The Long Journey to Jake Palmer (24 page)

B
y the time Jake finished with his mom, his emotions were as ragged as they'd ever been. He'd sung for over an hour before she promised not to end her life. But there was no guarantee the promise would stick. Ryan had created a house of horrors that Jake might never escape. But it didn't mean he wouldn't try.

Jake stumbled through his mom's front door and down the path toward the main trail, his mind frayed, his body almost as exhausted, but he would not stop till he'd fixed things for good.

“Had enough?”

Ryan's voice. Jake didn't look up. He refused to give Ryan the satisfaction of seeing the absence of hope in his eyes.

“You can't make me go through the same thing again and again. You're breaking your own rules.” Now Jake looked up and strode toward Ryan, his anger funneling strength back into his body and mind.

Ryan only smiled, which fueled Jake further.

“You'll never fix everything, Jake. You can't win.”

He could. He'd been doing this all his life—with his parents, with Sienna, with friends. He knew the routine, and he could
outlast Ryan no matter how many times the scenarios were thrown at him.

He would fix his mom again and again and again. As long as it took. Same with his father. He'd build the doghouse three hundred times if necessary. He'd take the test a thousand times in order to make it right. Sing the insipid song to his mom for centuries if he had to.

He tore off down the path toward his father's backyard and found the doghouse in pieces, and built it again, again endured his father's criticism. Then raced back to his mom's and she promised Jake for the third time that she wouldn't take her life.

Then again taking the tests. Again with his mom. Another two hours building the doghouse. He would not go down. It had to work. He would not falter, not fail. But even as he shouted promises to himself, he knew they were lies. No matter how many times he tried, he would never fix it. Ryan had said Jake would defeat himself and it was true. Eventually he would admit three hundred times, a thousand times, a million times would not be enough.

After he stumbled out of his mom's house for the twenty-fifth time and out to the path that would lead to his dad, he went the opposite direction. He had to recover. Think. Figure a way out, a solution to this insane puzzle.

The path meandered slightly uphill and Jake staggered up it, barely paying attention to his feet. As he pressed on, something moved in his peripheral vision. Jake spun and his eyes darted through the foliage, searching among the trees. There. Again, movement. Jake squinted. Ryan? Yes.

Ryan stood six paces off the path, almost hidden next to a large pine tree. Jake spotted him and in the same moment snagged the front of his shoe on a root. His momentum threw him forward; he lost balance and crashed to the ground. Sharp pain shot into his knees and his elbow.

The sound of Ryan stepping closer through the underbrush thundered in his ears. Jake pushed up to his hands and knees but didn't look up, his gaze fixed on the tiny pine needles on the path. This was the end. He felt it and waited for Ryan to strike him down. But the blow didn't come. The being was taunting him again. No blow was needed. Not even words were necessary. His mere presence squeezed at Jake's head like a press. Jake had been beaten and would always be beaten, no matter how long he stayed on this treadmill.

“What are you doing to me?” Jake drew in ragged breaths. “Why torture me like this? This will never end, will it? What sick pleasure are you getting out of this? Watching me fail again and again. I can't beat you. I admit it. So why not just kill me and end this charade?”

“Rise, Jacob Palmer.”

The force of Ryan's words sent a tremor through Jake. There was a strength and authority in his tone Jake couldn't ignore. Jake staggered to his feet and locked eyes with his enemy. There was a look of steel in Ryan's eyes, like a sword ready to strike.

“What are you waiting for?” Jake didn't back down from Ryan's intensity. It drove him harder. “I'm done with this game, this test of yours. It's finished.”

“It's not over.”

“Yes, it's done.”

“You are blind, Jake. Open your eyes.”

As the words floated out of Ryan's mouth, Jake's gaze shifted from Ryan's eyes to just over his shoulder. Twenty, maybe thirty yards up the path, Jake spotted a tiny trail off to the right. He stared at it, transfixed, knowing with more conviction than he'd ever known anything that he had to discover whatever was at the end of that path.

The narrow trail was covered in green moss and slalomed into the trees for forty yards before it curved to the left, out of sight. As Jake started down it, the ache in his muscles subsided, if only a touch, and the frustration started to seep out of his mind.

He reached the curve a minute later, and when he did he saw a small cabin fifty feet ahead made of light-colored wood. It looked new, its thick log walls offset by large windows on each side and a large porch with four chairs.

A waterfall similar to the one that fed the pond sat off to the right, this one higher, wider, with a greater rush of water pouring over the edge. Jake's eyes followed the path of the stream through the woods till he couldn't see it anymore.

The door of the cabin was open. When he reached the porch he stepped up on it, but hesitated before going inside. There was a power here that he'd never experienced, a sensation radically different from the sensations he'd felt at his mom's, dad's, and Sienna's houses. A moment to ready himself, then he stepped inside.

A young boy sat in profile on a thin wooden chair in the center
of the room. Sun streamed in from a large window and filled the space with light. A fireplace filled the wall behind the boy, and a redwood table with three chairs around it stood in the far corner. The floor was wood. Rustic but clean.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Jake.” The boy didn't turn.

“Who are you?”

“Would you like to join me?” The boy motioned to a chair directly across from him.

Jake eased over into it and stared at the boy. Familiar.

“Do we know each other?”

“Yes.”

“Who are you?”

“Before that, there is much for us to talk about.” The boy leaned forward, knees on elbows, and grinned. “Only if you want to.”

“Sure.”

“Can I ask you a question, Jake?”

Jake nodded.

“What is it that you want fixed? What is the one thing you want made right, the deep longing inside you, the one so deep you only hear echoes of its faint calling?”

“I want to be made whole. I want my legs back, my stomach, my feet, all back to the way they were.”

The boy shook his head slowly back and forth, not in a wondering way, but with kindness and understanding. “Deeper, Jake. Go deeper.”

Jake didn't have to think, didn't have to formulate an answer. He simply spoke from his heart.

“Go back in time. Do life over again. Be whole again. Wipe out the red in my ledger and be what they needed me to be. Be enough.”

“They? Who is they?”

“My mom, Sienna, my dad.”

“Sienna? I thought you were enough for her. Isn't that what you discovered today?”

“Be enough for another woman.”

“Really?” The boy arched an eyebrow. “So you don't believe Ari when she said your burns wouldn't matter to her.”

Jake stared at the boy.

“No, I don't think you need to be enough for another woman, I think you need to be enough for your mom and for your dad. That is the root. That is where it all comes from.”

“Where what all comes from?”

“You know, Jake. You don't need me to tell you. Go deeper still. I am safe. You can tell me.”

He hadn't even officially met this boy, and yet Jake knew what he spoke was true. He could trust this child, so young but so full of wisdom.

“I won't ever be enough for them. Even back then, I couldn't have ever been enough for them.” As the words slipped out of his mouth, Jake was stunned by the truth. He looked up at the boy and said, “There's nothing I could have done to be enough. I did it all. Everything I could to make my dad proud. Everything I could to be the son my mom wanted me to be.”

“Yes, you did.”

“And that's why I was enough for Sienna.” Jake shook his head
as the revelation poured over him. “But I wasn't even doing it for her. I was doing it for my mom, my dad. To get them to love me.”

“Yes, Jake. Yes.”

Jake looked up again at the boy, who now had tears in his eyes.

“What would life look like if you could accept yourself, Jake? What would it look like if you realized the fault in your growing up was not yours, but parents who were just children themselves? Parents who tried but simply did not know how to love you because of their own brokenness? What if you realized you are worth being loved not for what you look like, or how powerful your body is, or what you've accomplished, but simply because you are?”

Tears now streamed down the boy's face, accompanied by a radiant smile.

“What if you were to step outside the bottle and show the world who you really are? What if you didn't have to be perfect for anyone? What if you knew you are complete, and perfect, and perfectly loved exactly as you are? What if you knew that the burns you carry are a physical reflection of the burns you carry inside, and that the far greater healing would be of those burns that cover your soul? What if you realized you
are
Superman? Complete, powerful, whole in the Son of God? What if you knew these things, Jake Palmer?”

As the boy spoke each question, understanding rose up in Jake. Not just understanding, but healing. Not just healing, but forgiveness. For his mom, for his dad, for Sienna—but that was nothing compared to the forgiveness that thundered up out of him for himself. For not being enough for his mother and father.

And as he gave himself the gift of unquenchable grace, the tears he'd been fighting to contain exploded out of him and he leaned forward, head in hand, his body racked with sobs from the deepest part of his soul. As he did, the cabin itself seemed to shudder with a freedom and joy that reverberated off the walls.

After a time he felt a hand on his shoulder, the boy's hand, but it felt stronger than a boy's hand should feel. Jake lifted his head and blinked his eyes. The boy was no longer a boy, but a young man, at least four or five years older.

“What?” Jake shook his head. “What is happening?”

The young man smiled, now a hint of facial hair playing on his chin, his jaw strong, eyes even more full of wisdom than before. He held up a finger as if to place Jake's question on hold.

“What do you really want, Jake? The deepest desire of your being.”

“This.” Jake spread his fingers wide and placed his hands on his chest over his heart. “I want to be whole, here.”

The young man nodded. “And?”

“It's happening right now.”

The young man nodded again, and as Jake fixed his gaze on him, his face grew from that of a young man to one in his midtwenties. The same dark hair, the same eyes, the same angle of the shoulders. It couldn't be, but it was.

“I don't understand what is happening.”

“Yes, you do, Jake.” The man laughed, his head thrown back. The sound sent a lightning bolt of joy through Jake's heart. “You know exactly what is happening. I'm growing up. Right before your eyes.”

“I created you. Out of my imagination.”

The man fixed his eyes on Jake and laughed again, even more powerfully, if that was possible, and it echoed through the small cabin and shot such life into Jake that he thought he might explode.

“Yes and no. I'm as real as you are, Jake. Trust me that this is true. And yet you are right; you did imagine me. But more than imagine me. You've known me as long as you've existed. I've always been here. But you hid me away. Covered me up. Forgot that I existed, even when those around you told you I did. But now those days are over. You have done it, Jake. You have taken the long journey and at last have found me.”

Jake stared at the man for eons before he spoke what he'd somehow known seconds after stepping into the cabin. “You are me.”

The man nodded as smiles broke out on both their faces.

W
hen Jake finally forced himself to leave the cabin and walk back toward the meadow, he tried to convince himself that he didn't have to look at the place where his mom's house had been.
Had been.
Funny how he didn't have a shred of doubt it would be gone—just as he didn't doubt Ryan would be gone—but when he reached the tiny trail that led to her home, he found his feet shuffling over the pine needles once more. He had to see it.

He kept his eyes focused on the path till he reached the point where he knew the house would be in view. When he looked up, he found himself gazing at a massive willow. Jake chuckled. The perfect replacement.

He was right. Gone as if it had never existed. But about Ryan, Jake was wrong.

After he walked through the apple orchard into the meadow, he gazed in a wide arc and spotted Ryan sitting at the base of the waterfall.

Jake approached cautiously, and yet he wasn't sure why. He'd won. Found the healing he'd wanted all his life. Was now living
in a freedom he didn't think possible. What could Ryan do to him at this point?

When Jake was ten yards away, Ryan rose to his feet and smiled. A different smile. An old smile. The one Jake had come to know the first two times they'd met.

“Hello, Jacob Palmer. You know what your last name means, don't you? ‘Pilgrim.' And you have completed your quest. Well done, Jake. Well done.”

Once again, revelation swept over Jake. “You're not . . . you're not . . .”

“Your enemy? No.” Ryan chuckled. “No, I am your friend. I always have been. Yes, I was distressed to see the pain my actions caused you, but as I told you that day at the river, they were necessary.”

“What?” Jake tried to wrap his mind around Ryan's pronouncement, but it was almost too much to take. “The things you said, the things you admitted to about who you were . . .”

“No, I admitted to none of the things you think I did. I never lied. I only spoke truth. Think back, Jake. There is nothing I told you that wasn't true.”

“But you said I would die.”

Ryan's smile went wide. “Would you not describe what happened to you in the cabin in a quite real sense as being reborn?”

Jake eased over to the pond and looked down at his reflection. He was indeed a new man, a man reborn. “Without question.”

“For something to be reborn, something else has to die.”

“Die to the man I was—to the lies, my beliefs, the way I lived my life—in order to become the man I always was destined to be.”

“Yes.”

“But why? Why did you have to make me think you were my enemy?”

“Because you had to fight to win with everything you had. You had to have a rage burning inside, a determination so deep that you would never quit trying to be enough. You would go back again and again to your mom and dad, and you did. That way, when you had expended everything you had, you would realize the task was utterly impossible. Only then would you be ready to receive the revelation you did inside the cabin.

“I had to force you to go back into your deepest wounds and see them for what they were. If you knew I was for you, you
might
have still agreed to walk into your mom's house, Sienna's home, your dad's backyard. I don't know. But certainly you wouldn't have gone into them with the intensity that you did, with the relentlessness you did, and your heart would not have been in the condition needed to take in the healing.”

Ryan motioned toward the lake and they both strolled in that direction. He set his hand on Jake's shoulder as they approached the curtain of willow vines that would usher him into the corridor, onto the lake, and back to his friends. They didn't speak again till they reached the edge of the meadow and stopped, now facing each other.

“I won't be coming back, will I?” Jake reached out and took a few of the willow vines in his hand.

“The corridor has grown narrow, Jacob.”

“Too narrow to get through again.”

Ryan nodded, sadness in his eyes.

“But the healing will remain.” Jake winked.

Ryan's eyes brightened as he laughed. “Oh, yes, your healing will remain.”

“Thank you.” Jake grabbed Ryan and gave him a fierce hug. “Will I see you again?”

“Your life is but a moment, Jacob. A vapor. And when the vapor is gone, what is eternal will remain, so yes, you will see me again.”

Jake clambered back into his canoe, and when he'd settled in, he glanced around to see if Leonard was there. No. Not this time. This moment was Jake's to immerse himself in. The sun streamed down on him from just above the mountains to the east out of a cloudless sky, and the lake was glass.

He reached for his legs and ran his perfect hands over his once again blotchy, burnt, scarred legs and smiled. Jake let his head fall back, and he breathed deeply of the late morning air and laughed. Yes. The healing would remain. He would never hide again. Not from himself. Not from anyone.

He dipped his paddle in the water and gave a gentle pull. The bow of his canoe parted the scattered cattails in front of him and he eased through them into open water. Jake didn't hurry back. He wanted time to figure out what he was going to say to Susie, to the others. Maybe nothing. Maybe it was okay to let what had happened settle for a day, a week, a month. He would eventually tell Susie everything. Of course. She was the reason he now felt like
he was beginning life over again. But he wouldn't say anything for a while, not for a while.

Jake reached the dock half an hour later and peered up at the deck. Voices floated down to him, but he couldn't make out who was who in the concert of conversation. He secured the canoe to the dock and started up the stairs. A quarter of the way up he heard Susie's contagious laughter, and Andrew's deep, booming voice as well. Peter? Yeah, him too. And then Camille. They were all there. True friends. All of them.

When Jake was twenty or so steps from the deck, Susie appeared at the top and clomped toward him. He stopped and waited for her, a good excuse to catch his breath. She reached him a few seconds later, her eyes wide. “What's going on with you?”

He grabbed her in a bear hug and didn't let go for almost thirty seconds.

“What?” Susie laughed. “What? Tell me.”

“I was healed, Sooz. In the corridor. I was healed.”

She glanced at his legs and looked back up, confused. “I don't—”

“Don't worry, I'll explain. Soon.” He wrapped her up in another quick hug. “But thanks for being the inquisitive, adventurous, weird little sister you've always been.”

They tromped back up the stairs and Jake immediately went to Andrew—gave him another fierce hug as only some men can give. “You killed it with your words last night. Nailed me. Inspired me. Pushed me over the edge. Thank you.”

Jake released him, and the happy, puzzled look on Andrew's face was priceless. Next, Jake grabbed Peter and Camille, one arm around each of their shoulders.

“Warning. Sappy moment about to erupt.” He yanked their heads down and kissed each one of them. “I love you guys.”

It seemed like minutes later they were all saying good-bye in the driveway of the cabin, telling each other they needed to come back here next year. Jake agreed but stayed silent about the fact he'd be coming back in less than a week. As soon as he could free himself up from work, he'd be back to have a long conversation with his friend across the lake.