Tying the Knot (11 page)

Noah paced the shoreline, his heart still lodged squarely in his throat, choking off any words of sympathy he might have said to Anne. At least it had silenced his pat answers.

He couldn’t fault her for wondering if God had dropped her. He’d fought that faith battle more times than he wanted to remember.

Like when he’d seen a boy he’d led to the Lord, a boy with promise and hope, flush his future away with a scrum—intravenous drugs. Or when he’d seen the woman who had raised him, the closest thing Noah had to a mother, die of a heart attack a week later. He even remembered the first time he felt as if he’d been drop-kicked by God—at the age of five when his newly widowed father, stupefied by drink, had thrown him out of the house and told Noah how he’d murder him if he returned. Yes, Noah knew all about dark moments and the paralyzing fear that God had fumbled.

But he also knew how it felt to be rescued. To see God’s love in a smile, to hear it in a song, to feel it in the embrace of strangers. Strangers who found a hungry shivering boy in a Dumpster, huddled in a soggy apple box. Strangers who took him to a shelter and finally found him a home. God’s grace meant they delivered an orphaned boy to Mother Peters, a new mother with a heart as wide as the Pacific.

God’s grace didn’t mean life skipped over the hard parts. Grace meant that when life threatened to drown him, in those catastrophic moments, God enclosed him in the pocket of His embrace. Noah had learned that the only way to discover God’s sufficient grace was to let the storm buffet, then cling to God, like David said in Psalm 62:5, Noah’s favorite: “I wait quietly before God, for my hope is in Him.”

Noah dug his hands into his hair, feeling grubby and small in the face of what he’d seen in Anne’s eyes and the avalanche of pain storming her words. How was he supposed to comfort that kind of emotional wreckage?

“O my people, trust in Him at all times. Pour out your heart to Him, for God is our refuge.” The verse pulsed in his heart, something that he wished he’d said to Anne in place of his shocked silence.

Where did a beautiful woman like Anne get emotional scars that shattered her faith in the God who had made this wondrous landscape around her? Noah sat on the beach under the glow of the Deep Haven lighthouse and listened to the storm gather, wishing he’d been there to stop the one who had assaulted Anne’s soul.

“Noah? What are you doing out here?” Pastor Dan crunched in the rocks down the shore, holding a flashlight. Dressed in a rain slicker, he looked prepared, as usual, for the daily unpredictabilities. “I was at the nursing home and saw your bike.” He sat down, digging a place in the stony beach to hold the light. The beam flashed skyward and was devoured by the night.

“I’m just wishing I was a different man. Wishing I had the right words.”

Dan frowned at him.

Noah picked up a fistful of tiny pebbles, shaking them. “I blew it tonight. That nurse I got for the camp, well . . . I sort of trapped her.”

“What?”

Noah grimaced. “I know it wasn’t the right thing to do, so I went to apologize to her and managed to not only scare her to death, but I also stomped all over her feelings.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“You don’t know me that well, Dan. I’ve been accused of having the sensitivity of a porcupine.” He gave a wry smile. “She’s been . . . emotionally injured. And I—” he could barely pry the words out of his constricting chest—“laughed.”

Dan stayed mercifully silent.

“She was so . . . cute and frustrated, and I had no idea her issues ran bone deep.” Noah buried his face in his hands. “I don’t know what to do.”

The waves washed on shore, growing violent. The spray landed on their boots.

“Noah, you’ll figure out a way to make it right.”

“No, I think I really blew it this time.” He stared at his hands, at the scar across his right palm. “I’m not sure why God picked me to do this job. I’m so unqualified. How am I supposed to reach kids’ hearts with the gospel when I can’t even encourage Anne?”

Dan threw a handful of stones into the surf. They crackled as they hit the beach. “Well, that’s where you forget that you’re just the vessel. Remember Galatians 2:20: ‘I myself no longer live, but Christ lives in me. So I live my life in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.’ It’s God who has to reach the kids. It’s God who will encourage Anne. God made you the way you are, and you’ll have to trust Him to mold you into the person He wants you to be. Trust Him to give you the right words for this woman.”

Noah blew out a long, unsteady breath. “I can’t help feeling like I’m in way over my head, treading water for all I’m worth but going under fast.”

“Hmm.” Dan reached for the flashlight, flicked it erratically toward the sky, then straight out across the lake. The beam lit the frothy peaks of waves. “It seems to me that a man who is drowning has no choice but to reach up for help.”

Noah closed his eyes, letting Dan’s words settle deep into his soul.

“You know,” Dan said softly, “I wonder if over your head and drowning might be exactly where God wants you to be.”

Noah opened his eyes and pitched a rock into the swell of waves. “Perhaps. But if Anne Lundstrom doesn’t change her mind, I won’t even get a chance to get my feet wet.”

The night toyed with his emotions. Sliding over him like a snake, slithering through his pores.

Infecting his bones.

He itched, shifted, struggled against the claw of the past. Voices—loud, drunk, angry. Fear, cold and thick, icing his veins.

No! Father!

He flinched, reeling from the blow of the memory. Fought to open his eyes. The room spun with the smell of anger—sweat, beer, iron-ore shavings.

Then the shadows lurched over him, and the icy sting of a gun barrel screwed into his jaw.

“Where is it?” a voice growled, and he came fully awake. Three shadows, accented by the spark of moonlight on silver gun barrels.

“I don’t have it. Yet.” He sounded pitiful and adolescent. Fear rose and clogged his throat. “But I will.”

Breath, thick with booze, streamed across him. “You have one week. One.”

Relief melted every muscle. He lay down, a soggy, trembling mass on his double bed as they filed out and closed the door with a soft click.

7

The sunlight woke him, a kiss of hope after the onslaught of the night. Noah sprawled on the ratty sofa of the Wilderness Challenge lodge and closed his eyes, feeling as if he’d been beaten and left for dead. He’d chased his worst fears around in his sleep, and somewhere in the wee hours he knew he had no choice but to surrender. Wilderness Challenge would have to wait another season to open.

His heart felt like cement in his chest.
God, I am sorry I’m not the man to make this happen. Please forgive me for being less than who You needed.
He sat up and swung his legs onto the floor, the chill somehow a balm to his knotted nerves.

The idea of calling the mothers and aunts of the campers and having to tell them the kids would be spending the summer on the streets pitched his empty stomach.

He needed coffee. He staggered into the kitchen, newly outfitted and sparkly with a new industrial refrigerator and stove. The bag of coffee lay crumpled and empty next to the Mr. Coffee. He made a face at the two-day-old sludge crusting the bottom of the pot. Closing his eyes, he held the bag up to his nose and inhaled deeply. The aroma would have to do until he made it into town and grabbed a cup at the Footstep of Heaven.

He enjoyed his occasional mornings there, chatting with Joe, the owner’s husband. Evidently, the guy knew something about being judged by external appearances, although Noah wasn’t sure how. Joe Michaels seemed to have life in the palm of his hand—a beautiful and charming wife, a life goal that didn’t need the approval of three committees to attain, and a very definite niche in the community. Everyone loved Joe, and it wasn’t rare to find the guy hosting a small crowd, like he was some sort of celebrity.

Noah grabbed a towel and headed out to the men’s washhouse, a building with nothing more than a trough and a few faucets, half open to the sky. He’d built a private shower on one end, but Noah counted on the attraction of a clear Boundary Waters lake to entice his campers to cleanliness.

The icy water, pumped up from the lake, made him gasp. He dunked his head into the trough, washed his hair, and felt frozen when he toweled dry.

The sun blinked through the sodden trees, turning droplets into diamonds against a jade background. The storm had littered twigs and leaves across the yard, and Noah counted at least two big branches across the trails. He’d have to do some cleanup before he tackled assembling cots.

No. He stopped and shook his head. There he went, thinking like a guy with a mission instead of a soggy failure with nothing but expenses piling up around his ears. It was so easy to fall into the plans, skipping ahead on the hope set before him, the grace already granted to him. He took a deep breath and trudged back to the lodge.

He bent into the fridge, scrounging up some sort of sandwich—pickles and mayonnaise, maybe—when he heard the gravel crunch of wheels on the drive. He paused, riffling through his mental files. Staffers? Not until Saturday. Inspectors? His stomach knotted.

He closed the fridge and plodded outside. He was halfway out the door and across the porch when he saw her standing with her hands on her hips, surveying his freshly tiled roof.

The wind toyed with her hair, the delicious color of copper. Dressed in a pair of track pants and a sweatshirt, she looked suspiciously ready to . . . work?

Then she looked at him and smiled, and for a moment, he thought he would never move again.

“Good morning!”

Where was his voice? He managed to nod.

“I thought, well . . .” She wrinkled her nose, as if trying to conjure up the right words. Then she took a breath and shrugged. “You helped me last night. I thought I could repay the favor.”

His heart took a flying leap right out of his chest and landed at her feet. “Swell,” he croaked, trying not to sound like a besotted idiot. He had the sudden urge to race over to her, shake this alien being hard, and demand that the Anne he knew, the one with inborn spitfire, be immediately returned to her human body.

Or maybe not. Perhaps he liked this new version better.

He must have missed a few days here, a few episodes of their rocky relationship, because to save his life, he had no idea why Anne Lundstrom was standing in his yard, rolling up her sleeves.

“Don’t make any assumptions. It’s just for one day.” But the way she smiled, well, he didn’t believe her for a second. No, not for one second. Because he’d make this day the best of her entire life.

Shame had driven Anne up the Gunflint Trail to Wilderness Challenge. Noah had helped her clean her house and sat with her on the porch, listening to her spew out spiritual bitterness. Yes, she felt orphaned by God, but the pastor’s kid in her couldn’t leave that last ugly impression on Noah’s brain.

And when he grinned at her, his expression turning to pure delight when she offered to help him, her heart did a tiny flip. With his wet hair, a shag of dark whiskers on his chin, his rumpled black T-shirt and army fatigues, he looked like a confusing, way-too-attractive mix of gangster and hobo. She shook off the impression and opened her car door. “Hope you don’t mind, but Bertha begged to come along.”

The dog jumped off the driver’s seat and into Noah’s arms. He laughed and fell on his backside, saturated by Bertha’s sloppy affection. Anne shook her head, oddly warmed by the sight of him wrestling with her dog. “I guess she likes you.”

“Well, you know, we’re partners in crime.” He winked at Anne, and she decided that . . . well . . . maybe . . . she could try and like him too. If he didn’t sneak up on her or tread into her spiritual wasteland.

“So, where do we start?” The camp looked . . . rustic. The Lincoln Logs lodge, with its sagging porch and weathered steps, looked about a century old. She couldn’t imagine spending any significant amount of time here. She liked the North Shore scenery, but Anne had been a city girl most of her life, and she appreciated the benefits of, say, indoor plumbing and electricity.