“I’m really not looking forward to this,” Rodney said to Emma, still looking at the door.
“What are they expecting from you?” Emma asked.
“Oh, I don’t know that anyone is expecting anything from me. It’s just that I’m so uncomfortable around the grief of these people.” He took a deep breath. “So there it is.”
Emma leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I know what you mean. But I expect you feel that way because of your children.”
Rodney took another deep breath. “I guess I’ve been trying not to focus on how much I have in common with these parents.” He hesitated for a moment, his hand on the door handle. “I almost wish Anna hadn’t visited me, it made me feel like my kids are still accessible, not totally gone, the way I used to think of them.”
Emma nodded and the two of them climbed out of the van.
In the school auditorium, they found a murmuring, milling bunch of people, most of whom looked familiar. Rodney received a look from Jason Cooper that seemed more hopeful than anything he had seen from Jason. On the stage stood eight or nine strangers, plus both Hyo and Young. As the people in the seats began to settle, the people on the stage bypassed the chairs setup there and walked to the edge of the stage, sitting with their legs dangling over, so they were more on eye level and not so far away.
Seated in the center of the group arrayed along the edge of the stage, a small woman with short brown hair and large dark eyes surveyed the people sitting in the theater style seats, as silence spread from row to row and from seat to seat. She smiled and addressed the group. “I’m so glad that we can meet like this, your pain over your missing children can finally be addressed, as it has been for so many people all around the world. And let me say clearly, up front, that we are going to help you to reconnect with your kids, so you needn’t worry about that. What we need to discuss is how to do it.” The room filled with gasps and sighs, expressing the parents’ collective relief.
As that relief started to crescendo, the woman continued. “The answer to that question will not be the same for all of you, so we will be meeting with each individual or couple and making the specific arrangements with you.”
Some of those present could barely restrain themselves and not all of their vocalizations were joyful ones. The accumulated anxiety of parents missing their children could not vanish so quickly as that, but the feeling in the room left Rodney much more comfortable than he had anticipated. He looked at Emma and smiled a half-satisfied smile. She could read the nuance of that smile, taking his hand to comfort the part of him that wasn’t smiling.
The woman coordinating the meeting guided each couple to one of the Jerusalem representatives who would explain how and where they would see their children. Rodney stood up to leave and Emma shuffled down the row and out into the aisle after him. However, as they walked up the aisle, Rodney heard his name. He slowed and then turned. The spokeswoman, who had jumped down from the stage, was at the front of that aisle looking at him.
Rodney cocked his head in question. What did they need of him now?
“Rodney,” she said again. “You will be meeting with Hyo over on that side of the auditorium.” She pointed to her right.
Rodney stood dumbfounded. Emma raised her eyebrows as he stared at her face, looking for reassurance that what lay ahead would not cause him more pain. Before he could turn around and head back down the aisle, Hyo rounded the back row and headed for Rodney, a smile on his face. There was the reassurance Rodney needed.
Emma and Rodney sat in the second row of seats, holding hands, waiting for Hyo to finish a brief consultation with another of the immortals. Hyo came back and sat in the front row, turning around to face them.
Hyo delivered the smiling message that Rodney had been waiting for longer than he would admit. “Your children will be visiting you out at the farm tonight before it gets dark. There is no reason to make you wait any longer.”
As if seeing the world in a mirror, all flipped around, Rodney doubted his eyes and ears. He thought, “So soon? They’re coming tonight? How can I get ready so soon?” Then he calmed himself, as Hyo just smiled at him and Emma squeezed his hand. The fact is, he wouldn’t know how to get ready anyway.
“Thanks,” Rodney finally said to Hyo, offering his hand.
The Korean shook his hand and said pointedly, “They will be so happy to see both of you.”
Emma pondered the idea that she was to be included in this meeting, she would, of course, not shy away. Like Rodney, she had learned to trust the immortals.
Handing her the keys, Rodney asked Emma to drive home that afternoon. He had numbly shaken hands with two men on the way out, who seemed to think he had contributed to their relief. But he hadn’t even focused on what they were saying enough to disabuse them of their mistaken notions. He arrived in the driveway without noticing anything about the ride home, including picking up Daniel. Emma knew she needed to let him reorient before trying to wake him from his anxious preoccupation.
Rodney insisted on cooking supper that night, hoping it would distract him from his anxiety. The resulting meal served as evidence that his mind had not been in the kitchen. He laughed along with Emma and Daniel about the half-baked biscuits and burned beans. He was, however so preoccupied that he mindlessly ate the entire botched meal. At least he hadn’t managed to ruin the salad of fresh greens from the garden.
Daniel began to grow jealous when he saw how overwhelmed Rodney was at the prospect of seeing his kids again, as if he was about to be displaced from Rodney’s life. Emma sensed her son’s tension and tried to assure him that nothing would change for him, once this meeting was over. But she didn’t actually know that to be true for Daniel or for herself. Her experience with the immortals had been one surprise tumbling over another. Why would she assume this next phase would be different?
They finished their meal before six o’clock, but later than Rodney had hoped. Not much daylight remained. Fragments of his frazzled psyche feared that the kids would not come if he was not done in time with supper. He stifled such childish fears and took a glass of water out to the porch, to wait. Emma brought him a handful of tissues to put in his pocket. He smiled wordlessly at this insightful gesture.
For what seemed like long, unbounded moments, Rodney sat trying to remember his children, David and Olivia. Then he told himself to let go of those memories, feeling sure that the children would have changed from what he remembered, changed in ways he couldn’t anticipate. Instead, he forced himself to just look at the barn and watch the paint chipped boards change color in the light of the setting sun.
Then he heard a voice and the word it pronounced nearly stopped his heart, “Dad.”
Rodney turned to his right and saw David and Olivia walking toward him, smiling. He stood up, automatically, as if his legs responded independent of his stunned brain. He recognized them as they approached, they didn’t look like strangers, but just like his kids.
He grabbed each of them in his strong arms and they laughed as they embraced him. Rodney felt electricity throughout his entire body as he held them and cried. And they did not let go, no shyness or self-consciousness to limit their reunion with their father. It was Rodney who broke free of them, apologizing and fumbling for the tissues in his pocket. He kept apologizing for the messy greeting, but he didn’t stop crying. After stemming the flow from eyes and nose, he looked at them both, locking his eyes on theirs in turn, first David and then Olivia and back.
In David, he could see Anna’s eyes. Then he looked more deeply, seeing contentment and wisdom, even in the way that he looked at his father. Olivia seemed older, more womanly even in her small sprite-like form. Her beauty somehow transcended what he remembered of his daughter and overwhelmed his senses, much like Anna had. His chest felt tight as he took all this in. Then he noticed thin lines etched into their skin, barely visible in the twilight. He gently traced a jagged path on Olivia’s cheek.
Olivia answered the question his fing
er asked. “We were killed. But now we are alive again.”
Rodney looked at David’s face, a very thin, purplish, wavy line down the middle of it, from forehead to chin. Like a bucket of cold water, recognition doused Rodney. This river map of thin lines was the pattern of faint scars from their fatal injuries. Tears gushed from him now, as he relived the loss of his precious children during the war.
David and Olivia helped their father to the nearest rocking chair, patient and caring as grown children would be toward a doting elder. Again, he apologized as he struggled to control his breathing and felt the blood return to his head. And again the children—if they really were still children—offered unqualified affection and acceptance.
When the blur of those first moments began to fade, Rodney sat in the chair, David standing on one side and Olivia on the other, the latter almost at eye level and her brother a head taller. Certainly, they appeared older than in his memories, as is always the case when one leaves his children for any number of weeks. This absence had been years, however, and though they had not aged at pace with those years, they had evolved into something he couldn’t describe, or even fully understand.
Heeding the pointed remark from Hyo that afternoon, Emma opened the screen door of the house and stepped out onto the porch to join them. Both of the children smiled at Emma, clearly pleased to see her, and Olivia surprised Emma by quickly stepping toward her and wrapping both arms around Emma’s waist. Tears brimmed in Emma’s eyes and she gently stroked the blonde curls pressed against her blouse. Internally Emma felt unnatural warmth and a sort of movement in her lower abdomen. She grew rigid, afraid of what might be happening to her.
Olivia loosened her grasp and looked up at Emma. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “You’re getting well. You can have babies now.”
Emma started to shake, her face turned red and then she sat down suddenly on the porch, to keep from toppling over backward. Olivia, with strength beyond her size, deftly assisted Emma, softening her landing. The little girl then squatted next to Emma, approximating eye level with her.
“You can have as many children as you want. Everything is different now. All of your arguments for not having children are gone now,” she said, with perfect clarity and irresistible authority.
Emma had, in fact, been oscillating between blind shock and a mental list of objections regarding having children. She didn’t speak, just shaking her head slightly, signaling her disbelief.
For his part, Rodney sat in that rocking chair, turned a bit to look at Emma sitting there on the porch, looking like a new father at his child’s birth, awkward, awestruck and as speechless as Emma.
“Please call Daniel to join us,” David said politely. To Rodney this version of his son was indeed “David,” and not “Davey,” as Rodney knew him when he was a freckled-faced boy, full of mischief and questions.
Rodney stood up, a bit tipsy and carefully stepped around Olivia to the front door. Daniel was standing behind the screen.
“I heard,” he said, revealing that he had been close by, listening to this encounter.
David stepped around the chair, as Daniel pushed through the screen door, hesitating next to Rodney. David stepped forward, took hold of Rodney’s right hand and Daniel’s left hand and joined them. “You two have wanted to be father and son to each other since the time you first met. Nothing should stand in the way of this desire in both of your hearts,” David said. He looked at Rodney. “Take him as your son.” And to Daniel he said, “He is your new father, never meant to replace your first father, but as real to you as your first father ever was.”
Daniel started to waver on his feet. Rodney put his arm around Daniel’s shoulder to anchor him. Daniel smiled at Rodney and at David. This immortal boy had addressed every fear Daniel had built up around this meeting and answered those fears decisively.
It occurred to Rodney that this meeting with his children served much the same purpose as his meeting with Anna. She had come to set him free to live on without her and had even given him a little push into the new life he now enjoyed. Here, again, his resurrected children offered not only himself, but also his new family, a gift of home and attachment such as his natural children had enjoyed with him in that other life.
Rodney began to prepare himself for their sudden departure, just as their mother had vanished from his side. But Olivia stood up and asked him, “Can we see the house you built?”
Rodney grinned at her. “Of course, you can.” And he and Olivia helped Emma to stand up.
Emma looked around at them all and then said quietly to Rodney, “You go ahead, I need a minute.”
He rubbed her near shoulder and nodded. She stepped past the smiling faces and off the porch, on her way for a recuperative walk down the driveway.
During a tour of the entire house, including Daniel’s demonstration of Chip’s newest programming, David asked several questions that Rodney would expect from a professional contractor. He tried to contain his surprise at the sophistication of the construction inspection that his son performed. Olivia merely made comments on the beauty of views out particular windows and sunset light in various rooms. To Rodney, they seemed like strangers, but much in the same way that one’s children do when they come back from college.
Emma joined them in the dining room when the tour ended. “Can I get you something to drink, or eat?” she asked, though uncertain whether they did eat or drink.
“Sure,” said David.
“Oh yes,” said Olivia. “I would like some ice tea, please.”
Emma hesitated half a second, caught by how odd it was for a guest to ask for something so specific, even if asking politely. She wondered if Olivia already knew that there was ice tea in the refrigerator. She swept the speculation aside and went to get glasses, as David agreed to ice tea, as well.
The momentous meeting lasted late into the night, the children asking questions about the farm, Rodney, Emma and Daniel. Though the level of the conversation continually amazed them, all three enjoyed talking to David and Olivia. By the time they were ready to leave, Rodney felt certain that these people—who were his children once—were much more intelligent than he, yet they never even hinted at talking down to him.
Both of the children gave the impression that they were glad to answer questions, but their answers seemed filtered to fit into the cultural context of the questioners. Rodney was thrilled and intrigued to learn about the work his children were doing. He remembered the child-labor concern voiced by Jason Cooper, but those concerns seemed laughable in the midst of an intense and intelligent conversation with these chronologically young people. David had taken charge of rebuilding an entire town. Somehow, Rodney missed which one, and it seemed that David intended it this way.
Olivia would be working with a team of artists, commissioned to create massive paintings and sculptures in a larger city, using only organic materials. She sounded like an experienced artist when she described her project with grace and joy.
Emma, who had a story to tell Rodney when his children left, asked Olivia if she wasn’t going to be involved in some kind of medicine or healing.
Olivia said, “Oh we are all involved in healing, whenever we have the opportunity. That is part of our nature, but my particular work will be with the material arts. Some of that work will have a healing power of its own when we’re finished.” She seemed to sparkle, when she thought of this fantastic result.
Well past midnight, after dozens of questions launched in both directions, David stood up and Olivia followed. Rodney was sitting on the couch, with Emma lounging next to him, her head on his shoulder. Daniel sat sideways in a cushioned armchair and David and Olivia smiled at their sleepy hosts.
“You need your rest,” Olivia said, somewhat maternally. She, on the other hand, seemed to need nothing.
In that realization, that his little girl no longer needed anything from him, or from any other human being, Rodney found a sense of closure. Yes, these were his children, but
in another form. In this form, they could no longer be his dependents and thus they had fully become all that their creator intended them to be.
As they left through the front door, Rodney, Emma and Daniel followed them to the porch, in a daze. After the hugs and goodbyes, the children walked into the darkness and disappeared, just as their mother had months before.
That night, after Rodney and Emma said goodnight to Daniel and went to bed, they lay in the dark, as Emma explained to Rodney, in much greater detail than she had before, about the loss of her second child during childbirth and the infertility that resulted. She had mourned the loss of that child and the loss of other children she had dreamed of mothering.
The faltering healthcare system of those days had provided just enough medical intervention to leave her with chronic lower abdominal pain and no ability to bear children. But, when Olivia embraced her, Emma felt that pain disappear and felt her internal organs shift inside her. She had never felt better than she did that night.
Rodney listened quietly, feeling the intensity of the emotion from Emma’s voice and her small movements in the dark. And he wondered whether he could seriously consider being a new father again, in his late-forties. Emma, a few years younger, warmed to the idea that she was not only healed, but that she had been commissioned to have children, by the little angel that visited her that evening.
Too late for that sort of discussion, they fell asleep wondering what it all meant.
During the next week, Rodney and Emma each heard stories of parents whose missing children had visited them. The day after seeing his kids, Rodney met with the other congressional representatives.
Will Snyder told the story of his neighbors, whose three small children returned to their home for a few hours. “Kim and Andy were not part of the crew that flew to Israel, but they had been in close contact with those folks and had been traveling the area looking for signs of their kids before that,” Will said. “Anyway, they waited at home for their kids to show up, like the immortals promised, all nervous and worried. I think they really doubted that it would happen. But, right on schedule, they got a knock on the door and all three of their kids were standing on the porch smiling, as happy as can be, but not like overwhelmed at finally being home, just sort of calm. I actually saw this part myself, out the kitchen window.”
The REIGN: Out of Tribulation Page 24
