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

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Anna stopped watching when she fell to the floor, overcome with the warm caress of a loving presence in her apartment. She eventually fell asleep on her living room rug after hours of listening to a voice from deep inside herself singing over her and pledging his love to her forever.

  For Jack and Beau, the evening didn’t end until they had each spent another hour on the floor weeping and laughing, each in a separate pile of stunned and healed meeting attendees.

  Four hours after the meeting began, Beau was back on his feet. The video stream had been shut down. Half of the people who had been lying on the floor had left. And he found a restroom where he could wash his face and comb his uncharacteristically wild hair. By this time, news of the outrageous healing event had bounced around the world and back to secular news outlets. Half a dozen reporters crept into the building during the latter stages of the meeting.

  One reporter, after hearing stories from twenty or thirty people, found Beau and asked him, “Are you the greatest miracle worker in the world today?”

  Beau laughed, stopped his search for Jack Williams, and looked squarely at the man. He said, “Miracle worker? When it comes to miracles, I’m not even the greatest in this country. That would be Bobby Nightingale. And that doesn’t account for the rest of the world.”

  Several of the reporters and groupies who heard this statement began researching this Bobby Nightingale over the following days.

  Beau finally found Jack, who ushered a very boney woman with a pale face toward him. He assumed the woman needed healing from something, perhaps AIDS or cancer.

  That woman was Willow Pierce, who lived in Palos Heights, Colorado, near Boulder. She had travelled to the meeting to deliver a message to Beau, not to receive healing. Jack was familiar with Willow, such that, when he received a call from her earlier that day, he planned to link her up with Beau at the end of the meeting. But, when Jack saw Willow late that night, he barely recognized her. She seemed shrunken from when he had seen her four years ago. Her eyes glistened out of sockets that looked like small craters in her sallow face. Jack’s first thought was that she was terminally ill, also thinking of AIDS. Then a thought landed in his head, that she had been fasting from food and had not slept well for a long time. This revelation accelerated Jack’s pulse and tightened his neck and shoulder muscles, as he connected her wasted condition with the message she had for Beau.

  “How are you, dear?” Jack said to Willow, when they met at the front of the auditorium around midnight.

  She smiled, knowing why Jack asked. “I knew there would be times that I would have to deliver a hard message,” she said, bowing her head as if it was too heavy to keep upright for more than a few moments. Her skeletal frame jerked with sobs for two seconds and then she recovered. “But I’m glad God didn’t tell me how hard it would be.”

  Willow’s weakened state spurred Jack to urgently search out Beau, both to relieve her of the message she was carrying, and to hear what this terrible news might be. He had known of her for decades and had first met her about nine years before, introduced by a mutual friend. At that first meeting, Willow had prophesied the huge expansion of miracles and increased attendance at Jack’s church. This was before the acceleration of Beau’s healing ministry and the subsequent multiplication of Jack’s churches into several more. Jack had come to rely on the accuracy of Willow’s messages from God.

  Beau saw Jack, and seemed to know he was looking for him. He recognized Willow, but couldn’t remember her name, their acquaintance being scarce and his clarity of thought muted just then. When he saw the look in both Jack’s and Willow’s eyes, however, Beau sobered and prepared for what he had coming. He knew Willow had an important message for him.

  To Jack, it appeared that Willow suddenly became inflated with life, when she finally stood facing Beau. She stood up straighter and her eyes opened wider. The wracking sobs he had witnessed just minutes ago, made no return as she reached the end of a very long journey with this message.

  Beau took a deep breath. Jack made introductions.

  “You know Willow Pierce, don’t you Beau?”

  “I think we’ve met,” he said, automatically offering his hand.

  Both Beau and Willow seemed surprised by the electric current that passed between them when their hands made firm contact. Again, Jack saw Willow infused with more life and strength.

  “You know that the end of your time here is coming,” Willow began, as if reading Beau’s mind. “And you must also know that, this time, Father isn’t going to let you come back. It is your final exit from this life.”

  “How soon?” Beau said evenly.

  “Timing is always hard to understand,” Willow said. “But it is not months, though it seems like more than just days.”

  Beau looked at Willow with the eyes of a loved one who fully appreciates the cost of a gift he has received. Though he didn’t know her well, he felt he needed to embrace her. And Willow stepped into his enfolding arms, allowing her body to rest against his.

  Only Jack could see one of the strangest effects of this mystical embrace. Willow’s hair seemed to drink new life from the air. At the same time, her whole body was fueled with strength that further straightened her back and lifted her head. When Willow pulled away from Beau, he and Jack both saw that her face had shed years of age in that half minute of contact with the healer.

  “David killed the messenger,” Willow said, referring to an ancient biblical story. “But you heal her.”

  Beau smiled. It was exactly the sort of surprising thing he had always loved to be part of.

  Jack tried to reflect Beau’s smile, but he found no heart for such an expression of contentment and peace. He turned to Willow and patted her on the shoulder, nodding without a word to say. Whether you knew him as a pastor or even an apostle, no one knew Jack Williams to be without words.

  Adopted

  Just as Justine expected, Raylynn showed up at the house. She arrived two days after “The Meeting.” As far as Beau and Justine were concerned, Raylynn was the profit earned from their little reality TV venture, which made it a good investment of time and frustration, according to their accounting standards.

  What Beau, Justine and Miranda didn’t realize about Raylynn, was that the woman they met was a different Raylynn than her mother had known. Born in a small town in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas, Raylynn Joyce Collins, she had known more pigs than people by the time she graduated from high school and escaped her shameful back-woods childhood. At least, that’s how she thought about it, looking back from Hollywood, California, ten years later.

  That’s about how long it took her to lose her hillbilly accent, and learn to speak proper California English. Again, that’s how she calculated her transformation. From feeding chickens on her uncle’s farm to attending parties hosted by famous actors such and directors, she had transformed herself, even saved herself. That’s what she thought.

  Then she met the Dupere family. In their presence, she discovered that, as high as she had climbed out of her past, she was still in the foothills. She hadn’t even reached the mountains yet, the ones that she really wanted to conquer.

  When Raylynn was six years old, her father got in the family pickup truck and took off for points south; Houston or New Orleans, the adults speculated. When she was eight, her mother died of cervical cancer. A good hearted man, her uncle on her mother’s side adopted her into his family. But she always knew she was adopted. She never forgot. She kept a secret copy of Cinderella in her plywood toy box, beneath the eyeless dolls and cracked plastic tea cups. She was Cinderella. None of her cousins worked as hard as she did. And that was because she was adopted. She was sure of it. Her aunt and uncle hadn’t brought her into their family to love and comfort her, but to harvest her labor, to put her to work earning her place in the corner of the ten-by-ten bedroom she shared with two cousins.

  Raylynn was too smart to get pregnant and married, like her cousin Brianna. Instead, she graduated at the
top of her high school class of eighty students and grabbed hold of a scholarship to the University of Arizona, like the ladder rung she often gripped to pull herself out of the pig sty and up into the main level of the barn.

  She studied hard and worked two jobs much of the time, earning her degree and her self-respect out in the bigger world, beyond her rock-strewn and cheerless beginnings. It was hard work that landed her production assistant jobs in Los Angeles and then in Hollywood. The young men and women against whom she competed for those prized gateway jobs didn’t know anything about hard work, compared to Raylynn.

  Though her body still stood tall and straight, and she never even thought to complain about the long hours and low pay, she had grown weary inside, where no one even tried to enter. And she dreaded days off, alone in her little apartment in Venice, alone in the crowds on the beach, alone in her heart.

  This is what drew her to Beau and Dianna and the kids. She wanted to be really adopted, the way Justine had invited Dianna in, and the way Rhonda and Bethany had found a home full of compassion and rest.

  That first evening, at dinner with the mixed collection of women and children present for that particular meal, Raylynn couldn’t finish eating, after Peter looked at her over his spaghetti and said, “Are you gonna be adopted into this family?”

  Olivia and Dianna exchanged a look, as their guest sobbed into her white cloth napkin, and each finished their food in a few quick bites. Still chewing the last of her salad, Olivia stood up, excused herself and then took Raylynn by the shoulders and helped her to stand and stagger toward the back patio. Dianna said something into Emma’s ear and the little girl nodded, skipping dessert to go and help the new lady get well.

  Insightful observers have said that we are a society and a generation of orphans, children longing for the love of father and mother. For Raylynn, an orphan in the literal sense, this culture of emotional poverty has its hands stuffed into its empty pockets, offering no hope for help. When she thought of attaching herself to the household in Malibu, Raylynn felt a twist just above her stomach at the thought of being the odd guest, or the thought of her hosts offering obligatory tolerance.

  Wrapped in Olivia’s long, strong arms, with Emma’s head resting on the opposite shoulder, Raylynn lost that twisted feeling, a feeling she had climbed over to risk rejection one more time. As she sat there weeping, she remembered the men she had scared away, their eyes wide and feet fast for the door, fleeing her need to cling, which they discovered after they pressed in close enough to flip her from shy to dependent, as they sometimes did.

  She cried that all out of her, both the clinging urge, and the shame of disgusting so many men—surfers, nerds, starving actors and hipster musicians united in their flight away from her.

  With Emma’s cooing consolation in her ear, Raylynn’s old self peeled off like thin white curls of birch bark. Softly, easily, she sloughed off loneliness, fear and shame at the cost of one long evening and a hundred wadded tissues. That was just the beginning. But, adoption is just the start, after all.

  Gone Again

  Anna didn’t understand the invitation she received from Miranda near the end of October. The gathering at the Dupere home was personal, mostly family, it seemed. The difficult piece for Anna was understanding her place among them.

  With protestors still lining the street, though fewer than even that first time Anna visited the house, Anna had to park outside the Dupere compound. The driveway was full of cars, both inside and outside the gate. Four black-clad guards stood along the line between the street and Beau’s property. One of them that she hadn’t met before asked for Anna’s I.D. But one of the more familiar young musclemen spoke up for her. “She’s invited. I know her,” he said.

  Anna thanked him and passed between the defensive line, her high heels clicking on the pinkish paving stones of the long drive. Ahead of her, Anna could see a couple approaching the front door of the house. When the man turned toward the woman to say something, she recognized Jack Williams. She wondered if he would remember her. Then she recalled the video of him staggering around with Beau, at the dramatic healing service, and she repressed a laugh.

  Anna followed Jack and his wife into the house, and was greeted by Olivia at the door. Anna had only met Olivia briefly during one of her later visits to the house, but hadn't had time to interview her, nor to get to know her personally.

  “Anna, I'm glad you could join us. Beau was very determined that you should be here,” she said.

  The look on Olivia’s face reminded Anna of an elementary school teacher she had, or perhaps of a compilation of teachers, Olivia’s eyes warmly embracing her with no self-consciousness. This freed Anna to ask the question she had been rubbing in her mind all day.

  “Why did he want me here, especially?” she said. “I mean, of course, I want to be here, but I'm not sure I fit into even the broadest category of family and friends.”

  Olivia wrapped an arm around Anna's shoulder. “Well, you have to remember that around here, some of the most significant things happen where eyes can't see and ears can't hear.” Wading into the crowd milling in the foyer, as throughout the house, Olivia could feel Anna's confusion through the tension in her shoulders.

  “To Beau and Justine, you're like an adopted daughter,” she said, “and it's important for them to have you with us for a big family celebration.” They stopped at the living room and Anna stared, with her brow curved in continued question.

  Olivia persisted. “It's not just your conversion, or the baptism, or any of that. It's also the way you shared in their suffering around the attacks on Beau and your stories about him. They feel like you paid a price that you weren't really warned about, when you took the time and effort to be honest about what you found here.”

  Anna mostly recalled the self-recriminations she survived around each of the attacks on the family. “Thanks for explaining all that, Olivia.” She looked at the willowy woman and felt like she knew her beyond her ability to explain. Then she realized that Olivia had that same spirit about her that had welcomed her into that house from the first. That spirit apparently blurred things, like the lines between inside and outside, even regarding who counts as family.

  All of Beau's children were in the house for one of the few times since Luke was born. Anna met the older sons, had her first real conversation with Joanna and even spent some time sitting on the carpet in Peter's room, surrounded by a dozen other little ones playing with Peter's toys. He didn't seem to mind the strangers playing with his things, and even displayed a gift for intuiting which toy each child would like most when they entered his room.

  Beau found Anna there, her shoes off, her head resting to one side as she listened to Luke explain what the men in his truck were doing.

  “Hello, young miss. I heard you were here, but hadn't seen you. Hiding with the kids?” Beau said.

  Anna stood up, with her shoes in one hand, as gracefully as she could. “I've made the rounds, met your grown sons and Joanna, and a bunch of your friends. I feel so lucky to be included in all this.”

  Looking down at her like a proud father, Beau's warm smile gradually wore away under the weight of sorrow he had been hiding all day. “As usual, you haven't really been briefed on exactly what's going on here. Not everyone knows, of course.” He put an arm around her, his large tan hand resting gently on her pale shoulder. She let him lead her out of the room.

  “A woman Jack knows, named Willow Pierce, was sent to give me a message,” Beau said, leading her toward the master bedroom suite.

  Anna's disorientation about what Beau was saying erased the realization that she was heading toward the only part of the house she hadn't seen before. The door stood half open, a lamp in the corner keeping the approaching darkness of the fall night from invading the entire room. As they pushed through the door, Anna first noticed Dianna and Maggie sitting close to each other on a window seat in the far corner of the sitting room. Beau smiled at them, but continued talking to Anna
.

  “She said I wouldn’t be allowed to come back this time,” he said, stopping in the center of the room and releasing his soft embrace from her shoulders.

  “Come back?” Anna said. But, as soon as she said it, she knew what the answer was. She had recognized a sort of intuition rising up in her in recent weeks. But, just now, she ignored the wonder of this new ability, focusing instead on Beau's news.

  “Did she say when it would happen? Is there anything you can do to prevent it?” Anna said, realizing that she was talking like the other people who lived in that house, allowing the unspoken parts of a conversation to mingle with plain old words.

  “It’s soon enough that I called all my kids home for one last family time. We're heading out this weekend to our place in the mountains, just me, the kids and their mothers. This is goodbye,” he said. And for the first time in Anna's experience he looked both sad and resigned to that sadness.

  She tried to ask another question, but it stuck in her throat. She could hear Dianna’s ardent but gentle tone as she spoke with Maggie. Anna could guess the subject of their conversation, in light of the news she had just received.

  Beau continued. “It wasn't a warning, like when someone tells you to duck. It was more like advice to see my loved ones before succumbing to a terminal illness.” His smile lacked the aggressive joy that she had always felt from him.

  “But the kids, little Luke,” she said, protesting in fragments.

  “Yeah, that's where the sadness comes from. But even that’s selfish, as if I'm the one they really need. God will take care of them in ways I never could. And my absence will make way for others to have a bigger place, a bigger reward.”

  Anna looked now at Maggie. She seemed more solemn than Anna had ever seen her.

  Beau glanced toward the window seat and said in a hushed tone, “She really felt it deep when she sat over my bleeding corpse. She took the weight of bringing me back to life fully on herself. It left a mark,” he said. “It cost her a lot.” He took in a gulp of air and released it quickly.