More Than This: Contemporary Christian Romance Novel (14 page)

“Like what?” It was so intriguing to watch her. It was like flipping on a switch that brought her into full animation mode, and he liked the energy she seemed to suddenly have.

“Like the whole right-brain, left-brain thing. Did you know that dyslexics make up like 20 percent of the population? And the reason they are dyslexic is because they think mostly with their right brains, so that means they are really creative and smart, but they just can’t read.”

“That’s weird.” He shook his head. “If they’re really smart, then surely they can read.”

“That’s what I thought.” She pointed her fork at him and then dropped the top of it to her plate. “But it’s not about their intelligence. It’s about how they process the words on a page.”

“I’m not following.”

“Well, from what I’ve read, dyslexics look at a word, not as separate letters to decode, but as a word, like as an object.”

Jake nodded, not fully understanding what she was saying. “And that’s bad?”

“Well, yeah. It’s like looking at a forest and not seeing any of the trees. You just see this big, amorphous thing and when you try to describe it or pull it apart, you can’t do it because you don’t see the individual parts and how they can come apart and go back together.”

“O-kay.” He really wasn’t following now, but that only animated her more.

“See, the left side of the brain is what you use to analyze small bits of information. It’s where when you read, your brain pulls the words apart into letters so you can sound it out. Then your left brain puts it back together, and you say the word, and your right brain figures out what it means. The problem is, these kids don’t decode very well, or at all. So they’re trying to figure out what something says by using the context clues or the pictures or things like that.”

Now he was getting genuinely confused. “And you’re not supposed to do that?”

“Well, no. I mean not eventually. At first, yeah, of course you do, but the older you get, the less those things are available, the less you’re supposed to need them. At some point somebody had better have taught you to decode or you’re in serious trouble.”

Jake was fascinated, but more by her and how fascinated she was.

Her gaze fell back to her plate. For a long moment she didn’t say anything, then with her head still down, she said rather softly, “I’ve been thinking about going in to the literacy center on campus. They do a lot of work with dyslexic people in the community. I think it might be interesting to see it up close and personal.”

His smile was both amused and captivated. “Well, it sounds like someone may have stumbled on something they really like to do.”

She smiled, but it was a mysterious kind of smile. “Yeah. Who knows? Maybe so.”

When Jake left an hour later, Liz couldn’t be unhappy about any of it. He had made her take more cold medicine, but even that was good. It relaxed had her and put her into a contemplative mood. In fact, she’d finally mellowed enough to get up the courage to ask him about his last name. McCoy. It was a nice name, and her mind and heart traced over and over it and him even as she studied after he left. An hour later and she gave up studying. She knew as much as she was going to.

The shower felt good. The bed felt even better. She was still sleeping on a mountain of pillows so she wouldn’t cough the whole night, but finally she felt like she was going to live. Snuggling into the pillows, she smiled at that. Strange as that sounded, it felt good to be taken care of. It felt good to not be alone. Being with him, whether that made any sense or not just felt good. And with that thought, she fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.

Jake had no clue where he might find her the next evening. His steps hurried first home and then to The Grind. In a way he hoped she was there because that would mean she was feeling better. However, in another way he hoped she wasn’t so he could go to her place, make dinner for them both and sit and talk for hours. It was all he wanted from life anymore.

He stuck one hand in his pocket as nerves attacked him when he got to the door of The Grind. With one hard, short breath, he reached for the handle and yanked it open. The bells greeted him followed almost instantly by the most beautiful smile from the most beautiful woman on the planet who stood behind the counter.

“Hi, there,” she said brightly.

“Hey.” He wanted to smile, but his heart was filling so rapidly with love, it barely came out. He stepped inside, liking everything about the space that surrounded her. Instead of going to the back corner which now seemed ridiculous, he went over and leaned on the counter. There were only a couple of customers anyway. “How’s it going?”

“Better.” Her doe-shaped eyes fell as her gaze did. She only glanced up at him. “Thanks to you.”

His smile came with no effort. “I didn’t do so much. A couple vats of chicken soup and some orange juice.”

“Yeah, well, it was very much appreciated.”

He nodded and smiled broader. “Duly noted.”

She glanced to his empty hands. “You didn’t bring your computer?”

Opening his hands, he shrugged. “I didn’t know. I thought I might be playing doctor again.”

She came over and leaned on the counter toward him. “Nope. Your patient’s all better. She had a great doctor.”

“Well, well, look who we have here.” Mia came out from the back and clattered the items she was holding to the counter next to them.

“Mi…” Liz jumped back.

“Hi, Mia,” Jake said, knowing how the older woman felt about him and especially about his interest in her friend. However, he wasn’t going to be cowed this time. “Nice to see you again.”

“Jake,” she said dismissively. Then she turned to Liz. “Mind helping me with this stuff?”

“What? Oh, no. I mean. Yeah. Of course. What do you need?”

Jake took that as his cue to leave them to their work. “I’ll just be over here in the corner.”

When Liz looked up, there was an unnecessary apology in her eyes. However, Jake simply smiled and winked at her. With that, her countenance relaxed and she smiled back before bending to help Mia with shelving the items under the counter.

Liz didn’t bother to bring her books when she took her break. Ten minutes wasn’t going to be long enough to talk as it was. “You know, you’re going to drown in that stuff if you’re not careful.” She pulled out the chair and sat across from him as he took a drink of the coffee she had poured for him not five minutes before.

“I’m thinking about switching to decaf.”

She laughed. “I don’t know how you manage to walk out of here and go to sleep. I would be wired for days.”

There was a small smirk as he shrugged. “Sleep isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” He shifted forward. “So how was the test? Did you pass with flying colors?”

“Colors. Don’t know if they were flying or not. We’ll see when I get it back next week.”

He nodded. “Did you get a chance to go to the… what did you call it? The learning place?”

“Literacy center. No. Not yet but I’ll have some time tomorrow.” She coughed once, a hollow remnant of the others. Leaning on her elbows, she surveyed the empty table. “You’re not writing?”

“No.” And he ducked his head. “Not tonight.”

Something about the way he said it made her wonder. She tilted her head to get a clearer look at his face. “Not tonight? Or not ever?”

His gaze came up to hers, and there were words written there that she couldn’t read. “I don’t know.” He exhaled hard. “I don’t know if it’s even worth it.”

“Why? Why isn’t it worth it?”

This shrug was barely there. “Maybe I’m just kidding myself, maybe I can’t really make something like that happen.”

“But you said you’ve written… what? More than one, right? That has to mean something.”

“Maybe it means I’m a dreamer.”

“Hey, now. Don’t diss dreamers. They are the ones who actually jump when everyone else is going, ‘I don’t know. It looks kind of high.’” She arched her head as if she was afraid of the cliff that wasn’t there. “Sometimes you have to jump and do it anyway. You’ll never know what’s possible unless you try.”

“Liz!” Mia called from the counter, and her attention jerked that direction.

“Oops. Duty calls.” She stood but didn’t leave. “You going to be here for a while?”

Jake looked up, and in his eyes there was a pleading hope that she could feel more than comprehend. “Yeah, I’ll be here.”

When she walked away, Jake watched her go and then purposely redirected his gaze from her. He heaved a sigh. “This is crazy. You know that, right? I’ve got to be insane to even think about writing or her.” He leaned over and took a drink of the cold coffee. His gaze slid up to her, already back to work. She didn’t understand, and although one part of him wanted to explain it to her, he knew he never would. Some things were better left in secret compartments that no one had a key to open.

The next morning Liz made a stop between classes. The literacy center. She had seen it on her numerous trips to and from the bus stop, but not once had she ever thought she would be walking into it. Reading. It had never been a problem for her. But she now realized she was lucky that way.

“Can I help you?” a young woman about her age asked. She was blonde, not overly big, but she had kind eyes that invited rather than pushed.

“Um. Well.” Now that she was here, Liz couldn’t really decide how to phrase what she was here to do. “I’m interested in learning about your services.”

“Okay.” The young woman slid a sheet over to her. “Name?”

“What?” Liz shook out of her shock. “Oh, no. I’m not here
for
services. I… more… want to find out about what you do.”

That puzzled the young woman. “What we do?”

“Yes.” Straightening the strap on her purse, Liz wondered if this was just a really bad idea. “I’m in a teaching course on literacy, uh, reading, and we’ve been covering, uh, dyslexia and things like that.”

The young woman was nodding, a perplexed look on her face, as if she was trying to decipher all of the uh’s and um’s surrounding Liz’s explanation.

“I wanted to find out like what you do for someone with dyslexia or other learning disabilities.”

“Oh.” Finally the young woman seemed to understand. “Let me get my supervisor. Hold on.”

She left Liz standing there. After a moment more of embarrassment about her performance, she began to look around the center. There were people at desks scattered throughout. Some were her age, others were much older. That surprised her.

“Yes?” An older woman stepped up to her, followed by the young woman. She put out her hand. “I’m Mrs. McLaughlin. I’m the supervisor for the Literacy Center. Bethany tells me you’re interested in what we do here.”

Liz nodded, fighting not to fidget with her strap. “Yes, Ma’am. I’m in a psychology class, and we’ve been studying learning disabilities.” Without her really realizing it, she and Mrs. McLaughlin went for a little walk away from the information desk. Mrs. McLaughlin put her head down, very serious and nodding the whole time as if Liz and only Liz was on the planet. “I’m an education major, but I haven’t been really sure that’s where I was supposed to be, but I got really interested in the stuff about dyslexia. I just wondered if you could tell me some more about it.”

“Well, dyslexia and all of its cousins are what we focus on here.” They walked around the tables, to the edge and back again. “Most of our clients have reading issues although we deal with dyscalculia and dysgraphia as well.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Dys…?”

“Calculia,” Mrs. McLaughlin filled in with a smile. “It’s trouble with math. Specifically ordering numbers. Those with dyscalculia flip numbers and get them out of order without realizing it.”

“But the professor said that’s what people think people with dyslexia do, except they don’t.”

Mrs. McLaughlin smiled. “It’s one of the myths although it comes about quite honestly. Simply put a dyslexic sees words as whole units instead of as individual letters. So they see words more like a picture. When people think of them flipping the letters, it’s because a dyslexic will see a p as if it has the line going up or down, like you would turn this picture upside down. They don’t realize in the early stages of reading that a p only goes down. So they know what it looks like, but they don’t always know which way that confounded line goes. It’s the same with d’s and q’s and m’s and w’s. We think of them having a flipping problem, but what they have is an accurate and consistent picturing problem.”

“And how do you fix that? I mean, can it be fixed?”

“Well, it’s not quite that easy. You see, dyslexics also have a couple of other challenges. Some have more than others. But they all stem from the fact that a dyslexic person relies primarily on the right side of the brain.”

“The creative side.”

“Yes. The creative side. In fact, dyslexics are often highly skilled artists or musicians. They are very imaginative people. Quite, quite creative. There are many actors who are dyslexic. They memorize like lightning… as long as they don’t have to read the actual script.”

Liz shook her head. “How do you do that?”

“Oh, they get quite creative in ways to go around the problem. Many get books on tape or maybe have other people read for them. Because they understand how things work, they can assimilate information very quickly. They understand. It’s just the issue of they can’t read, and because of that, many can’t write either. Spelling can be a huge hurdle. So many dyslexics are trapped in a world that is unbelievably full and yet tragically empty.”

At one table they sat down together. They had their backs to the window as they looked out across the center.

“So how do you bridge the gap? I mean how do you teach someone how to read when they have this huge wall like that?” Liz asked, totally into the topic.

“Well, we start by re-teaching that letters have sounds.” Mrs. McLaughlin smiled at the surprise on Liz’s face. “I know it sounds very basic, but if you miss that, all the practice in the world does not help.”

“They don’t even get that letters have sounds?”

“No. Many of them when they were much younger and first learning to read, they memorized the words.” Mrs. McLaughlin picked up a blank paper and a pencil that were on the table. “Let’s say the word the teacher has on the board is bag.” She wrote the word on the paper. “Now, you and I see the letters. B. A. G.” She sounded each one out as she pointed to the letters. “But a dyslexic student sees ‘starts with a b, has a little letter and a long letter.’”  She drew the word in boxes instead of with letters. “They take a picture of the way the word looks and file it in their memory bank.”

Liz nodded, watching fascinated.

“The problem is when they come up against the word beg. See. ‘Starts with a b, has a small letter and a long letter. So what would they say?’”

“Bag.”                           

“Exactly because their word picture of how that word looks is bag. But the word isn’t bag. It’s beg.” Mrs. McLaughlin wrote beg below it. “So what do they do?”

“Miss it.”

“Yes. And when the teacher corrects them, they take a new picture and file it away as well.” Moving the paper, Mrs. McLaughlin wrote below beg. “Now what happens when they have the word boy?”

Liz was beginning to see the problem. “Starts with a b, has a short letter, and then a long letter.”

“What are they going to say?”

“Bag.”

“Or.”

“Beg.”

“Exactly. Now we have an even bigger problem, and it just keeps getting bigger. What about this word?” She wrote ‘big.’  “Or this one?” She wrote ‘bay.’  “Or this one?” Under the others she wrote ‘bog.’

“But that could go on forever.”

“Right. So what happens when they learn that all of these picture-words look the same? What do they do when they get to a word that starts with a b, has a little letter and a long letter?”

The thought made Liz blink in its complexity. “Well, I guess they would start by saying maybe what makes sense with the sentence.”

“Right.”

“But what if several of them made sense?”

“You’d try to use context clues, or maybe pictures if there are any. But then what?”

Liz shrugged. “Then I guess you start guessing. I mean what else can you do?”

“Precisely.”

“But at some point, you’d be guessing all the time. I mean, you could do that with just about any word. Bat.”

“Um-hm.” Mrs. McLaughlin nodded, encouraging Liz to think through the ramifications of the issue.

“Could be but, could be bet, could be bad.” She sat back, blown away by the understanding. “No wonder they can’t read.”

“Right, but they
can
read. The problem is no one realizes that they do not know about decoding words.”

Liz sat forward with a start. “My professor was talking about that, how they have to be taught to decode words, what most of us take for granted.”

“Yes, and once they learn to decode words, reading becomes comprehensible.”

She thought into that. “And then they can use all of their other abilities— the creative stuff— to understand what they are reading. Do they ever get good at it— reading I mean?”

“Yes, some get quite good. For others it is always a struggle, but even they can break out of not being able to read at all.”

“Mrs. McLaughlin,” Bethany said, stepping up, “you have a call on line one.”

“Oh. Thank you.” Mrs. McLaughlin stood and Liz followed her up. “Feel free to take some of our brochures, Miss…?”

“Savoy.” Liz put out her hand. “Thank you so much for your time. If you don’t mind, I might come back on Monday to do a little more research.”

“Anytime, Ms. Savoy.” And with that Mrs. McLaughlin walked into her office in the back.

Liz went to the information desk where Bethany had already taken up position again. She was obviously trying not to be nosy as she had her head down over her book. Stepping up, Liz took first one brochure and then another.
Dyslexia & You.
Two more were in her hands before she looked back up at Bethany. “Thank you.”

Bethany smiled, that same non-threatening smile. “Sure. I hope it helped.”

“Oh, it did.”

“And this one,” Liz said, spreading the little tri-folded paper in front of Jake as they sat in the corner during her break later that evening. “Did you know that 20% of students have this to varying degrees? Twenty percent! That means one-in-five kids is struggling with this, and nobody even realizes it.”

Jake was still fascinated mostly because she was so fascinated. “So what do you do about it?”

“I don’t know. I mean Mrs. McLaughlin talked about hooking sounds with letters, but we didn’t really get into that much.” She took the brochure back and scanned it as if absorbing it into her soul. “One-in-five. Man, if you could help even half of those…”

He loved seeing her like this. Lit up. Alive.

“And the best part is, these kids are really very smart according to Mrs. McLaughlin. I mean they have this great creative side that just gets buried because they are struggling so much to read. Imagine what you could unleash if you took away that barrier.”

“So are you going back?”

“Well, they’re only open awhile tomorrow.”

“It’s Saturday. Your day off.”

“Yeah.” She leaned back, still looking at the brochure. “I just… I don’t know where this is all going, you know? It’s kind of scary. I mean, I don’t know if there is like a major or something to help with these kids, or if you can just show up and they’ll show you what to do.”

Dread traipsed through him. “Are you thinking about going to work there? In the Literacy Center?”

She didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t know.” Her gaze came up to his and all he saw was the fear. “That’s like a really big leap. I mean I don’t know what it entails or if I could even do it.”

Jake had to take a long breath to get the words out. Before he did, he slid his hand across the table to cover hers lest she take his words flippantly. The touch jarred something loose in his soul, but he breathed that back. “I think, you need to jump.” He looked right at her, never flinching. “Do what your heart is telling you. Okay? I’ve seen you here, working, but when you talk about this, you get… I don’t know… alive with it or something. I mean coffee is a job. This… this could be your…”

“What? My calling?”

He thought for a minute and nodded. “Something like that. Don’t you think you should at least follow the path as far as it goes? Who knows, maybe it will only be for a while; maybe it won’t be for forever. But it’s not like you have to quit this right now to find out. Go tomorrow. Ask some more questions. Who knows? It might be right, and it might not be.”

“Liz!” Mia called from across the restaurant, and both of their attentions jerked that way.

Suddenly Liz was all-aflutter, adjusting and standing and moving away from him. “Coming!”

When she looked back at him, there was still fear in her eyes.

“Jump, Liz,” he said, wondering how he could be so calm, but he knew this was right for her. “It’s gonna be okay.”

A moment more and she smiled and then nodded. “Thanks.”

When she walked into the Literacy Center at ten in the morning on Saturday, Liz was still hanging onto his words and that look in his eyes— the one that said he would catch her if she walked off the cliff and made a complete fool of herself. It gave her courage, courage to take this step, courage to not turn and run away, courage to explore something she felt totally out of her depth with.

“Well, good morning,” Mrs. McLaughlin said, walking past the door just as Liz entered.

“Oh. Good morning.” It occurred to her that she had no good excuse for being here.

“Back to do some more observing?”

“Do… do you mind?”

“Not at all.” Mrs. McLaughlin started toward her office, papers in hand, without offering for Liz to come with her.