If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Before she had even stepped onto the front porch, the eight-foot high door swung open and a woman slightly taller than the petite reported stepped out into the shade provided by the house. “Anna?” the woman said, smiling as if she were greeting a welcomed guest.

  Anna nodded and took the offered hand, almost as thin as hers but much more tan, and bejeweled with diamonds that Anna could only dream of owning.

  “I’m Justine,” the greeter said, wrapping her other arm around Anna’s waist. This maneuver seemed natural to Justine, but made Anna’s skin crawl. Here, she confronted her unspoken dread that she would be captured by the bizarre polygamous cult that she feared occupied this house.

  Justine sensed Anna’s tension immediately and just as quickly slipped her hand free of Anna’s waist, as she gestured toward the door. “Come on in. Can I get you something to drink? Water? Juice?”

  Anna was thinking whisky, but kept that to herself.

  “Water would be nice,” she said. Over the years of interviewing people in their homes, Anna had discovered that accepting an offer of water generally helped reduce the tension of having a stranger in the house. It helped her subjects think of her more as a guest. But she already felt Justine’s friendly welcome, with her gently stroking touches and sunshine smiles. She just hoped she was a guest that had the option to leave when they were done talking.

  As Justine led her across the bright foyer of black and white marble, a nimble teenager strode out of the kitchen toward what appeared to be a living room or great room. “Maggie,” Justine said, addressing the girl. “Maggie, I want you to meet Anna Conyer from the Western Horizon newspaper,” Justine said, dropping the “s” at the end of Anna’s last name, but remembering her employer closely enough.

  “Hello, Anna,” said the slender girl, who stepped up close to shake hands. For a second, Anna thought that the glowing teen would kiss her on the cheek, but Maggie seemed to change her mind and settle for a penetrating gaze on top of a sparkling smile. That smile reminded Anna of her fantasies about Beau Dupere, and she realized the resemblance was natural.

  “This is my daughter,” Justine said. “She’s just turned sixteen. She’s my youngest.”

  Seeing the two women side-by-side, no one could doubt that they were related, from the gray green eyes, to the fine Phoenician points at the top of their smiling cheeks. No hint of makeup, both women could easily appear in advertisements for cosmetics. Anna couldn’t imagine that Justine had children older than this full grown girl in front of her.

  “It was wonderful to meet you,” Maggie said with 24-carat sincerity. Then she said, innocently enough, “I bless your time here. Just relax and enjoy.” With those words, Anna felt most of her tension drain away. The feeling of that stress leaking from her was so palpable that she instinctively looked down at her feet, as if she might find her anxieties in a pool there on the floor. Here, she noted that the other two women were barefoot and she forgot to question what had just happened.

  When Maggie released her hand and continued on her way, Anna followed with her eyes, as Justine answered that question she had forgotten to ask.

  “Maggie has a gift for relieving people of emotional tension and fear. That’s what you just felt when she blessed you.”

  Maggie glanced over her shoulder, as if to acknowledge her mother’s words. She passed from sight, a flash of golden brown locks the last thing Anna saw of her.

  “Oh,” was all she could think to say.

  When Justine handed her a tall glass of ice water, in the kitchen, Anna continued to look around her, unsettled, but feeling a sort of expectancy that she couldn’t explain.

  “There’s some lovely shade and a perfect breeze by the pool today,” Justine said, leading the way down a back corridor, toward the ocean side of the house. Anna followed with a smile and unblinking eyes.

  As Justine led the way, her athletic hips swaying in her white capris pants, she played the role of tour guide. “Fourteen people currently live in the house. My sons have recently moved out, along with my step daughter. She and Eli went to Argentina, where we have some ministry partners. My older daughter, Jo, is traveling with her father. He likes to take at least one of the kids with him when he’s away overnight.”

  The screen door to the patio hung halfway open, and Anna only noticed the reason when Justine stopped and looked down. A toddler stood holding the door, looking up at her. The little boy must have been between two and three years old, with long brown hair and almond shaped eyes. He wore a tiny pair of swim trunks. Pointing to Justine, he said something that sounded like “Jadeen.”

  Justine looked at Anna and explained. “That’s what he’s calling me these days. I guess Justine or Aunt Justine is just too much for him to handle.” She smiled as she turned back to the little doorman.

  “Did someone send you to find me, Luke?”

  This time he pointed outside and said, “Mommy,” quite clearly.

  Anna raised her eyebrows slightly and smiled, relieved to hear a word she understood. Nothing so far had been much clearer to her than Luke’s twisted name for Justine.

  Justine caught the door as Luke turned to lead the way at a short-legged gallop, saying, “Jadeen,” repeatedly as he scampered ahead. Recovering from her distraction at the funny little herald of their arrival, Anna raised her head to take in her surroundings. Just then, they reached an immaculate glass table surrounded by white metal chairs with green and yellow cushions on the seats and backs. Beyond the table, she could see a woman in a one-piece swimsuit playing catch in the shallow end of the pool with two girls less than ten years old. Across the pool she spotted two women in bikinis sitting on shaded chaise lounges. But all that lost focus, as a totally nude woman walked across her line of vision on the opposite side of the pool. Anna stared.

  Justine, who was talking to a very short Hispanic woman about snacks for the children, since they had eaten an early lunch, saw Anna’s stare and followed it across the pool to the naked woman.

  “Oh, that’s Bethany,” Justine said, pulling out a chair for Anna. Anna broke from her stare and looked at Justine, hoping for an explanation.

  Justine chuckled, aware of the shock Anna was feeling, but completely free from any discomfort of her own. “Have a seat. You’ll just have to get used to Bethany like that, at least for now. It’s part of her healing process.” She reached across the table, retrieving a half glass of ice tea and taking the seat next to Anna, who was slowly lowering herself into the chair as if uncertain whether it was actually there to catch her.

  “Healing process?” Anna said, managing to construct a cogent reflection of Justine’s phrase, if not a fully formed question.

  Bethany had rounded the end of the long, narrow pool and passed within easy earshot. “Okay if I tell Anna about your healing?” Justine said, to the enviably proportioned woman.

  Anna tried to look only at Bethany’s face, wondering what was hidden in the eyes behind the large sunglasses.

  “Of course,” Bethany replied, smiling at Anna and nodding a bow of greeting.

  “It’s only women around here these days, and small children,” Justine said. “So we decided it was okay for Bethany to parade in whatever she wanted to wear, or not wear, as you see.” She gestured toward Bethany’s departing backside as it disappeared through the same door from which Anna had exited the house.

  “You see, when she came to us, she barely weighted ninety-five pounds. And you can see that she’s a tall woman.”

  To Anna, Bethany looked like a supermodel, tall and shapely. Certainly she weighed much more than ninety-five pounds now, though certainly less than most women her height.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, she was healed of her anorexia when some of the children gathered around and prayed over her,” Justine said.

  That was, however, not an explanation, as far as Anna was concerned. It was more like a list of questions waiting to be asked. “How did they do that?”

  “Bea
u had an insight into what was haunting her and he knew that the children would drive it away, if they touched her and prayed for her. That was one of his sort of intuitions, you might call them.”

  More questions. Perhaps Justine and Beau both knew how out of her depth Anna would be there, which would explain why they assumed she would need multiple interviews. Was that one of Beau’s intuitions too?

  Only because she felt so thoroughly dislocated mentally, did Anna ask the next question. “Is she one of his wives?”

  Justine let go of her iced tea and pressed her hand against her lips, as if trying to suppress a laugh. She breathed an answer with the air she had captured from that aborted laugh. “I’m sorry, dear. This must be a bit much for you,” she said, her head tilting and eyes resting sympathetically on Anna. “Are you all right?”

  Anna took two deep breaths and sat up in her chair, crossing her legs and trying to feel the real world around her, the breeze, the sound of the ocean, the brilliant sunlight. Just as she began to focus on Justine again, Bethany stepped out of the house. This time she wore a large hat and no sunglasses. Anna looked at her and giggled. She couldn’t have stopped herself even if she had seen it coming. She was nearly hysterical.

  When she did find the edge of a rational thought, Anna feared she might have offended Bethany, giggling at her like that. But, instead, Bethany turned and walked toward Anna. She stopped immediately next to Anna’s chair and gently rubbed her upper back.

  “It’s okay. Be free, little sister. Be free,” she said. Her tone was soothing and maternal, not the hallucinogenic tone of a hippy nudist that Anna expected. Bethany’s words carried authority, along with their sympathy. She spoke like a guide through a dangerous land that she had repeatedly survived and that Anna needed yet to conquer.

  Tears filled Anna’s eyes, though she managed to cap off the sobs that lodged in her throat. A wave of hope, like the first cooling wind of a storm front, pushed into Anna, but something inside her pushed back. A thought that seemed foreign to everything she had experienced in the last ten minutes pounced into focus. “Are these people doing all this just to avoid answering my questions?”

  Luke returned to the table with a graham cracker in his fist. He stopped on the side of Anna opposite Bethany and pointed to the stranger seated in front of him. “It’s okay, Anna,” he said with perfect diction.

  Her lower jaw came loose and her mouth eased open. “How did he know?” she said in a midnight whisper.

  Justine grinned. “He gets that from his father.”

  The Blind Healing the Blind

  Hundreds of people wedged into the space between the front row of seats and the stage, as Beau stepped down the stairs to meet the sick and injured. Next to him, a thin young man, with spiked brown hair, carried a microphone. He held the mic close to Beau when the healer spoke in English, but as the healings started popping on every side, his language changed to a rapid-fire dialect that sounded Slavic or Eastern European. The young man translated as much of that flurry of words as he felt would help the people at hand to know what was going on. He had worked with Beau many times before and Beau trusted his judgment regarding the necessary interpretation.

  The sound of crutches clattering together on their way to the floor was familiar to Joanna, who had observed and assisted her dad in a hundred meetings like this. She tried to stay close to him to assist her father, though she would be on her own later as the healing spread. With Joanna at his side, Beau would often ask her to touch someone on his behalf. Once, that night, he asked her to wrap her arms around a frail woman of forty who had the withered frame of a ninety-year-old. That embrace resulted in a deep heating sensation at the sight of the woman’s lung cancer.

  After the number of people she had touched and healed had become too great to count, Joanna stopped and watched Beau for a few seconds. He was kneeling down and holding his hands over the eyes of a little girl, perhaps five years old. He flipped his hands open, like shutters, and asked if she could see. When she said “no” he covered her eyes again and repeated the move and the question. This time, the girl’s hands shot up to grasp Beau’s hands, and she shouted. “I can see! I can see!” Her mother, standing behind her, fell into a dead faint, caught by the pressing crowd around them. The little girl jumped up and down and shouted over and over, “He did it! I can see! I can see!”

  Joanna stared at her father in that moment. He had seen so many healings that he often appeared unaffected even by dramatic recoveries. But not this time. A glisten in his eye, he remained on his knees laughing at the joy of the little girl. Then he addressed her by name.

  “Tina, let’s go and heal some more eyes,” he said, like a father inviting his daughter to go to the zoo or the circus. Tina nodded and held her hands up for Beau to carry her. Her actual father, standing behind her, nodded his approval when Beau looked his way.

  Beau leaned in close to his interpreter. “Jeremy, call everyone who has problems with their eyes up onto the stage,” he said. Then he pushed his way back to the stairs and mounted them with Tina held against him by one strong arm.

  Though most people heard it when Beau said it, Jeremy repeated the instructions for people with blindness, or other eye problems, to come onto the stage. Dozens followed Beau up the stairs or pushed up the other stage stairs to the left or right of where he now stood. A small handful of those people climbing onto the stage did so with the help of seeing friends or relatives, unable to see at all.

  Beau prompted Tina to touch the forehead of the first man who accepted the invitation. The briefest tap sent him sprawling backward, his hands flying to his eyes as he fell. Tina clapped her hands as if it was a game and she was winning. Beau laughed as she did the same forehead tap for a woman with curly gray hair, and then a young man with a shaved head. After several of these taps, Tina stopped and looked curiously at one tall blonde woman. For this woman, she just held her little hand on the side of her face. A jagged scar across one eye socket stood in place of her right eye. Beau commanded the eye to come back, as Tina held her hand there. As soon as he spoke, the woman screamed and tried to step back. She lowered her head like someone who had suddenly lost a contact lens. Tina looked concerned, until the tall woman looked up, a delirious smile on her face and two good eyes staring wide.

  Others screamed, a man began to jump up and down shouting inarticulately, and several people raised their hands to their own faces to catch the healing grace that had just landed there without a touch from Beau or his tiny assistant.

  Joanna watched this from below the stage, tears rolling down her cheeks, laughing sobs shaking her torso. She shook her head and continued to weep, as Beau and Tina pushed through the crowd that had begun to resemble a cornfield after a heavy hailstorm. Instead of the dense rows of people pressed all around, great swathes of bodies lay in piles, people stumbling and laughing drunkenly. The power of God to heal all those with missing, blind or severely nearsighted, eyes flowed through the hand of a little girl who had been blind fifteen minutes ago.

  The Home Front

  Dixon Claiborne stepped out of his five-year-old Toyota sedan onto the cracked asphalt of his driveway. His confrontation with Darryl Sampras at the office still echoed in his head, his brain still working on filtering what he had said, and the tone with which he said it, so that he could live with the (altered) memory of it. As a result of this preoccupation, he didn’t notice the grass that needed cutting, the proliferation of dandelions and thistles, and the downspout that had split open at the elbow near the ground, so that the rain that fell last week had begun to dig into the ground near the corner of the house. Normally, he was the first one in the house to notice any of these things, though the kids would be assigned the remediation work.

  Nothing broke through his focus until he dropped his keys in the usual spot on the kitchen counter, near the phone. Sara stood over the island counter arranging cookie dough on baking trays. Dixon didn’t notice the cookies. He noticed his daughter. She was be
autiful. Even in baggy gym shorts and a pink tank top, she was a remarkable looking young woman. The pride of a father admiring his daughter, however, mixed with the fears of a father with a daughter who looked like that. One of the few things he admired about Islam was the conservative traditions around women and public exposure. He privately thought a burka seemed like just the thing for his fully blossomed eighteen-year-old.

  “Hello, Daddy,” Sara said, turning from her cookies to kiss Dixon on the cheek.

  He grinned for a second and said, “Hello, Dear.” Then he noticed the cookies, two dozen already cooling on wire racks. “What’re the cookies for?”

  “Cheerleaders are having a party tonight, end of year sort of thing. We’re all bringing something.” She shifted the tray to her right hand and stepped to the oven, opening the door with her left.

  Dixon spotted the frosting waiting in two bowls on the counter, one blue and one yellow, school colors. What else would you make blue cookies for?

  “Sounds good,” he said blandly. “Won’t be any boys invited then?” He asked questions like that with no effort whatever, it was as reflexive as wincing when seeing a friend bang his head on something.

  “Don’t worry, Daddy, just us girls tonight.” Sara’s response was equally reflexive. What Dixon didn’t know was whether telling the truth was part of her reflex.

  He hummed a brief acknowledgement of her answer, glanced at her bare feet with the fire engine red polish and shook his head on the way into the living room. There he found Brett battling zombies with a hand-held Gatling gun. Of course, the Brett on the TV console game weighed well over two hundred pounds and could handle the monstrous weapon. Half the TV screen splashed red as he vanquished another of his vicious enemies.