Marla picked up on the signs. “What’s happening with you?” she said, assuming a lot more than Anna would have assumed in reversed roles.
“Happening with me . . . ?” Anna said, looking for a good headline, or at least an opening paragraph. “You know, I think that’s why I want to talk to you. I don’t really know what’s happening with me.”
“You’ve met with him?” Marla said.
“Yes, and with his wife, Justine.”
“Okay. What’s your impression of them?”
Put so starkly, Anna hesitated to offer a summary impression, as if it would make her look naïve or suggestible or something. Some part of her also longed to please Beau and Justine, she didn’t want to betray them in any way. She writhed inside, sinking into the center of the tangle that provoked this cry for help in the first place.
Finally, Anna tried an honest answer. “I have mixed feelings about them, and I guess I have more intense feelings than an objective journalist should have.”
Marla leaned back and grinned slightly. “Well, let’s set aside the idea of objective journalism. Are you feeling pulled in by them, like with a cult or something?”
Shaking her head rapidly, Anna said, “No, it’s not creepy at all. I mean they seem like normal, very nice people. They seem to care a lot about me, especially when they can tell that the things they’re telling me are freaking me out.”
“Okay, like what things?”
“Like that Beau’s youthful good looks, perfect teeth, golden tan and great hair are not the product of extensive training, surgeries or stylists. He says it all comes from being healed of everything, even stress. These people don’t seem the least bit stressed. And this is with a crowd of people calling for their crucifixion outside their front gate.” Anna surprised herself with the jet fuel behind her response.
“You believe his claims of healing?” Marla said, her tone even and revealing no prejudice.
Again, Anna aimed for honesty. “I actually do. And part of the reason I believe is the things I’ve felt when I’m with them. Like the first time I walked in the house, their daughter, Maggie, touched me and seemed to drive anxiety right out of my body. I didn’t expect that at all. It wasn’t Beau that did it, with his famous reputation, but just a teenage girl passing me in the hallway. I doubt that was just me being a pushover to the power of suggestion.”
Even though Anna felt like she was chucking her guts out for Marla to scrutinize, she felt instant relief at being able to say these things to another person. Unexpectedly, she noted a tangent thought about what her mother would say if she told her.
Marla smiled a tight sort of smile that raised the prominence of her cheeks and overwhelmed her eyes. “You do sound like you’ve had some sort of spiritual experience.” She held both hands out, palms up, her elbows on the arms of her chair. “Do you feel better than you did before you met them?”
Blinking and raising her eyebrows to maximum height, Anna answered, to her own surprise. “Yes, of course, I do feel better. Nothing they’ve said or done has harmed me in any way, and they’ve pushed stress and anxiety out of me more than once. My only negative feelings are just confusion, and maybe even fear, about what all this means.”
“Fear about what it would mean if these people really could heal your soul or even your body?”
“Yeah.” That was exactly what Anna feared. Wouldn’t she have to change something about her life if these people, who claimed God lived inside them, proved it by the way they cared for her?
Marla chuckled. She was amused by the dumbfounded look on Anna’s face and excited at the positive review she was hearing about Beau Dupere. Marla’s faith in spiritual things had never rested for long in any one particular religion. She not only thought of herself as open-minded, she had truly cultivated an appreciation for a wide range of spiritual experiences. Her estimation of Beau Dupere had elevated lately when she saw how much he was upsetting conservative elements of his own faith. Marla’s openness to a variety of ways to pursue God tended to favor the fringe elements of any given religion. Pictures of Beau lifting a champagne glass with the stars, and possibilities that he practiced open marriage, endeared him to Marla, in exactly the opposite way he infuriated Dixon Claiborne and those even more conservative than him.
Marla stopped laughing and said, “Well, girl. Get as much good stuff as you can from these folks. Who knows, maybe they‘ve found the map to the fountain of youth.”
Though the religion editor seemed to be taking her experience more lightly than Anna would have liked, that levity relieved Anna of some of her fear. Maybe she could be like Marla, amused by Beau’s eccentricities, without any deeper implications for her life.
Maybe.
Cold Comfort
Dixon Claiborne tried to resume the regular duties of a pastor, between the radio interviews, irate phone calls and confused visits from church members. The heaviest of those duties, of course, involved visiting the terminally ill members of the church.
For as long as he had been pastor of the church, Glenda Larson had faithfully attended, treading water through some rough changes and keeping her smile on throughout. Since her husband had died in the early days of the Afghan war, she had lived alone on the death benefits of the career Master Sergeant, supplemented by part-time work for the Post Office. She lived just past the outskirts of a little town called Kearney, ten miles from Parkerville. It was during a day when she substituted for one of the carriers that she first fell and broke her hip. At fifty-five, she was strong and healthy, not prone to the fragile falls of more senior friends and family. But, with the break, doctors discovered advanced bone cancer, which had weakened her femur and left it vulnerable to even a slight stumble, such as the one which left her lying face-down in the grass on her postal route. After weeping and crying out for as much as ten minutes with no help, she passed out. A truck driver finally saw her on his way to deliver bottled water to a neighbor, perhaps an hour after Glenda fell.
In all the times that Dixon had visited her since that fall, never once had she mentioned lying there for so long without help arriving. Never had she complained about the difficulties of a major injury, and then cancer treatment, for someone living on her own. She and Patrick had never been able to have children and Glenda had been an only child. Without family, people from the church had to step into the gap, though her distance from the population center of the church dissipated the amount of help she actually received. In a way, Dixon had been relieved when she was finally admitted to the hospital this last time, so he wouldn’t have to worry about her being alone and in need.
“Well, hello, Pastor,” Glenda said, her crinkly voice both weaker and older than her years.
Dixon strode across the hospital room with a pasted-on smile and great care at landing his steps softly, in deference to both Glenda’s pain and the skeletal lady in the next bed, whose skin looked as if she was made of papier-mache.
“Hello, Glenda, dear,” Dixon said, with the look of a man who smiled harder the sadder he felt. “How are you today?” he said, covering her left hand with his right.
“Oh, I’m feelin’ pretty good today. I think you got me on one of my good days.”
Throughout her convalescence, Glenda had traced the precarious path between refusing to complain and being dishonest. By now, Dixon had learned to listen to her tone and ignore her words. The words didn’t vary much from day to day. But her voice had been hollowed out by the extended pain, by the failed chemotherapy and by surgeries merely to minimize her agony, with no hope of a cure.
Dixon didn’t know it yet, of course, but Glenda had survived into her final week of life, still fighting to stay positive even as she resisted larger doses of medication. She seemed to Dixon to have begun to tip over the fence from tough to crazy. Maybe women really do have a higher pain threshold, but what he had learned from the doctors, and what he could detect in the changes to her glassy eyes and trap-tight mouth, convinced him that Glenda was enduring more
than she should. He missed the sparkling face that smiled so easily and the woman that exuded compassion to others, compassion that she never would have tolerated for herself. Her terminal illness had already ended her ability to choose such things. She was at the mercy of strangers now. And the doctors and nurses who attended the shell of what used to be Glenda Larson didn’t know what they were missing, and were too busy to dig deep enough to find out for themselves.
Dixon’s silent stare in response to her usual game-face seemed to prompt unprecedented honesty from Glenda. She placed her right hand over Dixon’s, still holding her left, and said, “I’m not going to be getting out of this place, this time.”
Though this could have come as a complaint, or a mournful confession, Dixon knew it was rather a direct and brave embrace of reality.
“Tell me how to pray for you,” was all Dixon could say.
Glenda relaxed her grip on the back of his hand and rested her head deeper into her pillows. He could see in her eyes the process of flipping through all of the expected responses that she had practiced for over a year now. She sighed and said, “I just don’t want to be any trouble to anybody. I know this is the end for me here. I just don’t want to waste people’s time and concern when I know it’s already over.”
These words nearly dragged Dixon to his knees in powerless pity for himself, and everyone else he knew, who would never be as selfless as Glenda. He caste about for some kind of response, some kind of reward suited to her faithfulness and courage. But he had none to offer.
Bowing his head, Dixon maintained his grip on Glenda’s hand and started a weary, apologetic prayer to a God, who he imagined must certainly be tired of hearing from him on behalf of Glenda. All those prayers for her healing had used up what little endurance Dixon had for the attempt. All those “your will be done” prayers felt like a white flag surrender in the face of a ruthless enemy, who would only continue to be more ruthless as a result.
This time, in this last prayer with Glenda, before she would be unconscious and unable to hear what he prayed, he thanked God for her life and for her steadfast patience and faith. In essence, he thanked God that she was dying well, at least better than he would in her place. And that was the best he could offer.
It was nothing. Less than nothing. It was really a catalog of what she had offered to him, which was mostly an example of toughness without meanness. That example was, after all, something the retired football player could appreciate more than most.
After a few words about funeral arrangements and contacting distant family, Dixon left as he had arrived, striding lightly, in consideration for the suffering of those around him. His silent retreat would do as much to defeat sickness and death as had his silent approach. Exactly nothing.
This had, of course, always been the case for Dixon. But this time, he actually felt it in his chest, like a wasp nest buzzing inside him, insisting that he leave it alone there, lest a swarm be unleashed that would not only hurt him but everyone close to him as well.
Dipping a Toe in the Deep End
Sara sat on her bed with her laptop in front of her, a posture unique to her generation, and one that would cause crippling pain to most people over forty. She stared at the Web page in her browser with intensity worthy of a surgeon. About Beau Dupere and his friends and affiliates, she had become more than simply curious. The video she watched in a small window, typical of shared public content, claimed to show a man’s amputated finger restored. The healer was Kay Grayson, another product of Jack Williams’s church. The fierce focus on Sara’s face fled before a flash of wonder, as the stump grew into a whole finger before her eyes.
Of course, Sara had grown up with computer graphics enhancement to movies and videos. She knew that sort of thing could be faked. But, what would have been harder to fake than altering the video to show a finger growing into place, was the reaction of the sixty-year-old man who got his missing digit back, as well as his wife standing next to him. The wife, a head of cotton-like hair, a pointy nose and big smiling teeth, nearly fell over with the shock of it. She didn’t look like an actress, but, if that video was digitally altered, she gave an Academy-worthy performance. The healed man laughed so hard that his round stomach heaved and shook, the definition of a belly laugh. He showed everyone around him his perfectly good finger, his brand new finger. Not very many adults have one of those, of which he seemed fully aware.
Sara paused and looked out her window, though not focusing on anything there, either on the glass or outside it. “What if this were real?” she thought, though as it formed in her mind the thought didn’t fall together into one simple question. It was a hundred questions, questions about reality and perception, questions about faith and God, questions about her family and truth, questions about deceptions and liberation. A God who could do something like replacing that man’s finger seemed much more interesting to Sara than the old guy she heard about in church, who seemed to live in some far off country, one that had no extradition treaty with the United States.
She had never expected to see God. She had never expected to see God do anything.
At the age of eighteen, in the U.S. of A., in the twenty-first century, whether or not to take a chance in order to discover something inspiring is not even a rational question. Sara would find out for herself if this stuff was real. To begin, she stayed up past midnight watching videos on Web sites she had never heard of before, as well as on the most popular video Web sites of all. Though any number of the scenes could have been fabricated, she found it difficult to believe that so many absolutely convincing actors could be brought together to fake witnessing a healing, their own or that of family or friends. These people looked like people Sara knew. They acted like people she knew. At least, they acted the way she imagined they would act if they saw their father’s glass eye replaced with a real one, or if they saw someone’s leg grow out three inches in two seconds. She could only imagine.
And she dreamed. Sleeping late on that Saturday morning, she would have slept on until noon if Kim hadn’t kept her word and finally called with information about where they could see Beau Dupere. The downside of that ring tone as her wakeup call, was that Sara had been dreaming all night of people getting healed, including a decapitated body getting a new head. And, of course, Beau Dupere—with his perfect, romance novel, good looks—featured in many of those foggy and fleeting scenes.
When she answered the phone and heard Kim’s greeting and bubbly details about the service the next day, in Sacramento, Sara couldn’t sort out her dreams from reality for a full five seconds. Kim worried about the silence.
“Sara? Sara? Are you there? Did I call the right number?” she said into the stunned void of the mute cell phone connection.
“Kim? Oh, Kim.” Sara regained her coordinates and engaged her vocal chords. “You woke me up, and I was dreaming of Beau Dupere holding my foot to heal it of something that I couldn’t really explain, like I was just making something up so he would hold my foot.” She streamed this account of the last dream she remembered, before considering whether she wanted Kim to know her subconscious thoughts about the famous billionaire.
Kim giggled. “Then you definitely wanna go see him,” she said.
Sara focused her mental energy into the cell phone, feeling a light lift at the sound of Kim’s giggle. It didn’t sound like a ridiculing laugh. It hit Sara more like a sympathetic affirmation.
“Yeah, definitely. We gotta go and see him.”
Counting to a Billion
Anna intended her conversation with Marla Kato as a security measure, a firewall against the brimming warmth and wonder she experienced when she merely thought of Beau and Justine and Maggie. Now, thanks to Marla’s profligate appreciation for disparate faiths, Anna felt more open to the Duperes and yet less vulnerable. She thought not only of Beau Dupere, with the quivering compulsion of a coquettish teen, she thought, instead, of Beau with Justine, with Maggie and with Luke.
“Who else was there
?” she thought. She wondered about other offspring, about the mothers of those children. Had she seen those mothers around the pool? Bethany couldn’t be one of the wives, could she? She was certainly beautiful enough, for Anna to imagine her with Beau. But was external beauty something he desired, or was there more in his relationships with these women? When Anna thought of Beau with Bethany or with Justine, she couldn’t find the same sort of salacious thrill she felt when she watched a sexy drama or comedy on Blu-Ray, or read a libidinous paperback alone in bed at night. She didn’t want Beau more now. But she did want to know more about him.
The press and general populace often referred to him as “Billionaire Beau Dupere,” as if “Billionaire” was his real first name, or perhaps a title granted him by the queen of something or other. Looking around their home, the only home she knew for sure that they owned, she had noticed a lack of the lascivious luxuries of the rich that she had observed in other Malibu mansions. Now she set about tracking Beau’s finances, using the best public information available through the Web and other news organizations, and using some contacts in the finance industry, where Beau had reportedly made his millions, and perhaps billions.
By Monday, the day of her next appointment with Beau Dupere, she had accumulated a pile of data and managed to form it into a timeline linked to a spreadsheet. She used a Web site that allowed her to graphically navigate the data she input, to zoom in on details and zoom out for a broad overview.
Because the vast majority of his wealth was made and held in private funds, she couldn’t be confident that she had found everything there was to know. But she did find enough to allow her to ask educated questions that afternoon at the Dupere home. What she found certainly did inspire questions, many of which would have seemed utterly bizarre to ask of any other rich investor. But, typical of how atypical everything about Beau Dupere seemed to be, some outlandish questions seemed necessary for Anna to assemble a true story of his wealth.
If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1) Page 12
