“Aw, Sophie.” Wrapping her in his arms, he buried his face in her hair. She could feel the horrible pounding of his heart against her, and she thought she felt his own tears. “Love? A long time ago, in high school, we had to memorize this poem. ‘Renascence,’ I think it was. I never forgot it.”
Low and killing, his words slid into the spaces between them.
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink.
She held on to him with all her strength. “Are you sinking, Judah?”
“Oh, God, Sophie. I’m drowning, I’m drowning.”
“Then hold on to me, Judah. Let me be your spar.”
“I’d drown both of us.” He unwound her arms and stood up. “I’ll want you until the day I die.”
“But not enough.”
His T-shirt half pulled on, he stopped, frowned. “That’s not true. You know I want you.”
Naked, she faced him. “Not enough, Judah. You don’t have any faith in yourself, not in what we create together. You think it’s easier to walk away, safer. But it isn’t. You’re a coward.”
“Probably.”
“Hearts don’t break, Judah, I know this, so why does it feel as though mine is ripping apart? I’ll survive, but my world will be smaller without you. You need to know that, to understand what you’re doing. To me. To Angel. To yourself.”
She turned away before he could touch her. She didn’t think she could bear it if he touched her. Not now.
There was nothing left to say.
She’d known she couldn’t change him. That had never been in the cards. She’d hoped that with her he could find the path to change himself. As clearly as if she were watching a movie, she saw what the days ahead would be like. For her. For him.
And she feared for him, for the darkness waiting to consume him.
Judah hesitated at Angel’s bedroom door. He couldn’t go in. He’d thought he never wanted children in his life, but Angel— Well.
He shut the door of Sophie’s beach house carefully, with a quiet finality, and somehow believed that by doing so, he showed respect.
Even though he tried not to, he looked back once. Sophie was in the living room, holding Angel. The hint of red in Sophie’s hair caught the glow of the lamp as she leaned forward, her body curving over the baby’s. Through the window as he watched, he saw Sophie stroke Angel’s cheek. One russet curl clung to Angel’s flailing hand.
His heart beat hard in his chest, and there was no room for it, his chest closing tightly around that poor organ until he believed he couldn’t breathe. There, behind the glass, Sophie and Angel, caught in the amber spill of light.
He turned and moved into the darkness of Christmas Eve, walking away from everything he loved most in the world and everything that most terrified him.
Starting the engine of his car, he fought the impulse to turn off the key and run back inside, to run to the refuge of Angel and Sophie.
He drove, for hours it seemed, before parking.
The river flowed smoothly, darkly before him, its glassy surface glinting even in the pitchy night. For a long time he watched as the river, moving like a powerful muscle underneath glossy skin, pulsed toward the Gulf.
Sophie was right. The heart didn’t break. But he’d had no idea that it could hurt, hurt beyond anything he’d ever known, aching until he pressed his fist against his chest and sank to his knees on the tough grass edging the riverbank. Loneliness he understood, but this, this awareness of being alone under the dark bowl of the sky went beyond loneliness.
Like an animal forced to its knees, he knelt there in the silent, chilly night.
Then, suddenly, barely heard, music drifted toward him.
Like tiny, distant bells, the music pierced him.
Angels singing in the night.
He was not a man whose experience had led him to believe in angels. Even so, it took him a minute to understand that the sound he heard, the music surrounding him, filling him, came from human voices, the voices of men and women lifting in an unbearably sweet harmony.
Following the river, Judah approached the center of town. A crowd of people—men wearing yarmulkes, women wearing the shawls of the Muslim faith, priests in collars—hundreds of Poinciana’s people were gathered along Main Street. They held shielded candles in their hands. Luminaria lined Main Street and its side streets, a yellow glow down to the dark of the river’s edge.
Off in a corner of the crowd, under the banyan tree of the Second Baptist Church, a boy-man stood alone, a stubby candle in his hand.
Tommy Joe. Out on bail that Sophie had provided. He knew Sophie had gone to talk with him from time to time, had arranged counseling, and had been the instigator behind the decision to allow Tommy to live with Billy Ray while his case was proceeding through the courts.
Sophie had believed in the kid, believed in Billy Ray.
But still, Tommy Joe, here with the rest of Poinciana, joined with some of the very people he’d said “weren’t like us.”
Judah looked again at the kid, thinking it couldn’t be the same boy.
Tommy Joe nodded stiffly back at him.
The same boy?
No.
Judah found himself nodding back, acknowledging the need in the human soul for something higher.
It wasn’t a question of religious faith. It didn’t have anything to do with one religion or another. It was faith in the human heart. This was what he’d never understood. That it all came down to this—
To the small flicker of goodness inside each human heart. To the light of that tiny, sometimes barely perceptible flame casting its glimmer of hope into the darkness of an often bitter world.
There were evil and hate and cruelty in the world. God knows he’d fought them long enough. His whole life had been spent in those trenches where the worst of humankind lived.
And he’d forgotten.
Forgotten that sometimes religion wasn’t used as a weapon. Forgotten that men and women could sometimes rise above everything to join together as they did now in a flowing river of light.
This was what Sophie had tried to show him.
And he hadn’t understood.
Lifting his head, Judah watched the slow, now silent movement of all the different people in Poinciana as they merged into one.
His town.
His people.
Tommy Joe was there, too. Tommy Joe could change.
Standing there in the shadows, the lights flickering in front of him, sending a message in the face of darkness, Judah realized that if Tommy Joe could change, maybe he could, too.
What he’d tried to do alone, he could do with Sophie. And Angel.
If he weren’t a coward.
If he could take that leap of faith that Sophie had talked about.
On Christmas morning, Sophie let Angel bat at the colored papers from presents that her friends in the ER had sent. Paper spiraled and clumped under the tree, across the floor into the kitchen. Irina had already called, and they’d both shed tears as Sophie related the events of Christmas Eve. Sophie’s eyes were swollen from crying. There had been no sleep during that long night.
But as Angel made her funny noises and the whisper of the incoming tide came through her windows, Sophie was at peace.
With her grandmother, she’d shed her final tear.
She touched her talisman on the chain around her neck. Some day she would pass it on to Angel, to remind her that while love didn’t always conquer everything, it was the only thing that stood a chance.
Judah’s presence was there with them in the remembered moments. It would be all she would have.
But she wouldn’t dwell on the loss.
She would cherish the memories and let them enrich her life.
She would make it be enough.
Lost in the moment, absorbed in Angel’s play, Sophie jumped when her door vibrated with the pounding on
it. She tucked Angel into the playpen, another gift, and went to the door.
There, standing on her stoop, was Santa.
A Santa who’d seen better days, that was for sure. His red suit was much the worse for wear, torn and bloodstained. His cheap beard was drooping off his lean cheeks.
Santa, nonetheless, and bearing a brown bag.
Judah.
Gasping, laughing, crying, Sophie pulled him into her house. “Judah! You idiot!”
Behind her, Angel gurgled a word that perhaps only she understood, but it seemed to Sophie that Angel was communicating something, was welcoming the tall, tattered figure in front of her.
Seated on the floor beside Angel’s playpen, Judah handed Sophie the brown bag.
“A present? After everything that’s happened?” Her hands shook. That Judah, of all people, would be so whimsical as to appear in a Santa suit left her trembling inside.
“Wait. Don’t open it yet. I have a story you need to hear.” Still not touching her, he finally told her about going to the cemetery, about the silence he’d found there, the lack of answers. Then he told her what had happened after he’d left her, what he’d finally grasped. “I am stupid, Sophie. But can you find room in your life, your heart, for a stupid, work-obsessed fool?”
“What have I been saying over and over again, you goof?”
“You sure? All I can promise, Sophie, is that I won’t walk away again. I’ll do my best to learn how to be a husband and a father, to love you as you deserve. If you’ll help me?”
“Oh, you fool! You know I will.” She dragged the beard free of his well-loved face and covered it with kisses. “Judah, together we can do anything, become anything. That’s all I wanted you to see. The possibility.”
“All right. Open the bag. I’m sorry it’s not exactly gift-wrapped.”
“But the top is folded over so nicely. Such effort. I’m impressed.”
He laughed, a free, unreserved, no-holds-barred roar. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh like that and it went straight to her heart. Angel shrieked. Then, waving a fist full of paper, she laughed.
“The kid has a sense of humor.” Judah fidgeted, picking up bits of this and that from the floor as Sophie unfolded the bag slowly, wonderingly. “That’s good.”
Sophie thought he was nervous.
It made no sense.
Until she pulled out the first piece of paper inside the bag. One of those forms anyone could pull off the Internet, it was a marriage license. She blinked, blinked again as she looked at Judah’s signature at the end.
“Please?” He tapped her knee. “Make it official? Make it real? Soon?”
She dipped her head and slowly removed the second folded paper. She’d thought Judah had made her cry for the last time, but as she opened the folds and saw what was there, she burst into tears.
Another Internet form, it was a sample request for adoption. Under Father, Judah had carefully filled in his own name.
She leapt into his arms, knocking him over backwards. His head bumped the edge of Angel’s playpen. Through the webbing, Angel reached through and batted his face.
“No fair, kid, two on one.” Half sitting, he reached in and lifted Angel out, settling her on Sophie’s lap.
Judah rubbed his whiskery cheeks against Sophie’s face and then nibbled her chin. “You taste so good. Maybe a little salty.”
“I cried a lot.”
“I’m sorry, Sophie. For that, for all the mistakes.”
“Of course you are. And you’ll make more mistakes. So will I. But we’ll forgive them.”
He held her in his arms, and she could feel him shaking.
“God, Sophie, I love the taste of you, the smell of you. You. Moye zoloto,” he said, using her grandmother’s name. “You’re my treasure, Sophie. My gold.”
Much later, after the party, after they’d settled Angel down for the night, Sophie led him to her room. There, in that room, in her body, her self, he found the sanctuary he’d never known he wanted or needed. In the quiet of a darkness pierced by the light of stars shining outside their window, they made slow, achingly sweet love and with each murmur, each touch, Judah, patron saint of lost causes, felt himself learning that with love, everything is possible.
Even hope.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-8091-9
DEAD CALM
Copyright © 2003 by Jimmie Morel
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Dead Calm Page 24
