions, Willow had become confident that Bianca understood English, and even her one word reply at the end sounded natural. But Willow was beginning to doubt that the message got through.
“Do you have any questions about what I said?”
“No.”
“Would it be okay if I prayed for you right here?” Willow looked up and down the promenade, only the backside of two walkers to be seen in either direction.
“Sure,” said the stoic receiver.
Willow prayed a brief prayer of blessing for Bianca’s future actions and decisions, without reiterating the message entirely, something that was tempting to do, given the lack of response.
When she finished, Willow smiled at the older woman. Bianca smiled back and simply said, “Thanks.”
That was it. Willow had received stifled responses before, but often those accompanied some sign that she had offended the recipient, or that they didn’t recognize the message applying to them. Over the years, Willow had learned to let that go, even if she was pretty certain about the accuracy of her prophecy. It was a bit less satisfying to receive so little feedback to her efforts, either positive or negative.
The following afternoon, she and Claudia experienced the opposite response to a message Willow gave to one of the girls who danced in the Broadway-style shows in the big theater on the ship. The young woman was taller than Willow, yet somewhat slimmer, except that the dancer’s physique might have made Barbie jealous. Even without her stage makeup, the girl looked like a doll, her youthful skin conspiring with large brown eyes to finish the impression.
Willow and Claudia had just finished eating lunch at a table overlooking the swimming pool, a special grilled feast provided during a day at sea. As they sat digesting their chicken and Caribbean beans and rice, the dark-haired dancer slipped into a seat at the table next to them. A young man, also with the stage production cast, left a plate next to her and strode off to where he could get drinks for the two of them.
Taking the opportunity of the young woman being left alone for a few moments, Willow turned slightly in her chair and asked, “Is your name Brianna? And did you grow up in the San Francisco Bay area?”
The young dancer nodded, lending Willow her usual celebrity smile, reserved for fans on the cruise. “Yes, that’s right,” Brianna said. “But did it say I grew up in the Bay Area in my bio? I grew up in lots of places. I don’t think that’s the one in the show bill.” She had exchanged that adored-celebrity look for curiosity, pinching her perfect eyebrows that looked like they had been painted on by an expert calligrapher.
“Oh, I didn’t read your bio in the show bill. I don’t remember seeing a show bill,” Willow said, glancing at Claudia for confirmation. “I just saw you now and sensed that you had lived there and perhaps needed to find some peace about what happened there when you were about nine.” Willow saw the rising confusion on Brianna’s face. “I often get these sorts of impressions about people,” Willow said. “I think of them as messages from God.”
Brianna’s head began to shake from side to side like a Parkinson’s patient, and her face flamed red. She started to speak, but only sputtered.
Willow tried to head off an explosion. “I could be wrong, of course. Or maybe we should talk about it another time.” It was clear that she had hit a nerve, though she couldn’t yet tell what it was, whether the mention of God upset the dancer, or the introduction to the message. Willow wasn’t finished, but was willing to postpone the rest of the conversation if she was upsetting the girl.
“You... you... don’t have any right... ” Brianna began, once she found her voice. “What do you know about it? You can’t possibly know anything... ” As if provoked by her own inability to articulate a response, Brianna switched from a verbal response to hand gestures. After a few seconds she seemed to capture the energy of her flailing hands and began to aim them at Willow.
Willow leaned back, just avoiding the red fingernails of one hand, then stood abruptly, so that the nails of the other hand swept across her stomach. She and Claudia could both hear the sound of those long nails zipping across the cloth of Willow’s cotton-knit blouse. Willow’s chair made a growling complaint at being pushed harshly across the deck. Claudia pulled her feet in just in time to avoid a bruising by that chair.
Brianna released a stream of profanity that would have embarrassed a sailor twice her age. Then, as if the sound of those words woke her from some fierce fugue, the young woman stopped herself, clamping both hands over her mouth.
Claudia was on her feet and ten yards away, by the time the dust settled. Willow had stood her ground, just outside the range
of those fingernails. Brianna’s lunch companion had reached Willow just as the fury ceased. His eyes were the size of ping-pong balls.
“Bree?” he said.
Brianna shook her head and started to cry. She turned and ducked toward her lunch, just missing a face full of salad. When the young man placed a hand on her back she shrugged it off emphatically, reigniting the adrenalin of everyone who had witnessed the first outburst.
Willow slipped into the chair on the other side of Brianna. “That caught you by surprise, I know. I’m sorry about that,” she said, leaning down near Brianna’s ear, but keeping her hands to herself.
Raising her head, as if to check on Willow, Brianna met the loving eyes of the woman she had almost maimed. This time she reached her long arms around Willow for an embrace. A hug for comfort more than for apology. She was as shocked by her own actions as everyone else, and wanted help with whatever that was that Willow’s words awoke.
The conversation between Willow and Brianna continued on and off for the next six days, until the last day of the cruise. Even then, they exchanged email addresses to continue. Along the way, they had searched out many of the calm and private parts of the ship in a half-dozen meetings. Brianna’s life changed in those few days, in a way that she would always remember and for which she would always be grateful.
That was Willow’s vacation. Oh, she did get to see some beautiful islands. She and Claudia sampled some excellent food on board and on shore. They even took a horse-back riding excursion, recalling Claudia’s early childhood on a ranch and Willow’s life-long love of horses.
Over the course of those ten days, Willow found a rhythm of rest not so different from her normal life, but with warm breezes in the middle of winter that helped to heal the parts of her soul that had been scraped by her time in jail. Even when she stopped to deliver a word from God, she did so at her own pace, her own choosing. And most of them were much less dramatic or threatening than her exchange with Brianna.
The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2) Page 20
