Whispers of the Bayou (32 page)

That left the issue of AJ and the difficult conversation we needed to have, but my cell phone had been conspicuously silent all day.

Thinking of last night’s letters and of today’s discovery about my twin sister, I realized that most of all I had the overwhelming urge to go back and see my Uncle Holt and maybe talk to him about some of what was going on. We still didn’t know each other all that well, but we had made a connection yesterday, and I felt sure that he was as eager to spend time with me as I was to spend time with him. I went downstairs and freshened up, and though Deena wasn’t crazy about the idea of me going for a walk in the woods with a head injury, she didn’t try to stop me.

Despite the late afternoon heat and humidity, the walk to Holt’s house did me good. By the time I got there, my stride was strong and the pain on my forehead had lessened. Were it not for the bruise and slight swelling at my hairline, I might have put the fall out of my mind completely.

Just like yesterday, I could hear Holt before I saw him, though this time there was no banging pot, just his voice. Afraid I might startle Duchess again, I cupped my hands around my mouth and called out the news of my arrival. By the time I reached the clearing, Holt was sitting there waiting for me, his hand on the collar of a massive blond-colored dog.

“Miranda!” he cried, his eyes crinkling in delight. “I’ve been hoping you’d pop in today.”

I gave him a hug and then with his permission greeted the dog, asking about Duchess. He said she’d been sent on her way this morning with a recommendation for search and rescue training, replaced by this new candidate, Sugarpie.

“Sugarpie?” I asked with a chuckle. “For this big lug?”

“Yeah, kind of humiliating, isn’t it, especially considering he’s a male. Anyway, help me out a sec, would you? I want to try something.”

“Sure.”

“Hold on here and walk him over to that post, and then on the way back, act like you’re losing your balance. I want to see what he does.”

Gripping the handle of the dog’s harness, I did as Holt instructed. When I started to wobble, I was surprised to feel the dog’s big body move right up against me and steady me in place.

“Good,” Holt said calmly, though whether to me or to the dog I wasn’t sure. “Now do it again, but this time wobble a little longer.”

I repeated the steps, walking to the post and then turning around and coming back. This time, as soon as the dog braced against me, I noticed that Holt took a shiny red ball and rolled it along the ground so that it passed right in front of us. Sugarpie whimpered, but he stayed where he was until I finally stopped wobbling and stood up straight. Even then, he didn’t dart away, though I could tell he wanted to.

“Excellent. You can let him go.”

Sugarpie bounded away, retrieving the object of his affection, and then
the three of us headed for the house, the dog carrying the ball in his mouth. Holt said my visit was perfect timing as he was ready to take a break and have something cold to drink.

Soon Holt and I were relaxing on the porch with our cups of sweet tea, looking out at the lazy bayou, and I asked him how he had landed into this whole dog thing in the first place. He said that it started when he was about six months sober and volunteering down at the VA hospital. A patient there had one of the very first “PTSD Dogs,” who had been trained to help her owner manage the challenges of his post-traumatic stress disorder. Holt said this dog could do everything from retrieving the guy’s medication to crowd control to panic management, and watching her work had inspired him to launch a new career in the field.

Despite his handicap, Holt went back to school to become an animal behaviorist. After graduating, he worked as a trainer, but soon it became obvious that his real gift was for evaluation and placement. Eventually, he founded his own nonprofit organization that did just that. Currently, he had two employees, dozens of volunteers, and a waiting list for his services that could keep him busy around the clock seven days a week, if he let it.

“So do you have this same sort of gift for evaluating people?” I asked.

He laughed.

“I don’t know. I never thought about it,” he said. “I suppose if somebody stayed here for a week like the dogs do and let me run them through a bunch of tests, I just might.”

We both smiled, gazing out at the water.

“If I were a dog, where would you place me?” I asked.

He rubbed his beard, considering.

“Well, let’s see, you didn’t lick my face when we met,” he quipped, which made me laugh, “you take direction well, and you’ve obviously got the ability to focus.”

He had started out teasing, but now he grew more serious.

“You’re tall,” he continued, “and strong, I imagine, but I wouldn’t want to depend on that strength too heavily because you’re so slender. I’d say, considering your warm nature, your obvious loyalty, and your high intelligence, I’d start by testing you for medical assistance tasks. Depending
on how calm you remain in a crisis, you could work with someone who has anxiety or depression or even a chronic pain disorder. I don’t think I’d recommend you as a guide dog because recovery time might be a concern.”

“Recovery time?”

“That means how long it takes you to bounce back and get to work when you’ve been thrown for a loop. Fast recovery is vital for some areas, but you strike me as the type of person who might need to absorb things for a while. Maybe mull them over before you can move on.”

I met his eyes and then looked away. “I’d say,” I told him, “that your talents give you insight into both man and beast.”

“Thank you,” he replied, and then we just sat there, the only sounds the hum of crickets and the gentle rocking of my chair. Finally, he spoke. “So what is it that you’re bouncing from right now, Miranda? If you feel like talking about it, I mean.”

I did feel like talking about it, and I was so glad he had asked.

As Holt sat and listened, I began to unburden myself, telling him about the letters I had found from AJ to my grandparents, my learning of Cassandra just today, and the conversation I’d had with my father afterward. Holt offered an ear and a shoulder and a lot of wisdom, and as I shared what I was feeling, I decided that it really wasn’t all that difficult to be the one on the telling side of a heart-to-heart rather than taking my usual stance as the listener. Holt said he had known about my erased memories, which was why he’d been so surprised yesterday when he thought my daughter was named Cass.

The only time he contradicted me was when I described my anger at AJ for keeping me so isolated from the rest of this family.

“I understand that she wanted to give me a fresh start,” I said. “I even kind of get why she never told me that I had a sister, much less one who had been my identical twin. But why keep me from having a relationship with my grandparents? Why keep me from having a relationship with you?”

“I can’t speak for her motives with my parents,” he said, “but I’ll tell you exactly why she kept you away from me. When the two of you left
here, Miranda, I was a mess. I didn’t deserve to be a part of your life. I was drinking, doing drugs, all kinds of stuff. That’s who I was to her at that time. I don’t blame her one bit for cutting off that tie.”

“But what about later, once you got sober?”

He shrugged.

“I contacted her once, to see if maybe you and I could establish some sort of relationship. She said it was…complicated. In the end, she felt it best if things stayed as they were. I couldn’t blame her. She didn’t know the man I had become.”

I understood what he was saying, but still I didn’t agree.

“How did you become that man, Holt? Why are you so very different from my father?”

“Why don’t we take a walk? Or rather, you can walk, I’ll roll. I’ll answer your question as we go.”

I wasn’t sure what our destination was, but I had a feeling we weren’t just aimlessly wandering the countryside. We put Sugarpie on a leash and brought him with us, heading up Holt’s driveway for a while and then diverting onto a wide, well-worn path that led us alongside the bayou. As we went, Holt told me his story, how he and my father had been raised with every advantage, every indulgence. Their parents, he said, were experts at getting the two mischievous boys out of trouble. When Richard was drafted, they managed to protect him from going to Vietnam, but two years later when Holt faced the same problem, things had changed, and finding a way to remain stateside wasn’t quite as simple. He ended up having to serve in combat, where he fought for nine months before getting caught in an ambush that obliterated most of his platoon and left him paralyzed from the waist down. By the time he got back home, he was a bitter, angry paraplegic with no hope for the future. Regardless of his parents’ money or power or influence, the wheelchair was something he knew they would never be able to bail him out of.

Meanwhile, his brother had moved back home, taken a job in their father’s company, and married the beautiful Yasmine Greene. Holt tried to figure out how he, too, could create some semblance of a normal life, but that all began to fall apart within a year or two, about the time the perfect
couple, Richard and Yasmine, announced they were expecting their first child. Holt had been using drugs since Vietnam, but at that point he turned to the bottle too. By the time Cassandra and I were born, he was such a drunk, in his words, that when my mother brought us home and he held one of us in his arms—he was sorry, but he couldn’t even remember which one—he nearly dropped that baby on the floor. Five years later, by the time Cass and my mother died, he said, he was living in an adapted trailer at the foot of his parent’s property, either drunk or stoned around the clock and of no good use to anyone.

“That’s why you can’t blame Janet,” he said. “Heck, I even showed up drunk to Cassandra’s funeral, a bottle of Jack Daniels in my hand. Your father was so agitated, he actually punched me in the jaw. I was kind of glad. At least then I felt something. Four days later, when they buried your mother, I didn’t even bother to go.”

His words were rough, but I certainly got the picture.

“I hate to sound like a cliché,” he said, “but I really did have to hit bottom and come to the end of myself before I could begin to climb back up.”

He went on to describe how an old war buddy dragged him to an AA meeting where he learned about having a “higher power.”

“They say your higher power is what you believe it to be, but I knew who that higher power was. His name was God, and He had been waiting to hear from me for a long time.”

Holt talked about how he found a church-based recovery group and then found faith, how God dragged him “kicking and screaming” into believing that he could either buy the whole package or none of it at all.

“The whole package?” I asked.

“The Bible. Either it’s the true Word of God or it isn’t. You can’t pick and choose just the warm and fuzzy parts, or just the parts that make sense, and then use them to create your own version of who you wish God was. I realized that I had two choices: embrace the whole thing or reject the whole thing. Period.”

“So you embraced it and became some Bible-toting Holy Roller?” I asked, trying to make light of it but feeling stupid the moment the words came out of my mouth.

He was quiet for a moment and I was afraid I had offended him, but then I realized that he was just taking care to form the right words before he replied.

“You know what parts I had trouble with?” he said, his wheels crunching over some branches that had fallen on the path. “The verses about suffering. The parts where these early believers, these incredibly important followers of Jesus, saw their lives get worse, not better, after they believed. Why, I wondered, would you choose to follow someone who was only going to drag you down? ‘Take up your cross and follow me’? Please! Trust me, I already have a cross. Everywhere I go, I roll there on a cross. And I want to make things even
worse?
”

I listened to him talk, thinking that if he was trying to convince me not to believe as he did, he was doing a pretty good job of it!

“Then I found what I was looking for,” he continued, “the words that made sense—not just for Christianity, but for what had been the problem my whole life.”

I didn’t reply, wondering how a simple Bible verse could give anyone that much insight.

“It’s from Romans,” he said. “I have it memorized. May I share it with you?”

“Sure,” I replied, tossing a stick ahead of us and letting go of Sugarpie’s leash so that he could run for it.

“It says, ‘We rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.’ ”

“That’s lovely.”

“Those words, Miranda, those words explained everything to me. In my entire life, I had never had to suffer through anything—not even a class I found boring at school or a punishment I was given by the nanny. My parents bailed me out of suffering, which meant I had never learned perseverance or developed character or found hope. And hope was what I needed most. That’s what saved me from myself. That’s what finally led me to believe, which in turn brought the Holy Spirit into my life. And that’s
the most important part of that verse. The suffering which leads to all of those other things wasn’t the point. The point was that the suffering doesn’t even feel like suffering anymore, because I was transformed the moment I accepted Christ. He came into my heart and changed my life.”

It was an interesting story, and I could tell it came from the heart. We continued on, side by side, for a bit longer, and though I was glad to have heard such passion for what he believed in, I didn’t know how his experience could apply to me.

Finally, Holt seemed to be slowing down, and I realized we were approaching two stone pillars, almost smaller versions of the ones that flanked the driveway at Twin Oaks.

“What is this?” I asked. “Where are we?”

Holt took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.