Sway (15 page)

He doesn’t like it. “How can you think they’re right when—”

“I have a question for you.” Two can play at this game. “Why were you really at the bar?”

It isn’t that I don’t believe his earlier explanation, but the idea of a pastor hanging out at a seedy tavern is about as foreign as the idea of me showing up to a tent revival. Completely ridiculous. Senseless no matter how many ways you analyze it, concern for his foster kids notwithstanding. I saw how those women were dressed that night. I smelled the alcohol dripping off everything that moved. Was it coming off Caleb, too? I pull the penny from my pocket and roll it in my hand. “Pastors aren’t supposed to go to bars.”

Now, I have no idea if this is true, but it should be. Because if Caleb had done his job the right way, we wouldn’t be in this mess. It occurs to me that I might be in a bigger mess of lying in a coffin or filling out police reports or submitting to the harsh reality of pregnancy tests, but it’s easier, at this moment, to deflect blame.

Caleb doesn’t blink. In fact, his gaze grows distant. “Met a lot of pastors in your life, have you?” He rolls his eyes. “I guess that would be a yes, since you and your parents have built careers out of targeting churches like snipers target enemies. I’m surprised you haven’t tried to kill me yet, or is that next up on the agenda?”

I toss the penny on the ground and remind myself that he was blindsided. We both were, but he’s the only one being publically attacked, and that fact alone reminds me that I need to take everything he wants to throw at me. He has a right to be angry. If I were in his shoes, I would hate me, too. “This isn’t my career by choice, Caleb. I don’t know anything about your church—whether it’s good, bad, or uses Voodoo dolls to perform healing rituals.”

“We don’t.”

Only hostility exists in his voice now. I try hard to ignore it and keep talking, because if nothing else, at least we’re in the same space, walking side by side. “That’s not the point. I don’t know anything about any of the churches except what my parents tell me, because frankly, I’ve never given them much thought.” I cringe when the words come out, but they’re true. I’m tired. I know my place. I analyze my situation about as much as the average person analyzes a wart on their finger. As long as it doesn’t hurt, you just ignore it. “I’ve been dragged to these events since I first learned to crawl. Obviously you’ve done your research by now. My face is to my parent’s movement what the Gerber Baby is to strained peas. One doesn’t exist without the other. I don’t think it ever will.”

I hear his sigh. For the first time in several minutes, he seems more concerned than angry. “And you’re okay with that? Being the poster girl for a long string of hurt, false accusations, and misplaced kids? It doesn’t matter to you?”

He doesn’t get it. Whether I’m okay with it or not, that’s the way my life works. It’s the way it is, and the way it will be. I tell him as much. He doesn’t buy my excuse.

“Life is what you make it, Kate. Anything else is a cop-out and you know it.”

“You know nothing about my life, Caleb. You can judge me and yell at me and give me a step-by-step plan to turn things around, but you don’t know what it’s like to live my life.” And he doesn’t. He can pretend—he can get self-righteous and indignant and tell me sob stories of little boys like Ben who will be tossed out onto the street with no one who cares about them if my parents have their way—but I’ve heard the stories a million times. I hate the stories. The stories are the main reason I stopped watching television years ago and learned to escape into music.

Besides, if my parents are right, those kids just might be better off.

We turn on my street, and a small part of me dies inside. This might be the last time I see him, and we’re not ending on the greatest note. That step up has sunk into a crater. It’s lowering by the minute.

“You’re right,” Caleb tells me, bringing me back into the moment. “I don’t know anything about your life. But here’s the hilarious part—you know nothing about mine, either. Yet according to your father, I’m a thief, a manipulator, a corruptor, and a danger to kids. According to him, I deserve to lose my job and have the doors closed on one of the most special things about my church all because of a nativity scene that no one is forcing you to look at. It’s
Christmas,
for heaven’s sake. And since you stood beside him and clapped at all the right parts—even threw in a few of your own uplifting words—I can only assume you agree with his assessment. So Kate, excuse me if I’m having trouble feeling sorry for you. Because for all your self-pitying statements about me not judging you, it seems to me that the only one playing Judge here is you.” He stops in front of my apartment and looks at me long and hard, and all I want to do is disappear into the pavement. “You personally handed me a death sentence the other day and then again tonight on television. But you’re right, Kate. It must suck to be you.”

I say nothing because there’s nothing to say. His words might infuriate me if I could really focus on them. Instead, I can’t get past the fact that Caleb just called me out on the one crutch I’ve always allowed myself—that this is my parent’s cause, not mine. That if anyone gets hurt, at least I’m not the one doing the wounding. It’s never me. Never, ever me.

It’s always been me. From the first time my cherub baby-face appeared on that first flier, it’s been me. News stations might show clips of my father speaking or my mother clapping, but every stitch of material that’s ever been stuffed in mailboxes and doorways and fax machines announcing brand new press releases has always had my face slapped at the top. New look as I grew older, but the smile stayed the same.

The delusion has been easy to keep up until now. Maybe it’s awful that I never cared about any of it until I cared about one of the targets, but it’s true. I care about Caleb. I care a lot.

“Caleb, I didn’t mean to—”

“We’re here, Kate.”

The last time he spoke those words in the foster center parking lot, my life exploded into a million tiny fragments. Now, he’s simply dismissing me, and it hurts. Hurts like my chest is being forced into a vise and squeezed until air and space and matter are eliminated and nothing is left but obliterated, powdery bones. I can’t catch a breath, but my voice manages to make it out anyway.

“Okay. Thanks for walking me home.” I nod and turn to leave. Before I can, he’s speaking again.

“I was at the bar because I’ve been to about a hundred bars in my life,” Caleb says in a low voice, stopping me. I almost forgot I asked the question. “Before I became a Christian, I used to go every weekend to get drunk, to pick up women, to start a fight. But never, in all the years I used to go, was I ever there just to talk. Sometimes I wanted to, just to unload my misery, but no one was ever interested in that.” Caleb looks at me, really looks at me, for the first time since we started this walk. “Yes, I was at the bar in case one of my kids showed up. But I was also there that night to talk to people. To find out their stories and listen while they told me. Because sometimes people just need to know that someone cares. For some people, it’s the only thing that keeps them from ending it all.”

It occurs to me that I haven’t taken a single breath since he started talking, so I exhale slowly and swallow around the lump in my throat. “So basically, you’re a Good Samaritan,” I whisper.

His brow furrows in the middle.

“What?” I say. “I’m not completely ignorant about Bible stories.”

“That’s nice to know.” A ghost of a smile tilts his mouth, which isn’t really a smile at all but a knee-jerk reaction to hide the sadness I know he’s feeling. I saw it earlier, just for a second, when he first saw me walking toward him in the park. “I wouldn’t call myself a Good Samaritan…”

“I would.”

I hold his gaze until I no longer can, partly because it hurts to look at him when he’s staring at me that way, but also because my eyes are suddenly all watery. This guy is good. Kind to children and strangers. A savior to naive women in trouble. Caring through and through. Despite whatever has happened in his past, Caleb saved me that night, and for three glorious days I nearly had a shot of making him mine. Those days passed too fast, and now it’s just me. Alone again. The way I’ve been forever even when surrounded by strange guys in bars who wanted to take me home.

My watery vision grows blurry. I would blame it on allergies, but it’s December and everything is dead.

For a second he looks like he wants to say something more. His mouth opens, his arm moves a little, but then seems to think better of it. Whatever might have happened is over.

“Goodbye, Kathryn. I’ll wait here until you walk inside.”

I nod, trying to look appreciative. But all I can think is…Kathryn. Not Kate. Not Princess. Not anything but goodbye.

The loss seeps through my pores as I walk into my apartment and slump against the door. My stupid eyes burn for a minute or two, but I squeeze them closed and lean my head back. For that space in time, the darkness is the only thing that seems real.

But then I stand, head for the kitchen, and grab a glass of water.

I don’t cry.

I never, ever cry.

Caleb

“Love Bites”

—Def Leppard

I
can still see my mother’s face right before she died. I can see it, because only three inches of air and space and ripped flesh and massive amounts of blood separated hers from mine. Her body was split in half, the center gear shift of our Toyota Tercel acting as a tourniquet, keeping her alive long enough to beg me to listen. My mother, once so beautiful and perfect and angelic and kind, left this earth wearing a bone-chilling expression of fear. But not before giving me one last order.

Fight, Caleb. And don’t fall asleep.

Those were her last words to me, the words I repeated like a mantra inside my head for the rest of the afternoon as I waited at the bottom of that ravine for someone to rescue me. I sang to myself, I cried to myself, I made wishes to myself over my mother’s dead body until the chime of sirens blasted through my ears like a jet engine.

I was saved. And it was my birthday. Turns out that even without candles and cake, birthday wishes do come true.

Even my mother’s last one.

I didn’t sleep again for the next five years.

It’s 2 a.m. and I’m wide awake.

It’s been four hours, twelve minutes, and thirty seven—thirty-eight—seconds since I dropped Kate off at her doorstep and jogged toward my own apartment, and aside from a quick shower, I’ve managed to do only one thing since.

One thing.

Like the stalker she accused me of being just a few hours ago. Like a man obsessed with torture and too far gone from the sick pleasure of it all to make himself stop.

One thing. And here I am, stuck inside a world of play and repeat.

I get to the end of the clip and start it once again for the last time, or at least that’s what I tell myself. I’ve said the same thing at least a dozen times since I began watching, once even getting up to switch a load of laundry and brush my teeth in an effort to prove that I’d conquered the world of compulsive Kate-viewing. But then I found myself on my sofa once again, hitting play on a two-minute segment of television just to look at her one more time.

Even now—as she’s skewering me and pastors and God in general on the most heavily watched news station in our four-state area—she’s beautiful.

It’s there, for the world to see. With her blonde hair flowing in ringlets down her pale pink sweater and the tentative smile that flashes onscreen every time she glances at her father, Kate is beautiful. And she was nearly mine just a few days ago. Even earlier tonight, the loss didn’t escape me.

When I first caught sight of her walking toward me in the park, I was aware of two things. One, I wanted to strangle her for the things she’d said about me. And two, I wanted to kiss her, hard and fast, right then, right there on that secluded stretch of pavement. A classic description of a homicidal maniac maybe, but then most homicidal maniacs haven’t met Kate Hawkins.

But I’ve met her, and I’ve never been so consumed with the thought of someone else in my life. Worse, she’s the absolute wrong person for me. I know this. I’ve prayed about this. I’ve told myself this over and over the past three days, but it isn’t getting easier. Not when I remember her smile, how it feels to hold her, how it rocked my world upside down and back again the first time I kissed her.

I press play again, recalling that kiss in my mind, listening while the sound of her voice eventually lulls me to sleep.

Kate

“I’d Hate To Be You On That Dreadful Day”

—Bob Dylan

T
he uncertainty of our situation is the worst part, especially because things haven’t gotten better all weekend. Not at home. At school. Driving in my car. Thumbing through racks of albums at various indie record stores. I’ve always known what I wanted.

Now, I’m not so sure.

I try once again to pinpoint of the source of my restlessness, but come up empty. Still, it doesn’t prevent a long list of scenarios from flashing through my mind.

Maybe it’s the media attention. As usual, I’ve been called a dozen times from local and national reporters wanting more interviews to clarify my statements. A nice, juicy sound bite to add to their already scandal-laden story—a tale of supposed cheating the system and mind-control mixed together with a refresher course on the merits of separating church and state. One reporter even made suggestions of tax-evasion on Caleb’s part and questioned how safe the children were with him anyway because of his teenage stint in jail.

Jail. I hadn’t known about that. Not wanting to hear it from a tabloid talk show, I shut off the television before any new bomb could be dropped.

Maybe it’s the news outlets. The story has grabbed headlines all week as suspicion surrounding Caleb’s church has grown. Without materializing a single foster child, stations have peppered news reports with words like supposed and allegedly—
alleged
abuse,
supposed
forced prayers,
alleged
withholding of food—to prop up my parent’s viewpoint that God has no place in a government-involved foster center. This has always made me proud. Thrilled by the attention. Justified in my participation. Confident that I was doing the right thing. After all, these poor kids needed a voice—a fearless leader to protect them from cruel adults and the harsh arm of a made-up God—and we were the one’s giving it to them.