For This Life Only (9 page)

“I'm sure emotions were running high. I understand that your brother was a great help to her with her class work.” Drizen paused. “Thera's not a bad kid.”

But his tone indicated that he thought otherwise.

“She just forgets that not everything has to be a fight,” he said, his mouth pinched with weariness and disapproval.

I wondered how often Thera had been in his office over the last year. And how hard she'd had to fight to get someone to listen to her. I wouldn't have listened before today.

“It wasn't her fault,” I began. “I was—”

Principal Drizen waved his hand, dismissing my attempt at speech. “It doesn't matter. Thera put in a request to spend her exempt period in the library for additional hours as an aide, and I'm going to approve that. So it won't be a problem again.”

Then, having received a final sympathetic pat on my shoulder and a pass to my next class, I was released back into the wild, with no idea what had happened.

Except that I felt like I'd lost something else. I just wasn't sure what it was. The only bright spot in my whole day had come from the two-second conversation that Thera and I had where we weren't yelling. When I'd blurted all that about not wanting to live with what I'd caused, she hadn't put on a fake smile in response or gotten that panicked, oh-shit expression. She'd thought about it and actually answered me.

I wished there could have been more of that.

Now, after an afternoon that had stretched into eternity, I limped out the front doors. My mom's minivan was nowhere in sight.

I frowned. That was weird. I couldn't drive while I was on pain pills, so she'd insisted on driving me everywhere, including to and from school. She didn't trust anyone else behind the wheel, particularly friends who might be distracted and get into another accident.

I dug in my pocket for my cell to see if I'd missed a call or text from her.

“Jace. Jacob!”

I searched faces and cars until I saw the open passenger-side window on the black Escalade hybrid, and the familiar figure behind the wheel summoning me with a sharp wave of his hand.

Dad.

My heart sank.

I lugged myself toward the Escalade. “What are you doing here?” I asked through the open window. Dad was in casual mode today; he wore a dark blue button-down shirt, with a tie instead of a formal clerical collar pressing tight against his neck.

“Your mother thought it would be good for you to start working at the church again, get back to another part of your routine,” he said, staring straight ahead through the windshield. There was nothing to see but the dead brown grass and muddy patches of the baseball field in the distance.

It took me a second to run those words through the Parent Filter. Translation: My mom was pushing my dad and me together, hoping that would somehow make everything magically better.

Reluctantly I opened the door, releasing a wave of new leather smell from the pristine interior. Unlike my mom's van, which was frequently decorated with crushed Goldfish crackers, empty Gatorade bottles, and leftover streamers and poster paint from whatever project Eli had been working on, my dad's SUV was in factory condition.

The church paid the lease on it, so there was no eating or drinking in it and there was definitely no borrowing it. Even my mom didn't like to drive it, for fear that a gallon of milk would split open in the cargo area or that Sarah would barf in the backseat.

I hauled myself into the seat, shrugged out of my backpack, and dropped it on the floor. It took me extra time to get my leg arranged around my bag, the door closed, and my seat belt on, and the entire time, I could feel the distance growing, like the driver's seat was moving farther and farther away from me. In the old days, before the accident, Dad would have asked me about my practice schedule, what the coaches were saying, if they were recommending changes to my workout.

But now, without baseball, my dad and I didn't have much to talk about. Except all the things we
couldn't
talk about. And my healing injuries and impaired movements were vivid reminders of how everything had changed.

“Carol and Delores have been taking on the extra work, which is too much for them, especially during Lent,” he said as he pulled away from the curb. “We need you to come back.”

“I thought you would have hired someone else to take my place,” I said. Or Eli's, at least. No matter what I did, the internship had been designed for two.

“You made a commitment to the council and to the Riverwoods community,” my dad said.

Which meant if I didn't come back, it would be one more thing my dad would have to explain away.

I leaned my head against the headrest and closed my eyes.

My dad took a corner too quickly, and the force of it knocked my arm into the center console.

My eyes snapped open, watering, and I sucked in a sharp breath, my right hand moving reflexively to cover my elbow. The stitches were gone, and I was technically “healed” (after a second surgery to correct the first failed one). But tell that to the bones, ligaments, and muscles involved; they didn't seem to be getting the “all better” message.

Dad frowned, looking over at me for the first time. “Are you managing your pain medications appropriately?”

Because I'd screwed up in so many other ways.

Fury flashed through me but vanished before I could catch hold of it. “Yes,” I said wearily.

“Are you sure?” my dad persisted.

This had to be coming from somewhere—probably from some well-meaning church member. “Dad—”

“You've lied to us before,” my dad said, and the calmness in his voice was worse than if he'd yelled.

Line drive over the fence. No stopping that one.

I slumped in my seat. “If you think you can't trust me, then why are you asking?” I asked

“Because I'm trying, Jacob,” he said, his knuckles blanching with his grip on the wheel. “I'm only asking that you do the same. You need to get back on track, Son.”

How am I supposed to do that?
I wanted to shout. When
he would never forgive me for not being Eli? When what little we had in common was gone? When I couldn't undo what I'd done? When I wasn't even sure if there was a point to any of this?

I turned away from him to stare out the side window.

“I have a counseling appointment,” he said finally, as we pulled into the parking lot behind the new auditorium building. “Delores and Carol are expecting you in the office.”

Then he parked the Escalade, stepped out, and smoothed his tie into place before walking away without looking back, leaving me to limp in on my own.

•  •  •

The good news was that the main offices for Riverwoods were now in the auditorium building. The building was much closer to the parking lot, and the auditorium was far less churchy than the main sanctuary, where we'd been on Sunday. No stained glass windows, polished pews, or candles. It was all modern: theater seating for a thousand, a stage, a giant metal sculpture representing the Dove of Peace—the Riverwoods logo—hanging on the center wall. Far less likely to trigger a panicked, existential freak-out in me. I hoped.

Outside the auditorium was a maze of hallways and offices and classrooms that might have been found in any school or corporate building. Except for the permanent
bulletin board display of a cartoon Jesus with his hands outstretched in welcome to a diverse group of children, and the palm crosses from last year's Palm Sunday—now brown and dried—tacked to several wooden office doors, beneath the staff nameplates.

And yet, my shoulders tightened with dread as soon as I crossed the threshold and walked into what had been designated as the “greeting area.” It still smelled like new carpeting and fresh paint, even after eight years.

This building had been Eli's home away from home. He'd helped my dad pick where his office would be, both of them well aware of the hope and expectation that it would one day be Eli's.

But the last time Eli had been here, it had been just his body, lifeless in a coffin on the auditorium stage.

I shut my eyes and shook my head, trying to clear the imagined image.

When I opened my eyes, a set of heavy wooden doors directly ahead of me caught my eye. On the other side of those doors, the quiet auditorium waited, and it felt like an ominous threatening presence.

The doors taunted me, daring me to face my sins and try to come out without further fracturing. But I was barely holding it together as it was.

With a deep breath, I turned away from the hypnotic pull of the doors and headed down the hallway that led to
the central office. My dad's door was closed, the low murmur of voices escaping through the crack at the bottom as I passed.

I paused at the threshold of the central office area, which was humming with activity. The giant photocopying/collating/folding machine on the back wall was spitting out folded bulletins in a stack on the far right side. Carol, the office manager, was on the phone, arguing with someone, while Delores, my dad's personal admin, tapped at her keyboard, her long shiny red nails clicking loudly. Shelly, the administrative assistant for the directors of music, outreach, and children's programming, wasn't at her desk, but her aquarium screen saver burbled cheerfully, flashing tropical fish as they swam by.

Pastor Verner and Pastor Matthews, both of whom reported to my dad, had offices and assistants on the other side of the building, which was probably a statement of some kind. My dad keeping them at a distance, literally and figuratively? After all, the only way to get promoted at Riverwoods, as far as I knew, was to leave and take a new call, or to try to force the head pastor out in a polite, socially acceptable coup. Dad wasn't taking any chances.

“You're back!” Delores exclaimed, pushing back from her desk as I walked in.

Carol waved and smiled at me before scowling at the paperwork in front of her. “No, we changed this order
months ago,” she said into the phone, rolling her eyes. “Four hundred lilies. I have the confirmation number right here.”

“Let me help you with that, honey.” Delores came around the edge of her desk, reaching to take my backpack. Delores had been working for my dad for as long as I could remember. She was kind of a third grandma, with big hair, wicked nails, and more jewelry than one of those gold exchange stores.

“No, I got it,” I said with a lame smile, holding my bag closer like a shield.

It would keep her from trying to hug me. I didn't want to hurt her feelings, but I just couldn't let her do that. The familiar smell of her rose perfume would bring back a thousand memories, most of them with Eli at my side. And if I knew her, she'd start crying, and then I'd be caught in that awful position of making her uncomfortable for crying when I wasn't crying myself. I couldn't cry anymore; it hurt too much. And terrible as it sounded, I didn't have enough emotional energy left to soothe another grieving person.

As if sensing my reluctance, Delores retreated, fidgeting with the series of gold bracelets on her wrist. “I'm so glad you're back, honey.” Her heavily mascaraed eyelashes left dark, damp spots beneath her eyes when she blinked back her tears. “And that you're doing okay.” She pressed
her hands to her chest. “We were so worried about you.”

Eli's absence loomed, overshadowing every word.

I nodded and forced myself to smile again. “Thanks. I'm doing all right now.”

Her mouth turned down, which told me she recognized the words for the lie they were. But she didn't call me on it.

“Well, good.” She squeezed my shoulder. I tried not to flinch but wasn't entirely successful.

Her gaze jumped away from mine, hurt radiating from her.

Crap.

“Shelly got the bulletins started for us,” she said. “But if you want to take over with the inserts, that would be real helpful.”

She gestured awkwardly toward the desk in the far corner of the office, the same one Eli and I had shared, as if I didn't remember. But there was only one chair at the desk now, the good one.

I searched for the other chair and found it in the opposite corner, near the giant photocopier. Reams of paper had been stacked on the seat along with foam boards depicting what appeared to be a series of buildings—probably my dad's latest church expansion dreams—as if these items would disguise it.

I appreciated the effort. But seeing the bad chair,
alone and in the corner, felt like a punch to the chest. That stupid chair. Eli and I had had an unspoken game to see who would get stuck with it. Whoever got to the office first claimed the good one. But if you left it, you didn't get it back.

It was stupid but just something we did. Hell, we'd never even talked about it. And now it was over. One of a million little important things that would sound so insignificant if I tried to explain. Was I mourning my brother's life cut so short? Grieving that he'd never be my best man, or that we'd never have a chance to try to trick any kids or nieces or nephews we might have had by switching places?

Nope, I was sad about a dumb chair.

I made my way over to the intern desk and sat in the good chair. Delores brought over a batch of bulletins and inserts. “Here. This should get you started.” She reached out to pat my shoulder and stopped herself.

Before she could walk away, I reached back with my good hand and caught hers, giving it a quick, clumsy squeeze. “Thanks.”

“Of course, honey,” she said, her voice quavering with emotion. Then she bustled to her desk, where she blew her nose loudly. “Allergies,” she announced to the entire office.

I smiled and turned my attention to the inserts and pale purple bulletins in front of me. The only artwork
was text in a simple, scrolling font: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.”

The words sent a strange pang through me. I couldn't tell if it was from recognizing my own need in them or from recognizing that the need was likely to remain unanswered.