Reinventing Rachel (4 page)

Chapter 5

The apartment was silent. The echoes of Rachel’s shouts and sobs existed only in her head. She sat on the sofa, black TV screen ahead of her, spinning the diamond ring on her finger.

Patrick hadn’t tried to deny it or even soften the accusation. “How long?” had been met with “four months.” “Do you love her?” elicited a reluctant “yes”—though the answer had been the same when Rachel asked if he loved her as well. Not that it mattered. There was no forgiving this. The wedding was off, and they were done.

Patrick and Trisha had slunk out together after Rachel refused Patrick’s attempts at consolation. And now she was alone.

She’d left the apartment shortly after they had, unwilling to stay where Patrick’s betrayal had taken place, but she returned half an hour later when she realized she had nowhere else to go. She’d poured all her relational energy into Patrick over the last year. There were no other friendships in her life with depth or intimacy—except for her relationships with her mother and Barbara. But she couldn’t go to Barbara, for obvious reasons, and there was no comfort to be found at her childhood home right now. She had a hard time even considering it home. Just like her childhood, her relationship with Patrick now felt like a lie, which made the apartment not feel like home, either. She’d never felt so isolated.

Daylight faded and night settled in around her. Her body was leaden, her muscles no match for the weight of grief that enveloped her. Her mouth wanted a steaming café mocha with extra whip—she supposed a situation this desperate required not only coffee but chocolate as well—but she didn’t have the energy to make one. When her cell phone jangled in her purse, the shock of sound sent an arrow of adrenaline through her gut.
Patrick?
Heart racing, she fumbled for the phone, her hands clumsy from idleness. The caller ID showed Daphne’s number.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t call you back sooner,” Daphne said when Rachel finally flipped open the phone and managed a weak greeting. “It was totally one of those super-sucky days that just would not end! So what’s the story—you in for Vegas?”

“Patrick’s been cheating on me.” The statement renewed the tears, and she began to cry.

“What?”
Daphne fell silent as Rachel struggled to get her tears under control, then let out a stream of insults broken up with words of empathy and condolence. “I’m in shock,” she said at the end. “And if I’m in shock, I can’t imagine what you’re feeling.”

Rachel sucked in giant gulps of air, trying to get a hold of herself. “I just don’t understand,” she said between hiccups. “I don’t understand why God is doing this to me. I don’t understand what I did wrong.”

“It’s not you, it’s not God—it’s life.
C’est la vie.
Things are great sometimes, and other times they’re awful. It’s just … the balance of the universe. A little hell here, a little heaven there, you know? I doubt it’s a matter of God doing anything to you—why would he? What did you ever do to deserve it?”

They were the very questions Rachel had been asking herself in the back of her frazzled mind. What happened to “I’ll hold you in the palm of My hand?” There was no hand there now, no safety net, and she was in free fall. The God she’d grown up serving didn’t do this to the people who loved and obeyed him like she did. At least, she never thought he did.

But if he did—how dare he?

“Listen, Rachel—I’ll totally understand if you don’t want to come to Vegas, given everything that’s going on. But I think it would be good for you to get away from there for a couple days. You need space to breathe and recover. What do you think?”

Think? Rachel couldn’t think. Her decision-making ability was shot. “If you think I should …”

“I do.”

“All right then.” She sniffed. “See you in Vegas.”

Rachel dragged herself to bed after hanging up the phone, and tumbled fully clothed onto the mattress. In her despair she forgot to set her alarm before finally falling asleep, and when the phone rang at six-thirty the next morning she was so groggy she almost didn’t answer. Her boss’s voice on the other line brought her fully awake, however, and after they hung up she scrambled to get dressed and out the door.

Idiot, idiot, idiot.
In her haste she’d left her makeup bag on the kitchen table, so she had no way to fix the bags beneath her puffy eyes. Her embarrassment over her appearance compounded the embarrassment over being so late to work.
Good luck getting that time off for Vegas now.

“Sorry,” she said as she jogged into the coffee shop and threw her cardigan into the closet. “Put me to work. What should I do?”

Roy pointed to the stock room. “Help Cora with inventory. We need to figure out what needs to be replaced.”

She nodded to her boss but groaned inside. Cora was a fellow Beach Cities Church attendee and the last employee Rachel wanted to work with today. She headed to the stock room and noticed the floor was still slick in some areas, and the bottom three inches of everything was soggy and warped.

“This is so icky,” Cora said when Rachel knelt beside her to wrestle a waterlogged box from beneath the counter. Then she got a good look at Rachel’s face and frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“I look that bad, huh?”

“Sorry, but yes, you do.” They unpacked the box of napkins and began inspecting the individually-wrapped packs for damage. “Bad night?”

“Well … yes. But I forgot to set my alarm before I fell asleep. Roy woke me up when he called.”

“Oh no. You poor thing. Why the bad night? Did something happen?”

Rachel couldn’t stop the bitter snort that escaped her nose. “A few somethings, yeah.”

“Do you need to talk about it?”

“No.” She sighed. “Actually, yes, I do, but I can’t guarantee I won’t fall apart.”

Cora nodded to the counter full of napkins. “Plenty of tissues here if you need them.”

Rachel managed a smile. “True.” She took a deep breath and quickly listed the events of the nightmarish week she’d had so far, eyes focused on the inventory list she was marking. She didn’t have to see Cora’s face to know what it looked like—the sounds of surprise she made were plenty descriptive. “Rachel, I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”

Rachel shrugged and began to stack the napkin packs into a dry box. The less she talked the better grip she was able to keep on her emotions.

“Is there anything I can do?”

Rachel gave a mirthless chuckle. “I don’t think so, but thanks.”

“Can I pray for you? Here—” Cora nudged the stock-room door shut. “Let’s pray together.”

Rachel gripped the pack in her hand. “You know, normally I’d jump at that, but I’m a little angry at God right now. I’m not really sure I want to talk to him.”

Cora was silent for a moment, then said, “I understand. I’d be mad too.”

The dangerous thoughts she’d been having for the last few days began to form on her tongue. She knew she should keep her mouth shut, but Cora was as good a sounding board as anyone else, and if she didn’t start hashing these thoughts out now, they were going to eat her up inside. “You know, it’s not just that I’m mad at God. It’s like … why bother praying, even? I just wonder if it’s like talking to a wall. Maybe it always has been. I’ve been pretty disciplined, pretty devout, since I was a little kid. And you’d think all these years of it would add up to some kind of … I don’t know … immunity. Maybe one of these things should have happened—no one’s life is perfect, right? But all three, in less than a week? What did I do wrong?”

Cora was frozen in the path of Rachel’s rant, and when she spoke, Rachel could tell she was searching for just the right words to say. Her caution grated on Rachel a little. “I totally see where you’re coming from,” Cora said. “But … I don’t think it works that way with God.”

Rachel threw the napkins into the box harder than she meant to. “Well why not? What kind of God says, ‘Hey, thanks for the love. You did really good for the last twenty years, but I’m going to ruin your life anyway’? What kind of father does that, especially one who’s supposed to be perfect?”

Cora shook her head slowly. “I—I don’t know, Rachel. I know you’re hurting—”

“No, this isn’t just about hurting. Hurting has just made things start to seem obvious. I mean, honestly—what’s the point? If you don’t get protection, if you don’t get some kind of divine insight that shows you the lessons to be learned or the way this situation can be used for good, then what’s the point of all the obedience and the sacrifice and the dying to flesh and all that crap? What does it get me?”

Cora’s face was flushed, and for a brief moment, Rachel felt bad for dumping on her. But then Cora said, “But … God is good, Rachel,” and Rachel lost all sense of guilt.

“I’m not so sure. In my estimation, He’s either an insensitive, promise-breaking jerk, or maybe … maybe He’s not there at all, and we’ve just made him up.” Rachel couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of her mouth. But somehow, they felt really good to say. “Either way,” she continued, “why should I bother? If He’s a jerk, then He’s not the God we’re taught to believe in, which means the whole belief system is suspect. And if it’s all just make-believe, then …” She shrugged. “Maybe we should just pack in the whole thing and give it up. Either way, right now He’s not doing what He’s supposed to be doing, and it’s not making me real eager to keep working my butt off to be acceptable to him.”

“Wow.” Cora was the one avoiding eyes now. She crushed the ruined box with careful steps. “So … that’s it, then? You’re done with God?”

Rachel ran her hands over her face and sighed as the energy of her anger drained away and left her exhausted. “I don’t know, Cora. I don’t know what I think. Maybe my anger is clouding my thinking and once I get over it everything will make sense. Or maybe it’s making everything clearer and I’ve struck upon an epiphany. Who knows.”

Cora grew silent, and they finished their inventory job without any more peripheral discussion, though Rachel’s mind continued to dwell on the things she’d said to Cora. She kept coming back to Cora’s question—
You’re done with God?
—and running from it, afraid to consider the possibility. Because part of her felt like the answer was yes, and it scared her.

But not as much as she might have thought it would.

o

Rachel didn’t want to spend any more time in her apartment than necessary, so after work she retreated to another coffee shop where she claimed an armchair by the window and sipped her long-awaited mocha. A movie she’d seen during college came to mind as she licked whipped cream from her lips—
The Truman Show
. Jim Carrey’s character discovers his entire life is the ultimate reality show—a scripted sham lived out on television for the whole world to see. His hometown is a soundstage, the horizon a backdrop. Nothing he thought to be real actually was.

Rachel could suddenly identify. Nothing was secure. There was nowhere stable to plant her feet. Things she never would have doubted had turned out to be questionable at best, and she was afraid of what would turn on her next.

And what about God? He had promised to be unchanging, but now she couldn’t believe it. How could she? All she had was his word, and the last few days had been proof enough that words meant much less than she originally thought. After all, doesn’t Scripture say that God is like a father, who provides what his children need? That if they ask for bread, he won’t give them a stone? Hard to believe that promise now when all Rachel had done was asked for bread, worked hard for it, and received not just one stone but a whole avalanche of them.

But if she couldn’t trust or even believe in God, she stood to lose more than just her faith. Her whole worldview was wrapped up in the doctrines she’d learned in those sixty-six ancient books. She didn’t know how to live without that theology as her foundation. She’d always pitied people who did.

The thought of stepping off that platform of faith into the … what? Nothingness? It was beyond unimaginable. Yet there was no point to sticking with something that wasn’t real or trustworthy.

Completely unsettled, she left the café to distract her mind with driving and checked her e-mail when she got home, hoping to keep the distractions coming. There in the inbox sat her e-ticket for Las Vegas. She was more convinced than ever that this trip could be exactly what she needed to get out of her emotional rut.

The Internet provided Rachel with a couple hours of entertainment until her eyes grew heavy. She tumbled into bed and let the cool sheets soothe her. Her thoughts drifted to Daphne, to their childhood, their unlikely friendship. Funny how Rachel had always thought she held the key to Daphne’s happiness. Wouldn’t it be just the thing if it were the other way around?