by Nancy Rue
“Hey, Mom?” It was the indignant tone only a thirteen-year-old girl can achieve. “Could you come get me?”
I could see Jayne’s eyes rolling. But I could also hear the whine of uncertainty, even over the siren now screaming in the distance.
“Rachel was supposed to take me home from rehearsal, but I guess she forgot me. Could you call me when you get this?” The whine reached a peak and fell into a teeth-clenched finish. “Never mind. I guess I’ll have to call Christopher.”
I searched the screen. She’d left the message at eight—forty-five minutes ago. Fighting back visions of child abductors in black vans stalking Cedar Heights Junior High, I shoved the Jeep into gear, then shoved it out again. I dialed my home phone.
“You so owe me,” Christopher said, in lieu of “hello.”
“Did you pick Jayne up?”
“Like I said, you owe me.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s in her room with the lights out and that music on that sounds like some chick needs Prozac.” Christopher gave the hard laugh he’d recently adopted. “Which is what she always does, so, yeah, she’s okay. Where were you?”
I was suddenly aware of the nakedness under my jacket.
“I had a meeting,” I said. “Has your dad called?”
“I called him to see if he was okay.”
“Why?” I said. My chest tightened automatically—the Pavlovian reaction of the firefighter’s wife.
“Fire at that 76 station on Mile Hill Road. Heard on the radio on my way home from the library. They said it was contained, so I called him.”
I told myself I was imagining the innuendo of accusation in his voice, the Why didn’t you call him? I chalked it up to the overall attitude of superiority my son had taken on now that he was a college freshman and knew far more than his father and I could ever hope to. I was forty-two with a doctorate in theological studies, but Christopher Costanas could reduce me to the proverbial clueless blonde.
“He said they got another call and he’s going out on it,” Christopher said. “Even though his shift’s over—you know Dad.”
Thank you, God, I thought as I hung up. Although God helping me keep Rich out of the way until I could find out what had just happened wasn’t something even I could fathom. Funny. All through my affair with Zach, I’d continued to talk to my God, asking His forgiveness over and over, every time I left the yacht club, knowing I’d be back. Now that I’d ended it, I couldn’t face Him. In His place was a rising sense of unease.
Rich’s Harley wasn’t in the garage when I got home. Christopher answered with a grunt when I said good night outside his door. I tiptoed into Jayne’s dark bedroom, but all I saw was a trail of strawberryblonde hair on top of the covers and a rail-like lump underneath them. I kissed the cheek that was no longer plump and rosy, now that my daughter had abruptly turned into a teenager. She didn’t stir, even when I whispered, “I’m sorry about tonight. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
Whatever “tomorrow” was going to look like. The uneasiness rose into full-blown nausea as I pulled on an oversized Covenant Christian College nightshirt and crawled into our empty bed. Tomorrow would be the first day of a new existence—without Zach to make me okay. When I woke up, I would be completely Rich Costanas’s wife again, and nothing would be any different from the first moment when I’d admitted to myself that I’d fallen in love with someone else.
Tomorrow I would still try to be cheerful as Rich silently, sullenly sat like he was walled into a dark room he wouldn’t let any of us into. I would kiss him on the cheek before I left for work, and he would mumble “have a good day.” He would go to the station for the evening shift before I came home, leaving no note, making no phone call, giving me vague, monosyllabic answers when I called him. I’d stopped calling three months ago.
Tomorrow I would do the right thing: give up a relationship that made me feel alive and loved and necessary, and attempt to revive what Rich and I once had, before September 11, 2001, drained the life out of us. I’d found a reason to keep breathing. I wasn’t sure Rich ever would.
And yet, tomorrow I would try. Only it would be a different person doing the trying. I was now a person who’d manufactured lies so she could meet her lover. A person who’d stripped herself down to betrayal, just to feel connected again. A person who’d been caught in the flash of a camera with her clothes on the floor around her.
I churned in the bed, tangling my ankles in a knot of sheets. I had to see Zach and find out what had gone down. And I had to make sure that he knew we were over—and I was really gone.
Though I pretended not to be, I was still awake when Rich fell into bed beside me, smelling of smoke and the Irish Spring attempt to wash it away.
“Hi, hon,” he said.
I stiffened. Why did he choose this night to sound like the old Rich? His voice hadn’t held that smushy quality for—what—two years? It sounded the way it used to when he wanted me to rub his head or make him a fried egg sandwich.
“How was your shift?” I said.
“I’ve got bad news for you.”
My eyes came open. The answers I’d heard for months had tended toward It was all right or The same as always. They always implied that I’d asked a stupid question that was more than annoying. I propped up on one elbow and tried to sound sleepy. “What happened?”
“We hadda fight a boat fire—down at Port Orchard Yacht Club.”
I curled my fingers around the pillowcase.
“Does your friend—that guy who took us out that one day— does he still own that Chris-Craft?”
He didn’t know. He didn’t know.
“Uh, yeah,” I said—and then my heart clutched at itself. “His boat?”
“Had to be—total loss too.” Rich punched at his pillow and wrapped it around his neck in his usual preparation for going into a post-fire coma.
But I had to ask.
“Is Zach—was he hurt?”
“Dunno. He wasn’t around. I don’t think he was there when it started.” He gave a long, raspy sigh. “It was a mistake to ever leave New York.”
I struggled to keep up. “Tell me some more,” I said.
“I don’t belong here, Demitria. I’m a fish outta water.”
How many times had I turned myself inside out to get him to open up? Six months ago, I’d have had our bags half-packed already, willing to do anything to bring him out of his cave. Now I said nothing, because I felt nothing—except terror at the vision of Zach as a charred version of his former self, buried in the rubble of The Testament.
Rich sighed heavily and flopped over, leaving me on the other side of his wall of a back, the one I’d stopped trying to hoist myself over. “There’s nothing we can do about it now,” he said.
I sank back stiffly onto my own pillow. “Not tonight,” I said.
“I didn’t mean tonight.”
There was the edge that implied I was of no help to him whatsoever, and why did I even think I could be?
I turned my back and moved to the far edge of the bed.
The next day couldn’t dawn soon enough. Most of the night I watched the digits on the clock change with maddening slowness, and planned how to get to Zach before I lost my mind.
I was up, dressed, and making coffee by six thirty. Fortunately— and not surprisingly—I didn’t hear a sound out of Christopher, but Jayne slipped into the kitchen in ghostly fashion at six thirty-five. Guilt scratched at me like an impatient dog.
“Hey, girlfriend,” I said. “You’re up early.”
“Mom, I’m always up at this time. I have to catch the bus at seven.”
I didn’t see whether she rolled her eyes. Her face was already in the pantry, where she pawed at the cereal boxes. From the back, she was still a waif of a child, with little-girl-fine golden tresses and a penchant for long flowy skirts, an echo of the tiny days when she fancied herself a fairy princess. Her front was a different story, where late-blooming breasts and a well-rehearsed d
isdain proclaimed her as teenager.
“Silly me,” I said.
“Unless you want to take me to school,” she said into the cabinet.
Her wistfulness slapped me in the face.
“I can’t today, Jay,” I said. “I have an early meeting.”
I’d made up half-truths so easily until now, but this lie stuck to my tongue like a frozen pole.
“What happened to Rachel last night?” I said.
“I don’t know. She ditched me, I guess.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get your message right away. I had—a meeting.”
Jayne turned and looked at me over the top of the Rice Krispies. “Is that all you do—go to meetings?”
“Sounds like it, doesn’t it?”
“Whatever.” She shook her hair back and turned the box upside down over a bowl. Two pieces of cereal bounced into it. She curled her lip.
“So—how was rehearsal?” I asked.
I tried to listen as I filled my coffee cup and twisted the lid on. If I didn’t get out of there, I wouldn’t get to talk to Zach before his eight o’clock.
“I got a different part,” Jayne said.
I fumbled for the appropriate reply. “I thought you were playing Mary Warren.”
“Mercy Lewis.” She gave a disgusted grunt.
“Oh, so—who are you now?”
“Abigail Williams.”
The sudden light in her always-serious brown eyes made me hunt through my faded memory of The Crucible.
“Isn’t she a main character?”
Jayne nodded. The shyness that had disappeared with her twelfth year glowed on her face. I felt my throat thicken.
“Jay, that’s amazing!” I said. “Congratulations!”
“Rachel didn’t learn her lines and she kept messing around during rehearsal, so Mrs. Dirks bumped her and gave the part to me.” She tilted her head like a small bird, spilling a panel of wavy hair across her thin cheek. “Maybe that’s why she left me last night.”
“Ya think?” I willed myself not to look at my watch. “Well, from now on, I’ll pick you up from rehearsals.”
“What if you have a meeting?” she said, adolescence slipping cleanly back into place.
“I’m not going to be having so many meetings from now on.” The thickness hardened in my throat. I couldn’t even say good-bye.
I’d just turned off Raintree Place when my cell phone belted out its disco version of the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the ring tone one of my students chose for me. My heart sagged when the number on the screen wasn’t Zach’s. It was a college number though.
“Dr. Costanas, this is Gina Livorsi,” said the California-crisp voice on the line.
Dr. Ethan Kaye’s assistant. As in president of Covenant Christian College. My boss and my friend. So was Gina. My stomach tightened. Since when was I “Dr. Costanas” to her?
“Why so formal?” I said.
“Formal occasion.” She sounded guarded. “Dr. Kaye wants to see you in his office. Soon as you can make it.”
It was already after seven. Zach liked to be in his classroom by seven forty-five—
“I have a class at nine,” I said. “I can be there after that.”
Gina paused—uncomfortably, I thought.
“He says to cancel your class and be here at eight if you can.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Unh-uh.”
“What’s this about, Gina?”
“He didn’t say.”
“He didn’t have to,” I said. “You always know.”
“Can you be here by eight?” she said.
My fingers tightened around the phone. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
Why this summons? Something so secretive I couldn’t even get it out of the secretary Zach and I had affectionately dubbed Loose Lips Livorsi?
I went cold.
CHAPTER THREE
Zach wasn’t in his office when I arrived. Normally by seven-thirty there were several students hanging out with him, drinking Starbucks and discussing Habbukuk.
“Where’s Dr. Archer?”
I jumped.
A lanky redhead in a hooded sweatshirt loped toward me— Brandon Stires, a junior who thought Zach hung the moon.
“You seen him, Dr. C.?” he said.
“It’s not my day to watch him, Bran.”
“He’s not in his classroom either.” Brandon peered into the narrow window in the door. “He’s always here by now.”
“Is he?” I said. I felt more transparent by the second.
While Brandon continued to muse on the weirdness of Zach’s absence, I headed for the only other place Zach would be this close to the start of class.
Freedom Chapel stood at the bottom of the gentle slope that led down from the back of Huntington Hall, the administration building. The chapel’s position always bothered me, behind and below the ostentatious structure named after one of the college’s original donors. Law overshadowed creativity as the stalwart stone and timber blocked Freedom’s silvery-white, winged roof. On paste gray days like so many in the Pacific Northwest—like this one—I wanted wings, not tradition.
The glass doors sighed shut behind me as I stepped into the dim narthex. I saw no heads silhouetted in the weak sunlight seeping into the sanctuary. I ventured in further, knowing the minutes were ticking relentlessly toward eight o’clock. Sometimes, Zach told me, he would come here before a class and imagine Ethan Kaye preaching from the center of the aisle.
Ethan’s sermons were an undercurrent in my thoughts as well. He urged us all, students and faculty alike, to eschew the God-talk that depersonalized God into an abstraction. “Go to the Gospel,” he’d tell us, “and listen to our Lord’s speaking voice. He awakens our imagination so we can experience how His words work.”
A chill settled over the sanctuary, and I put my hands in my coat pockets and squeezed myself in. Didn’t help. This cold signified the absence of something. Perhaps of Zach. More likely the gaping space where Jesus’ voice should be. I didn’t want to hear what He would have to say to me right now.
As I hurried up the hill toward Huntington Hall on the path lined with still-bare trees and the first pokings of daffodils, I wasn’t particularly anxious to hear what Ethan Kaye had to say either. Ethan and I—and Zach—were friends, drawn together by our common ideas. One of the reasons I’d accepted the teaching position here four years ago was that he sat at the helm.
Ethan had a reputation for wanting his college to be a place where students could face their doubts and ask their questions in an attempt to make their beliefs and convictions theirs and not the dictates of parents or professors. “Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith,” he said to some student at least once a week. “Doubt is an element of faith.” He refused to let the fear of the more legalistic faculty members turn CCC into a dogmatic prison of peer pleasing and rule keeping. That, he said, denied everything personal and free in a relationship with God.
Which accounted for the positive reception he gave Zach and me when we proposed the Faith and Doubt project. I buried my hands in my pockets and took the hill at a slant, only tangentially aware of the infant forsythia that promised spring. I remembered sitting in Zach’s office one afternoon, early on in our friendship, studying the wet-gold leaves plastered to his window. We’d been listening to yet another student tell us over lattes that his early experiences in the church left him feeling less than Christian.
“Everybody talked about the joy you were supposed to feel in the Lord,” Brandon Stires told us. “I’d walk out of the church feeling like roadkill.”
“They’re stuck, Doc,” I’d said to Zach. “These kids that were raised in strict homes think God gets mad at them because they even have doubts.” I’d looked at him—not expecting the liquid blue look I got back.
“Then let’s get them unstuck,” he’d said. “Because if anybody can get them free, it’s you.”
I stopped now, my hand on the knob of the back door int
o Huntington, the small door Zach and I always slipped through to get up to Ethan at the end of the day, when he could take off his ever-present tweed jacket and his battle-weary face and hear us wax on about plans, process, results. This method was working—students were going out into the community and interviewing seekers, people who wanted God and were in various places on the path to finding Him.
Ethan stood behind the project even when faculty members like Kevin St. Clair saw it as creeping liberalism. Zach called him “Kevin St. Pompous” during our after-hours discussions over Chinese food in the president’s office. Ethan always grinned.
I started up the back steps, planting my feet in the worn places in the wood where three generations of students had climbed. Each step grew harder to take, because I knew that as steeped in compassion as Ethan was, he took a hard line when people behaved stupidly. I tried to convince myself this urgent meeting had nothing to do with my recent stupidity, or with the possibility of Zach’s horrible demise in the boat fire, but my insides were a large, gelatinous mass by the time I walked into the outer office. When I heard voices in obvious conflict on the other side of his door, I clung to the hope that Zach had been called to the president’s office too.
I grabbed onto the corner of Gina’s desk to steady myself. She didn’t turn from her computer monitor.
“Who else is coming to this meeting?” I said.
“Don’t ask,” she said. “Dr. Kaye said to go on in.”
“Gina—”
She twisted to look at me, face as white and expressionless as porridge. “This is one time I can’t tell you, because I honestly don’t know.” She glanced warily at the double oak doors. “All I can say is that I have never seen him lipid before.”
I blinked. “You mean livid?”
“Whatever. He’s ticked.”
I swallowed hard to keep from throwing up.
Four faces swiveled toward me when I entered Ethan’s office. None of them belonged to Zach.
Oddly, the one I noticed first belonged to the man sitting apart from the others. Andy Callahan. Attorney to the college. Thin man with the kind of unflappable manner you want in your legal advisor, though at the moment his presence fanned the flames of my anxiety. Why did this meeting require a lawyer?
