Wheels (Tabor Heights Year Two)

by Michelle Levigne

  "Too many memories," she muttered as she pulled into the driveway in front of the pretty two-story house with a raw stone facade.

  She sat in silence for several minutes after turning off the engine. She had been living in reporter mode, twenty-four-seven, for far too long. Constantly asking questions, trying to see any situation from several different aspects, was fine when she hunted a story, but this wasn't a story. This was her first visit home -- granted, a home she had never been to, but anywhere her parents lived was "home" -- in more than two years. Since her brothers got married and started producing children, family holidays were usually spent at the homes with the newest grandchildren. She needed to stop being a reporter, stop looking for the story, the interest points, the subtext and takeaway. Finally Natalie let out a long, slow breath, hit the latch, and swung her legs out of the car. She snagged her overnight bag, computer case, and camera case, her usual load for going into overnight lodgings, leaving her bigger suitcase -- and in this case, her laundry bag -- in the trunk.

  Four more deep inhales and exhales got her to the front door. Natalie toyed with the idea of using the key her mother had sent her the day they took possession of the house. Her parents were expecting her, but she still might surprise them, and her experience had taught her that most surprises weren't that pleasant. Still, it felt odd, almost cowardly, to ring the doorbell.

  "Nat?" Her mother laughed when she opened the door, and spread her arms wide to embrace her. At least she didn't chide her for not walking in. Natalie knew she had chosen the right strategy.

  Her mother asked her about the drive as she led her from the front door to the great room at the back of the house and the stairs leading to the second floor, to get Natalie settled into her room. Off the great room was a smaller room that could function as an office or bedroom. Natalie knew that because of the detailed floor plan her parents sent her. This room was now her father's private domain, but not for TV watching. The fifty-two-inch TV sat in the great room opposite the massive raw stone fireplace. Five years ago, her father had experienced a spiritual renewal and a growing hunger for Bible scholarship. According to her mother, every time he finished reading one book, he bought two more. She paused and glanced at the door that hung open four inches. A glimpse of movement made her take a step closer to the door before she realized that was the back of her father's head. He turned as if he felt the weight of her stare. Their gazes met. He let out a bark of laughter and flung the door open.

  "There's my little girl!" He swept her up and spun her around once, setting her down again with a bouncing little thud.

  Natalie forced her smile, when everything inside her went hollow, just for a moment. It was ridiculous to feel chilled, disappointed, when her father didn't lift her to the ceiling. He hadn't been able to lift her above his head since she was in middle school.

  "Didn't expect you until after dinner. Jonas -- you remember my daughter, Natalie?" he said, taking a step back into his office and pushing the door open further.

  "Yes, I do." The voice was softer, gentler than Natalie remembered, yet essentially the same voice, the one voice in the world she thought she would never hear again. "How are you? What are you up to?"

  "Ah… I'm a roving reporter." Natalie blanked, staring at a face that had aged forty years in the last fifteen-plus, but was still painfully familiar despite the sagging jowls, nests of wrinkles around eyes and mouth, and streaks of white in the thinning ebony hair. "America's Voice. I report -- investigate -- on the road for America's Voice." She swallowed hard, fighting the choking pressure. "How are you, Mr. Donnelly?"

  "Well, as your father can testify, God has been doing a major work in me. Renovation." He let out a raspy chuckle that was nothing like the hearty, booming laughter that used to dominate parties at the Schaeffer house or church social functions. "Necessary, but painful." He glanced at Mr. Schaeffer. "Pain is necessary, wouldn't you agree, Norman?"

  "Lewis said that pain was God's megaphone." Natalie's father nodded, and the look of compassion he wore, directed at a man he had once vilified and condemned to a hypocrite's hell, nearly made Natalie's jaw drop.

  Somehow she stumbled through the usual litany of nice-to-see-you, just-here-for-a-week, see-you-at-church. She congratulated herself on her acting skills saving her from sure disaster once again. Her mother said nothing as they climbed the stairs, walking ahead of her until they reached the guest room, then she closed the door.

  "What is he doing here? I thought Daddy would beat him black and blue if they ever came face-to-face," Natalie said, her voice a strained rasp.

  "Jonas showed up about nine, ten months ago, making his way around town, making amends." Her mother shrugged and sank down on the side of the bed covered in one of her hand-made quilts. That was her winter hobby, one quilt each month, each one a masterpiece, not a single repeat in the last thirty years. "If your father hadn't been going through something similar…" She shrugged. "Funny, but you never think of the damage you do when you're the offended party and you hold onto your righteous rage for too long."

  "Uh, Mom, you lost me there." Natalie put down her few bags and sank down into the rocking chair her mother had bought during her first pregnancy, with Nick.

  "You never heard what triggered your father's reformation campaign, did you?" Mrs. Schaeffer sighed, a weary, aching sound, and rubbed at her eyes with her open palms. "He ran into someone he worked with just about the time of Tommy's accident and their family falling apart and your father's --" A ragged chuckled escaped her. "Your father's tantrum. This woman laughed at him when your father invited her to the Easter pageant at our previous church. When he pressed, wanting to understand, she finally unloaded on him. Why, she asked him, would she want to hang around with Christians when he had given her a guided tour of how they react when the going gets tough?"

  "I bet that just got Daddy going again on what a hypocrite Mr. Donnelly was."

  "It might have, but she added that Jonas' actions were perfectly understandable, that a lot of families fall apart when a child is killed, or in Tommy's case, crippled. It's perfectly normal, human, to tear into the drunk driver who crippled his son. What got her was how your father took it as a personal attack when Jonas Donnelly made a lie of all his years of leadership in our church. She repeated back to your father some of the things he said before, his criticism, his anger, his hopes that Jonas suffered for what he had done."

  "Ouch," Natalie whispered. She had learned early to leave the room, to leave the house if she could, when her father got on a righteous tear and Jonas Donnelly's name spilled off his lips.

  "The last time I saw your father cry was the day you were born, but he came home that night absolutely shattered. He spent that night crying… and praying… and apologizing and…" She shrugged. "Reformation."

  "So Mr. Donnelly is back in town, making things right with all the people he hurt." Natalie thought of the house that had been torn down to put in another street. She thought of the big back yard with the woods and fields behind it, where she and her brothers had played with Tommy and Jarod, and sometimes even Claire when she wasn't busy with school or service projects at church. There was something symbolic about the loss of the woods and the loss of her childhood innocence, tied into Tommy's broken back. "Has he seen…"

  The thought of that sagging, faded, prematurely aged man confronting his wheelchair-bound son and trying to make things right… "infuriated" wasn't the right word for the churning feelings that made her head ache and burned in her gut, but it was close. Natalie supposed she had a lot of her father in her, even if she hadn't been so vocal when the man she looked up to as a spiritual giant betrayed the trust and respect and admiration that she heaped on him. She wanted Jonas Donnelly to suffer. She didn't want easy forgiveness and healing for him.

  "So wrong," she whispered. "God, please help me …" Natalie wasn't quite sure what she was praying. She only knew she needed to step away before she fell down into the whirlpool that had consumed her fat
her for so many years and turned them all into church gypsies. That whirlpool, as she had seen in her own father's life, had jagged rocks at the bottom, ready to break her into little pieces.

  "If you mean Tommy, no, he hasn't seen him. He has no idea where Tommy is." Mrs. Schaeffer snorted. "He knows where Jarod is. What an arrogant, self-righteous con artist he became. He actually was here at our church for a little while -- Jarod, I mean. Very disappointed when there was nobody around who remembered him." A muffled chuckle escaped her. "There's been some major housecleaning at the church in the last few years. Which is a blessing. Nobody remembered your father -- at least, nobody who would hold it against him. The ones who really matter, the ones who are still here, they're the forgiving type. The kind of people Jarod ignored, because they weren't important enough for him, couldn't give him the power he wanted.

  "Anyway," she said, after another loud sigh and a pause where a sad, introspective light dimmed her eyes, "Jarod was getting ready to move on. He was making all sorts of sounds about being worried about the spiritual health of our church, about its lack of vision for outreach."

  "Lack of opportunities for him to be in charge, you mean," Natalie murmured. That was the Jarod Donnelly she remembered from youth group activities and weekend retreats, and complaints she had overheard from the people he had used and cast aside.

  "When Jonas showed up, Jarod acted the injured party granting forgiveness. He made sure that the movers and shakers in our church got a good chunk of the story, so they would know what a mature, forgiving, spiritual man Jarod Donnelly was. Jonas told him in front of all those witnesses that Jarod was just as much a sinner and hypocrite as he had been. He confronted Jarod with his own words when their marriage fell apart and Jarod blamed his mother. So Jarod stomped away in a righteous rage and never darkened the doors of the church again, but Jonas stayed and has been making amends ever since."

  "We're not the ones he hurt. Not really."

  "There are different kinds of hurt." Her mother rubbed her arm in a comforting gesture. "The problem is that Jonas can't find Claire and Tommy. Camille is easy enough to find--"

  "He can throw all the flowers he wants on her grave, it isn't going to do him any good." Natalie immediately clapped a hand over her mouth, stunned at the words that had slipped out, and the resentment still sitting like a pool of acid inside her.

  "I think there are some people who share your sentiment," her mother said, nodding. "Chances are good someone here, of those who attended our church at that time, has kept in contact with Claire and Tommy, but they aren't talking. They don't believe Jonas has changed, that he's truly repentant." She sighed. "And I don't blame them. There are other people who left the church after the mess Jonas made of his marriage and his testimony. He was witnessing for years to Shane Holbrook, trying to get the man to come to church and give up drinking. All it took was one explosion in the hospital, while Tommy was still on the operating table, to ruin all those years of hard work, of patience, to make a lie of all the teaching Jonas had done. That man went to AA after the accident and has been sober ever since, but he's staunchly anti-Christian, thanks to Jonas."

  "Well, you really can't blame him," she murmured, feeling her long day of driving and the weight of the surprise downstairs finally taking their toll on her. "Mr. Holbrook was driving drunk and caused the accident that broke Tommy's back."

  "No one is innocent, and everyone deserves some sympathy and the benefit of the doubt." Mrs. Schaeffer took a deep breath and got up. "Now, I'm heading back downstairs to see how dinner's coming along. How soon do you want to eat?"

  After her mother left, Natalie unpacked the few things she had brought in. She supposed it would only be smart to head right back downstairs and out to her car to get her suitcase. Since she planned on visiting her parents for a week, it made sense to hang up everything she could and get some wrinkles out. If she was going back to her childhood church on Sunday, she wanted to look good. The anticipation of finding a few old friends who might still remember her clashed with her dread of meeting up with Jonas Donnelly in the church hallways. That was also why she hesitated to go downstairs while he was still in the house. Her father sometimes teased her about the crush she had on Tommy Donnelly. What if Jonas remembered how she had felt about his son, and he saw her and mentioned it? She couldn't handle that.

  Instead, Natalie lay down and turned on her tablet to check her email. She made a habit of checking in every time she stopped to get gas or just stretch her legs, so she was fairly sure at this time of the day there was nothing vitally important, requiring a prompt answer.

  "Wrongo," she murmured, when she opened up her office email account and saw the forwarded message in the subject line. There was no other mail to claim her attention, after she deleted the junk. Another invitation to sign up for a single Christians dating service. Another request for help from an alleged persecuted/dying Christian who wanted her help to pass on a fortune to people who needed it.

  Dear Editorial Department:

  I really hate pestering you like this, but it's urgent I get in contact with one of your reporters, Natalie Schaeffer. We were roommates at Southeastern Christian College in Iowa. Maybe if I explain why, you'll help me? I'm afraid that if you forward my letter to Natalie, once she sees my name she'll delete it, unread. I don't blame her. But I really need to get through to her. Can you maybe flag this email so she'll at least read it to the end?

  "Huh?" Natalie took her finger off the delete button, poised to tap the moment she figured out what the latest scam was, disguised as a request.

  Usually the main office of America's Voice was very good at weeding out the crackpots and weirdos and didn't forward their emails or letters to her. Sometimes, though, the person screening emails didn't pay attention. Since her name started appearing in America's Voice, Natalie was used to people demanding she tell their story and put it in print. At least a third of them made the mistake of listing all the previous reporters who had turned them down because they couldn't provide a single verifiable fact. Then there were the people who wanted her to ghost write their book, and promised her a "very generous" twenty percent of all profits for her work on their behalf. Usually they made the mistake of admitting all they had were some ideas, and she had to do all the research as well as help them promote the book.

  Someone claiming to be a friend from college wasn't a new tactic. Natalie had yet to hear from anyone who claimed to be a fellow alumnus from SCC, but she had heard horror stories from other reporters for America's Voice. The most mild ones expected free advice, free writing help, or whatever "favor for an old college chum" was the flavor of the week. Others started out with the assumption that a traveling reporter received a glamorous paycheck to go with the glamorous -- not -- lifestyle of living on the road, and operated on different variations of "pay up or we'll reveal all the awful things you did in college and ruin your career."

  However, someone admitting Natalie might not be happy to hear from them was definitely a new tactic. Especially someone who said they were roommates. That was a lot easier to prove and disprove, as opposed to someone who claimed they attended a few classes or Bible studies together. It made her think maybe this was a real person she had actually known. She kept reading.

  I hurt Natalie when we were roommates, and God has been working on me in a major way, straightening out my heart and my testimony. I need to make things right, for my own sake, as well as to hopefully heal the wound I caused her. Please send this on to her, and if at all possible emphasize to Natalie how truly sorry I am for hurting her.

  Suzette Emsworth.

  "Holy Torquemada," Natalie whispered, and leaned back against the headboard of the bed, pushing the tablet away to arm's reach. She held her breath and waited for that surge of fury to shoot through her, the tightening in her temples, that acid churn in her stomach that always came when she thought back to those three months of frustration and sense of powerlessness when she shared a four-plex room at the col
lege.

  She had always known that her forte was in writing, that verbal communication was not one of her gifts because she needed time to think through what she wanted to say, needed time to arrange her thoughts and her words, and especially needed time to respond to others' words. The slightest hint of conflict, the first increase in volume, the first suggestion of accusation or condemnation made her freeze up, mentally and verbally. She had never been able to defend herself against verbal attacks, especially in a social setting. Her brain just didn't work fast enough.

  Suzette had been overly generous with her criticism from the day they met and became roommates, Natalie's sophomore year at SCC. Natalie had transferred from a junior college where she had managed to get all her requirements out of the way in one year and one summer term. Suzette had transferred in as a junior from the University of Las Vegas. She claimed she had studied dancing and had worked as a model, but now she was on a quest to clean up her life and dedicate it to God's service. Only later, when she was still trying to figure out how things had gotten so bad, so quickly, had Natalie wondered how Suzette could make such claims -- not about cleaning up her life, but about being a dancer and model. She was at least fifty pounds overweight, walked with no visible grace whatsoever, her thin hair was constantly clogged with mousse, and her skin was always greasy-shiny and blemished by enough makeup for a clown.

  It took only two weeks for Suzette to reveal that "cleaning up her life" meant she felt ordained to scrutinize the lives of everyone around her and clean them up as well. She constantly used scriptures to bully people into changing to suit her standards of "proper Christian living." Natalie avoided her as much as she could, but they did live in the same dorm room. She came in for her share of snipes. Her tee-shirts weren't modest enough. Her designer ripped jeans -- bought at the Salvation Army store -- were a sign of vanity and frivolous spending, bought to lead young men into impure thoughts. The fact that she didn't wear makeup or shave her legs indicated she secretly wanted to be a man, rejecting her God-given femininity. Usually Natalie just walked away since she couldn't come up with a verbal defense, leaving Suzette shouting down the hallway after her. She always got lectured for her rudeness the next time they were in the room together.