Tangled Ashes (15 page)

Beck, who had been considering his own definition of church, shifted against the counter and said, “So . . . you’re Catholic?”

“Good question, Mr. Becker.”

“Beck.”

“Beck. I was Catholic. Then I was agnostic. Then I went through a bit of an atheistic phase—my mother died and I had to hate somebody, right? And it was easiest to hate God because he doesn’t fight back. And then I found . . . something else. Not so much a religion as a place where life is valued and hope is pursued and . . . and there’s peace. I’m a big fan of peace,” she concluded.

Beck found himself envying the simplicity of her statement. He couldn’t help saying, “So now you’re Buddhist.”

At this, Jade laughed. She laughed and again caught the edge of the counter. This time, Beck could see what little color was left draining from her face. He moved quickly, catching her arm as she swayed and hooking a stool from the table with his foot. “Here. Sit,” he said, hoping the roughness he heard in his own voice didn’t sound like anger to her.

Jade sat and leaned forward, her hand on the table’s edge, as if
she might fall from the stool. Beck opened two cupboards before he found the glasses. He filled one with water and brought it to the woman who sat bent over, taking deep breaths. He knelt down in front of her to push the hair back from her face and assess the situation, but she immediately pushed his hand away.

“I’m just . . . ,” he began.

“I’m okay,” she said.

Beck handed her the glass and she took it gingerly, her eyes unfocused, her breathing deliberately slow and deep. After a few more moments, she took a sip and closed her eyes as she swallowed. She let go of the table to blot at the patches of sweat on her face with her fingers. “That’s attractive, isn’t it?” she said with a weary smile.

“Jade . . .” He didn’t know what to do or how to ask whatever questions needed to be asked in a situation like this.

“See what happens when you get smart-alecky in conversations? Somebody always gets hurt.”

He didn’t know where she was finding the strength to poke fun at the situation. She looked—depleted. Worn out. Another wave seemed to hit her and she bent over again, her hand clutching the edge of the table for support.

“Do you need me to help you to the bathroom?” Beck asked, becoming truly concerned as the episode wore on. He reached for her elbow and started to help her up. “Here, let me . . .”

She motioned with her hand for him to stop. He stood beside her as she took several more deep breaths, then straightened.

“I’m calling the Fallons,” Becker said when she seemed to have regained her balance. “They’ve got to know a doctor you could see on a Sunday.”

“Don’t.” Her voice was firm, her eyes trained on a fixed point in front of her, as if trying to keep the world from spinning. She didn’t move her eyes when she motioned toward the stove with her hand, fingers flapping. “The steak!” she said.

Beck quickly removed the pan from the fire, the very-well-done steak a little seared around the edges. “You’re sitting here about to pass out and you’re worried about the steak?”

“I’m a cook. It’s what we do.”

Beck thought he saw a trace of color returning to her cheeks. “Have more water,” he instructed.

She drank a little. “I think it’s passing,” she said, tentatively moving her eyes away from the fixed point at which she’d been staring.

“What’s passing? What was that?” Now that she was starting to look better, Beck wanted some answers. He went to the counter and tore off a paper towel, handing it to her to blot her face. “Does this happen often? ’Cause really, you need to warn me next time.” He attempted a lighthearted chuckle, but it got caught somewhere between his mind and his throat. His legs were shaky and his heart was racing. He’d wanted to—help, somehow. To comfort her or warm her or touch her. But he hadn’t been able to do anything but stand by and watch her suffer. He tried to counteract the powerlessness with purpose. “Okay,” he said, “how ’bout we try to make it to the office. You can lie on the couch in there for a while and see if this really passes.”

“I’ll be fine. . . .”

“You’re going to the office. Now.”

He was relieved to see that Jade knew an order when she heard one. When he placed a hand under her elbow and helped her stand, she didn’t resist. They made it to the office, where Beck pulled the protective sheet off the couch, moving around it with her and helping her sit. “Still okay?” he asked. She nodded. Beck handed her the glass he had carried with them from the kitchen and offered to get her a blanket.

“No, I’m fine,” she answered. “It’s almost passed now.”

“At the risk of repeating myself . . .
what’s
almost passed?”

She looked at him with the enigmatic expression that was so
typical of her and smiled a little weakly. “It’s nothing to worry about. I promise you.”

Beck pulled the sheet off one of the armchairs and sat across from the woman whose face had, moments before, been frighteningly white. Though some color had returned to her cheekbones and the tip of her nose, she still looked far from healthy. “So I’m not calling the Fallons?”

She shook her head. “It’s nothing to panic over, I assure you.”

He attempted some levity, if only for his own good. “Maybe somebody spiked the holy water at church.”

She gave him a look that warned him not to joke about her religion. “For your information,” she said, her voice gaining back some of its strength, “we don’t have holy water at my church.”

He was curious. “A confessional?”

“No.”

“A priest?”

“No.”

“How ’bout those incense things. You got some of those? Or a crucifix?”

Another smile, this one nearly amused. “No and no.”

He smiled back. “So what’s left?”

Jade took another deep breath and shifted, sipping from the glass of water, her eyes evaluating him. “I’m not sure what you really want me to say, Beck. I mean, I can give you a fairly thorough overview of what I believe and how it is lived out in my church and beyond, but . . .” She hesitated, sipping again. “Something tells me that you’re just looking for one more topic to turn into a joke.”

Beck considered this for a moment, admitting to himself that probably would have been the direction the conversation took. He realized there were few topics of any substance that he could approach without ridiculing them.

“Am I right?” Jade asked.

It was Beck’s turn to take a deep breath. He saw the sincerity on Jade’s face and gave himself the challenge of hearing her out without turning her words into weapons. “Fine,” he said. “I promise to be good.” He thought of his own checkered past where church and religion were concerned and added, “I’d actually be very interested in your point of view.”

Jade put her glass down on the coffee table and rubbed both hands over her face. “Here’s what I know,” she said, leaning her head back against the couch. “My parents used to read me Jesus stories when I was little. Then I went to Sunday school and heard more Jesus stories. And when my mom died when I was fifteen, I heard more Jesus stories about how she was with him and he was comforting me and . . . and then I decided I didn’t want to hear any Jesus stories anymore. Ever.” Another deep breath. Another sip of water. “So I went a few years being angry at God—literally cursing him and accusing him of all the horrors in the world—and all that time . . . all I wanted, all I craved, was for someone to tell me another Jesus story.” The eyes that had been so dull until moments before now filled with tears and certainty. “They aren’t just stories, Beck. I know that now. They’re promises. And without those promises and the God who made them . . .” She shook her head.

Beck swallowed hard. There were no jokes needing to be stifled. Only a yawning void at his core. He nodded, incapable of doing much more.

“And at your church?” Jade said, pulling her legs up onto the couch next to her. “Were there priests and incense balls and crucifixes?”

“The ugliest crucifix you’ve ever laid eyes on!” He managed a chuckle.

“I loved the Catholic church,” Jade said. “Still love a lot of aspects of it—the reverence, the mysticism. . . . But those Jesus stories told
me that he’s right here, as real to me as you are. And I didn’t want a secondhand connection to him.”

Beck had a few questions he wanted to ask, but he didn’t voice them. He had avoided this topic for two years now—when he hadn’t been using it to vent his frustration on the pious and self-righteous. He’d allowed Jade to speak for reasons he couldn’t understand, but it wouldn’t go any further. The God thing was dead to him. Life made more sense that way.

Jade gingerly sat forward on the couch. “I think I’m okay,” she said, moving to stand up.

Beck was on his feet in an instant, reaching for her arm. They stood there together while Jade seemed to gauge her stability. “I’m fine,” she finally said, this time with more conviction.

Beck stopped fighting his frustration. “Okay, so now that it’s behind us, will you tell me what that was?”

Jade walked toward the door, Beck close on her heels. “First, I’m going to walk you through the rest of the meal preparation. It’s almost finished anyway, and you might as well learn a few tricks while I sit on a stool and bark orders at you. The broccoli’s going to be overcooked, by the way. Second, you’re going to take a plateful of food over to Jojo’s and leave it by his door.”

“Wait, I’m not—”

“Oh, hush. I’ve been taking food over every day since that lasagna and I’m still here to tell the tale. And third, I’m going to go home, put my feet up, and not move again until tomorrow morning.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Beck said. “But it doesn’t answer my question.”

Jade sighed loudly, turning exasperated and revived eyes on Becker. “Will you shut up about it if I tell you it’s female problems?”

He wasn’t convinced—but by that point, he’d used up all the courage required for follow-up questions.

It was the children’s screams that alerted Becker that something was not right. He was up on a ladder helping install the renovated molding in one of the dining rooms when Eva and Philippe’s frantic voices reached him. They were calling Jade with such urgency that he jumped off the ladder and rushed to the French doors that led from the dining room to the front of the castle. The first thing his eyes registered was Eva holding on to two bars of the closed gates, her face pressed into the space between them, immobile. Philippe stood a little closer to the castle, his attention torn between the frantic pleas for help he was yelling toward the château and the tense scene beyond the castle gates.

A terrified stallion stood in the center of the large four-lane boulevard just beyond the castle, probably escaped from the racetrack on the other side. He had a racing saddle still strapped to his back, but his jockey was on foot nearby, flanked by other men, arms outstretched, who were trying to corral him away from the traffic. Amazingly, though many of the cars had pulled off to the side, others still sped past the hysterical animal, too eager to get where they were going to wait until the drama was resolved. As the men stepped closer, nearly encircling the black, wild-eyed stallion, he bucked and whinnied and burst through their ranks, narrowly avoiding a collision with an oncoming car and coming to a stop in the middle of the short, broad passage that led from the castle’s front gates to the boulevard beyond. His flanks quivered with panic and his nostrils flared.

The men who had been trying to surround him were so busy shouting strategies at each other that they didn’t initially notice the hunched form that emerged from the gatehouse and moved toward the horse. The children, who had been pressing their faces between
the bars, didn’t see him either until he had grasped one side of the ten-foot gate and pulled it open. They fell back a few steps and stared, gape-mouthed, at the apparition.

By this point, Beck had run across the circular lawn and, with a “Stay here!” barked at the children, was about to follow Jojo into the street. The older man’s eyes were focused on the horse with an intensity that made the jockey and men stop their bickering and watch. Beck was just passing through the gates when Jojo, without a backward glance, held out his hand in an unmistakable order for the younger man to stay where he was.

The horse, the kind of spirited thoroughbred that Lamorlaye and neighboring Chantilly were famous for, made a couple lurching bounds away from Jojo as he approached. Jojo stopped, his lips forming inaudible sounds, his hand outstretched, palm down, toward the fierce animal whose coat shone with sweat. When the horse snorted and stamped a hind leg, Jojo moved forward again, one soft step at a time, his gaze so powerful that Beck wondered if its trajectory could be seen if he concentrated hard enough.

In the boulevard, cars had resumed their noisy travels, oblivious to the drama being played out just feet away. The men who had previously failed to contain the thoroughbred now stood several paces behind Jojo, some of them eager to step forward again but a couple of the others ordering them to stay put. The old man in his worn wool coat was now just four or five feet away from the racehorse. He stopped again, lowering his hand this time, his lips still moving, his eyes still connected as if by a tangible thread to the horse’s gaze.