The Heaven Trilogy (22 page)

“Lacy Cartwright. How on Earth did you end up stranded on the side of the road?”
Her car broke down, you idiot. She told you that.

She broke into a wide grin. “This is weird. I don’t know what happened. It just stopped . . .” She chuckled. “So how in the world are you?”

“Good. Yeah, good,” he said, thinking it both a downright lie and the honest truth.

He stood silent for a full ten seconds, just staring at her, at a loss for what to say next. But then she was doing the same, he thought.
Come on, man. Get a grip.

Kent finally motioned to the car. “So, what happened?”

She gazed at the tangle of tubes under the hood. “It just died. I was lucky to pull over without hitting the rail.”

The atmosphere was charged with expectancy. High above, a line of lightning crackled through black clouds. “Well, I’m not a mechanic, but why don’t you get in and turn her over and I’ll poke around a little.”

“Good.” She held his eyes for a moment as if trying to read any message there. He felt a strange tightness squeeze his chest.

Lacy jumped behind the wheel, eyeing him through the windshield. He dipped his head under the raised hood. Good grief ! He was staring at a ghost from the past.

The engine turned over, and he jerked back, immediately hoping she had not seen his reaction. No sense coming off like a wuss.

The engine caught and rumbled to life.

Kent stood back, studied the running motor for a moment and, seeing nothing extraordinary, slammed the hood shut.

Lacy was out. “What did you do?”

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“You’re kidding, right? This thing was dead, I swear.”

“And I swear that I did nothing but breathe on it. Maybe I should’ve been an auto mechanic. I could fix cars by breathing on them.” He grinned.

“Well, you always did have a lot of hot air.” Lacy shot him a coy look and smiled slyly.

They chuckled, and Kent kicked at the pavement, suddenly shy again. He looked up. “Well, I guess you’re fixed up. I heard you’d moved to Boulder.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe we should get together.”

The smile vanished from her face, and he wondered if she’d heard. “You heard about Gloria, right?” he asked.

“Gloria?”

“Yes. My wife died awhile back.”

Her face registered shock. “I’m so sorry! I had no idea.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Anyway, I should probably get going. I have to get back to work.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I have to get back to Boulder. My washer broke down.” She offered no further explanation.

He nodded again, feeling suddenly stranded. “Yeah.” She was not moving.

“I’m really sorry about your wife, Kent. Maybe we should get some coffee and talk about it.”

“I heard you lost your husband a couple years ago.”

She nodded. They were nodding a lot. It was a good way to fill in the blanks after, what? Thirteen years?

“You have a card?” he asked. That sounded dumb. Sounded like he was hitting on her, and he had no intention of hitting on anyone. No desire at all.

“Sure.” She reached through the window, withdrew her purse, and handed him a card. Rocky Mountain Bank and Trust. Customer Service.

“I didn’t know you were in banking.” He glanced up at her. “You know I’m in banking, right?”

“Someone said that. Information Systems, right?”

“Yeah. Good, I’ll call you. We’ll catch up.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” she said, and he thought she meant it.

“Good.” Lots of
goods
and
yeahs
and nodding. “Hope your car runs well,” he said and dipped his head to her.

Then he was jogging back to his car. The horizon flashed crooked fingers of lightning, and thunder boomed. The rain was eager, he thought. When he reached his door, Lacy’s white Acura sped by and honked. He waved and slipped behind the wheel. Go figure.

LACY DROVE west through a hard pour with her gut twisted in knots. The chance meeting with Kent had thrown her completely off center. She sped down the blacktop, fixated on the
whap, whap
of the windshield wipers, slowly exiting the big city. But her heart was back there, on the roadside, gazing into those lost blue eyes.

Kent looked as though he’d stepped out of some lost corner of her mind, a carbon copy of the zany college student who’d managed to capture her heart. Her first love. It had been his sincerity, she’d mused a thousand times. A man as sincere and honest as he was ambitious. The unique blend of those traits had whipped up a potion that had her swooning for the first time in her life. Well, his blue eyes and blond hair had not exactly impeded her swooning, she supposed.

He had lost his wife. Didn’t he have a son as well? Poor child.

And under that haunting facade hid a man aching for comfort yet repelled by it at once. She should know. She’d been there. “God, help him,” she breathed, and she meant it. She meant not only that Kent would receive help, but that
God
would help him. Because Lacy believed in God. She had fallen to his feet just over a year ago while climbing out of her own despondency, learning that she did not have the world by its tail.

“Father, comfort him,” she whispered. The wipers squeaked.

Lacy fought a sudden urge to pull off, whip the car around, and chase Kent down. Of course, that was ridiculous. Even if such a thing were possible, she had no business chasing after an old flame who’d just lost his wife. And since when had she become the chasing type, anyway?
Listen to me, even thinking in terms of chasing! Heavens! I don’t mean chasing like some dog in heat, but chasing as in trying to . . . help the man.

She glanced at the new water pump in the passenger seat and remembered the broken washing machine. Now, if that machine had not broken down precisely when it had, she would have missed him entirely. If the strange service tech had not been as accommodating on the phone, if he’d had a pump in stock, if she had not driven to Denver, if her car had not lost its spark for a moment when it did—any single fluctuation in this endless string of events, and she would not have met Kent.

And on top of it all, Kent had pulled over without knowing whom he would be helping. That much was evident by his shock when he recognized her.

On the other hand, every event that ever occurred did so only after a string of other events lined up perfectly.

Lacy glanced at a brown smudge on her right sleeve, a spot of smeared grease. Had he seen it? She returned to her line of thinking. Almost anything was statistically possible. But the pull in Lacy’s heart suggested that today’s string of events was not just a random occurrence. It had been somehow orchestrated. Had to be.

On the other hand, stranger things had happened.

Lacy ground her teeth and dismissed the mental volleys. But they did not go so easily; within the minute they were back, nipping at her mind.

In the end she decided that none of it mattered. Kent had her card. He would either call, or he would not call. And that had nothing to do with chance. It had everything to do with his choice. Her heart jumped at the thought.

An obscure memory from her early adolescent years flashed through her mind. She was all dressed up for the prom, clad in a pink dress with white frills and her hair pulled back in a cluster of curls. It had taken her and her mother a good three hours to make everything just so. It was her first date, and Daddy had told her how proud he was of her, looking so beautiful. She sat on the living room couch, holding a white carnation for her date. Peter. But Peter was late. Ten minutes, then half an hour, then an hour. And she just sat there swinging her legs, feeling all gooey inside and trying to be brave while her father stormed on the phone. But Peter never came, and his parents knew nothing about their son’s whereabouts. Her father took her out for dessert, but she could not manage eye contact with anyone that night.

A lump filled her throat at the memory. Dating had never gone well for her. Even dating with Kent, who had dropped her on her seat at the slightest hint of commitment. She would do well to remember that.

What had she been thinking,
chasing
after him? She no more needed a relationship now than she needed a bout with lupus.

On the other hand, he might call.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Week Eight

HELEN TOSSED and turned, and even in her sleep she could feel her eyes jerking behind closed lids. Slapping feet echoed through her head, sounding like a marathon runner who had taken a wrong turn and ended up running through a tunnel. A tunnel called Kent’s life.

The feet beat on—
slap, slap, slap
—without pause. Heavy breathing chased the slapping. The runner pulled deliberately against the stale dark air. Maybe too deliberately, as if he or she were trying to believe that the breathing was all about flooding the lungs with air, when actually it was just as much about fighting off panic. Because steady sounds do that—they fight off uncertainty with their rhythm. But this runner seemed to be losing that battle with uncertainty. The deliberate breaths were sounding a little ragged around the edges.

The slapping feet had made frequent visits to her mind in the last week, and that bothered her because she knew they were saying something. She just hadn’t been able to decipher their message. At least not all of it.

She knew they were Kent’s feet. That Kent was running. Running from God. The running man. She’d heard of a movie called that once.
The Running Man
. Some gladiator type running for his life through a game show.

Pastor Madison didn’t like her calling this a game, but here in her own mind she could call it whatever she wanted. And it felt like a serious game show to her. The stakes were death; the prize was life. But in a cosmic sort of way, that prize wasn’t so different from winning a Kenmore refrigerator with built-in ice maker or a ’64 Mustang convertible, now, was it?

She took a deep breath and tried to refocus her thoughts.
Lighten up, Helen. Goodness, you’re going off the deep end. We’re not playing
Wheel of Fortune
here.

Her mind sank into the dungeon again and listened to those slapping feet. How long could a person run like that? Another sound bounced around in the dark. A thumping sound. A pounding heart to go along with the heavy breathing and the slapping feet. Which made sense, because her heart would certainly be pounding if she ran.

She imagined herself running like that.

The thought came like a sharp jab to her solar plexus.

She caught her breath.

Now there were only two sounds in the tunnel: the beating feet—
slap, slap, slap
—and the pounding heart—
thump, thump, thump.
The breathing had stopped.

Helen bolted up in bed, suddenly awake, a single thought now whispering through her skull:
That breathing stopped when you stopped breathing, sister! That’s
you
in there!

She snatched her hands to her chest. Her heart pounded to the same cadence she had heard in her dream. In the tunnel. The only thing missing was the slapping feet. And no matter how weird things were getting, she knew that she certainly had not been running up and down her hall in her sleep.

Helen knew the point of it all, then, sitting in bed feeling her heart throb under her palm. If she was not actually in the game, she was
meant
to be. Her feet were
meant
to be slapping along the floor of that tunnel. This insane urge to walk was not just some senile thing; it was the pull of God on her spirit.
Walk, child, walk. Maybe even run. But at least walk.

It might be Kent in there running for his life, but she was in there too, breathing down his neck! Praying for him. She was in the game too. And her part was the intercessor. That was it.

Helen threw the sheets off and stood beside her bed. It was 5 A.M. She should walk, maybe. The thought stopped her cold for a moment. She was not a walker, for heaven’s sake. The doctor had wanted to put new knees in her legs less than a year ago! What on earth did she think she would do now? Hobble up and down the driveway until the neighbors called the police about the lunatic they saw out their windows? Walking back and forth on her plush carpet in running shoes was one thing. Taking a prayer trek through the streets like some prophet was another thing altogether.

And more important, why on God’s green earth would he want her to walk at all? What did walking have to do with this craziness? God certainly did not need on old lady’s walking to move his hand.

Then again, neither had he needed old Joshua and his cohorts traipsing around Jericho to tumble the wall, now, did he? And yet he had demanded that. This was not so different.

Well, yes, this
was
different. This was different because this was now and that was then and this was her and that was Joshua!

Helen grunted and made for the bathroom. She was up. She might as well get dressed. And there was another reason why this was different. This was different because this was mad! What would Pastor Madison say? Goodness!

She stopped midstride, halfway to the bathroom.
Yes, but what would God say? Was that God talking to you back there, telling you to walk?

Yes.

Then walk.

Yes.

It was settled then, in that moment.

Twenty minutes later Helen stepped from her house wearing her white Reeboks and over-the-calf basketball socks below a swishing green dress with yellow sunflowers scattered in a pattern only the original designer could possible identify.

“Oh, God have mercy on my soul,” she muttered and stepped from the landing to the sidewalk. She began to walk down the street with no destination in mind. She would just walk and see.

And she would pray.

KENT ROLLED through the hours with all the constancy of a yo-yo those first two weeks. One moment consumed with the audacity of his ever-clarifying plot, the next blinking against memories of Spencer or Gloria. To say that he was unstable would have brought the textbook definition into clear focus.