Providence (3 page)

Nancy pushed in the stinger. “Jack, have you considered taking a leave of absence?”

“No, I haven’t.”
But I can read the writing on the wall.

“I think that’s an excellent idea,” Aaron said.

Downstairs the office phone rang, and I heard Mrs. Burman pick it up. “Campus Missions Office.”

Aaron stood, and Nancy and Peter followed suit. Our meeting was over. The most trusted people I knew on earth had just cut me loose from the tether that held me to it.

“You’ve had an incredible year, Jack,” Aaron said. “Don’t be afraid to take some time off.”

“Yeah, Jack, unwind a little.” Nancy smiled.

“We’re not trying to get rid of you!” Peter quipped, prompting laughter from Nancy and Aaron and lightening my somewhat dour mood.

As Aaron walked through the conference-room doorway where I’d nearly knocked him down twenty minutes earlier, he turned and issued a decree. “Use this week to get your things together, and then take off the rest of December and January—even February if you need it.”

I spent the rest of the morning in my office answering e-mails, canceling appointments, and wondering what had just happened. I’d walked into the building intent on ditching the book. Now, as the heaviest snowfall of the year fell outside my office window, I was clearing out the desk I’d known as my home away from home for the past twelve years. It didn’t take a week to get my things in order. By ten thirty I’d scratched all the upcoming events off my day planner.

“Doesn’t do interviews,” Peter had said.

“There are a lot of things about you
I
don’t know,” Aaron had said.

Welcome to the club. I’ve been walking around in these shoes for forty years, and there’s plenty I don’t know either.

Around noon Mrs. Burman knocked on my open door. She handed me mail she normally would have left in a box downstairs.

“A little birdie told me you’re gonna be leaving us for a while,” she said, making it sound like I was a kid about to be dropped off at summer camp.

“Yes. I’ve been hearing that too, Mrs. B. You want to join me? We can make it a twosome.”

She laughed, ever guileless. “Oh-ho, I can’t do that. But I’m going to miss you when you’re gone.”

I knew she meant it. I got up from my desk and gave her a hug, not something I normally did, but it felt natural just the same. I thanked her for her thoughtfulness and took it all as a sign the office would find a way to adjust to my departure.

I called Arthur and told him the news. I’m certain he tried covering up the phone, but I could still hear him squealing with delight. He was a lucky jackpot winner hitting it big the day his house almost got repossessed.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways, Jack!” he told me. I wondered how he’d ever wipe the grin from his face.

After twelve years at CMO, my last official day ended with Peter and me stepping out for a quick bite at Oscar’s, a popular on-campus deli. We grabbed seats in the first open booth. A busboy cleaned off the vinyl red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, and I scanned the mini-jukebox mounted on the wall between us. We gave the waitress our order without looking at menus. Over the noise of the bustling lunch crowd, Peter asked how I was doing.

“I’m fine,” I said, not wanting to admit to either of us the trepidation I was feeling. “It’s going to take transition time, that’s all.”

“Sorry if we were a little brusque with you. We could have eased you into things a little better,” Peter said, mending fences that didn’t really need mending.

“It’s fine, Peter. I’ll get into the swing of things.”

“That’s the spirit. You really do need a break. What’d you sell? Something like a billion books? After that kind of earthquake, I’d think anyone would want to step away for a while, nail their cupboards back on the walls.”

The waitress returned and dropped off two oversized Reubens with dill pickles and chips and two Coca-Colas in large red plastic cups. We asked the Lord for His blessing, then dug in.

“I’m not against taking time off, Peter,” I said. “I just haven’t figured out what I’m in for.”

“All the more reason to take a break. Have you thought about going somewhere? An exotic writer’s retreat, or whatever you best-selling authors call it. Go somewhere and just write and relax.”

Did those two words go together? Write and relax?

“I can’t say it’s crossed my mind,” I said, suddenly distracted by a twenty-something female student a few tables away, who reminded me of someone I knew a long time ago.

A customer in the booth behind me dropped a quarter in the jukebox and punched in a song. Even with the deafening crowd noise, I could hear the faint melody from an era ago.

“This is the sound of my soul, this is the sound …”

“You’re writing the book, right?” Peter took a long pull from his Coke.

“Yes.” I said for the official record.

“So, fly out of here. What’s keeping you? We’re in the middle of the coldest winter in memory, and Jamaica is eighty degrees with blue waters and white, sandy beaches. I thought you were rich, Jack.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t even be here now.”

I took another bite of my Reuben. “Jamaica, huh?”

“Why not? You haven’t taken a vacation in … how long has it been?”

“Twenty years, give or take a decade.”

“So go. Who knows, the future Mrs. Clayton may be waiting for you on one of those beaches.” Peter smiled, a subtle tease at my being forty and still single.

I didn’t need to remind him that he was single and nearly forty too. I wouldn’t remind him, of course, how there’d almost been a Mrs. Clayton. That was a memory I kept private. As close as Peter and I were, I could never tell him about Jenny. Where would I start? And just how would I end, with her tears or my own?

“Well, I hope she doesn’t burn easily,” I said.

After lunch we drove back to the office and said our good-byes in the parking lot, the relentless snow temporarily switched to off. I climbed into an ice-cold Jeep and fired up the engine. Sitting in the frozen cab with the windows frosted over, my mind wandered to dreams of tiki huts, resting my bare feet on a crate of fresh papaya, reading in a lazy netted hammock, the setting orange sun warm on my face.

Driving out of the parking lot, I thought about those boxes of memories sitting unopened in the far reaches of my mind, most having not seen sunlight for twenty years.

I got home around two o’clock, exhausted, and managed to switch on CNN before falling asleep on the sofa in front of the TV. Two hours later I awoke feeling disoriented and went upstairs for my second blistering-hot shower of the day. By the time I was dry, I felt a state approaching normal again. Across the bedroom the phone-message light was blinking red. I walked over to the nightstand and pressed the playback button.

“Helloooo, Jack!” the caller said in a tone crackled and low. “This is a voice from your past. Does the name Howard Cameron ring any bells for you?”

Oh my gosh …

Howard’s good-natured laugh trailed after the question like the twinkling tail of a kite. “You’re probably at work right now, but since this is the only number we have—without tracking you down through the FBI—we’ll just have to leave a message.”

Had it been twenty years?

“By now you’ve probably received the postcard Angela and I sent you.”

Postcard?

“We’re back from England as of the seventh, and as I wrote on the card, we’ll be passing through Providence this Saturday. We both read your book by the way and are delighted to see you’ve finally come to some good!” More hearty laughter. “Hope you’re free ’cause we’d love to see you, Jack. Anyway, we’ll try you again later in the week.”

The machine shut off, and the little red light began blinking again. For all these years, Jenny’s parents had been in England working as missionaries. The last time I’d seen them, they were leaving to
go
to Europe. I’d always liked Howard and Angela, especially Howard. He acted as if he thought the world of me, even though I never did a thing to earn it. Now they were on their way back to Indiana.

“Well, I’ve got the day off,” I said to the empty room, a sure sign of my impending crack-up.

I finished dressing and went downstairs. It was five thirty and already dark outside. I set a fresh pot of coffee to brew in the kitchen and returned down the hallway to the office. I switched on a small lamp and lit a scented candle I’d found in the back of a drawer. Nothing wrong with a little atmosphere.

Soon the room was aglow with light and the scents of vanilla and cinnamon. Fractured frost painted the windowpanes in front of my desk. Outside, Indiana was a winter icebox, the wind whistling her subzero carols.

When the iMac finished booting up, I double-clicked the document icon I’d planned on tossing out just twelve hours earlier. It was time to write—but first, time to pray.

Lord, You’re here with me. I know You’re doing something. Let my work be in line with Your plans. Make me fit to serve You.
I needed God’s blessing, and His company, on whatever journey I was about to take. I needed to hand Him the book before I wrote a single word.

The iMac greeted me like C-3PO from
Star Wars.
“Master Jack, how good of you to return! I knew you wouldn’t leave us!”

“Leave you? No, I wouldn’t do that, C-3PO. I’ve got a story to write. And I need your help to travel back in time, to the year 1985.”

~
T
HREE
~

These dreams go on when I close my eyes
Every second of the night I live another life.

—Heart

“These Dreams”

I bolted upright in bed. A cool breeze whispered through the open window after a day as hot as a summer greenhouse. I could hear the rumble of a storm tumbling from the far side of Collinger County. Awakened from a bad dream, I lay back in my bed, counting the seconds of silence between the flashes of light and the booms of distant thunder. I listened for sound coming from the other side of the upstairs hallway where my mother, Marianne Clayton, slept, but I heard only the raging of the storm outside. There was no noise loud enough to wake my dad, George Clayton, since divorce had transported him to Southern California eight years earlier.

His departure left my sister, Ruth Ann, and me alone with our mom in a three-bedroom country home in Overton, Iowa—the only home we’d ever known. I’d spent the last eighteen years of my life there.

Bright and early in the morning, my best friend, Mitch McDaniels, would pilot his navy blue Cutlass Ciera up our long gravel driveway, past the bountiful, sweet-smelling farms. I’d load two bags into the trunk, and we’d fly over the Cloverlane bridge, leaving Overton for college.

For good.

I’d waited eight years to blast off from Overton, to leave for college or anywhere else. On nights like this when the bad dreams came, I’d learned to close my eyes and remember the good times. And there
were
good times, like the last vacation we’d all taken together as a family. But remembering them had gotten harder over the past few years.

Ruth Ann died when I was sixteen. She was killed by a drunk driver only a few miles from our house. That driver was her best friend, Patricia Dunwoody. Patricia had been sitting behind the wheel of her dad’s 1980 Chevy Caprice, with Ruth Ann buckled in next to her. The two eighteen-year-olds were driving around Overton enjoying some postgraduation fun when Patricia missed the turn at Archer’s Farm and plowed into a hundred-year-old oak tree. Patricia received a cut across her forehead just below the hairline. Ruthie died instantly.

There are some things in life we just have to deal with. If we don’t, then those things get stuffed inside like laundry in a canvas bag with the cords pulled tight. Ruth Ann had been accepted at Providence College in Indiana, a school I’d never heard of at the time. A good student, she’d been awarded their prestigious Hensley-Drumons Science Scholarship at Overton High School’s honors banquet during graduation week.

I saw my dad for the last time at Ruthie’s funeral. Two years before I would head out on my own. Two years before the door would finally close on that tragic era. Two years before I’d leave my mother standing in the yard, wondering how we’d become such total strangers.

In the years following Ruthie’s death, Marianne and I lived in relative silence. We’d gotten used to the steps of three dancers when Dad left, but with only the two of us left, we didn’t know how to move. We lost the rhythm.

During the fall of my senior year, I got it in my head that I wanted to go to college, and not just to any college, but to Providence College, where Ruthie had been accepted. Standing with Mitchell at our lockers between classes, I tried to convince him we should
both
go to Providence, though months earlier he’d applied to the University of Iowa. After weeks of persuasion, he finally caved in and applied to Providence.

Our last season in Overton was a whirlwind. It was 1985, the summer of Live Aid; “We Are the World” was still playing on the radio. That time was as much about celebrating our freedom as saying good-bye to childhood. I had an unshakable confidence that things could only get better at a place called Providence College. It became for me a shimmering oasis far from the barren desert Overton had become.