by Becky Wade
He clicked on the desk light and opened Bearer of a Woman’s Soul. The table of contents was impressive. Ten weeks of study—each with five assignments? Eleven recorded teaching sessions.
Sam scratched the back of his neck. He hadn’t realized there was a demand among women for ten-week-long Bible studies. He flipped through the book. Lots of blank spaces and questions. Not only did this study last ten weeks, it came with homework.
He wasn’t afraid to rebel against the assigned order and skip the first teaching session, which was supposed to come before the first assignment. Except his curiosity was stirring.
Gen . . . teaching a lesson?
He powered up his computer, went to the site noted in the book, and paid for the first recording.
High-quality graphics. Music. Then Genevieve came into focus on screen, sitting on a dock at a lake.
She wore the same type of fashionable clothing she always wore. Her hair and makeup were even more done up for the recording than they were in real life. She communicated relaxed warmth as she made introductory remarks.
More graphics and music. Then the picture showed Genevieve walking onto the stage at a sleek, modern church. She set her Bible on the podium. Women packed pews that swept away from her in a semicircle. And she began to . . . preach. Teach? It seemed like a combination of the two.
He lifted his eyebrows. His desk chair gave a squeak as he leaned back and interlaced his hands behind his head, watching.
She’d clearly researched the material. Even so, she came across as genuine and humble, never condescending. She spoke to the large group in a way that guaranteed that every woman in every seat would not only like her but also feel as if they knew her.
She told stories that illustrated her points. She strode from one end of the stage to the other. Down the stairs to the first row of pews. Up again.
She used her hands to emphasize her speech. Sometimes she raised her voice. Sometimes she lifted both palms. Sometimes she whispered.
His respect for her climbed.
When he was growing up, his mom and stepdad had taken him to church twice a year, on Christmas Eve and Easter. The two of them were good-hearted, moral people who’d put a lot of effort and love into their family but very little effort into organized religion.
He’d followed their lead. He’d tried to be good and moral and loving toward his family. But that hadn’t stopped him from testing every pleasure the world offered. Starting at sixteen, he’d tried heavy drinking. Partying. Drugs. Girlfriends. Sex. Money. Travel.
A year after he’d graduated from uni, he’d been working as a sous chef and partying hard on his days off.
His roommate, Benji, had taken a contract job for a couple of months in Europe. Benji had asked Sam if he could sublet his room while he was gone to the daughter of his parents’ closest friends. Sam had told him he could.
Memories started to tow Sam beneath the surface, deeper and deeper, until he was no longer sitting in his office but entering his old Melbourne apartment one hot summer day to find a woman standing in the living room. Moving boxes, two suitcases, and a surfboard surrounded her. She wore tight shorts and a bikini beneath her tank top. Her hair was sandy blond and wavy. Her body, tan and athletic.
She leveled her pale blue cat’s eyes on him. “G’day.”
“G’day.”
“I’m Kayden Westcott.”
“Sam Turner.”
“I was a year behind you and Benji at school.”
“You just graduated, then?”
“Yeah. And now I’m wondering if I made a mistake when I told Benji I’d sublet his room. It’s gross in there.”
Benji had never said that his parents’ friends’ daughter looked like a poster of the classic Aussie beach girl. He wanted to kill Benji for not giving him a heads-up. He wanted to kiss Benji. He wanted to make sure Kayden never regretted her decision to stay in this apartment.
“Do you think I should fumigate it before I move my stuff in?” Kayden asked, grinning.
A half second passed before he laughed in response to her question. But that half second had lasted long enough for him to fall in love with her. “I’ll help you clean it. Once we finish, we can decide if fumigation is necessary.”
He spent that whole summer with Kayden. Surfing, going to concerts, working out, sharing a bottle of wine over dinner, making love. Long before Benji returned from Europe, Kayden had become a permanent resident of Sam’s room. A month after Benji moved back in, Sam and Kayden had gotten their own one-bedroom flat.
When a buddy at work offered to sell Sam weed and a Baggie of twelve Percocet pills, Sam had taken him up on it because the combination of weed and Percocet had sounded to him like a good weekend waiting to happen. He’d known, too, that Kayden would like the weed. She’d been no angel before they started dating. Like him, she’d sampled several different substances, and weed was her favorite.
The Percocet had simply come with the weed. Like when a grocery store gives you a free box of crackers for buying a certain brand of granola bars. Percocet hadn’t been the main draw. Sam had taken painkillers before and hadn’t been all that keen. He’d expected Kayden to feel the same.
However, when he’d introduced her to Percocet, she’d surprised him. She’d loved the way the pills made her feel.
And he’d loved her. Intently. Wholly.
Their first year together had been perfect. She talked about Freud and oceanography and feminism. She could go to a library or to a club and have fun either place for hours. She listened to The Doors albums on her record player. She rolled her eyes back into her head with joy every time she tasted a dish he made for her. She easily befriended all her co-workers at her graphic design firm. She laughed hard and sometimes cried hard. She went barefoot everywhere.
Sam was the son of two countries. He’d grown up spending time in both but never feeling like he fit in either. His mother had married the love of her life, a man who was not his father. His sister and brother were full-blood siblings of each other but only half-siblings to him. Since birth, he’d looked for belonging in friend groups, sports teams, activities, entertainments. All without success. Until Kayden.
With her, in their flat in Melbourne, he belonged. At long last, he’d come home. He was appreciated and needed. He was integral to their circle of two. He was the happiest he’d ever been.
Kayden took Percocet more and more frequently, but still recreationally. It hadn’t interfered with her ability to function.
Until, gradually . . . it had.
As intimate as they’d been, Sam didn’t know when Percocet had changed from her diversion into her addiction. Kayden had successfully hidden that from him.
Little by little, the pills sucked the perfection from their relationship. Kayden began to lose things. At first little things, like her sunglasses. Then her memory of the appointments on her calendar. Then a few of her friendships. Then her entire existence came to revolve around pills—how to get them and the taking of them.
He asked her to quit. She said she would.
She didn’t.
He came home from work one night and called her name. No answer, even though he’d seen her Jeep in its parking spot. An episode of Dance Academy played on TV. He walked closer to the TV in search of the remote, so that he could turn it off, and the patch of rug in front of the sofa became visible. Kayden was there. She was having a seizure.
Blind fear consumed him. He knelt beside her. Helpless and panicking, he phoned for an ambulance.
Later, the doctor informed him that she’d mixed Percocet with alcohol and overdosed. Once they’d stabilized her health, she’d gone directly to a rehab center.
He’d slept alone in their flat. Ate alone. Moved through life alone while she was in treatment. Their circle of two had been broken, and he’d counted the hours until she returned to him.
But the day he’d arrived at the center to bring her home, she’d been a pale and withdrawn version of her former self.
A few weeks later, when searching for positive things to replace what the pills had been to her, she’d informed him that she wanted to go to church. Eager to support her, they’d attended a church service held in an old, renovated building. The band rocked. The pastors and members were welcoming and around their age.
He looked over at her during one of the songs. Her braided blond hair shone under the light. Her profile was wildly beautiful. Her hands, raised, palms up. Her smile peaceful.
His hope expanded. He wanted so badly for church, for anything, to keep her from a relapse.
Kayden grasped onto God immediately. He, the more cautious of them, needed time to consider the things the pastor taught.
They had long, deep conversations about death and souls and whether their existence on the planet could be accidental or had to have been purposed. They read books by scientists and theologians and philosophers and—at the end of all that—decided that the evidence against God was far harder to accept than the evidence for God.
A friend from church explained what faith required, and he and Kayden prayed for salvation. They attended church on Sundays and small group meetings weekly.
He’d gone to that original service because it’s what Kayden had wanted. Yet slowly faith had changed Sam’s heart. Many—but not all—of his behaviors shifted.
At one point their small group leader, who’d become a friend, expressed concern over the fact that he and Kayden were still living together, despite their unmarried state. It seemed to Sam that his friend had stepped way over the line, and Sam responded with defensiveness. He had no intention of changing their living situation, and he didn’t want Christians judging him and Kayden or trying to take away their freedom. He loved Kayden too much to change. For the first time in his life, he had a place. He filled his head with proof that justified his own rightness. Kayden needed him in order to have a chance at recovery. Practically, it made no sense to pay for two separate apartments. Living together was convenient, comfortable. It’s what kept their relationship strong. They weren’t hurting anyone.
They parted from their small group but continued to attend church. Then, all of a sudden, Kayden’s company was sold and the employees let go. Kayden couldn’t find another job. The sorrow and stress of that, coupled with the difficulty of staying clean, covered her with depression. In order to bounce back, she reached for Percocet.
All the hard-won progress she’d made—destroyed.
Her ability to function again began to crumble.
She went through detox at home. He nursed her through it.
She reconnected with God. Found work. Found purpose and stability.
Then her grandmother wasted away from cancer. Kayden reached for Percocet to help her through her sadness.
Her ability to function again began to crumble.
He nursed her through detox.
She reconnected with God. Found work. Found purpose and stability.
Then she developed migraines and couldn’t bear them without Percocet.
Sam begged her to return to the rehab facility.
She assured him that she had it under control. She promised that she’d limit herself to just enough Percocet to treat her migraines, so little that he wouldn’t even notice.
Her ability to function began to crumble and—all at once—he couldn’t face going through it again: The worry that came with his role as her caregiver. The belief that she’d stay clean, followed by heartbreak when she fell off the wagon. The fights. The pleading.
The futility.
The repetitiveness of it all.
The violent emotions.
He’d locked himself to Kayden when he’d fallen in love with her. Then she’d locked herself into a destructive cycle, which meant he was locked into that destructive cycle, even though he hadn’t misused a single prescription or recreational drug since the day he’d found her having a seizure on their living room carpet.
He told her he’d leave unless she quit using.
She didn’t quit, and so, after a particularly bad fight, he followed through on his promise.
He left.
By then, they’d been together for three years. One day, she’d been the closest person to him. The next day, she wasn’t in his life at all. There, then gone.
He’d moved in with a co-worker and existed in misery. A misery that seemed like nothing compared to his feelings when Benji called him three months after his breakup with Kayden to tell him, through tears, that she’d overdosed again on Percocet and alcohol. This time, she’d killed herself.
He’d been the one who’d introduced her to Percocet.
He’d been the one who’d broken up with her, and so he hadn’t been there when she’d needed him to call an ambulance for her.
At her funeral, he stared at the casket containing her young, beautiful body. He experienced physical pain in response to the desolation on the faces of her parents and siblings.
Grief tangled with guilt sent him down a dark tunnel in the seasons following her burial. He couldn’t shake the conviction that, if he would have done something differently, if God would have done something differently, Kayden could have lived a long, healthy life. He was furious with himself and with God, but he didn’t have the strength or the heart to turn from his faith. Desolation drove him to his knees. He needed God. And so he clung to Him.
It had taken a year of therapy before he’d finally reached the end of the tunnel.
His whole life he’d been flailing. Because he didn’t want to be an outsider. Because he didn’t want loneliness.
Enough.
He embraced the things he used to fear. He made them part of his identity. I don’t belong. I’m an outsider. I’m lonely. That’s who I am.
He’d managed to hold on to his relationship with God and, as long as he had that, he didn’t need anything or anyone else. Very purposely, he turned his life upside-down by moving to America.
To this day, he still had his faith. It was steady. Simple.
Gen’s faith seemed public, bold. Complicated.
Sam paused the video and hunched over the computer’s keyboard to run a search for Gen. Her impressive website supplied links to social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. He visited all three and saw that she had a huge following on each.
So. His tenant was a professional Christian with an image to maintain and hundreds of thousands of people looking to her for guidance on how to live their lives. The women who consumed her Bible studies and packed churches to hear her speak expected her to do the impossible—live a perfect life. The pressure of that had to be heavy.
Both he and Gen had made mistakes. They’d both fallen short.
He lifted his vision to the glowing moon hanging in the sky beyond the window.
He worked Sunday mornings, so he attended the contemporary worship service at The Vine Church on Saturday nights.
Back in Australia and here in America, he sometimes heard pastors speak about their past struggles in vague terms, but only in the context of having overcome them on the road to their current, better place. He’d never heard a pastor confess a present struggle. Nor had he heard a pastor confess an opioid addiction.
He and Eli talked about issues surrounding the Bible. Viewpoints, controversies, archaeology. But even though Eli was his closest friend in Misty River, Eli had never admitted an area of failure to Sam. Sam hadn’t admitted an area of failure to Eli.
Why was it so hard for Christians to come clean to one another about the sins that had them by their throats? Because of pride? Because every Christian wanted every other Christian to think they were doing it right? That they were strong and good?
If so, that was idiotic.
His pastor liked to say that the church wasn’t about helping sick people become well. It was about bringing dead people to life. Every single one of them was dead except for Christ. So what was keeping them from trusting other people with their deadness? Why so superficial? Everyone wa
s messed up and hurting. It didn’t help to pretend the opposite.
Kayden’s smoke screen of silence and lies had not helped her. Kayden had gone to worship services and small group meetings before, during, and after her relapses and never once mentioned her issues with Percocet to their church friends.
He could see why it would be brutally hard for Genevieve to admit her own struggle. Once she admitted she’d been relying on painkillers to get through her days, she couldn’t continue to stand on her pedestal. If her addiction became public knowledge, some of her fans might turn on her. The media might view her secret as a scandal. Her career might take a very hard hit. So would her reputation and her reach.
Even so, he knew that silence and lies wouldn’t help Genevieve, either.
He hit play and watched the rest of the video.
Troubled, he climbed the stairs, then came to stand at his bedroom window. He rubbed his arms in an effort to get rid of the cold inside.
What was he doing? It was dumb to stare at his guesthouse.
He went back downstairs. Swept the first floor. Walked back upstairs. Showered. Stared aimlessly at his closet for long minutes, as if he’d forgotten where he kept the drawstring pants he slept in. Pulled a pair on. Tried to read. Found himself at the window again.
Gen’s invisible airwaves grew stronger every day.
Light glowed from the guesthouse windows this evening, telling him that Genevieve was still awake. Which royally frustrated him for two reasons. One, she was drinking down electricity the way a thirsty border collie drinks water. She was probably running the heater full-bore and taking an hour-long shower, too, in order to drain him of all his resources at once. Two, she didn’t seem to have the sense to know that, in order to recover, her body needed sleep.
By some terrible twist of fate, he was one of very few people who knew that she was attempting to make it to ninety days sober. Unfortunately, he was also the least qualified to help her.
Genevieve could have crashed so many houses on so many farms. He didn’t understand why God had brought her to his. He couldn’t afford to get mixed up with another person going through treatment, relapse, addiction, treatment, relapse, addiction.
