More Than This: Contemporary Christian Romance Novel (22 page)

Cheering. That was the first thing Jake heard when he slipped out of the grasp of sleep. He came back to consciousness and shook his head trying to figure out where he was and why he was there. Suddenly it all came back with a rush and he jumped six inches. “Oh, man.” Swiping at his eyes and face, he shook his head hard. “Was I asleep?”

Liz looked over at him and laughed. “Yeah, for like two hours. If you don’t be careful there, you’re going to give me a complex.”

“Oh, my gosh. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“Well, I thought about it, but I didn’t want to get my couch all wet with the bucket of cold water.”

Jake raised his eyebrows in fright and rubbed his hand over the cushion. “Thank you, couch. I owe you one.”

She closed the book on her lap. “So you hungry yet?”

“Starving actually.”

“Good because I think the overcooked turkey is probably about ready.”

The smells drifted into his consciousness, and he stretched, knowing he should apologize again but really feeling better for the nap. “Wow. Something smells delicious.”

“Yeah. Let’s hope it tastes that way.” She stood and strode into the kitchen where he heard the pots and pans start banging around.

It was weird how the sleep clung to him, like a rabid dog it did not want to let go. On his way to the kitchen, he noticed that the table was already set and that it was almost two o’clock. Embarrassment crawled through him. “Anything I can help with?”

She half-turned from the oven. “The green beans are done. Here you go.” She handed him one pan and then another. “And here’s the stuffing. I put potholders on the table already just put them on those.”

Together they went about putting out the food, which when it was all on the table suddenly looked like enough to feed a small army.

“Gee, I hope you really are hungry,” Liz said, sitting down.

“And I hope you invited half the neighborhood,” he said laughing. “Did we buy all of this?”

“Didn’t look like this much in the basket.” She looked over at him. “Shall we pray?”

Without protest, he bent his head.

“Dear Father,” she began, “thank You for Your love and Your provision. We ask You to be with those who are travelling this weekend. Let them get safely to their destination and home again. Thank You for the company and for giving us Your Grace. We thank You and we praise You. Amen.”

“Amen,” Jake echoed.

When the prayer broke, he didn’t immediately reach for anything, just sat for a moment saying his own prayer of thanksgiving for God letting him be here with her. “So, what were you reading?” He took the serving spoon and began dishing the food out to her and to himself. “Homework?”

“No. More on dyslexia. Did you know that there isn’t just one form of dyslexia? And it can be caused by a lot of different things.”

“Really?”

“And there are different forms of the types of problems you can have too. Like you can have dyscalculia which is trouble with numbers, or you can have dysgraphia, which is trouble writing.”

“But I thought dys…”

“Lexia.”

“Yeah, that, was trouble with reading.”

“Well, it is, but even that isn’t cut and dried. Some kids have trouble with reading because they can’t focus right on the words on a page. They have eye-hand coordination issues. Like the words go all shape-shifting on them.”

The term jumpstarted his heart, but he fought off the smile in favor of interest. “Like how?”

“Like a double-vision kind of thing. They see two of everything, so they close one eye to try to read. Or they move their head when they read because their eyes don’t focus close. Sometimes kids use these colored plastic things that focus their sight.” She looked down at her food. “Wow. This turkey is amazing.”

“It’s all good.” However, he was thinking more about what she was talking about than the food. “So that fixes it then? Those colored-plastic things?”

“Sometimes, but with some kids it’s not the vision thing at all. For some of them, they were never taught to decode words. It’s more an auditory thing for them.”

“Decode?”

“Yeah, you know, break a word down into the letters and sound it out. You know, phonetics.”

Jake took a bite of green beans never tasting it.
Sound it out
— a phrase he was imminently familiar with and one he hated to his core.

“See, the left side of the brain is the side that pulls things apart into pieces. The right side puts things together. Most people are dominant left-brain thinkers, so when they see a word, they naturally pull it apart into the letters or small bits of the word like phonemes. But kids who are dominant right-brain thinkers don’t do that. They don’t see a word as individual letters. They see it as a unit— as if each word was a picture rather than made up of letters.”

This intrigued Jake. “Pictures. Like how?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly, but like they memorize the word bag as starts with a b, then a little letter, then a long letter.” She took her paper napkin, grabbed a pen from her backpack, and drew three boxes. “They see it like this rather than as three letters.”

Jake’s eating slowed as he watched her. “And you’re not supposed to do that?”

She laughed softly. “Well, no. You’re supposed to see the b, the a, and the g. Otherwise, you would get completely messed up by other words that look like bag. Like what if the word was bog or beg or boy.” She wrote them each down like they all looked different, which to Jake they really didn’t. “Then when they see one of them, they can’t tell which it is so they just start guessing.

“The thing is, they are really super-super-smart people.” She laid the pen next to her plate. “That’s what’s sad. I mean, right-brained people are brilliant. They just don’t learn the way everybody else does, so they get pushed off into corners and sent to reading recovery until they either get frustrated and quit or the school system gives them enough modifications that they pass without ever really learning to read.”

Jake was still back on the boxes thing. It fascinated him because that’s exactly how he had always learned words— like they looked like a picture. He’d always thought that’s the way everyone saw them. “So how are you supposed to learn that box thing?”

Liz laid her fork down and grabbed the pen again. “Well, apparently with dyslexic kids you have to teach them to decode. They don’t understand that intuitively. So you go through linking the sounds to the letters, like buh-a-guh. Three sounds, three letters. Buh. That’s a b. Uuu. That’s u. Guh. That’s a g. She wrote each down. Bug. See, simple.”

He nodded, but the lesson was as frustrating as it was intriguing. Was she saying that the way he had done it his whole life was wrong? Was she saying there was another way? He didn’t quite understand the buh, uuu, guh thing, and all those words on that napkin looked like all the other ones. Could she really tell them apart so easily? The questions flitted around his heart and mind through the rest of the meal and even after when they were cleaning up. When he came back out to the table to check it the last time, he saw the pen and the napkin still laying there. It was impulsive and maybe reckless, but he picked the pen up and traced once over the letters she had written. As his mind contemplated the lesson again, he drew a swirl above the word and one below and then in between he filled in a small flower and the outline of a silhouette— not because he was trying, just because he was thinking.

“Wow,” Liz suddenly said from across the table. “What is that?”

“What?” Jake’s head jerked up, and he was surprised to see she was looking not at the television but at his drawing. Quickly he straightened, grabbed up the napkin, and crumpled it. “Oh, nothing. I was just messing around.”

However, her gaze came up to his in complete awe. “I didn’t know you could draw.”

He shrugged, crumpled the paper more and went to trash it. “I can’t really. I was just trying to get out of doing the dishes.”

Liz wanted to argue with him, to pin him down that he had real talent. That flash of what he could do with a pen was incredible. However, he seemed stuck on fast-forward-auto-pilot when he came back into the room. “So, are we eating pie now? I can cut it if you want.”

“What? Uh. No. I’m stuffed. Let’s watch the game.” She snuck a playful look at him. “If you can manage to stay awake this time.”

He smiled. “Sorry about that. Jasmine kind of had me up all night, running for her life.”

“Jasmine? Really?” Liz grabbed a pillow and sat down, excited to hear more of the story. “I thought her getting the book was going to solve everything.”

“Yeah, so did I.” He sat down on his side and put his head back in consternation. “Then last night, I had this really intense dream that she went to take the thing back, and Mr. Nguyen, the librarian guy had been disappeared.”

“Disappeared as in…?” Liz ran her finger under her chin as Jake looked over at her and laughed.

He turned so he was lying on the back of the couch but looking at her. “That’s just it. I don’t know. She showed up to give the book back, and there was no trace of him ever having worked at the library. So then she tried to get out of there with the book, and it was this huge chase all over the library with these goons that were waiting for her. I think I was up writing until about six.”

Liz’s head came forward in surprise. “And what time did you start writing?”

“Like three.”

“In the morning?”

“I know.” He shook his head and sighed. “It’s nuts sometimes. It’s like this spigot— either it’s all the way on or shut off completely.”

Liz looked at him, digging into his skull for the story of him. He seemed so completely deep, like if she dove in, she might never find the top or the bottom of his existence. “Man, I’d love to live just ten minutes in your head. It must be so full of neat things— stories and characters and places and action.”

“Remember that chaos thing we talked about?”

“Yeah.”

“Um-hm. That’s pretty much it 24/7.” He shook his head. “It’s weird.” He sat for a long moment, seeming to dive beneath the surface of his own mind. Then he exhaled. “I guess I’m weird.”

Hearing the note of self-scorn in his voice, Liz felt her heart pang. “I don’t know about that. It’s not weird. It’s more…”  She gazed at him. “Intriguing.”

He looked at her as if she’d sprouted an extra head. “Intriguing?”

“Beguiling.”

“Seriously?”

“Fascinating.”

He laughed. “Now I think you’re the one who’s lost it.”

“No, seriously, Jake. It’s cool that you can come up with these awesome stories and they are just hang-on-and-let’s-go-for-a-ride. I don’t know how you do that.”

Honesty blanketed him, beckoning him forward even as his rational side said he should quit while he was ahead. “I guess I’ve always kind of done that. I mean, even when I was little.” He put his head back and stared at the ceiling. “I’d make up all these stories to put myself to sleep. I remember this one about this pony that could fly. Its name was Marco, and it would go on all of these cool adventures.” Then Jake realized how silly he was being telling her this, and he looked over with an embarrassed half-smile. “Too much information, huh?”

“No,” and she really did sound fascinated. “How old were you then?”

“I don’t know. Six, seven. I drew some pictures of him once, but my dad said drawing was for girls.”

“For girls?” Liz backed up in horror. “He told you that?”

Jake shrugged. “Dad was never much into stuff like that. He wanted me to grow up to be tough. A manly-man. Not drawing and writing.”

“But that’s what you’re good at.”

He laughed softly. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Well, I would.” Then she did something she’d never done before. She slid over to his side of the couch. “I for one think you are incredibly talented, and I’m glad we’ve gotten to be friends.”

Friends?
Is that what they were? Surprise jumped on Jake about the time she laid her head on his chest. For a long second he had no clue what to do, but then as if nature had taken over, he let his hand fall to her shoulder and then slide down her arm as she snuggled into him. Wow. Did that feel incredible! How had he lived nearly 30 years without this feeling?

“I’m starting to see why you fell asleep over here,” she said, and there was a yawn tucked somewhere in the midst of that statement.

“Why’s that? Am I that boring?”

She yawned for real. “No. Not at all. Just really relaxing.”

He ran his hand over her arm again, agreeing totally. The breath was slow and tranquil. “You know, you don’t have to stay awake on my account. I can just sit here and watch the Broncos.”

“The Cowboys.” But she was already drifting out.

Jake smiled. “Like it matters.”

He felt her laugh and then slide off into oblivion. The world seemed to spiral around him. Here he was, with her, loving her, holding her, and it all felt so very easy and right. If life could stop right there, he would certainly have accepted it with complete peace.