Salvation City (27 page)

A few days after her visit to Salvation City, Addy e-mailed Cole some pictures. One of them showed the light-colored six-story building where she had her apartment in Berlin, in a neighborhood called Prenzlauer Berg. It was the only picture in the group Cole hadn’t seen before. Most of the others were copies of photos his mother had sent to Addy over the years. There were some baby pictures, including one taken by his father immediately after Cole was born, and there were several school pictures. In some of the photos he was by himself and in others he was with friends or parents or grandparents. There was a picture of him with Sadie when she was a puppy, another of him and his dad at a Cubs game. In the most recent photo, he and his parents were standing outside their building in Chicago. It was snowing. It was their last Christmas together and Addy was visiting; that would have been Addy behind the camera. There were also pictures of his parents without him (more of his mother than of his father), some taken years before Cole was born. It was a picture of his mother when she was a little girl (same eyes, much curlier hair) that brought him the greatest emotion.

It wasn’t until he saw these photographs that Cole understood his fear was real: he was starting to forget what his parents had looked like. Recently he had tried drawing them from memory but had given up in frustration. He was thrilled to have the photos now—for one thing, he could use them for drawings—though every time he looked at them he suffered fresh pain. He would never see his parents alive again. There had been no mistake—they would not rise from the dead as he and Addy had done. But something had changed. Disturbing as Addy’s visit had been, it seemed to have quieted some storm in him. It was as if in some way she had given his parents back to him. At least, they felt closer than they had before. He was still their son. They were gone, but they were still his parents. He did not need any others.

He did not care so much about the photographs of himself. He didn’t like looking at pictures of himself, and he’d always hated having his picture taken. He could not recall a time in his life when he hadn’t thought there was something (either big or
ginormous
, depending on his age) about his looks that was wrong. In fact, he was surprised anew each time he recalled how Addy had described him:
like a young man now, so handsome and so serious.

Alone in his room, he stared bravely and hopefully at the young man in the full-length mirror hanging inside his closet door. So handsome and so serious. Yes, maybe. Sometimes he thought he could see it, too.

PART FIVE

It began as a small thing: a red round mark on the right shoulder blade, as if a hot dime had been pressed there.

“It’s nothing,” said PW. “It just itches.” He asked Tracy to dab the spot with some calamine lotion. But the next day the itch was worse, and all up and down his spine he had tingling and pricking sensations, which soon turned into what he said felt like a bad sunburn across his back. He had a fever, too, and a mild headache. He took some aspirin and went to bed. “I’ll be fine in the morning. You know me.” Never sick a day in his life.

And maybe if he’d been able to sleep that night—maybe then he would have felt better in the morning. But the “sunburn” kept him up. And now there was a red stripe down his back (“Long as it ain’t yellow!”), like the mark of a whip.

Tracy wanted him to see the doctor, but PW said he wasn’t about to make a big deal out of what was probably just a simple case of hives. “Maybe I’ve developed some kind of allergy.” After all, the person without some kind of allergy these days was the exception.

Tracy said hives didn’t give a person headache and fever. “I think it’s some kind of nerve thing,” she said.

 

 

 

“Your wife was right,” said the doctor. “I wish you’d come in sooner.”

Nine days after the first symptom, painful oozing blisters covered much of PW’s torso, front and back. Had he come in right away, an antiviral drug might have helped. As it was, not much besides rest and painkiller could be prescribed.

The rash should clear up in another three to four weeks, the doctor said. “But I’ve got to warn you it could be a rough ride. Things might get worse before they get better.”
Much
worse, he should have said.

 

 

 

Cole had never heard of shingles before. It was frightening to see PW so helpless in its clutches. He couldn’t help thinking about his father in his last anguished days, though no one had said anything about PW being in danger of dying. The pain was so bad (“It’s like someone across the room is throwing knives at my back”) that he could not give his sermons. Some days he could not even leave his room. At its worst, it turned him into a raving stranger.

Cole and Tracy huddled together downstairs, listening to the commotion overhead. Shouts and roars accompanied by much fist banging and foot stamping and now and then the crash of some object hurled across the room.

But even as she wept Tracy assured Cole that PW would be all right. “The Lord never sends anyone more suffering than they can bear.”

Not that that was going to stop her from blaming the suffering on Addy. An almighty coincidence, was it not, that PW, who was never sick, should have become so very sick at this particular time?

Cole had kept his promise to Addy to stay in touch. It was from her that he learned that another name for shingles was “the devil’s whip.”

WHEN BOOTS HEARD Cole was learning how to shoot, he blessed him with a Remington .22 from his own collection.

The first time Starlyn saw Cole with the rifle, she said, “Now you’re complete.” Said it lightly, like something that had just popped into her head. But Cole pretended it was her way of saying she liked him better now. Certainly these days she was nicer to him. But that niceness appeared to be part of a larger change taking place in Starlyn that summer. She was still apocalyptic, but it was as if some restless, ornery part of her had gone into hibernation.

Earlier, when she was in a mood, you’d know it by the way she flounced in and out of rooms and acted as if she didn’t always hear what was said to her. Now she was more likely to lapse into something like a trance. Cole had observed her staring at the same page of a magazine for almost an hour. When something on TV made everyone else laugh, she startled, proving she hadn’t really been watching.

Maybe it was about turning sixteen—no denying she acted more like a grown-up than when he’d first met her. More likely it was about Mason, the burden of her secret love. Or maybe it had something to do with being a rapture child (though Cole still wasn’t quite sure what made her—or any other kid for that matter—one of those; and sixteen was old for a rapture child).

Whatever it was, he couldn’t help preferring this new Starlyn, who was not only nicer but even prettier in her new soft dreaminess. Not that he’d lost all fear of her, but most of his feelings for her were tender ones, including something he wouldn’t have expected to feel and which he thought she might find insulting.
He
found it baffling: what reason could there be for him to feel sorry for her?

Yes, he’d caught her crying while listening to her iPod—but what girl didn’t cry at “O Lonesome O Lord”? Cheerful-ness was beneath apocalyptic girls, but no one would have called Starlyn unhappy. Nothing came easier to her than making friends. And this summer there was an exciting new face: Amberly, who was twenty and newlywed and who’d just moved to town from Evansville. Amberly wasn’t apocalyptic, but she had dramatic dark eyes and the grace and perfect posture of a ballerina. Starlyn was flattered that a twenty-year-old married woman would want to hang out with her. They saw each other almost every day. It occurred to Cole that at least some of the time Starlyn was supposed to be with Amberly she might actually be with Mason. But no one shared that suspicion as far as he knew.

At first he figured it was because of Mason that Starlyn was spending so much time visiting Salvation City—why else? But then he thought it could be Amberly, and later he learned of another factor. Starlyn’s mother, divorced already a few years from Starlyn’s stepfather (her real father had run off before she was born), had just started dating a certain man. There’d been other men since the divorce, but “This one’s a keeper” (Tracy). Cole sensed a problem, though, something about which everyone was tight-lipped, at least around him.

Lovebirds need a little privacy, he was told. But Cole thought maybe Starlyn and this man, Judd, didn’t like each other. Starlyn herself never spoke of Judd. But once Cole made the mistake of mentioning him, and Starlyn turned so sharply on her heel that her hair, which she happened to be wearing braided that day, smacked him in the mouth like a cable. The sting lasted a remarkably long time, and whenever Cole was tempted (and he was tempted a lot) to ask Starlyn whatever happened to that boyfriend of hers in Louisville, he felt it again.

Starlyn didn’t talk about that boyfriend anymore, but she didn’t talk about Mason, either, and for all Cole knew there was nothing to talk about. Say it was just one kiss, just that one time, just playing around, no biggie. No secret love. No
love
at all.

But Mason, too, was a different person these days. In Bible study he often had trouble sitting still, instead bouncing around the room or pacing the floor like someone expecting major news or an important visitor any minute. He mixed up names and faces as he hadn’t done before. He mixed up Cole and Clem, for example, who, though they usually sat next to each other, looked nothing alike.

Riding his bike downtown one day, Cole saw Mason walking along, and though he waved and even called out, Mason ignored him.

Once again, as when they’d first met, Cole found Mason scary-looking. The same tense, starving-wolf look as the three men on the mountain. A wolf with one supersharp, blood-shot, ever-shifting eye.

Cole wasn’t the only one to notice a change in Mason.

“It’s like he’s shook up somewhere deep” (Tracy). Probably for the same reason as her own whirlpool-stomach feeling. It wasn’t just the two of them, either. It was another epidemic: more and more people feverish with the notion of living on the cusp of Something Big.

Partly it was the weather—though the era of extreme weather was old by now, and if the floods and droughts and violent storms that struck season after season really were a sign of the end, no one could say what the Lord meant by dragging it out. Once again that year, spring had brought a record number of tornado outbreaks and enough rainfall to cause flooding throughout the Midwest. Now it was heat waves. Late July was especially bad, and nowhere worse than in Chicago.

With this message Addy sent Cole links to articles about the connection between extreme weather and global warming.

 

 

 

“Whatever you call it, and you can call it global warming or climate change or anything you want,” said PW, “it’s still the hand of God. Meaning it is part of his plan. And the only way we can understand any of it, or where God is going with it, is by praying and pondering Scripture and praying some more.”

 

 

 

Many Christians had grown up believing that the Gospel age would end in their lifetime. Many had taken it for granted that, when the pandemic struck, the final days had arrived. But as weeks and then months went by, people began craving a sign. Was it wrong to pray for a clearer idea of how much longer the world had to exist? There were a lot of pastors who differed from Pastor Wyatt about righteous Christian behavior in this regard. They believed time was so short that people should drop everything else and focus all their efforts on preparing for Christ’s return.