Devoted (14 page)

“Can I help you?” she says, looking up at me, and the minute she smiles at me I want to cry, but I don't.

“Lauren, I'm…” I stop myself. My eyes dart around the waiting room. People from Calvary Christian own pets, of course. They could be here. But there's only an old man I don't recognize sitting in one of the waiting room chairs, scratching the ears of an ancient mutt.

“Are you all right?” she asks. Her eyes scan me up and down, and her smile collapses a bit. Do I look odd, yet familiar? Does she remember wearing long skirts in the middle of May? Loose-fitting blouses when worldly girls and women cooled off in strapless shirts and swimsuits? Does seeing me make her sad? Or angry?

But then she smiles again, a smile so contagious her eyes catch it, and they smile too, crinkling at the edges.

“Are you…” she asks, her voice dropping to a whisper, “Rachel Walker?”

I nod. She knows me. “Yes,” I answer. “I'm sorry I came by your work. I can't really stay. I just needed to explain something.”

Lauren nods, her eyes wide. “I can't believe you're here,” she says. “When I last saw you, you were a kid. But I recognize your face.” She peers behind me.

“I came alone,” I say, suddenly aware of how fast my heart is still pumping. “But I have to get back before they notice I'm missing.”

Lauren nods, understanding.

“Mark,” she calls behind her, “can you come up here for a second and just watch the front desk?”

From a back hallway appears a boy about my age wearing a red T-shirt dotted with holes. It reads CLAYTON TRACK AND FIELD in faded black letters.

“Hey,” he says, “who are you?”

I blush and glance at my feet.

“Mark, we need a minute,” Lauren says, rolling her eyes slightly. She darts around the counter and takes my hand, pulling me into an empty exam room. The lights are off, and it smells like cleanser and wet dog.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

My want-to-cry feeling becomes a must-cry feeling, and suddenly I'm wiping tears away and I can't speak.

“Rachel, it's okay,” Lauren says, lightly touching my shoulder. “Are you okay?” she asks, uncertain.

I nod, still not able to talk and only crying harder. Lauren keeps her hand on my shoulder and her face looks into mine. Her eyes are knowing and sad.

“It's just that I wanted to tell you why I stopped emailing you back,” I say. “I didn't want you to think I didn't want to be your friend anymore.” I blush at the word
friend
. Did Lauren even think I was her friend? Or just some strange little kid from her former life? But Lauren smiles at the mention.

“What happened?” she asks.

“My dad thought I was spending too much time on the computer. He didn't know I was talking to you, of course.” I think about Pastor Garrett's special blessing. I think about what my mother might have seen that last day I was allowed online. “But I think he might have been … suspicious. So he changed the password and now I can't ever get on it again. At least, not for a really long time.”

Lauren nods like she expected as much. “I'm so sorry, Rachel.”

“I am, too,” I say. “I really liked talking to you. I mean, writing to you. It was just … really nice.”

Lauren nods. “Yeah,” she says. “It was.”

I hear the sound of the front door opening and voices in the waiting area. How much time have I spent here? Five minutes? Ten? Faith will be calling Mom any second, asking where I am.

“I have to go,” I say, panicked. “Now.”

“I know,” Lauren says, nodding. “But wait. Here.” She grabs a note pad and pen from the counter and scribbles something down, then hands me a slip of paper.

“This is the number for my cell phone. I always have it with me. Memorize it, okay? And call if you need anything at all.”

I glance at the note pad, which has the name of some sort of flea and tick medicine at the top. Scrawled underneath is a phone number. Lauren left her name off, for which I'm glad. It's safer that way until I can memorize it.

“Thank you,” I say, tucking the paper into my pocket. When we walk out that boy Mark is sitting at a chair, his long legs propped up on the counter.

“Mark,” Lauren says, “feet.”

Mark sighs and lowers his beat-up shoes down to the ground.

“So who are you, anyway?” he asks me.

“A friend,” Lauren answers for me, walking me to the front door. “Call me,” she says. “Anytime. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

“And Rachel, remember. You can make your own choices in this life. I promise you. You really can.”

I nod, but Lauren's wrong. I can't make any choices. I can't even choose what to wear or what to read. I don't have a choice in the world, and I'm not like Lauren. I can't just leave home like she did.

I walk out to the van and climb in. I start up the engine, and the classical music station comes on. I grab the dial and spin it, listening to static mixed in with words and snippets of songs I don't know—and will never know—and more and more static. I turn the volume up and scream as loud as I can.

 

12

When I get to Faith's,
I call and tell Mom a truck stalled out and blocked the road and that's why I'm a few minutes late. She seems to believe my lie. Faith thanks me for the humidifier, and I give her a minute to rest while I rock a stuffed-up baby Caleb. He curls up against me, and I whisper in his ear that he's a little sack of sugar. But he's so congested that he snores like a little old man.

Faith and Paul only have one car, so Faith spends most days alone in their two-bedroom house. I count the creaks of the rocking chair and picture myself in a home like this one with my future husband, whoever he is, and a sick baby. It takes me five minutes to memorize every inch of the walls of Faith's house, and I imagine the crushing tediousness of every day exactly the same as before, full of backbreaking housework and a future husband who sets the rules for me just like Dad.

I want to scream again, just like I did in the van.

That night back at home, I make supper, bathe the little ones, and put them to bed. I've already memorized Lauren's number to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” my favorite hymn. In the days that follow, I sing her phone number in my mind over and over. Even though I can't email her anymore, having her phone number reminds me she's a real person out there in the world.

Maybe I can find a way to be like Lauren but different. Still part of my family but something new. Maybe I could ask my parents about living at home while attending community college.

But Mom and Dad would never approve of that. Not ever. And Scripture says that God commands us to honor our father and mother.
He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death.
It's what the Bible says.

But what about what my mind asks? What about what my heart wants?

What about my one wild and precious life?

I'm a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse. I can feel it in every bit of my body, and I find myself walking around the house ready to explode.

These are the thoughts that are racing through my mind on the Saturday after I meet Lauren, when my mother finds me in the kitchen scrubbing out the breakfast pots and pans.

“Rachel, we're out of a few things, and I need you to run to the grocery store,” she says. She hands me a slip of paper with a few items listed on it and a folded-up twenty dollar bill. Normally we go to the discount warehouse closer to the city to buy in bulk, and when I see toilet paper and bread on the list I glance at my mother, uncertain.

“Don't we have enough of these things in the garage? In storage?”

“I'd like them just in case,” my mother says. Her eyes avoid mine, and for a moment, I worry she's getting sick again. I go to the coat rack to get my purse.

“Ruth is coming with me, right?” I ask. I can't imagine my mother will let me go out alone again, especially since I was late getting to Faith's the last time.

“You can go alone,” my mother says, straightening the chairs under the kitchen table, still not looking at me. “I trust you.”

I mull over those three words in the van on the way to the store. I trust you
.
She's never said them before. She never needed to.

I walk through the aisles of the grocery store finding everything on the list. Music seeps through the air, and something about the song that's playing catches my ear. I strain to hear the lyrics.

I never hear popular music except for in stores, and usually there are so many of us talking I can't make out any of it. When I reach the register, I load up the groceries on the conveyer belt. I don't talk to worldly people very often, but this cashier is an older woman with a kind smile.

“Excuse me, but what is this that's playing?” I ask. I point up at the air, sheepish.

She grins. “It's the Beatles,” she says. “But you're too young to remember them, right?” She winks.

I'm too something to remember anything. But I don't tell this to the cashier.

When I make it home, I get to the kitchen door and open it, struggling with my bags.

“Jeremiah, Gabriel, can you come help?” I say, trying to haul everything inside. The handles of the plastic bags cut into my palms.

But there's no response.

Suddenly, my father appears in the doorway between the kitchen and the family room. He fills up the entire space, he's so large.

“I'll get these, Rachel,” he says, coming toward me. “I need you to go into the family room.”

They've caught me. I know it as well as I know the Lord's Prayer. As well as I know the digits in Lauren's phone number.

I know it as surely as I know my own name.

“Where is everyone?” I ask. The house is weirdly quiet.

“Your younger brothers and sisters are at Faith's house,” my father tells me. “Your older brothers are at a job site.”

The trip to the grocery store is clear to me now. They had to get everyone out of the house while I was gone.

Oh, Ruth, what did they tell you I did?

When I walk into the living room, I see Pastor Garrett sitting with Mom in the family room. Pastor Garrett's been to our home before. Once when Faith still lived with us and was recovering from an emergency appendectomy and another time when one of the twins had a serious case of the flu. But no one is sick in our house now. Not physically, anyway.

My father follows me in and sits down, and three sets of eyes are on me. Everything in me is racing. My heart, my mind, the blood in my veins.

“Hello, Rachel,” Pastor Garrett says. “It's good to see you.” His voice is as loud and booming and full of self-importance in my family room as it is at church.

“Hello,” I say, so softly I can barely hear my own voice.

“Rachel,” he continues, “please sit down with us while we pray.”

I swallow and sit down on the hard-backed chair someone has pulled out from the kitchen table. Mom and Dad are perched on the sofa across from me, and Pastor Garrett walks over and stands next to me, placing his hand on my shoulder.

Take your hand off of me.

I squeeze my eyes shut. I can't think that way about Pastor Garrett. He's a man of God.

But haven't I just thought of him that way?

And don't I want him to take his hands off me and leave?

“Father God, we all fall short of your glory,” Pastor Garrett begins, “and we ask you to cleanse us of all unrighteousness. Redeem our souls and restore us. We ask you in Jesus's name for your love and the atoning blood of Christ Jesus. Amen.”

I'm the only one in the room who has fallen short of God's glory. Cherry-red hives are breaking out all over me, crawling up my neck like hungry spiders.

“Rachel,” my father is saying, and his mouth is moving but my brain is so muddled I have to strain to even understand his basic English. “Your mother and I received a phone call the other day from Donna Lufkin's mother. She was in downtown Clayton picking up a prescription, and she saw you leaving the Clayton Animal Hospital across the street. She thought we would want to know that you were somewhere strange unchaperoned.”

It's over. I'm finished.

“You know we've been concerned about your computer usage, and we called Pastor Garrett for guidance.”

Pastor Garrett has taken a seat on the edge of my father's recliner, and he's nodding along with everything my father is saying. Concern fills in every wrinkle of his matchstick-thin face.

I want to run so fast. I want to run so fast I disappear.

“Pastor Garrett recommended Ken Mason come over to examine our computer,” Dad continues, almost as if he's practiced this speech before. He takes a pause in between each sentence.

Ken Mason is one of the church elders. I don't know his family well, but I know he runs some sort of computer business out of his home.

“Mr. Mason came over the other evening after all of you were in bed, and he found this on the computer,” my father continues, handing me a stack of printouts. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to take them, but my father holds them out long enough that I do. My mother is crying now, but she's not making any noise. Tear after tear is sliding down her face, each one in a race against the next.

I look at the papers in my father's hands. It's all of my emails with Lauren. Every single one.

I know everyone expects me to be next—to get married and have babies just like Faith. And I really love kids. I love my little sister Ruth, especially. Even though she's not that little anymore. But the thought of having babies of my own in just a few years—I know it's what I should want. But it just isn't.

Let me tell you, if God took paying attention and being idle as prayer, I would be the world's greatest at praying!