From the day they met, Ben and Elise had been inseparable. They spent all of their time together during and after school, and she felt an unbreakable bond with her new best friend. At least she thought it was unbreakable.
Ben had a different home life than she did. He lived on the other side of the tracks, as her mother would call it. His mother and father had started their family years before Ben was born, and he was one of those “accidents” that people in their late forties just don’t expect. Actually, his mother was in her late forties, but his father was almost sixty when Ben was born.
Even though his parents were married, his father had little involvement in his life. He seemed nice enough, but Ben was always trying to get his attention and it never worked. They lived in a tiny little house in a questionable neighborhood, and his siblings were all older and had moved out. So, in essence, Ben was an only child.
He spent a lot of time at her house, hanging out on the back porch swing and listening to music on her boom box. They could spend hours doing nothing together, but it was never enough time. They just clicked from the very first moment.
Elise had only fond memories of those first years of their friendship. She knew now, as an adult with more experience, that she had been falling in love with him even then. But he wasn’t interested, and that was okay with her. The relationship they had as friends was more than enough at the time.
His shyness caused him a lot of grief. He wanted so badly to be popular, but he would never have admitted it out loud. Ben seemed to crave acceptance, and Elise gave him that much. She accepted him for who he was - a shy, average student who was shorter than most people in their class but had a heart of gold. She loved being his best friend, his confidante. She felt special, and he gave her that.
They remained friends through a lot, but Elise never could have imagined the first major life event that Ben would help her navigate.
April 1992
Elise had always been a good sleeper. Her mother even said she was sleeping through the night at three weeks old. Now, at thirteen, she was still able to sleep soundly even if a freight train was barreling through her room.
But, not on this night. She wasn’t sure what woke her up - the sound of her mother’s anguished wails or the flashing lights in her driveway.
It was 2:08 AM by the clock. On a Friday night in her small town of Carson Falls, Georgia, not a lot went on in the wee hours of the morning. Sure, local boys might have been skinny dipping with girls of less repute down at Skipaway Lake. Maybe some high school kids were cruising the parking lot of the local Kmart, which was one of the only landmarks in Carson Falls. But never anything like this.
The sound of her mother’s cries woke her from her slumber enough that she suddenly felt terror. She wasn’t dreaming. Something was wrong. Very wrong. She remained, for a moment, in that world that exists between our dreams and our reality, and many times afterward she would wish that she could have stayed in the dream world… where things were okay and life was bearable. Manageable. Livable.
Elise grabbed her robe hanging on the post of her bed and tied it around her. It was early April and still quite cool in the north Georgia mountain town, so she grabbed her slippers on the way out of her room and ran down the stairs, trying not to slip on the cold hardwood floors.
Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw.
Her mother was crouched on the living room floor. Paramedics and police officers were standing around her. And her father. He was lying there, motionless, on the new tan and black rug in front of the sofa. And there was blood beside him.
“Mom! Mom! What happened?” Elise yelled from the stairs as she ran the rest of the way and attempted to push one of the paramedics out of the way. He grabbed her arms from behind and pulled her back. Her mother continued to sob and then she started screaming at Elise’s father.
“Why? Why? Why would you do this? Why couldn’t you just stop?” she begged as she laid her face on his stomach. He wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t he moving? Elise was confused and yet she knew. Her father was gone. The dream world, where she had apparently lived instead of reality, was gone. She could feel her father’s spirit had left, and the world felt darker. More like a void. Her breath was gone.
“Mom?” she said as she sobbed in the arms of the paramedic. Finally, her mother was shaken out of her grief long enough to turn around and look at her daughter.
“Elise? Oh, my baby…” she cried as she reached for her daughter. Elise had never seen her mother’s face so puffy and red. She looked twenty years older in that moment, like a woman who had lost everything she had. Every hope. Every dream.
Elise slowly crouched to the floor beside her mother, barely peeking around her mother’s head. “Daddy?” she whispered. She was choking out her words now, the air seemingly sucked from her lungs.
“Oh, Elise, honey… Daddy has gone to be with Jesus,” her mother said, trying desperately to hold on to a moment of calm that had come over her. Elise’s calm was shattered, however, and she started shaking all over.
“No! No!” she yelled as sobs overcame her. “I don’t understand! Why would Jesus take him away from us?” Who was this Jesus? He wasn’t the Jesus she’d heard about all her life in church because that Jesus would never have taken her Daddy from her like this.
“Oh, sweetie, Jesus didn’t do this. Your Daddy’s decisions took him away,” her mother said in an exhausted voice. She shook her head and looked at Elise’s eyes, rubbing her cheek with her right hand.
“What are you talking about? What decisions?” Elise asked, but a police officer came up and asked Elise’s mother to come with him and answer some questions. A paramedic also whisked Elise away from the body of her beloved father, and he was loaded onto a gurney, covered in a sheet and removed from the home. Everything was in slow motion, and Elise had no idea what had happened. There was a small pool of blood on the carpet next to where his mouth had been. Had he shot himself? Why would he have done that?
An hour later, everyone had gone and it was after three in the morning. Elise sat stunned on the stairs while her mother locked up the house. Without a word, her mother took a deep breath and walked over the the rug. She knelt down and swiped her hand across it, just missing the spot of blood. She bowed her head and quietly cried as she started to roll it up. When she finally turned around, Elise confronted her.
“Mom, please tell me what happened. Did Daddy shoot himself?” Her mother looked shocked, as if a new wave of grief ran over her.
“Of course not! Your father would never do such a thing, honey.” She came and sat next to Elise on the stairs. “Elise, you’re thirteen now. You’re old enough to know about your father.”
“Know what?”
“Your Daddy had a disease, and he just couldn’t stop himself.”
“A disease?”
“Elise, your father was an alcoholic. He had been for several years, but he usually hid it well until recently.” Her mother put her head in her hands and sighed. She was all out of tears. “The last few months were hard. He was staying out later, getting involved in more than just drinking alcohol. We argued a lot about it when you weren’t around. Tonight, your father went on a drinking binge. I had gone to bed at midnight because I was just tired of waiting up for him. He wouldn’t listen when I asked him to come home. Just before two, I heard a noise down here so I came to see what it was. He was having a seizure, Elise. He threw up blood…” she started weeping, but she knew she had to finish giving Elise the answers she needed. The hard truth.
“Mom, stop. Please…” Elise said through her own tears. Her mother looked at her and felt pangs of guilt for giving her daughter so much information. Sometimes, she forgot Elise was only a kid. She was so mature for her age.
“I’m so sorry, sweetie. I tried to get him help. Maybe I should have tried harder. He wouldn’t go to treatment. He was so embarrassed, Elise. He didn’t want to shame our family like his father shamed him…”
“G
randpa was an alcoholic?”
“Yes, he was. But he eventually got help, and your Daddy was so ashamed at school that he started getting in trouble. It was a bad time in his life. I only wish it would have kept him from ever picking up the bottle himself. Alcoholism can be genetic, Elise. Please, please don’t ever…” she said starting to weep again.
“Don’t worry, Mom. I will never taste alcohol. I promise,” she said hugging her mom and starting to sob again. “I miss him…”
“I do too,” her mother whispered into her hair.
The two sat on the stairs in each other’s arms for what seemed like hours. Unable to move, they fell asleep that way.
When the sunlight started to stream through the windows, the doorbell rang. It was Mrs. Adams from next door. The older woman was like a grandmother to Elise. Groggy, she stood up and walked to the door, not really aware of the new nightmare she was living in.
“Mrs. Adams?” she said, rubbing her eyes. The woman grabbed her and gave her a long embrace. That’s when Elise remembered what happened just a few hours before. Her Daddy was gone. Reality seeped back into her consciousness like a sharp sword. She now lived in a world without her precious Daddy in it.
“Oh, Elise, I’m so sorry…” Mrs. Adams cried. Elise’s mother sat up and opened her eyes. Realizing that her daughter was being comforted by someone at the door, she jumped up.
“Edna…”
“Oh, Patrice, I’m so sorry about Jerry. I spoke with one of the paramedics when I saw the ambulance here.”
The two women hugged and spoke softly for a few moments as Elise walked upstairs quietly. She just needed some time alone, without her mother or anyone else watching her every move.
She walked into her room, her place of refuge most of the time. But now it was a stark reminder of her last moments of normalcy. Her last moments as a girl with a father. Now everything in her room reminded her of her father. The baseball cap on her shelf that her Dad had bought her at an Atlanta Braves game. It still had the chocolate ice cream stain on it from where her father’s cone dripped right on her head. They had laughed so hard about that.
The certificate from career day hung on her wall where her father came and spoke to her class about his business. The picture of the father/daughter Valentine dance was perched in a wooden frame on her desk. How had she never noticed so many memories of her father were surrounding her?
Her stomach clenched and she fell to her knees beside her bed. Why, God? Why? Why would you take my Daddy from me? She cried out silently because she wanted no attention from her mother or Mrs. Adams right now. She wanted to curl up into a fetal position and cry for days. She wanted to go back in time and help her father. How could she have helped him? She learned about alcoholism in health class. How could she have missed the signs?
She wanted to pour her heart out to God, but what was He going to do? He hadn’t saved her father, so He obviously didn’t care about her either. What had she done to deserve this?
Suddenly, the only light in her life popped into her head. Ben! He didn’t know about her father. He would comfort her. He would let her scream and yell and bad mouth God for what He’d done.
She threw on her clothes, ran a brush through her hair and brushed her teeth before running downstairs. Her mother was just closing the door from where Mrs. Adams had left.
“Elise, where are you going?” she said in a shocked voice.
“I need some air,” Elise said walking past her.
“But…” she could hear her mother saying behind her, but for once in her life Elise decided she was going to take care of herself. She hopped on her bike and took off toward the wrong side of the tracks.
Chapter 3
Ben pushed the lawnmower across the thick grass and wiped the sweat off his brow. April in Georgia wasn’t normally this warm, especially so early in the morning. But he wanted to get his Saturday chores out of the way so he could go to Elise’s house.
She was his best friend on Earth. Really, his only good friend. She seemed to understand him at his core, and she saw past his issues. He was poor, plain and simple. His mother worked hard as a housekeeper, but his father didn’t work anymore. He was getting too old to work given his health challenges. Truth be told, he was more of a grandfatherly type so Ben didn’t consider him to be his father. He had long ago decided that he didn’t really have a father. No one to throw the ball with in the front yard. No one to explain the ins and outs of girls to him. No one to wrestle with on the living room rug.
As he came around the corner of the house, he saw Elise riding quickly toward his house on her bike. What was she doing? She looked frantic, exhausted. Something was obviously wrong. She would never come to his house so early on a Saturday… or any day really. She wasn’t a morning person at all.
“Elise? What are you doing…” he started to say as he shut off the lawnmower and walked toward her. She threw her bike on the ground and burst into tears, running straight into his sweaty arms. “What’s wrong?” he asked quietly as he stroked her hair. She was taller than him, but in that moment he felt as powerful as he’d ever felt. And his mother had promised him he would soon be taller than Elise.
“He’s dead, Ben! My Daddy’s dead!” she sobbed. He felt her legs giving way, so he held her up and led her to the bench in his mother’s small flower garden.
“Elise, what are you talking about?” he asked as he tilted her chin up with his index finger.
“My Daddy died early this morning. He was an alcoholic, Ben. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t. I would have saved him. Begged him to stop.” She was choking out the words through her sobs. He’d never seen her like this, and he never wanted to see it again. Elise was the strong one of the two of them. She had her life together. She had a solid foundation of God. He’d never even been to church in his life. He sort of believed there was a God out there somewhere, but when bad things happened he wondered if he was wrong about that. Elise had been his only connection to God, but what kind of God allowed this to happen to her?
“I’m so sorry, Elise…” was all he could think to say. He felt completely helpless, so he pulled her face, wet with tears, against his already sweaty t-shirt and rocked her. It seemed like the natural thing to do. She sobbed until he thought she would either pass out or dehydrate, but he kept quiet and just let her cry. He didn’t know what else to do. Thirteen year old boys weren’t exactly equipped for heavy emotional moments, he thought.
Finally, she pulled back and wiped her eyes. “Oh, jeez, Ben. I’m so sorry. I got your shirt wet…”
“No, you didn’t. I got your face sweaty,” he said, not trying to be funny, but she laughed. In fact, she laughed so hard that she started crying again. He was so happy to see her smile, even if just for a moment.
“I can’t believe he’s gone, Ben.”
“I know, El. I’m so sorry. Your Dad was a good man.”
“He was an alcoholic.”
“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good man,” Ben said touching her leg. “Everybody has problems. Everybody has secrets they keep.”
“I know. But how could I not have known?”
“We’re kids, Elise. Our parents are supposed to shield us from the bad stuff. Sounds like your parents were protecting you.”
“Maybe, but now I feel like someone has pulled the rug out from under me. I’ll never feel safe again, Ben.”
“Yes, you will.”
“How do you know?” she asked, looking into his eyes with her dark brown pools of sadness.
“Because I’ll always be there to keep you safe. You’re my best friend, and I won’t let anything happen to you.”
She hugged him, and in that moment he really meant it. But what did thirteen year old boys know anyway?
June 2013
Elise sat at the breakfast bar clutching the pile of letters that lay in her lap. These used to be her prized possessions, at least until she met Ted and got married. Once that happened, she let her past go. At lea
st she thought she had done that until now.
She took a sip of her coffee and contemplated whether she wanted to open that can of worms. She decided to start with the heavy senior yearbook she had balanced on her lap under the letters first. Covered in protective plastic, she opened it and started reading the notes written by her old friends.
“You’re the sweetest girl I know. Have a good summer! Love, Cicely Hankins”
“Call me this summer! We can go camping out at Lake Skipaway! Love, Amber Daniels”
But those weren’t the inscriptions she was looking for. Who was she kidding? She was looking for Ben. And she quickly found him on page 108.
A flood of memories washed over her like high tide at the shore. All of the thoughts and feelings from her senior year consumed her for a few moments as she ran her fingers across where he’d written. She tried to conjure him in her mind, sitting next to her on the ground in the senior courtyard, laughing and trying to keep her from seeing what he was writing.
Always There: Christian Inspirational Romance Page 3
