The Heart of Memory

by Alison Strobel

  How much evidence of suspicion would the police need? The IRS? What if others knew, too, but had never said anything? He’d been so careful, but obviously not careful enough. What other slipups had he made that he was unaware of? Who else was sitting at home, stewing at the meager severance they’d been doled out at the ministry’s closing, plotting out their revenge?

  He had a timeline for how things were supposed to go. He had the information he needed, he was just trying to figure out how to go about starting things off. It was taking longer than he’d expected to ramp up the courage to tell Savannah he wanted a divorce. But after that, assuming she cooperated, things could go quickly. And then he could finish things, up in the mountains, somewhere where he’d be eventually found. Then it would all be over and Savannah and Jessie could get on with their lives.

  But knowing that Marisa was on to him, even with what little evidence she had, changed things entirely. The plan needed to go more quickly.

  Either that, or he had to skip to the end.

  SAVANNAH WASHED THE RAW HAMBURGER from her hands. “Can’t wait for lunch, Aniyah. Thanks again.”

  “Naw, thank you, ‘Vannah. It’s nice to work a little slower and not have to rush. The three of us make a good team. Gonna miss you when you go.” Her eyes glinted when Savannah glanced at her. “And just when is that, anyhow?”

  “Trying not to think about it.” She made room for Tim, the quiet young man who worked as Aniyah’s assistant, as he passed behind her with a sack of potatoes. “Who knows what might happen. Maybe I’ll just move here for good.” If only.

  Aniyah let out one of her deep chuckles. “Aw, ‘Vanna, stop that now.”

  Savannah dried her hands. “It’s about time to go. Are you ready?”

  Aniyah slid the green onions she’d been dicing into a bowl and covered it with plastic. “Just about. Now Tim, you watch them fries and make sure they don’t burn. You get overwhelmed, you just holler. I’ll hear you.”

  Tim looked up from the pile of fries he’d made. “I’ll be fine, Aniyah.”

  “Let the boy be,” Savannah said with a grin. “He’s plenty competent.”

  Aniyah pulled off her apron. “I just don’t like leaving my kitchen.”

  The two women walked out together and Savannah said quietly, “You think Tim even knows how to holler?” Aniyah’s laugh echoed through the foyer.

  With the scent of hamburger and spices still in her nose, Savannah followed Aniyah into the group therapy room where nearly everyone else was already present. As much as she’d begun to enjoy meeting with the others, she hated leaving the kitchen just as much as Aniyah did. It was where she felt most in touch with her old self. The act of service, not just to Aniyah and Tim, but for the Refugees and Tabitha as well, gave her a sense of purpose and served as her way to thank them for letting her hide among them while she sorted out her life. Even the thought of her family wasn’t enough to stir a desire to leave. She tried not to dwell on that uncomfortable truth.

  Tabitha saw them enter and smiled. “Alright folks, I think we’re ready to start.” The group settled into their seats and gave Tabitha their attention. “Every once in a while a former Refugee comes back to share his or her story with us, as a way to encourage and support those who are struggling the same way they did. And today Aniyah is going to do that for us. She’s been here for a few years now, cooking up the world-class fare we get to eat every day, and now she would like to share her experience. Aniyah — whenever you’re ready.”

  Aniyah had everyone’s full attention. Savannah had only heard a small sliver of the story, the first day she’d stepped into the kitchen to lend a hand. Aniyah had never continued the tale, and Savannah hadn’t felt comfortable asking. Now, with the others, she waited with anticipation to hear how the feisty woman had come to stay at The Refuge.

  “Sometimes folks think I’s telling tales when I tell them about my life. But I think I can trust y’all to know I ain’t lying. And hopefully it’ll speak to you, somehow. God’s been good about redeeming my lost years that way.

  “My mama was a voodoo priestess. We lived out in the Bayou, in a shack you couldn’t reach but by boat. I learned cooking from her, though it wasn’t just food we cooked, but charms and spells, too—though mostly I just watched when she did those.”

  She told her story without hyperbole to the riveted audience, repeating the details Savannah had heard while cutting beignets.

  “So’s I got to New Orleans and couldn’t get a job. Didn’t know my social security number, and didn’t want to bring attention to myself trying to find it. I took to the street, turning tricks to make money, but then this guy finds me and gives me my first crack. It was all downhill from there. Had to keep selling myself to buy the crack, and because of the crack I couldn’t do nothing else but keep turning tricks.

  “Sometimes when I wasn’t high — which wasn’t very often — I would think about my mama, and my auntie, and about spirits and God and all that. I’d grown up surrounded by talk about the loa, the spirits and souls, and when I got to Auntie’s she talked about the spirit and soul all the time, too, but in a different way. Mama’s way had been mysterious and beautiful, and a little creepy sometimes — but Auntie’s way had been all mean and depressing. I was never good enough. I was always bad, always sinful and evil, didn’t matter if I really did something wrong or not.

  “This street preacher used to come down to the tent city and talk about God. Most folks didn’t like him, thought he was gonna rat on them to the police or something. But all he ever did was talk about God loving people, even when they was all messed up. One day he saw me watching him, and he came right over to me and said, ‘Sister, he was bruised for your transgressions and crushed for your iniquities because he loves you.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, but it sounded like a lot to go through just to love someone like me.”

  She tugged at a thread on her sleeve. “But then I’d think about Auntie and what she said about God, and I figured Street Preacher didn’t know enough about me, ‘cause if he did he’d know God could never love someone like me. And besides, why would I want him to? What had he done for me? I was a homeless druggie prostitute — a whole Bible worth of sins rolled into one, and ain’t nothing lovable about that.”

  She looked to Tabitha and smiled. “But then one day this white woman comes walking down by the tent city, looking all pulled together and nice. I saw her and thought she’d be done for, but it was like nobody saw her but me. I was on the corner, looking for customers, and she stopped and said, ‘God told me to help you. Can I please help you?’”

  All eyes turned to Tabitha, who shrugged and grinned. “Well, he did.”

  “That was the first time I thought maybe Street Preacher was right. Maybe God was trying to look out for me. Maybe this white lady was an angel. So’s I didn’t even let myself think about it, I just said okay. She walked me to her car, and it was like we was invisible, nobody was looking at us like they shoulda been — this cleaned-up white woman and this dirty black lady that looked like a skeleton. She took me to a rehab place and checked me in and come to visit me every day. And when I was finally clean, she brought me here.”

  Tabitha shrugged again at the faces that looked to her in awe. “Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, but truly, I felt like God told me to find her and help her. I was on the other side of town, meeting with a psychologist that had been working with spiritual abuse cases, and when I left I got this impression to turn right at this one street, so I did. Then left at another, then right again, and then I saw an open parking spot on the street and just grabbed it. And then it was like God said, ‘Just start walking.’ I figured I’d know what I was supposed to do when I came to it, but I will admit I was nervous — that was not a good part of town. But when I saw her, I just … knew. Knew she was the one God meant for me to find, knew she needed to get clean. Some good friends of mine — they’re like my adoptive parents, actually—paid for her rehab.”
>
  “But you weren’t a believer before, right, Aniyah?” Savannah asked. “Why did you come here?”

  Tabitha answered. “I told her about The Refuge and we figured together that, if nothing else, this would be a safe place for her to be. Alanna—she helped me start The Refuge — she was the one in charge of the kitchen, but her husband was being relocated and we knew we had to find someone else. I asked Aniyah if she wanted to try her hand at cooking, in exchange for free room and board and, if she wanted, therapy.”

  “I wasn’t gonna say no, not to a roof over my head and decent food. Plus, how could I say no to the woman who saved my life?”

  Aniyah pulled one sneakered foot beneath herself and continued. “So Alanna taught me some basic cooking stuff, and when I wasn’t working I would sit in group therapy or just talk with folks. I didn’t tell no one why I was really there; they all just thought I was the new cook. And after a while I started thinking about how different these God people was from my auntie. For a while I was real confused—I mean, if one person says God loves you, and another says God hates you because you’re a sinner, then who do you believe? People like Tabitha here was making me want to believe God was real and really did love me, but then I’d remember Auntie, and I didn’t wanna get involved with him if she was the one who was right.

  “So one day I told Tabitha I needed to figure God out once and for all. Was he good like she said, or just waiting to zap me like Auntie said? So she gave me a Bible and said, ‘Just start reading, and we’ll talk.’ Now, I’d read the Bible before; Auntie made me write it out word for word sometimes, when she thought I was being bad. But I’d never just read it straight, you know? And I didn’t get a lot of it, but Tabitha and I, we talked about the parts I got stuck on, and after a while I started thinking Auntie must have got it all real wrong. God seemed mighty patient with his stupid children. And then when Jesus came—whooee, that was love like I’ve never seen! I read through those gospels in just a couple nights. And when I was done, I thought, this is what I want. I want this Jesus. And I knew Jesus and God was like a package deal, and I decided that was okay. Because that God, in the Bible, was nothing like the God Auntie tried to teach me about. This one loved me, and was sad I had to go through such a rotten life.”

  The room was silent as Aniyah paused, her lip trembling and tears glistening in her eyes. She pushed a corner of her sleeve to her eyes, then said, “Anyways, that’s why I’m here, and that’s why I stay. ‘Cause I love God and I love to take care of the people who’re trying to find him again. Now, you gotta excuse me while I go finish up making your lunch.” She stood and hurried out, head bowed, while the Refugees showered her with applause.

  Tabitha began to talk, but Savannah didn’t hear her. Her mind was churning, not just in shock from her friend’s story, but with the frenzied pinballing of ideas on the verge of breaking through. As soon as the session was over Savannah skipped lunch and went to her room to think.

  Legs folded beneath her on the bed, she sat with her notebook and pen, staring out the window at the orchard as she worked on the knot of thoughts in her head. After a few minutes she began to write. Charlie was mad at God because of the betrayal he experienced of both his father and his neighbor. He projected the unloving, unprincipled characters of these two men onto God. He heard God was loving, but didn’t understand why a loving God would let happen the things that he experienced. Charlie believed God had abandoned him just as his father had abandoned him. He was unwilling to believe anything that might paint God in a better light, because he couldn’t get past his own hurt.

  It wasn’t identical to Aniyah’s story, but the parallels were there. Both had made assumptions about God based on the very ungodly actions of other people. But, unlike Charlie, Aniyah had gone to the source to figure out once and for all who God really was. It was then Savannah realized she’d allowed her thoughts and feelings — or, more accurately, Charlie’s — to dictate what she thought about God, rather than going back to the source and reminding herself what was really true.

  She flipped the page and began writing again, her words scrawled with haste. WHAT I KNOW TO BE TRUE ABOUT GOD:

  She concentrated on the view again as she fought to recall the things she’d once believed about God. These she wrote slowly, wanting to make sure she was getting them right, as she forced herself not to analyze whether or not she actually agreed with them.

  God’s ways are not man’s ways/when we don’t understand why he’s doing or not doing something, it’s because of our own lack of knowledge

  The existence of evil does not disprove the existence of God

  Just because we think God has abandoned us does not mean he actually has

  God does not leave his children

  God can use our pain and painful circumstances for good

  God can heal us if we let him

  She stared at what she had written. It didn’t take up a lot of room, it wasn’t full of epiphanies or revolutionary thoughts, but it embodied a radical retooling of her thought process from how it had been over the last three months. She didn’t actually believe all those statements about God, but that didn’t matter. What was more important was the lesson that emotion and experience didn’t always tell the truth.

  She picked up her pen again and wrote, Do I believe God is real? She paused, thinking before writing. My heart does not. Not sure about my head— hard to isolate those thoughts apart from my emotions. Do I want him to be real? She paused again, though she knew the answer already. She just wasn’t sure what to do with it. I think my head does. My heart does not.

  So how do I get my heart on the same page as my head?

  She set down her pen and picked up her jacket. The sun was shining. It was time to head back to the orchard.

  There was no wind today, no storm on the horizon. She walked the same path she had run down just a couple days before, the memory of that evening vivid in her mind. The anger she usually felt had diminished significantly since then, though it was still there, manifesting itself more as a feeling of disgruntled annoyance than real anger. The peace that had bloomed after her catharsis was also still there. Changes were definitely happening, and moving her in the right direction, but that last hurdle still seemed impossible to jump. The open expanse of the orchard gave her the space she needed to think about how to attack it.

  She thought back to what she had written in her room. Fact: Charlie’s heart was hardened because of the pain people put him through, not because of God. He had projected those people’s actions onto God and aimed his anger at him. Maybe if she tried to address the hurts that he had been subjected to, validate his pain, and separate the anger from the fact of the situations, she’d be able to ease some of the negative emotions.

  But how?

  She took a quick look around, then spoke before she could convince herself she was crazy. “I know you were hurt. But you shouldn’t dwell on your pain to the exclusion of the good things that happened in your life.” She laughed aloud in nervous embarrassment, the sound swallowed by the silence that surrounded her in the hibernating orchard. Shaun would have her committed if he heard her talking to herself this way. Tabitha, on the other hand, would probably applaud her. She felt utterly foolish doing it, but in the absence of any other ideas, it certainly wouldn’t hurt. “I think it’s time to let go of that pain and get on with your life already. Well—not your life, since you’re dead, but let me get on with my life at least.” She rubbed a hand across her forehead, as though that might dislodge some better ideas. She wasn’t messing with spirits or anything, was she? That was the last thing she needed to deal with now—possession by Charlie’s hell-bound soul.

  She tried a different approach. If the hurt were actually hers, what would she want to hear? It dawned on her that the things that came to mind to say—get over it, move on—weren’t exactly empathetic. No wonder she and Jessie had a hard time communicating. Affirmation and encouragement had never come easily to her when it came to he
r own family. To a stranger, a woman pouring out her soul at a book signing or in the meet-and-greet after a speaking event, she could effuse gentle and inspiring advice without a problem. Why not for those she was closest to?

  Another problem for another day. Let’s focus on getting back to normal first, then we can go to Rose for some therapy. She tried again, picturing herself in her mind as wounded, hurting. What would she need to hear?

  “You were hurt. Your father should have been there for you, he should have provided you with the love and knowledge and positive example that fathers are supposed to give their children. He robbed you of the security and love that you needed to thrive in your childhood. That wasn’t your fault. He was wrong for leaving.”

  She let the words sink in, imagined them flowing through her veins and into her heart, absorbing into the tissue and soothing the cells. “Kirk was not a perfect human being. You idolized him because he was everything you needed — a strong man who shared your interests and took you under his wing, who taught you the things fathers are supposed to teach. He took a real interest in you, and invested himself in you. He even made you think twice about the conclusions you’d come to about religion. But he wasn’t perfect, despite how you thought he was. He was a broken, fallen man, like all of us are, and he made a very big mistake.

  “But he didn’t do it to hurt you. He didn’t do it to hurt anyone. He had a problem, and he tried to solve it the wrong way; it backfired and ruined his marriage. That doesn’t mean that everything he told you was wrong.”

  She stopped walking and stared down the row of trees that stretched beyond her vision. She almost expected Charlie to materialize in the distance, like a peach tree orchard version of Field of Dreams. As nutty as it felt to talk to herself, she had to admit it felt like a step in the right direction. She wasn’t any less disgruntled, any more willing to believe in God, but she did feel more open to thinking about him and possibly even reaching out to him, just as an experiment, to see what might happen. It struck her that praying for a release from the emotions might be the next thing she needed to do.