“How’s it going?” Dixon said.
“Good,” said Brett.
“Homework?”
“Done.”
“Great.”
The words that make memories . . .
Dixon could hear Kristen speaking on her cell phone. From the chirpy tone of her voice, he guessed it was her friend Lauren on the other end of that signal. He caught sight of the briefest bit of Kristen’s back as she slipped into the bathroom simultaneous with his step into the bedroom. He crossed the room to the mini-fridge under the table in the corner. He lifted a diet cola from the little black box and closed the door. When they had put that fridge in the bedroom, Dixon was contemplating allowing himself a beer in the evening, wanting to keep that out of the family fridge in the kitchen. But that cooler in the bedroom had never seen anything stronger than colas, which, after all, have been proven to dissolve metal.
He settled the soda on his nightstand and sat on the bed to take his shoes off. His heart swam in the placid knowledge that this Friday night would be free of committee meetings. He longed for the rest, actually playing with a fantasy about sitting in the back yard on his anti-gravity lawn chair with a cold drink and a spy novel. A pitiful fantasy, he told himself. Now, with the soft bed sinking beneath his efforts to remove his shiny leather shoes, his desire turned toward napping, instead.
Kristen’s voice crescendoed toward goodbye as she walked out of the bathroom. She wore a thin cotton robe that she usually reserved for closed door activities after the kids went to bed. Dixon noticed and wondered if there was a hidden message in that wardrobe choice. How long had it been? But he still felt the siren tug of that nap dragging him closer and closer.
“Hi, Honey. How are you?” Kristen said, dropping her cell phone into her robe pocket. Dixon kept his eyes on that pocket, still wondering if the robe was talking to him. This left Kristen to step up to the bed and hug the top of his head between her breasts. The oddity of that position caught Dixon’s attention as well, and he looked up, receiving a peck on the forehead as his reward.
He sighed. “I’m fine. Glad to have a night with no meetings.”
Kristen stepped back and planted both hands on her hips. “Are you telling me you forgot about the Stimsons?”
Now that she stood a bit further away, Dixon could more easily look into her eyes, scolding eyes, turned to glass in rebuke of his forgetfulness. That restful evening had been a fantasy, as it turned out.
On a fully-charged battery, at the height of emotional health, and with the wind at his back, a visit to the Stimsons’ luxurious house in the hills would still discourage Dixon. Wally Stimson would want to talk church and politics, and church politics, and punctuate his points with those dark dashes he called eyebrows a full two inches above his eyes, the resulting lines on his forehead like a heating vent. This facial expression would be Dixon’s cue to agree with Wally’s point. As the single largest contributor to the church, Wally knew he could throw his weight around with Dixon, even though he could never do that literally. Dixon outweighed him by at least forty pounds. Where Dixon’s triumphs in college happened between the hash-marks of a football field, Wally’s happened in Young Republican meetings, or in the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Fully mature now, Dixon never allowed himself to fully script out the image of knocking Wally unconscious with a clothesline tackle, he couldn’t afford even the thought.
With very little whining and only a modicum of muttering, Dixon forsook his plan to change into his shorts and UCLA t-shirt. Instead, he opted for Friday evening casual attire suited for the Stimson’s. Dock shoes and a crisp polo shirt donned, freshly combed and shaved, he felt like he was going to the yacht club. Not that he had ever been to a yacht club. As a pastor, as a man’s man, he had always felt more welcomed in basement rec rooms with a game on the big screen and debates about the qualities of quarterbacks and coaches. Wally knew none of that. Dixon would have to stay awake, however, alert to the policy directions implied in Wally’s impromptu position statements. Dixon would need all of his wits so that he could agree with Wally only as far as he absolutely had to, and with no hint of action points for follow up. He had to move as deftly as when his offensive line let him down and linebackers and tackles surrounded him deep in his own territory. Too bad he couldn’t just challenge Wally to a little one-on-one tackle in the back yard.
Dixon actually envied the kids their reprieve from that evening’s obligatory dinner. He dropped Brett off at his friend Mark’s house for a sleepover, as Sara headed for her cheerleader party.
Standing in Wally Stimson’s living room, Wally’s wife May providing Kristen a tour of the newest décor, Dixon nodded with serious eyes and mouth, plotting his reply, what he thought of as his shock-absorber defense. He would hit the bumps, and he would feel the bumps, but he wouldn’t feel the full impact of the potholes and even curbs. But a full minute into Wally’s latest tirade, Dixon realized that he actually did agree with the Chairman of the Trustees (an old pastor had told Dixon to give that position to the richest man in the church, because he would know finances).
Wally patted Dixon on the back, and Dixon noted a weight of respect in Wally’s look. “We can be on the forefront of something with national implications, Pastor. That is a great strategy for our church. This thing is gonna boost our attendance, I just know it.” Wally was, of course, speaking of the initiative to expose Beau Dupere.
Dixon adopted his most agreeable posture next to Wally, as the two men faced a wall arrangement of Chinese artifacts from some long past century, highlighted by carefully placed track lighting. “I’m not sure we’re gonna attract a lot of folks, but I know that people who are inclined to favor his ministry weren’t coming to our services anyway,” Dixon said.
Pressing for insider information, as he usually did, Wally said, “So have you gotten any serious backlash from folks inside the church?”
According to the church constitution, any pastoral concerns regarding issues of faith and practice would be the responsibility of the elders, not the trustees. But Dixon knew who signed his checks and who contributed almost ten percent of the money represented by those checks. Dixon wouldn’t, however, tell Wally about the most sensitive backlash.
“Well, of course, we caught some people by surprise. It’s not that they disagree with the content of what we said, I haven’t heard anyone defending that guy, but it’s the fact that we made a public announcement that has them upset.”
Wally pulled on his long, thin chin as if he had whiskers. Dixon suspected Wally couldn’t grow respectable whiskers, even in his fifties, but he started to lower his guard and allowed his host the gesture without even an inkling of annoyance.
At this same time, on the other side of town, Sara Claiborne sat on a brown suede couch in Patricia Oliver’s basement, scrunched together with three other girls, watching video of their cheerleading performances from the past year. Jenny Washington’s dad put together the video for the squad, out of dozens of hours of footage from the football and basketball seasons. After about twenty minutes of watching themselves, all nine of the girls tired of it, like people who hit the buffet too hard on the first few rounds and can’t find energy to go back for another bite. Sara, the captain of the squad, looked at Jenny to see if it would be okay to stop the video. Fortunately, Jenny’s dad wasn’t there to be insulted. Jenny sat at the other end of the couch, leaning on her left hand, as if her head was filled with lead and her neck just wasn’t suited to the task of holding it upright.
“Ya’ know, maybe that’s enough for now. We can run the rest later,” Sara said, a bit apologetic, but still clear about her preference.
Jenny seemed relieved at first. But, when the other girls enthusiastically agreed with Sara, her face turned sour. Now she did manage to hold her head up straight with no hands.
“It is a lot to take in,” Candy Matheson said, trying to soften the pinch on Jenny. A more trained video critic than Sara, Candy knew that they were all getting tired because
of the way the images had been recorded and edited. The angles lacked creativity and the framing was always the same.
“We really appreciate your dad working so hard on this all year,” Sara said. “We’ll watch the rest after yearbooks and food.” They had purposely timed the party to coordinate with the distribution of the yearbooks that day, which, of course, featured numerous photos of the girls.
Because Jenny was fully aware of the failure of her father’s efforts, and because she often wondered about his motives for spending so much time recording and editing video of cheerleaders, the efforts to assuage her bounced off. In fact, the obvious need the other girls felt to try to make her feel better just intensified the bitter taste in her mouth.
“It’s fine. I don’t care, anyway,” Jenny said, blurting her lie in a husky exasperated voice.
“Sorry, Jenny,” Sara said, responding to Jenny’s tone and not her words. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Here, Jenny allowed a switch to flip inside, bringing a deeper resentment to light. “I suppose when you’re so perfect, it’s almost impossible not to offend people.”
Sara leaned forward a bit on the couch to see Jenny past the other two girls. She recoiled her neck and her eyebrows popped up. “But, why . . .” she started to say.
Kira O’Connell piped in at half volume. “Uh oh, here it comes.”
Jenny stood up and Sara’s response died on her tongue. Seeing Sara stifled like that stopped Jenny for a second, but then she boiled over.
“You probably don’t even know how stuck up you and your father seem to the rest of us,” she said, blasting the words with flailing hands that appeared to be illustrating something that no one could translate.
“My father?” Sara said, trying to make the connection.
“See! You’re clueless. You probably agree with his little witch hunt, trying to make publicity for himself by pointing fingers at perfectly innocent people.”
Sara had finally caught up, just after the words “witch hunt” hit the air. She at least knew the general topic, though she was baffled by the reference to “perfectly innocent people,” and most dumbstruck by why this mattered to Jenny. As the only African-American cheerleader, Jenny got special treatment from Sara, who always feared offending her with some careless racial remark. That factored into Sara’s paralysis now, sending her looking in the wrong direction for a connection between Jenny and Beau Dupere.
Jenny had always liked Sara, and especially appreciated the efforts the captain of the squad made to welcome her into the inner circle, a circle that Sara had stretched to include the whole squad. Sara was a born leader, like her father, if not the same kind of leader. Seeing Sara so innocently unresponsive cooled Jenny’s fire. Her own words came back to her. She realized that Sara didn’t know, and her father certainly didn’t know either.
Throwing her hands over her head and plunking back down into the couch, Jenny burst into tears. Now she had a bit of sympathy on her side, even if most of the girls had no idea where the explosion originated. Kira knew.
Kira and Jenny attended the same Catholic church. She knew about how people had prayed for Jenny’s mother to recover from cervical cancer for several months. This had ended the previous summer, before Jenny made the varsity cheer squad. Sara knew nothing about it. Jenny’s mother looked perfectly healthy every time Sara saw her, starting the previous August.
While Jenny tried to suppress her sobs, Kira spoke up. “It’s because of her mother’s cancer.”
Unfortunately, since most of the other girls knew nothing of Mrs. Washington’s cancer struggle, this only confused them more. But Sara made the intuitive leap, perhaps due to her awareness of, and secret fascination with, Beau Dupere’s reputation as a healer.
“Wait,” Sara said. She turned to Jenny. “Your mother doesn’t have cancer now, does she?”
Jenny grimaced and shook her head, frustrated at how tangled the whole thing had become. But Sara helped her unwind the story.
“So she was healed of cancer?”
Jenny laughed a barky little laugh through her tears, relieved that Sara had caught on, and subconsciously noting a lift of excitement in Sara’s voice.
Kira, feeling left out of the spotlight, finished her revelation. “Jenny’s mom was healed of horrible cancer by Beau Dupere and his wife last summer.”
Sara allowed her eyebrows to coast upward even as her china doll lips parted to form a surprised O.
Send them Running for Cover
As on many of Beau Dupere’s healing trips, the hosts had arranged for a more sedate and intimate gathering the next morning, after the big healing service. The pastor of the Toronto church had invited some of the most severely handicapped people in the congregation to come for healing in that smaller setting.
Joanna recognized her father’s weariness in the way he leaned back and draped an arm on the back of the chair next to him, where the pastor had been sitting before he stood up to open the meeting. Beau’s eyelids had sunk a few degrees from wide open, probably due to less than five hours of sleep, after the previous meeting ran past midnight. But she didn’t worry that this tiredness would hinder what God planned to do there that morning, any more than she feared that the huge mass of people pressing toward him last night would overwhelm her father.
In spite of her confidence in what God could do through her dad, and even through her, Joanna sensed a presence in the room that churned her insides like a hand sifting through a bucket of gravel. She tried to detect some hint that her father was sensing the same thing. Though she could see no outward sign, she did feel an intuitive assurance that he was aware of that presence, as well.
In a twenty-by-twenty foot room off the corner of the sanctuary sat two dozen people that Beau had not yet met. The senior pastor, with the head of the healing ministry and two other church staff, also sat in the light gray fabric chairs with pale painted metal arms that reached around to support the sitters, like caregivers assisting the handicapped into a bath. No one seemed comforted by those embracing chairs or by the prospect of healing that morning. Many sensed the same resistant presence that worried Joanna.
As soon as the pastor finished his welcoming remarks and opening prayer, Beau awakened from his restful posture. Standing quickly, he strode across the room toward a teenaged boy sitting with his mother. The boy appeared normal until Beau approached. As Beau loomed over him, the boy curled his arms and legs reflexively and twisted his neck around to track something that appeared to be just over Beau’s shoulder. The boy’s previous inattentive posture turned quickly into what looked like schizoid paranoia, as he recoiled from a frightening attacker no one else seemed to see.
To Joanna, it looked as if her father was in a hurry to help the boy, striding to the rescue. To the boy and his mother, Beau looked like a swooping monster, bent on overpowering and crushing them. The mother screamed a single aborted note and the boy writhed into a full seizure, arms and legs twining together and head rotating around the full range possible for his thin neck.
Beau barked a single order. “You get out of here now!”
At that last word, Joanna thought she saw a shadow move behind the boy, as if some stray sunbeam had passed through a window to his left. But the room had no windows. Everyone in the room startled at the ferocity of Beau’s actions, several jumping from their chairs and scrambling away from the pounce on the squirming boy.
When Beau stopped above the boy, and his cowering mother, he turned instantly gentle, reaching down and holding the boy’s face in his hands. Suddenly, the boy stopped his writhing. Simultaneous with that calming touch, the mother surged out of her chair, as if to leap on Beau and protect her boy. Though she couldn’t explain how, it seemed to Joanna that the woman bounced off of Beau and landed on the floor, her attack entirely thwarted.
With gentle sternness, Beau spoke to the sickness oppressing the boy. “You all go now. All of you out now.”
Again the boy writhed, this time screaming li
ke a tortured animal. Beau waved his hands as if batting away diving swallows trying to protect their nest.
“Leave this building, now!” Beau said, his voice booming, but betraying no panic or rage.
Within a second, the entire room snapped free from a suspended darkness that had held all of them, like invisible restraining bands. Everyone dropped free, back into full awareness of the time and place—that plain gray room and the two dozen other people all looking like they had just survived a near miss on the highway.
Joanna followed a compulsion to attend to the mother lying on the floor. When she arrived at her side, the woman was praying, begging for forgiveness. Apparently, she had taken her son to some kind of alternative healer. Her penitent prayers acknowledged how that attempt had not resulted in any improvement in her son, Kurt, and had, instead, added a dark oppression to their lives. After listening for a minute, Joanna declared the mother forgiven and commanded all unholy spirits to stay away from her and her son.
Beau stayed with the boy for several minutes, praying in an unknown language or calling the boy to be present with him, as if his mind had gotten lost in some dark tunnel leading away from this world. When Beau stood up straight and looked around at the rest of the room, he had restored the boy to a normal posture and full awareness. The boy, Kurt, looked down at his mother with a childish smile, as Joanna helped the older woman to her feet. When she saw him, the mother knew immediately that he had been healed. He hadn’t looked at her like that since he was four years old. She burst into tears and wrapped her arms around her son, even as he struggled to stand up and return her embrace.
Beau and Joanna both stood and looked at the senior pastor. He stood next to his chair, still gripping the backrest, looking as if he couldn’t decide whether to run from the room or to jump in and help. He smiled and then laughed when they both looked at him.
If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1) Page 7
