To Know You (9781401688684)

by Ethridge, Shannon (CON)

  “So why aren’t you in the engineering program?” Julia said. “Duke must have a great one.”

  “Jack,” Destiny said.

  “He thinks premed is more useful,” Chloe said.

  “That’s no excuse for you taking the Jack way out.” Her sister’s words stung.

  “She’s right,” Julia said. “That’s no excuse.”

  Destiny tugged gently on her hair. “Told you.”

  “I know,” Chloe said. “I should have fought for what I wanted. But I wanted Jack so much. I thought being the good girl was the way to hold on to him. But he was such a good boy that I was afraid . . . that being . . . you know . . .”

  “Oh, for grief’s sake,” Destiny said. “Do you ever talk openly to him, or is it all about Jackie boy all the time?”

  “Not on this. I don’t know how. I have been afraid if I admitted my desire—my sexual need—that he would see me as something foul. So I began to wonder how it was for other people.”

  “Did you have sex with this man?” Julia said gently.

  “No.” Chloe closed her eyes, tried to corral the slippery images that danced in the back of her head. Rob giving her juice, telling her to take off her clothes and get into bed. “I’ll tuck you in,” she remembered him saying and she sat there waiting—untouched and getting goose bumps, her head spinning—while he did something with a white light. Then he took her hand and said, “Dance for me,” and she thought she was dreaming, so she danced and danced until she heard someone yelling “POLICE!” Then Rob exploded in curses and suddenly the cold air came over her, and the howling of the wind, and maybe Destiny’s voice. And she just sprawled back and lay there so the frigid air would sweep away his filthy kisses.

  “How do you know you didn’t have sex?” Destiny said. “You were drugged.”

  “I may be stupid but not so ignorant that I can’t tell whether or not I had sex.”

  Julia wrapped her good hand around Chloe’s. “What do you want now?”

  Chloe wanted the safe Jack. The considerate and determined and really good Jack. She couldn’t tell him what she’d done, and she couldn’t not tell him. Either way, he would hate her. He wouldn’t divorce her because that would be unmerciful. Instead, he’d hedge her in tighter—and hedge himself on the far side so he could never be touched by all that was wrong in her.

  There was only one path for redemption. “I want to go to Dallas. And see about donating.”

  “No,” Destiny said, peering over Chloe’s shoulder. “You can’t let her, Julia. Not like this.”

  Chloe ignored her. “As soon as the weather clears, we’ll go to Dallas. I’ll get tested, meet with Dillon’s doctor, and we’ll get this done.”

  “No.” Julia cradled Chloe’s face with her hands. “I can’t allow that.”

  “I didn’t have sex with him,” she said. “I should still be . . . physically clean.”

  “Oh, my dear child. As desperate as I am to help my son—to save my son—I’m not going to let you go into this out of guilt.”

  “I screwed up. Screwed up terribly. I need to redeem that some way.”

  “You need to start with Jack.”

  “No! How can I ever even face him again?”

  “Oh, man,” Destiny said. “And they accuse me of melodrama. Listen, guys, can we push pause on this Chloe stinks and Julia’s gonna fix her show?” She climbed out of bed and went to the closet. “Has anyone noticed how cold it is in here?”

  Not cold enough. Not cold enough to stop the stink of alcohol and the stench of her foolishness. Maybe if she threw open the door and just lost herself in the snow. The harbor was nearby . . .

  . . . but Julia was gently pushing her into bed and climbing in beside her while Destiny piled blankets on them and pulled the knitted hats Chloe had bought onto their heads.

  Destiny climbed in on the other side of Chloe, snuggled close, and said, “Okay, Mother dearest. Isn’t it about time that we heard the story of you and Chloe’s father?”

  Julia snuggled in from the other side. “Chloe, you might not feel so end-of-the-worldish once you hear how I screwed up. A big part of that has to do with the man who is your father. So I’ll start, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Please.” Chloe found Julia’s hand and held it tight.

  Ten

  Albany, New York

  23 Years Earlier, May

  Julia McCord had come to Albany to make peace with herself.

  Peace with Thomas Bryant would never be possible. That much was clear.

  She had taken to loitering in the lobby of Tom’s law firm, hoping to catch him on the way to lunch or court. She called him so many times that he changed his phone number. She banged on his apartment door, only to have it opened by a sleepy-eyed guy in his forties who worked third shift and growled that “the other guy had to move because some chick was climbing down his throat.”

  Julia prayed that Tom would run to her and say it was a mistake and the court will reverse our surrender and we will be the family I promised.

  She took to chalking again, abstract pictures of a baby with big eyes and open arms. She used the walkways of Tom’s life to display her dream. The sidewalk in front of the courthouse. His assigned parking space in his firm’s building. On the side of his mother’s apartment building.

  She welcomed rain because the pictures would wash away, and she despised the sun because the compulsion to draw her baby—her Destiny—would itch in the tips of her fingers.

  As the months passed, Julia imagined her daughter with her first tooth, and then three more, jawing on toys. Maybe starting to crawl and clinging to her adoptive mother so she wouldn’t tumble.

  When Tom threatened her with a restraining order, Jeanne intervened with tough love and a sleeve of cookie dough. She had to spoon it into Julia’s mouth, alternating cookie dough with fudge sauce and some stern words.

  “You’ve become a stalker,” Jeanne Potts said. “You need to move on, Jules, before you get arrested. And I know just the place. IronWorks Ministries is looking for someone who can paint.”

  Julia’s brain buzzed with sugar. “Walls or pictures?”

  “Both. My cousin said they need a jack-of-all, someone who can help renovate their activity space and teach some enrichment classes for the kids. They offer minimum wage and room and board. It’s better than jail, Jules. Because that is where you’re heading.”

  “I want to go back to Nahant,” Julia said.

  Jeanne wrapped her arms around her. “Go to Albany for the summer, see what you can do to help.” The day after finals Jeanne borrowed her father’s SUV and drove Julia the length of the Mass Turnpike, across Vermont, and into Albany.

  IronWorks was a consortium of churches that ministered to children in gang neighborhoods. The director, Reverend Paul Woodward, hired college students to help renovate the granite mansion the city had given them, to make lunches and scrub pans, to teach a variety of skills from dance to math to art. The consortium wanted to do it all. Day care. Tutoring. Sports teams. Living and enrichment skills. Counseling, and more counseling, and emergency shelter. So many needs to be met.

  Julia prayed her own needs would flake away like dead skin.

  Dark clouds rolled over the city, thunder rattling to the west. Spring storms, something Julia knew well from the plains of Oklahoma. She had a full class for Young Adult Art. A misnomer, to be sure, because no one older than eighteen was allowed in the IronWorks house before 6:00 p.m. In the evenings, they shuffled the young ones home for supper, cleaned up the day’s mess, and reopened the doors at night for older teens to hang.

  Julia’s strategy was to present narrative art as the key to making it in video games or graphic novels. The boys had endless visions of blasting heads or impaling hearts. Liz Sierra, a grad psych student, assured her that as long as the dead bodies didn’t resemble any of the living under the IronWorks roof, they’d go with it.

  Better to get it out on the page than on the street.


  The girls preferred to make fashion sketches, with enough enthusiasm that she lobbied Reverend Paul to add pattern making and sewing to their programs. In her third week at IronWorks, Julia observed thirteen-year-old Sasha designing maternity clothes. “These are for me,” the girl said. “In six months.”

  Julia held her tears until the kids had put away their supplies and gone out to the main room for pizza. Then she went into the supply room and cried. Children having children. That’s what her mother tagged her with, as if she were little more than a girl playing with a doll.

  For the first time, Julia considered that her mother may have been right.

  “Hey there.”

  Someone had come in behind her, and in a moment of insanity, and maybe unreleased anger, she swirled around and shoved the intruder. He staggered out into the art room and fell on his backside.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He held up his palms. “Is it safe to get up?”

  “Of cour—” Stop staring, she told herself. A ridiculous command, because who could turn away from eyes so winter blue? His hair was blond and his face angelic, despite being built like a Cowboys linebacker.

  He stood, brushed off the back of his jeans. “I’m Andy. Andy Hamlin.”

  Julia took his outstretched hand. “Julia McCord. I’m the art teacher and whatever else Reverend Paul needs me to do. Are you a volunteer?”

  “Paid staff, just in. Onboard to do some pastoring.”

  “You’re a pastor?”

  “Someday. I’m a divinity school grad. With my social work undergrad, Reverend Paul thought I could help in bridging with parents. The whole Stephen Ministry thing, linked to what y’all do here at the Works.”

  “We,” Julia said.

  “Huh?”

  “What we do at IronWorks. You’re part of that now.”

  He grinned. “Well, I guess I am. Thanks for the welcome.”

  “Anytime you need a good shove,” she said, “I’m happy to oblige.”

  23 Years Earlier, June

  Rain pelted the roof in sharp bursts. The power had gone out and with it, the air-conditioning. The attic room Julia shared with four other girls was steamy and thick. Her friends were stone-cold asleep, even in this heat. Julia lay awake, listening to the storm, anticipating each burst of lightning.

  Surrounded by kids and staff, she filled her days with physical labor and mental gymnastics. At night, she might cry silently—only for a minute—until collapsing into exhausted slumber.

  Not tonight. Tonight her skin ached with loneliness.

  Jesus, take this, Julia prayed, even as she traced Andy Hamlin’s face in her mind and then with her finger on the sheet. Trying to quiet her mind long enough to fall asleep wasn’t in the realm of possibilities. She pulled on a pair of shorts and crept down to the foyer. A safety bulb burned red in the stairway; otherwise the house was in darkness. When her skin ached like this, the only mercy was the chalk.

  If only it weren’t raining. The pavement of the basketball court had been poured last week and presented a literal blank canvas. What if she chalked in the storm? The colors would run and make something she hadn’t intended. That could be the best art of all.

  With her luck, she’d be struck by lightning.

  Thunder erupted, rattling the windows before the night settled back into driving rain.

  Focus. Focus on what God has given you. Maybe she could draw something on the dry-erase board. Swirling colors, night shades in deep purple with slashes of yellow. The challenge of making something unique and subtle with markers appealed to her. She’d have to mix, of course, difficult by flashlight—if she could actually find one. And then she’d have to wait for the light of day to reveal what was crafted by night.

  Now there’s a rotten spiritual metaphor for you.

  Four steps to her left, into the room that held multiple services: Art. Study. Dance. Even yoga. Who was in here last? She had no desire to maim herself tripping over a chair. Wait for the lightning—see what it revealed.

  Open space, chairs and tables folded against the wall. Thunder followed, and darkness. Reverend Paul had trained them for every kind of situation, including needle sticks, drive-bys, and hostage taking. How had he forgotten the simplest of preparation?

  Where did he keep the flashlights? The kitchen was the likeliest place. She could cross the front room and then inch her way around the table in the dining room. Or she could go back to bed like a sane person would do.

  “The nature of love is to create,” Madeleine L’Engle wrote.

  Is it still love if it has no recipient? Is it still love if the one created in love is then ripped away? Was expressing what God could create through her enough to qualify as love?

  Like Reverend Paul, it seemed God had forgotten to supply Julia a light for the darkness.

  She charged forward, crossing the room in quick strides. Into the dining room, hand brushing the backs of chairs. Through the swinging door, into the kitchen and—

  —into someone.

  She screamed and he wrapped his arm around her waist and put his hand over her mouth to stop her shriek and said, “Hush. It’s just me. Andy.”

  As he took his hand off her face, she smelled cinnamon. “You okay?” he said.

  “Are you okay? Good grief, I screamed loud enough to wake the dead.” She leaned against him because he showed no inclination to let her go, and she thought, The dead in me is waking up, and it’s a fearsome thing.

  “I am so sorry,” Andy said. “I was just hungry. You?”

  Starving. “I was looking for a flashlight.”

  “Spooked by the storm?”

  “No. I wanted to . . . it’s silly.”

  He slipped his arm away. “Tell me.”

  “I wanted to . . . draw something on the white board. It’s what soothes me.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Find me a flashlight.”

  “Seems to me you can’t draw and hold the flashlight at the same time.”

  “Probably not.”

  “So let me hold the light,” Andy said.

  23 Years Earlier, July

  The nights stretched into days and the days into nights. The whiteboard art became a game for the kids and the staff and sometimes inspired them in class. Julia would slip downstairs in the middle of the night and Andy would be waiting for her with the flashlight.

  Always the flashlight. Somehow it made the art more mysterious and less in the artist’s control. Julia would swirl the colors, let them speak for themselves. She drew what the kids knew. The snarling cat that the hoops kids wore on their team shirts. The oak tree that shaded story time. Comical pictures of lawn gnomes standing on the front porch, looking at statues of kids on the lawn.

  Anything was possible those nights because somehow Andy made it so. When the work was done, they’d sit in the kitchen for fifteen minutes, drinking orange juice and eating toast. They would say good night without a single touch because even on the calmest, starriest nights, they felt the lightning under their skin and knew—without a single word—that they had pledged to let Jesus calm the storm.

  Julia told him how she grew up in Oklahoma. Mom was a school teacher. Dad owned a parts store for farming equipment until he decided he wanted a jazzy sports car and a girl to hang on his arm and disappeared into the Northeast. She explained her course of study at Mass Art and her two summers at Nahant that made her skilled in painting, plastering, wood refinishing, hanging crown molding.

  Andy was from Georgia, the son of a pastor of a large church and since I’m the only child, I had a lot of spotlight time. His mother was nice, he said. Active at church and the local YMCA where she fought to keep the Christian in the mission without being pewjumping, Bible-thumping obnoxious. He did undergrad at Kansas State, played football, thought NFL was his future until he wrecked his knee and then the NFL didn’t think much of him. Seminary was a fallback, something to do while he got over his football dreams.

&nb
sp; Falling in love with Jesus was a shock and a delight.

  “And IronWorks?” Julia asked. “Why so far north?”

  “I had to get out of the establishment, try something new.”

  Something in the tightening of his tone made her say, “And what else?”

  “I have some personal things I needed to get away from,” he said.

  So do I, she thought but she couldn’t tell him. Not about her shame, or her loss. She gave him the noncommittal anything I can do?

  “I’m married,” he said.

  “What?” Her stomach went into free fall.

  “Married isn’t the correct designation. Not now.”

  “Are you saying . . . she died?”

  “I’m saying she and I died. My wife is divorcing me. I signed everything she asked me to. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for her to get the paperwork done. It’s a terrible thing. My parents are crushed and hers are not happy, but they see how this is wearing her away.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Julia McCord. Do you always apologize for nothing?”

  “It’s rarely for nothing. Is repentance bad?”

  “Forgiveness is better. That’s what I’m learning here at IronWorks.”

  “So who needs to be forgiven, you or your wife?” The word seemed to bounce on the walls and echo back—wife wife wife.

  “We all expect the world to be one way and, when it’s not, we get confused, then angry, and then resentful. It started early with me, the preacher’s kid who was supposed to hit hard in football and turn the other cheek the rest of the time. Katie and I looked great on the surface. So clean-cut, scrubbed in the blood of our parents’ faith. We wanted purity and wanted the other stuff too. We realized we could only enjoy the other stuff . . .” He shrugged. “. . . if we got married.”

  “You can say the word, Andy. I won’t melt if you say sex.”

  “Pathetic, huh?”

  “So why Albany?”

  “The failure of my marriage felt like a failure of my father’s ministry. He swore it wasn’t but we are—I should say, he is—all about families riding out the hard times. And Katie and I just couldn’t manage. She knew coming into the marriage that I wanted a ministry someplace like IronWorks. It doesn’t pay, of course, but I said we were young and we’d have time for that later. She wanted to be a traditional pastor’s wife, and my dad’s church had an opening she wanted me to jump on. I didn’t want to have to follow in every step my dad made. I want to follow wherever God is leading me.