The Book of Matthew (The Alex Chronicles Book 1)

by Doyle, K. T.

  THE BOOK OF MATTHEW

  Book One in The Alex Chronicles

  K.T. Doyle

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook distributor and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2015 K.T. Doyle

  Ebook layout copyright © L.K. Campbell

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.

  ISBN-10: 0983885311

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9838853-1-3

  PROLOGUE

  I want to tell you a story.

  My story.

  It starts twenty years in the past.

  Be warned: This isn’t your baby sister’s happily-ever-after filled with puppies and rainbows and knights on white horses.

  It starts out innocent enough. Doesn’t it always? Doesn’t everyone have the best of intentions at first? Don’t we all start out having hopes and dreams and visions of happiness for ourselves and the ones we love? Don’t we want the best for everyone, don’t we want to help others, don’t we want to make the world a better place?

  Of course we do. In the beginning.

  But somewhere along the way real life kicks you in the teeth and challenges your hopes and dreams and best of intentions. There will be fights and breakups and makeups. There will be anger and heartache and jealousy. There will lies and betrayals and tragedies, sometimes of your own design.

  What? You think you’re innocent in all this?

  Don’t worry, it’s not all bad. There were will happiness and joy and triumphs and victories. And there will be love. Of course there will be love. Lots of it.

  But there will be darkness, too. Lots of darkness. Dark days when you think your life is coming to an end. Or should come to an end. Some days you’ll fight like hell to hang on and other days you’ll just say screw it and let the darkness consume you.

  When that happens, sometimes you make it. Sometimes you don’t. All depends.

  But listen: don’t worry about any of that right now. I’m going to take it easy on you for this part of the story. There’ll be time enough for the darkness later. For now let’s stay in the light.

  So if you’re ready, let’s get going.

  PART ONE

  FALL

  CHAPTER 1

  May 1994

  It was midnight on my nineteenth birthday. We were in the park, about a mile from the university where we were both freshmen. I sat in the front seat of his Honda Civic, staring out the window, thinking that I should be in my dorm room studying for finals.

  Or better yet, I should be asleep.

  The back seat was filled with guitars and speaker amplifiers. Dozens of feet of thick, black cable snaked through the car—in the back seat, on the dash, at our feet. Through the fogged glass I caught a glimpse of the neon No After Dark Trespassing sign. I saw it when we first pulled into the park and it seemed to glow as a silent warning that we were about to break the law. But now it didn’t shine as brightly, as if it knew it had failed to do its job.

  I felt a twinge in my side and realized that during our hasty lovemaking the seatbelt hook had bruised my hip. By morning the mark was round and angry and purplish black, about the size of a half-dollar. In the light of that new day I stood naked before a mirror, staring at the bruise, wondering why I had chosen a boy instead of books. Over the next few days as it healed I pushed on it hard from time to time with my index finger to remind myself of the pain—a tender, aching pain.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  I rolled the window down as we made a right out of the parking lot onto Main Street.

  About a block into the ride home he looked at his watch—a present I had bought him for Christmas—and strained his eyes in the dark to read the time.

  “Don’t you have a final exam in a few hours?” he asked.

  “Mm-hmm,” I said. “8:00 a.m.”

  “You definitely won’t have enough time to study and sleep.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be pulling an all-nighter.”

  His eyes narrowed and he leaned towards me as he looked at the road. “Screw your exam. Let’s have our own all-nighter.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Aw, come on.”

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  “Yeah, but…” he trailed off.

  “I don’t know.”

  He ran a hand through his almond-brown hair. “Let loose. Live a little.”

  “What would Christine do?” I asked.

  He sighed. “Leave her out of this.”

  I should’ve known better than to mention her name. Talking about her was something he just didn’t do. Verbalizing our own relationship was something he didn’t do. Talking made things too real for him. So I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t say anything else.

  A few minutes later we arrived at my dorm. I hadn’t noticed because I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts. But when I saw familiar kids come into view, hanging out and smoking in a familiar parking lot, and when his car came to a gentle stop, I noticed.

  I was home.

  I turned to look at him. He was watching me.

  “What?”

  “We’re here,” he said.

  “I know.”

  He looked at me suggestively. “So am I coming up?”

  I allowed a little smile. “You’re insatiable.”

  He grinned, that closed-lipped crooked smile I had grown so used to.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

  He let go of the steering wheel and his arms fell with a slump in his lap. “All right, fine.”

  “Good night, Matthew,” I said, kissing him on the cheek before getting out of the car. “Thanks for the ride.”

  As I shut the door and walked away, I knew that that was the beginning of the end.

  CHAPTER 2

  I.

  “Don’t forget there’s a church on campus, honey,” my father said to me, one of the last things he said to me before he and my mother left me alone with my new roommate, Lisa, on freshman move-in day.

  He knew better than to suggest I attend a religious institution, but I think he was just trying to say something, anything other than the one thing he knew he had to say: goodbye.

  So of course for that reason I forgave him, but also because of the wink and the toothy grin that followed.

  “Ha, ha. Funny, Dad,” I said.

  My parents and I, and Lisa and her parents had just finished bringing up the rest of our belongings and we were all standing in the middle of our new dorm room. Lisa and her parents exchanged quizzical looks, trying to be subtle, but obviously unaware of the personal joke.

  My mother looked at her watch. “Well,” she said to my father, “I guess it’s time to leave.” She turned to Lisa’s parents. “Robert, Madeline, it was a pleasure meeting you. Perhaps we’ll see each other soon.” My mother shook their hands, followed by my father, and then me. Lisa walked her parents down to their car so that we could all say our private goodbyes.

  My mother hugged me first. She had tears in h
er eyes that she kept trying to blink away. I looked around the room as she squeezed me so that I wouldn’t cry too.

  When my dad reached out to hug me, though, I couldn’t help myself. Tears dripped down my cheeks and I accidentally let out a sob which I tried to cover up with a cough. He squeezed me extra hard and especially long.

  “Love ya, kid,” he said.

  That was the last thing he said before they left. The last thing my mom said was, “Call us if you need anything.”

  I didn’t look at them as they walked out the door. I was staring at the floor instead, wiping away a few stray tears. I wanted to remember forever the way they looked standing in the doorway together right before they left, their smiles, how proud they seemed.

  I looked up and my parents were gone and Lisa was there instead. She plopped down on her bed and let out a sigh.

  “So, like, what should we do now?” she asked, looking out our third story window.

  I stared at her a minute, inspecting her long, straight blonde hair and blue eyes. She was petite and couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. She was beautiful, the kind of girl I thought every guy wanted. I instantly hated her. Well, not really. I hated that she represented what every guy wanted. Lisa Carter couldn’t help that she was beautiful.

  Lisa didn’t wait for me to answer her first question before asking another. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I did. We broke up.”

  “That sucks. Because of college? That’s what happened with me and my boyfriend. He didn’t want to go to Kilmore and I didn’t want to go to Boston College so we said sayonara and went our separate ways.”

  “That must’ve been tough.”

  She shrugged. “Not really. We hadn’t been dating long.”

  “Oh.”

  “So when did you and your boyfriend break up?”

  I looked up at the ceiling to recall when Bobby and I had broken up. There were faint circular orange stains peeking through a layer of white paint.

  “A year and―”

  “A year!” Lisa interjected, eyes wide. Then she started to giggle.

  “Yeah,” I continued. “A year and two months ago.”

  “You haven’t had a boyfriend since?”

  “No.”

  I was suddenly feeling inadequate. It really didn’t seem that long ago since I’d been with Bobby.

  “Wow.” She picked at her fingernails. “I probably should’ve given myself a year off from men.” Then she smiled and slapped the bed. “But hey, we’re both single now and there are loads of men here to choose from. We could double date.”

  I had nothing against Lisa, and despite her upbeat sunny disposition, I’m sure we’d get along fine. But I seriously doubted we hung out with the same crowd, and we probably didn’t have the same taste in guys. But I played along anyway.

  “That’d be cool,” I said.

  At that moment I remembered something the tour guide who walked me and my parents around campus told me.

  “Do you have a car?” I asked.

  “Sure do. It’s a piece of shit but it runs. You?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you can totally borrow my car anytime,” Lisa said.

  I smiled. “Thanks.”

  I looked at all the boxes and bags that littered the floor, suddenly overwhelmed by all the unpacking we had to do. I also wanted to inspect the bathrooms, and I had a feeling Lisa was dying to walk around and say hi to all the other girls on our floor.

  “Maybe we should get started,” I said, motioning to all our stuff on the floor. Lisa nodded and we pushed our beds into opposite corners of the room, mine by the window and hers by the door. Then we busied ourselves with the rest of it.

  “So…what’s with the church comment your dad made?” Lisa asked after awhile, still sorting her clothes.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  And it was.

  I am not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination. I never was, and probably never will be.

  My parents were Catholic. At least I assumed they were from the framed wedding picture that hung in our living room. Mom and Dad, and their bridesmaids and groomsmen on either side of them, all stood in front of an altar, a huge wooden crucifix mounted on the wall behind them. Standing on the step behind my parents was a man wearing a long black robe holding a bible.

  For some reason my parents never sent me to Sunday school or bible study classes, and I went to church only twice in my life—once for a wedding and the other for a funeral. So how could I possibly know about Jesus and the saints and the prophets? For the longest time, in fact, I thought God and Jesus Christ were one and the same. I had heard of the Apostles, but I never understood what they did, exactly, or what the hell Joseph had to do with anything. But the point is, I was no worse off for not knowing. God didn’t figure into my life, yet I still turned out okay.

  When I did start learning about God at the age of seventeen, however, things suddenly weren’t okay.

  Looking back at it all at that moment, thinking about everything I’d seen, everything I’d been through, brought all the long-buried emotions to the surface. I’d made peace with my demons, forgave who needed to be forgiven, moved on. But I didn’t think I’d ever be able to forget.

  Lisa stopped organizing the shoes in her closet and turned to face me, waving off her question. “Hey, sorry. We hardly know each other. No need to get so personal so soon.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “Me, neither,” she said, turning her attention back to what had to be at least two dozen pairs of shoes.“I’m an open book.”

  I smiled to myself. I was starting to get the feeling that Lisa Carter and I would get along just fine.

  II.

  It was a sunny Saturday in late April 1992 when my parents and I took a guided tour of Kilmore University, which was about an hour from our home in suburban Philadelphia. I was a junior in high school. My seventeenth birthday was a week away.

  We toured the west side of campus and then crossed Main Street to the east side. Brick dormitories stretched out across a hundred yards in a horseshoe shape around a large grassy courtyard. A few students were strewn about, playing Frisbee in the grass, walking between buildings, sitting on benches smoking cigarettes.

  “So, my dear, what do you think of the campus so far?” my mother asked me.

  “Nice,” I said.

  The tour guide smiled. “That’s the Student Health Center,” he said, pointing to a white stucco building up on a hill off in the distance. He then pointed to the building next to it. “And that’s the new Student Activity Center. Real state-of-the-art.”

  The Student Activity Center, or SAC for short, was a mixture of brick and glass, with sharp angles and a curved roof. It looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. It offered quite a contrast to the cookie-cutter rectangular dorms that surrounded it. The SAC was a beacon on campus, the tour guide informed us, a place always brimming with activity.

  The campus as a whole was littered with neo-classical academic buildings and landscaped gardens and marble fountains, as well as the ordinary brick dorms and buildings with white stucco facades. It was a sure sign of age and beauty and of time and progress. A place to get inspired. Kilmore University was the kind of place I wanted to spend four years learning to become a writer.

  Ah, yes. I wanted to be a writer. Novels, I thought, but I wasn’t sure of that at first. So I tested the waters as a young girl by writing poetry. Most of it was nonsense—populated with puppies and rainbows and with lines that rhymed. My poems had to rhyme because I figured anybody could write a poem that didn’t rhyme. Only smart writers knew how to rhyme.

  Then in the seventh grade I wrote what I considered at the time to be a masterpiece of American Literature and I knew I wanted to be a novelist.

  My history class was studying the American Civil War. We were charged with writing a research paper
on the topic of our choosing. It could literally be about anything we wanted; our teacher suggested such topics as slavery, the roles of women or African Americans in the war, medicine and tools used to treat the wounded, individual battles, etc.

  But instead of writing a drab report, I wanted to do something different. So I stepped into the shoes of then-President Abraham Lincoln and wrote a heart-felt letter to a mother of a fallen soldier. It went something like this:

  October 18, 1863

  Dear Mrs. Quinn,

  It is with a heavy heart that I write you today.

  As you know, our country is engaged in civil war. As a result, we’ve all paid a heavy price—none greater than the loss of a husband, a brother, a friend, a son. In your case, Ms. Quinn, it is your son that I speak of.

  The three-day battle on the fields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, marked the turning point in this war and resulted in an outstanding Union victory. But it wasn’t won without major consequences. This battle was the largest and bloodiest of the entire American Civil War. Over 51,000 soldiers were killed, wounded, captured, or went missing. Among the dead was your son.

  He was valiant and brave in the face of battle, risking his own life in front of sharp bayonets and gun fire for two days in the sweltering July sun. In the end, however, it was a cannon ball blast in the waning hours on the third day of battle that claimed his life. He fell to the blood-soaked soil a hero. He served his country for the Union cause, and for that, he did not die in vain.

  In one month’s time, on the nineteenth of November, Soldiers' National Cemetery will be dedicated in Gettysburg near the battlefields. I was asked to make “a few appropriate remarks,” so I will be delivering a speech in honor of the men, like your son, who made the ultimate sacrifice. As I am a simple man, I think I shall call the eulogy, simply, my Gettysburg Address. As the mother of a fallen soldier, if you have the means to do so, you are welcome to attend.