The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell E-Book

Kelly Flanagan

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 441

Beschreibung

Illumination Book Award Nautilus Book Award Elijah Campbell is on the verge of losing his writing career, his faith, and his marriage when a recurring childhood nightmare drives him back to his hometown, Bradford's Ferry. There, his encounters with loved ones both past and present shed light on the reason his wife left him—and the meaning of his nightmare. However, beyond the light he begins to glimpse something even more terrifying—a decision he must make either to continue hiding the secrets of his past or unhide the only thing that can save his marriage: himself. In psychologist Kelly Flanagan's non-fiction works (Loveable, True Companions), he drew from clinical insight to explore the spiritual depths of identity and relationships. Now, in this debut novel, he weaves a page-turning and plot-twisting tale that brings new life to those insights, along with fresh revelations about personal growth, spiritual transformation, and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. This visit to Bradford's Ferry will linger long after the final page has been turned, and a guide for group discussion invites further conversation about the story's themes of healing, grace, faith, forgiveness, and freedom.

Leseprobe

TheUnhidingofElijahCampbell

A Novel

Kelly Flanagan

He said, “We all got secrets. I got them same as everybody else—things we feel bad about and wish hadn’t ever happened. Hurtful things. Long ago things. We’re all scared and lonesome, but most of the time we keep it hid. It’s like every one of us has lost his way so bad we don’t even know which way is home any more only we’re ashamed to ask. You know what would happen if we would own up we’re lost and ask? Why, what would happen is we’d find out home is each other.”

FREDERICK BUECHNER

To Kathryn Helmers, my agent, who kept asking, “What if?” until if came true.

Prologue

THE PAST IS BEHIND US, but it is also, always, within us. Which means the past can feel dead and gone one moment and then, in the next, it can be very much living and breathing and here. My past came back to life in the form of a nightmare I hadn’t dreamed in over thirty years.

When I was a child, the nightmare always began the same way, with me standing at a river’s edge, watching it rush by, brownly opaque with mud, swollen with storm debris, and foamy with turmoil. It was the kind of cataclysmic river in which a kid could disappear without warning, carried downstream to rot in some unpredictable destination. An old wooden bridge spanned the river. Though it had probably been a feat of humankind at its creation, its glory days were clearly behind it. The railings were gone. Most of the walkway had been torn away by storms long forgotten. The remaining planks were rotted and loose and spaced out, some resting where they were originally placed, some resting at angles. Large gaps in the walkway revealed the roiling waters just a few yards below it.

Beyond the bridge, the other side of the river was always cloaked in fog. I had no idea what the fog hid, and yet—with the kind of certainty that can only be called faith, the kind of anticipation that can only be called hope, and the kind of longing that can only be called love—I wanted to find out. So I’d look down, preparing to take my first step, and I’d see on my feet a pair of worn-out blue sneakers with yellow trim. They were so dirty the yellow looked almost brown and the blue looked almost black. The shoe on my right foot had a hole at the front of it, and my big toe protruded, covered by a dusty sock.

Every night, the dream seemed to contain all its previous renditions, so I knew exactly how it was going to end. I knew I would step out onto the bridge and the water would rise and it would be impossible to escape it and, as it reached me, I would silently scream myself awake. However, I also knew I’d step out onto the bridge anyway, yearning so much for the opposite shore that I was willing to endure the familiar terror at least one more time.

Sometime around middle school, the dream seemed to die. I went to sleep one night, and it didn’t go with me. Weeks passed. No nightmare. Then months passed, then years, and somewhere along the way I forgot about that old nightmare altogether. It turns out, though, it hadn’t died. It had simply gone dormant. Or maybe it had died, and almost three decades later, on the cusp of my fortieth birthday, it was resurrected.

I don’t think the future is ever predetermined, but I do think our futures are eventually determined by what we do with these moments of resurrection, especially when such moments cluster together, forming a sort of bridge in the middle of our life, one we may cross to new ground or one we may turn back from, retreading the ground from which we came. My bridge was made of that old nightmare. It was also made of a secret I kept from everyone so long I eventually began to keep it from myself, and a secret that was kept from me for so long I never knew it existed. My bridge was made of a bunch of lost loved ones who came to life again within the magic of memory and the mystery of imagination. It was made of a God I once loved who went silent, and then one day started speaking to me again through those beloved ghosts of mine.

In the Bible, Jesus dies on a Friday, and there’s a lot of talk about that. Then he’s resurrected on a Sunday, and there’s even more talk about that. No one talks much about Saturday, though. Death and resurrection. No one talks much about the and that bridges the two. Sometimes, though, all of life can begin to feel like an and. Every day can start to feel like the Saturday between what happened to you and what you will—or will not—do with it. And once you recognize your bridge for what it is, you have to decide whether you’ll cross it with no guarantees of surviving the passage, just the merest of hopes that it will deliver you to more graceful ground. It took me a long time to recognize my and—my Saturday, my bridge—for what it was. Too long. It began with a leg in my lap, more than a decade before the nightmare resumed.

My name is Elijah Campbell, and this is the story of my unhiding.

1

SOMETIMES YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR LIFE has been on pause until someone or something hits play. My someone was Rebecca. My something was that leg of hers, lifted from the cracked and crumbling concrete of the old patio where we sat facing each other, and lowered onto my lap, bridging the gap between us.

It was beautiful and it was brash and it completely blindsided me.

We’d met a month earlier on the first day of orientation for our graduate program in clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She’d spent most of the month going out of her way to connect with me, sending me signals that had gone well over my head. Finally, she’d decided to send me one that landed right in my lap.

The day had begun typically enough. A morning of study followed by a hot dog in the microwave for lunch, carried on a paper plate to the back patio of the dilapidated duplex I was leasing for the year. The patio was just outside some sliding glass doors that didn’t look very glassy with all the grime caked on them and, for that matter, didn’t so much slide as grind upon opening.

It was a Friday in October, a fall afternoon poised so perfectly between summer and winter that the former seemed a distant memory and the latter an impossibility. I was sitting in a plastic forest-green deck chair left behind by some previous renter of the duplex—the half-eaten hot dog perched on my lap, my face turned to the sun, eyes closed—when Rebecca walked around the corner of the building. Her shadow darkened the backs of my eyelids as she cautiously said my name, and I startled so dramatically the flimsy chair nearly toppled backward, the hot dog rolling to the ground where it collected flakes of fallen leaves.

She picked up the gritty frank, examined it theatrically, and said with bemusement, “Campbell, I’m not sure if I should apologize to you for ruining your lunch, or if you should thank me for saving you from this mystery meat.”

My embarrassment about being seen in such an unguarded moment was momentarily relieved by her playfulness. I paused for effect, then folded my hands into a namaste pose before bowing and saying with exaggerated solemnity, “Thank you.”

She laughed, and her laughter sounded like the autumn light.

Then she dragged the only other deck chair—a white one originally, now soiled and aged into a dull khaki color—so it faced mine, and she sat down with our knees almost touching. As we made small talk about our classes and our classmates, I asked her casually what she was doing that evening. Cue her leg in my lap. And her response:

“I don’t know, Campbell, what are you doing this evening?”

The whole thing sent a surge through me, twin threads of hope and fear intertwined—the conflicted response of someone whose loneliness is both their greatest wound and their most dependable defense. I stared down at the tattoo of a great egret on her ankle, framed by skin still bronzed by summertime, and I suddenly felt like an understudy called into the spotlight on opening night. The heat of her attention brought out prickles of sweat on my brow.

“I, uh, well, you know, I’m not sure. Actually, I think I do have some plans, but, uh, yeah, they’re no big deal. I could probably cancel them. But, well, probably not, so, um, yeah . . .”

The truth was, my roommate had set me up on a blind date for that evening.

I took a deep breath and tried to recover my most reliable way of responding when my walls were about to be breached: a smile so bright no one’s scrutiny had ever survived its wattage. It wasn’t a calculated smile; it was instinctive—the closest cousin to sincerity—which is probably why it had always been so effective. I often paired it with some charismatic question or another and, voilà, the spotlight would swing away from me. Leaving me in the dark again, but safe at least.

I beamed, but the reiteration of my original question—“What are you doing tonight?”—came out sounding a little too desperate.

Rebecca studied me thoughtfully with her hazel eyes. The brown waves of her hair glinted in the sunlight, revealing natural auburn highlights. The prickles of sweat on my forehead threatened to become beads as I waited for her to judge me with those hazel eyes, lower her leg, and move on to a guy who could field a simple question about his whereabouts without acting utterly exposed.

Instead, she doubled down, lifting her other leg and crossing it over the first.

“It wasn’t fair to start with such a difficult question,” she announced matter-of-factly. We both knew it wasn’t a hard question. Yet in her tone I could hear full permission for it to have been difficult for me. That felt like a gift. No one had given me a gift like that in a very long time.

“I tell you what,” she went on, “if I’m not going to get to know you better tonight, we should get to know each other better right now. Let’s play Two Truths and a Lie.”

It sounded like the kind of game I’d be about one-third comfortable with, but I was so grateful for the gift she’d just given me, I was hesitant to turn her down. “I haven’t heard of that one. How does it go?” Trying not to sound too cautious and mostly succeeding.

“It’s simple,” she answered, a smile in her voice and on her face. “I tell you three things about myself. Two of them are true, and one isn’t, and you have to guess which one isn’t. Then it’ll be your turn. Cool?” She held out her knuckles for a fist bump.

I focused on how the spotlight was about to swing to her while ignoring that it would eventually swing back to me. “Cool,” I agreed, reaching out and tapping her knuckles with my own. When they touched, it closed some kind of circuit between us, and a current ran right through me. Suddenly, I was awake.

I had no idea I’d been asleep.

“Okay. Hmmm,” she said, and as she contemplated what to say, she used a forefinger to tug her lower lip down before releasing it with a plop as it returned to her upper lip. Over and over again. Plop. Plop. Plop. It was both very innocent and exceptionally attractive.

“Got it!” She looked me in the eye. “I once lost my passport while illegally squatting on an abandoned vineyard in the hills of Italy and got back to Maryland without any help from anybody. I’ve been skydiving, twice. And I have three tattoos. Okay, which one is a lie?”

She recrossed her legs. The color of the great egret on her ankle changed from blue to purple as it shifted from light to shadow.

“I’m guessing the last one is a lie; you only have this one tattoo.”

She smiled again, rotating her right arm to expose a tattoo of a cross on the underside of her wrist. “Wrong. I do actually have three tattoos.”

She didn’t show me the third. It made me wonder.

“The lie,” she revealed, “was that I’ve only gone skydiving once. Okay, your turn!”

She leaned forward and rested her chin on her fist like Rodin’s The Thinker, settling in to fully listen to me, and the scrutiny was like a thousand spotlights—no smile of mine could outshine it. I decided the quickest way to get out of the spotlight was to get my line over with, so I barreled ahead.

“I’m from a small town in Illinois called Bradford’s Ferry. Pretty much everybody calls me Eli—yes, that rhymes with belly. And,” I paused, trying to come up with a lie, “both of my parents are dead.” That, of course, was a terrible way to get out of the spotlight. The guy who’d been voted Most Socially Skilled by his graduating class appeared to have exited stage left.

Rebecca’s eyebrows creased and the hand she’d been resting her chin on covered her mouth. “Oh no, I hope it’s the last one?”

I ran my palm over my forehead and it came away damp. “Yes, it’s the last one. I’m sorry. It was thoughtless of me to insert that into a fun game. My dad passed away almost seven years ago, but my mom is alive and well in Bradford’s Ferry.” I saw the question in her eyes. “Heart attack while shoveling. Right before I got home for Christmas break, sophomore year of college.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and she sounded like she really was.

“It’s okay. I mean, thank you. But I’m okay now, and my relationship with my dad was complicated . . .” I stopped, appalled by my apparent eagerness to tell her something I’d planned to take to the grave. “There I go again, getting all serious. Okay, your turn to be a buzzkill!” Self-deprecation. It worked. Perhaps Mr. Most Socially Skilled wasn’t completely AWOL.

Rebecca smiled again and reluctantly but graciously stepped back into the spotlight. After taking a moment to collect herself, she offered her next round. “Someday, I want to be a therapist for underresourced children. I once found a two-legged turtle and nursed him back to health and he became my pet. I named him Geppetto. And I think I really like you, Elijah Campbell.”

My smile was easier to find this time, and every lumen of it was for real. My rejoinder also came naturally. “Well, I certainly hope the last one isn’t a lie.”

“It’s not,” she replied, instantly yet gently.

“Then, I’m going to guess it’s the second one.”

“Correct you are, sir. Geppetto had three legs, not two.”

At this, a genuine laugh escaped me, and the look on Rebecca’s face suggested a laugh from me was the reward she’d come for.

“Okay, your turn,” she said, returning to her Thinker position. But I was saved by a buzzing in her backpack. She pulled out her cellphone, flipped it open, and tilted her head to talk to the caller. More red highlights shimmered like the red leaves in the maple next to the patio. She slapped the phone shut.

“Gotta go,” she announced as she lowered her legs and stood up. “My roommate and I are shopping for a used couch this afternoon, and she thinks she has a lead.”

She held out her knuckles again. Again I tapped them. Again the electricity.

She turned on her heels and hollered, “See you, Eli!” over her shoulder, pronouncing my name correctly. She’d actually been listening. Her spotlight was already seeming a little safer than all the rest. And suddenly it was the prospect of her leaving that made me feel uncomfortable and impulsive. The impulse was to prolong the conversation just a little longer.

“Hey!” I called. She stopped and turned. “Do you go by any nicknames?”

She shook her head. “Nope. Just Rebecca. The whole name. I’ve always wanted it that way. It reminds me to show up with my whole self.” She paused, thoughtful. “I guess I expect others to show up with their whole self too. Even if they have shortened their name.” She smiled mischievously. “Well, if I don’t see you tonight, I’ll try to swing by again next Friday, maybe catch you sunning yourself like a turtle again.”

Like a turtle.

The phrase got into me. And a theory about Rebecca’s interest in me began to form: like a turtle I had a shell, and like Geppetto she sensed a wound beneath the shell. She seemed oblivious to the parallels, but the comparison put a lump in my throat.

Then, she was gone.

2

THERE’S PROBABLY A FINE LINE between being smitten and becoming a stalker. For the next week, I walked that line.

I noticed where Rebecca liked to sit in each of our classrooms, and I started arriving early, positioning myself so I could observe her without her easily observing me. Every time she tugged her lower lip and it plopped back against her upper lip, I fell a little more madly in love with her.

I changed my evening running route so it took me by her first-floor apartment right at that moment when dusk had descended and lamps had been turned on, but no one had thought to close the curtains yet. Several nights in a row I caught a glimpse of her sitting on her new-used couch with her roommate, laughing at some syndicated sitcom or another.

I even went out of my way to shop at the supermarket near her apartment in the hopes of running into her. And it worked. Sort of. On Thursday afternoon I was tossing a package of hot dogs into my cart when I looked up and saw her debating heads of lettuce. I was so embarrassed by my purchase of mystery meat that I made a beeline for the checkout aisle and got out of the store as fast as I could.

I felt like I should file a restraining order against myself, and I wasn’t proud of it.

More importantly, I didn’t understand it. Before Rebecca put her leg on my lap, I would have told you I was just fine, thank you very much. A little bored with life, perhaps, but basically okay. For the last week, though, every time I’d thought of Rebecca’s turtle—that shell, that lost leg—the same lump had returned to my throat.

In a way, I was familiar with that lump. It was the lump I felt whenever I was faced with another person’s pain. An undergraduate adviser had called it compassion and said it was the superpower of the helping professions. I’d listened to him, declared psychology as my major, and my first month in graduate school had validated the decision. Every client I’d seen so far had put that lump in my throat, and I was more convinced than ever that most of our suffering is unnecessary: our hurts beget hurts and our flaws beget flaws because no one has taken the time to talk to us about them, to look at them, to turn them over and study them, to become familiar enough with them that we might actually come to have a choice about them.

This lack of examination goes back to the beginning, to the Garden of Eden, I think. What if God had kept us in the Garden and talked with us about our flaws so we might not have remained so ignorant about them and thus so doomed to repeat them? What if, instead of casting us out, he’d gathered us in to figure out the why of our mistakes—the who, what, where, and when? Throwing us out of the Garden. It never made much sense to me. I suspect that’s why Jesus made so much sense to so many people. He invited people back into the Garden, through holes in the roof, through moments at a well, through loaves of bread and baskets of fish. As a therapist, I wanted to be part of inviting people back into the Garden for a good conversation about what went wrong in their story.

But I’d never felt the lump toward myself before, and it was disconcerting. In it, I could feel an unfamiliar longing to be seen, to be known. However, I liked to think of myself as a “private person.” Not evasive. Not scared. Just . . . private. I’d worn that word with pride. Then, Rebecca. And Geppetto. And the image of a hard shell hiding a missing limb. All week it had been difficult to look in the mirror without seeing a turtle staring back.

Eighteen hours after I’d absconded from the supermarket with a ten-pack of Oscar Mayer wieners, I sat on my patio on another fall Friday afternoon, though this one had more winter than summer in it. The sky was an overcast gray, the canopy of the maple next to the patio more sparse, the patio itself covered completely with leaves that had already fallen. A wind from the north made fifty degrees feel like forty.

Sitting in the dirty white chair, I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my coat. I’d forgone a hot dog in the hopes of taking Rebecca to lunch if she appeared, and my stomach was beginning to rumble. I checked my watch. One o’clock. Thirty minutes later than last week. I felt a tug of disappointment. I felt a tug of relief. I noted the disappointment was the stronger of the two tugs, and the lump returned to my throat. I stood and stepped toward the sliding doors but stopped short when I heard a rustle of leaves along the side of the house. I turned around. And there she was, standing beneath the maple.

“Hi,” I said, with poorly pretended nonchalance.

She just stood there, doing that thing again with those hazel eyes of hers, looking me over, taking inventory. Her smile said she knew I’d been waiting for her, and that she knew I knew she knew, and that we didn’t have to talk about it. The gifts just kept on coming.

“Want to get some lunch?” we asked simultaneously.

“Jinx!” we shouted at the same time, followed by synchronous laughter. I suppose if you’re not becoming like kids again as you fall in love, you’re probably falling into something other than love.

“I’m buying,” I said quickly, trying to avoid another jinx.

“You’re on, Campbell. I’m dying for a Big Mac.”

I breathed an inner sigh of relief. McDonald’s was relatively cheap, and my student loan money had been dwindling quickly.

She shivered. I walked toward her, shedding my coat and throwing it around her. She pulled it close, saying, “I don’t usually go for such chivalry, but thank you. This weather caught me off guard. Do you need to get another coat for yourself?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” I replied, trying to sound casual.

I wasn’t fine. I was freezing. However, I didn’t have another coat.

“All right,” she said, taking me at my word and turning with her arm crooked so I could link mine through it. “Shall we?”

Thankfully, the nearest McDonald’s was just a few breezy blocks away. I learned along the way that she’d gotten the egret tattoo because it was the city symbol of Seaside, Maryland, the beach town where her parents lived. I told her tattoos were counterintuitive to me—there’s enough pain in life without seeking out more of it voluntarily. She told me that was part of what she loved about tattoos—they hurt while they’re happening, but you love them in the long run, and she was planning to turn as much hurt as possible into something that could be loved in the long run.

I thought of her turtle and the lump returned.

We supersized our meals and chose a table where the cloudy residue of someone’s halfhearted swipes at sanitizing could still be seen. By the time she’d polished off her Big Mac, Rebecca knew I was an only child, and I knew she had two younger sisters, who she adored. I knew she loved her mother without caveat, but she was without question a daddy’s girl, even though I could already sense she’d bristle at the label. Her father was an attorney. Mine had been a lawyer, too, before his death. I was relieved at finding some common ground again.

The conversation was clipping along nicely until I saw him.

He sat alone at a table for two, directly facing me over Rebecca’s shoulder. He was probably forty years old and wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt with a bland brown tie. It was poorly knotted and sagged away from the collar, not intentionally but obliviously. A head of strawberry-red hair about a month past due for a cut was overly combed to the side and slicked down in a way meant to blend him into the world, but it advertised effort and had the opposite effect. A weak chin beneath thin lips that were topped by a scraggly mustache. A face so boyish it would never be respected in any setting requiring him to wear a tie. Big, gentle, puddly eyes, creased by sadness at the corners and framed by glasses left over from a previous generation. He ate french fries one at a time and stared straight ahead. Straight at me, actually, but really through me. The kind of stare that is always looking into a past it can’t seem to escape.

The lump in my throat was so big I could barely breathe, let alone eat.

I tried to bring my attention back to what Rebecca was saying. Apparently her father was not just an attorney but a very successful one. The kind of success that allows you to buy one of those houses at the shore that tourists drive by every summer, gawking, wondering what those people do for a living, assuming it must be something exceedingly evil. His vocation was the opposite of evil. He was in environmental law and sued really wealthy companies for doing really terrible things to the planet. The Earth had thanked him for his service by rewarding him with one of its finer views.

“Eli? Are you okay?” I got the feeling she’d asked me a question to which I hadn’t responded. She sounded worried.

“Yeah,” I said, bringing my attention fully back to her. “It’s just this guy over there. He’s . . . I don’t know, there’s something about him. It’s sort of messing me up.”

She responded to the huskiness in my voice by briefly placing her hand over mine. Then she brushed a napkin to the floor, bending over casually to retrieve it while turning her head slightly to see the man. By the time our eyes met again, there was understanding in hers.

“Oh my goodness, Eli, he’s so lonely looking.”

At the word lonely, something in me unraveled, something that had been wound up tight for a very long time, wound so tight I hadn’t consciously known it was there, though the lump in my throat had probably known it all along.

Rebecca was asking again if I was okay. I sort of heard her and sort of didn’t as I got up and walked to the table where he sat. I exchanged words with him, the puddles in his eyes growing a little larger, different creases appearing at the corners of them as his lips formed a rusty little smile. I wished him a good day and turned back to our table, where Rebecca was watching me, her mouth slightly ajar.

“I’m sorry,” I said, taking my seat again. Her mouth was still ajar. I felt prickly hot with self-consciousness again. “That was rude of me to leave you sitting here like that.” Still ajar. The forehead sheen was about to make its return. “I don’t know what came over me. I hope you can forgive me.”

Her teeth clicked together as she closed her mouth. “What did you say to him?”

“Well, I, the guy, you know, you said it, he’s lonely, it’s oozing from his pores. I just wanted to let him know he’d been seen by somebody.” I corrected myself. “I guess I needed to let him know that. So I apologized for interrupting his lunch and told him he has the kind of eyes that make the world feel like a safer place to me.”

I was too embarrassed to look her in the eye, so I looked past her once again at the man who was still staring off into the distance. The stare looked different to me now, though. It seemed possible his past was forgotten for a moment. It seemed possible he was staring into his future.

Rebecca was silent. I forced myself to return my gaze to her face, cringing slightly at what I might find there. What I found was a trail of tears running down each of her cheeks. She looked at me that way for a long time. It didn’t make me uncomfortable though. In fact, I was feeling something exceptionally pleasant, something I hadn’t felt in a long time: hope disentangled from fear.

It seemed possible that Rebecca Miller, too, was staring into her future, and I was a part of it.

3

REBECCA AND I NEVER REALLY made anything official. One week she was putting her leg in my lap, the next we were eating at McDonald’s, and by the following week I was having a hard time focusing on much of anything else. The rest of that autumn was a blur, the kind of blur you must see when you’re falling from a high cliff into the ocean below. Rebecca was my ocean and I was falling fast. Everything else was just the world I happened to be falling through.

By the time winter break rolled around, going our separate directions already felt unnatural. Nevertheless, she planned to return to Maryland for the holidays, and I had no plans at all. I’d considered returning to Bradford’s Ferry for a day or two. There would be old friends gathering at the Draughty Den—a cozy, dimly lit pub on Main Street—including my best childhood friend, Benjamin, a burgeoning literary agent. Everyone would be sipping beer, watching the snow fall past wreaths hanging from the streetlamps outside, retelling old stories. But that reward just wasn’t worth the investment to me: the long bus ride home, the stilted conversations with my mother, the otherwise deafening silence of my childhood home, the long bus ride back. Rebecca left campus the Friday before Christmas.

She was very nearly killed three days later, on the shortest day of the year.

The phone call from her mother woke me up just before noon. Rebecca had been driving home shortly after midnight, returning from a night out with old friends. She was sober. The other driver was not. She glanced left, saw his failure to slow down for his red light, and tried to hit the brakes. A rare Maryland dusting of snow on untreated roads added up to a slippery surface. She skidded into the intersection, and he collided with her side of the car at thirty-five miles an hour. By the time she awoke eight hours later, the doctors were describing her survival as a miracle, side-impact airbag or not. She had some minor cuts, some bad bruises, and two cracked ribs, but the worst of it was a severe concussion. Upon waking, she’d asked her mother to call me. It was the first they were hearing of me. She’d planned to tell them about me on Christmas morning.

I asked Mrs. Miller if I could come see Rebecca. I heard some hesitation in her yes but pretended I didn’t. I threw some clothes in a bag, purchased a ticket for the earliest train out of Philadelphia, and was in Seaside, Maryland, by dinnertime. I met her parents in the hospital waiting room. I was unshaven and pretty sure I hadn’t brushed my teeth on the way out the door, but of course they weren’t really focused on me.

Rebecca was heavily sedated, buying time for her brain to recover from the closed head injury. However, she was conscious enough for the corners of her lips to curl upward on seeing me, and for a tear to roll down her cheek when visiting hours for everyone but family were over. I took that tear to mean she wished I was family. I wished I was too.

Over the next several days, I found myself in a strange situation: I was living in the home of people who barely knew me, wanting nothing more than to care for their daughter but knowing my name fell way below theirs on the list of candidates for primary caregiver. So I made myself useful by offering to pick up the slack in their home instead. They cautiously accepted my offer. I bought groceries. I waited at the house to sign for some last-minute FedEx Christmas shipments. I even wrapped a pile of presents.

By the time Rebecca was released from the hospital on Christmas morning, I’d been gladly added to the Miller guest list for the rest of our winter break. They were courteous enough to ask if my mother might be offended by me spending the holiday with another family. I told them my mother was perfectly pleased by the size of her holiday gathering. It was true. It was also true she spent the holiday completely alone.

Their home was beautiful, but the beauty of those two weeks went far deeper than tasteful decor, warm lighting, and ocean sunrises filtering through my bedroom blinds. It was beautiful for its lack of pretense, for the sincere affection shown among the Millers, for how different they were from each other and how much they celebrated those differences, for the sense that nothing was being withheld. By the time the break was over, I was reluctant to leave.

In the days before we departed, Rebecca’s father offered to buy her a new car. She declined for the same reason she’d made her way home from Italy on her own: she liked to know she was strong enough to stand on her own two feet. So she rented a car instead, and we drove back to Philadelphia.

The next day, before we returned the rental, I went car shopping with her. Rebecca had only enough money to look at used car lots. I suggested that together we had enough money to split the cost of a new car in a responsible price range. She mulled it over for about two seconds and agreed. Our first purchase together was a Ford, but I think it was more than a car—it was Rebecca’s acknowledgment that I’d become a part of her independence, not a threat to it.

For Rebecca, the purchase tapped out her automotive budget for the rest of the academic year. For me, it tapped out my entire savings. I didn’t tell her that, though. There were credit cards for situations like these. Also, I didn’t feel like I’d just spent thousands of dollars I couldn’t afford. I felt like I’d just found my calling, and it was priceless: I was going to give Rebecca Miller the life she deserved.

The following Christmas, I used a credit card to purchase Rebecca’s engagement ring. At the time, the debt didn’t bother me, because over the previous year credit cards had become both a necessity and a habit of mine. I just kept telling myself that only a few years and a couple of doctoral degrees stood between us and financial freedom.

However, it did bother me a little more the year after that, when in January we were married along the ocean in the Millers’ backyard. It bothered me because our marriage meant we would soon mingle our finances and start paying bills from a joint account; therefore, in a way, she was about to pay for half of her own engagement ring.

It was a shameful thought, in direct contradiction to the purpose I’d identified for my life. So I ignored it, just as I’d ignored the hesitation in her mother’s voice when she’d agreed I could join them at Rebecca’s bedside. In other words, at first I knew it was there, but I simply looked the other way until I eventually forgot it had been there at all. I’d gotten so good at keeping secrets, I could even keep them from myself.

Our honeymoon was a humble one, much like our car, and for much the same reason. Mr. Miller—he’d asked me to call him “Dad,” but I couldn’t bring myself to do so, for reasons I didn’t understand—had offered to send us somewhere sunny and sandy, but Rebecca had again insisted we pay for it ourselves. So we spent a long weekend in the wine country of upper New York State. Peak tourism in the region is late summer and early fall. By January, hotel rates are rock bottom, and the wineries are so glad to see you they become very generous with their free pours. Beyond the occasional wine tasting, there wasn’t much to do that weekend. That was fine with us. We weren’t terribly motivated to leave our hotel room.

Which is probably why Rebecca found my journal.

I’d been journaling daily since our first date at McDonald’s, but until Rebecca discovered the journal, there wasn’t another soul in the world who knew about it. I was in the shower and she was bored, rooting through the stack of books I’d shoved into our suitcase, when she came across something smaller and leather bound. You can’t really blame her for opening it, though I tried to when I walked out of the foggy bathroom and saw her holding it. She brushed aside my anger like you’d brush away a gnat distracting you from a glorious sunset. She was in awe, which really is the best reaction you can hope for when someone sees you turned inside out.

Holding it up, she delivered my first review. “Eli, this is exquisite. It’s like you’re speaking to all the clients you’ve worked with. It’s like . . .” She left from behind her eyes and traveled backward through time, then returned. “ . . . it’s like you’re speaking to that man at McDonald’s again. It’s like God is speaking through you to all of us, letting us know we matter to him, no matter how overlooked or ashamed we might feel. Where . . . where did this come from?”

It came from the voices within me, which had grown more graceful since I met Rebecca.

As a kid, the God who’d spoken to me through my church had been distant, disappointed, and dangerous. He hung out up in the heavens somewhere, mostly out of reach, and was more like Santa than like Jesus, keeping a list and checking it twice. You always seemed to come out naughty in his final tally, and he seemed a little trigger happy about casting you into hell for eternity. I’d watched my parents in the pews, nodding at all of it, as if it made complete sense to them, as if a love like that was one in which they could gladly participate. I’d figured it explained a lot about my parents and decided I wanted nothing to do with any of it. So when I’d gone off to the University of Illinois and met a bunch of atheists who were mostly happy, kind, and good, I tried to be one of them. No matter how hard I tried, though, I just couldn’t get rid of my parents’ God. However, he no longer felt so distant—rather, he lived on in the form of a disappointed and dangerous voice within me.

Then another voice had entered my life: Rebecca.

It seemed clear to me that any God worth believing in must look on me with at least as much affection as she did. So I decided to believe in that kind of God by listening for a more loving voice and, gradually, in our first year together, I’d begun to hear it everywhere. I heard it in Rebecca, in the books I was reading, in the wind through the top of that big maple in the back of my duplex. Eventually, I even began to hear it within me—a still, small voice, whispering of my worthiness and the worthiness of all things. I’d begun to record what I was hearing in a journal, and I’d told no one about it. In that honeymoon hotel room, Rebecca told me I needed to tell everyone about it.

Everybody in my life had always underestimated me; Rebecca always rounded up.

4

GROWING UP IN BRADFORD’S FERRY, every child spent the first month of summer break looking forward to Independence Day and the town’s annual River Days Festival. For one glorious week there was a pancake breakfast every morning in a park, boat races, outdoor concerts, an art contest, a parade, fireworks of course, and a carnival. Each year I anticipated the return of some of my favorite rides, but my favorite ride of all was the Scrambler. It didn’t lift you into the air; it flung you through the air, along the ground, the world blurring around you until you reached the apex of your orbit, where you’d pause briefly, the world snapping into focus, before being flung through the blur in the other direction. Then you’d get another moment of focus, and so on. Blur and focus, blur and focus.

The first decade of our marriage was a blur, with moments here and there that came into focus.

The morning after we returned from our honeymoon, I sat down at my computer in the modest apartment we’d rented off campus, searched Yahoo for how to join the blogging craze, set up a WordPress website, and published the first of more than five hundred entries from my journals. I called them “reflections” and was certain they wouldn’t attract any kind of digital spotlight. Rebecca, on the other hand, insisted on calling them “inspirations” and predicted they would strike a chord in the blogosphere. It turns out she was right to round up about my writings. They went viral, over and over again. The ride was underway.

That first year of blogging was all blur.

Then, almost a year to the day after we returned from our honeymoon, Sarah arrived. The ride reached an apex and the world came into crystal-clear focus. Rebecca in labor for forty-eight hours, pushing for the last twelve, exhausted and scared but fighting to bring our little girl into the world. My first glimpse of Sarah’s bald head. Her first howl. The rubbery resistance of her umbilical cord against scissors. The look on Rebecca’s face when she first took Sarah into her arms, the look you might give your beloved on their return from a long journey.

Sarah’s first year of life was more blur. My online platform was expanding exponentially, and one of my readers was an editor at a major publishing house. She reached out to me, asking if I had an agent. I said yes. It was almost true. By then, Benjamin had established himself as an influential literary agent, so I asked him if he’d like to represent me with the publishing house. We pinched ourselves—a couple kids from Bradford’s Ferry publishing books together!—and within a month I had my first book contract. The first half of my advance arrived a week before our second anniversary. Theoretically, I put it in the bank. Actually, I put it toward credit card debt.

A week later, I had my first panic attack.

I was already stretched exceedingly thin by my various responsibilities: coursework, clinical training, dissertation research, figuring out how to be a husband and father, and writing my first book. So when it came time to travel the country to interview for our clinical residencies—the final hurdle before receiving our doctorates—it was the straw that broke Geppetto’s shell, if you will. I’d been reading about panic attacks in my textbooks, but you can’t really comprehend them until you’ve had one. Heart hammering wildly, sweating like a midsummer heat wave, certain you’re on the verge of dying. I was afraid Rebecca would see me at my weakest and lose all faith in me.

Instead, she showed more.

She said the second half of my advance would be enough to get us through the next year. She said no marriage needs two doctors in it anyway. She said I’d be an amazing work-from-home father. She said I should drop out of graduate school and finish my book. She beamed as she said it. I momentarily considered correcting her assumptions about the advance—which I’d mostly already spent—but I didn’t. I wanted to become the man she was imagining as her smile stretched from ear to ear. So I stayed quiet. I let the truth float briefly at the edge of my awareness, until it drifted away. And I became a full-time writer.

Most of what came after was especially blurry, though once in a while life would come into focus long enough for me to really see it.

For instance, the morning Rebecca found out her clinical residency would be in Chicago, just a couple hours east of Bradford’s Ferry. The day we moved into a second-story flat in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of the city, within walking distance of the hospital where Rebecca would be a resident for a year. Later that day, when newly-walking Sarah tripped and skinned her knee on a sidewalk and reached for me instead of Rebecca.

The release of my first book—The Whisper in the Wind—about listening for the voice of God within us. The early sales reports suggesting it wouldn’t be bothering any bestseller lists, but it would probably earn out its advance and eventually produce a little more income for our family.

Rebecca’s graduation from UPenn. Her interview for her dream job in a western suburb of Chicago: a low-paying, full-time therapist position at a nonprofit community mental health center. The conversation about whether my writing career could compensate for her meager salary. My continued clarity of purpose: to give Rebecca Miller the life she deserved. Rebecca’s butterflies upon leaving for her first day of work. Her joy upon returning.

A contract for a second book—A Manifesto for Marriage—about how the Beatitudes might shape our vision for marriage. Rebecca’s mother teasing me about the temerity of writing such a book only four years into my own marriage. Benjamin telling me about the size of the advance, bigger than the first but not big enough to solve some monetary problems that were growing faster than their solutions. The week it was released and flirted with some bestseller lists. Finding out it would remain only a flirtation.

The afternoon Benjamin called to tell me Manifesto had sold well enough that my publisher had invited a third book proposal, blending the genres of my first two books. The week of our seventh wedding anniversary and Sarah’s sixth birthday coinciding with the publication of The Contemplative Couple. A big party celebrating all three milestones. Sarah standing on her chair at the dining room table, blowing a kazoo, singing the praises of my new book, “The Competitive Couple.”

Benjamin telling me the community forming around my books was beginning to see me as a guru of sorts, and my publisher wanted to capitalize on it. The word guru feeling like a very hot spotlight. Telling him I didn’t understand why people thought I had it all figured out. Telling him I didn’t write because I’d “arrived,” I wrote because I was still struggling toward the place where all my readers were also hoping to arrive. Benjamin telling me to get over it because I had an offer for a fourth book, a sequel of sorts to my first one—working title: The Voice in the Void.

Sarah falling from a playground slide and breaking her wrist. Several weeks later, breaking my own wrist playing basketball at the gym. Typing with only one hand. Opening the hospital bills for both fractured appendages. Kicking myself for telling Rebecca to choose a high deductible plan. Stuffing the bills in a drawer and trying to focus on my manuscript.

On that Scrambler in Bradford’s Ferry, it was blur and focus, blur and focus, until suddenly you sensed the ride was slowing down, and your time was up. It had never occurred to me the same thing could happen to my life. To my faith. To the words within me. To the purpose that had guided me. It had never occurred to me that my ride with Rebecca might come to an end.

It didn’t occur to me until, on an otherwise ordinary Friday morning in August—just a few months short of our tenth anniversary—I was awakened by some rustling in our closet.

5

THE DAY BEFORE REBECCA LEFT ME began like any other, with one exception. There was an unnecessary rapidity in her morning routine, as if she couldn’t get out the door soon enough.

It was a Thursday morning, and my cruise control was set to the speed we’d gradually established over Sarah’s nine years of life. Wake up. Lie there. Grab for a phone and check email. Get up. Start the coffee. Stand and wait for it while checking the news. Wake Sarah and walk with her through her morning ritual: get dressed, get breakfast, banter, brush teeth, pack her lunchbox, pack her bookbag, kisses all around as my ladies rush out the door for work and school five minutes later than planned. All of it had a well-worn rhythm to it. A cadence. A pace.

Rebecca’s pace was off.

She didn’t stand by the coffeemaker with me, trading news stories. She went right from waking to the shower. She poured her coffee into a travel mug rather than the ceramic mug that I’d already prepared for her with cream and sugar. She ate a banana standing at the counter rather than a bowl of cereal at the table. It wasn’t until I went to the fridge to prepare Sarah’s lunch and discovered Rebecca had already packed it that I realized how eager she was to get out the door.

I watched her more closely as she quickly finished checking Sarah’s bookbag for folders and homework, a pit threatening to form in my stomach. There was an urgency and an absence to her. Even as she gave Sarah’s hair one final brushing she was, for all intents and purposes, already out the door. Sarah kissed me on the cheek as she said goodbye, but Rebecca didn’t, and they left for work and school five minutes early.

Rebecca, it seemed, had finally run out of patience.

“So, how close are you?”

Benjamin’s smile was warm and relaxed, but I’d known him long enough to know it was a reflection not of what he felt but of what he wanted me to feel. Behind that smile was the understandable tension of a literary agent whose client was already six months past the deadline for delivering a first draft of his next book. I heard the tension not so much in what he said but in how quickly he said it. No catching up about our kids first. No reminiscing about old times in Bradford’s Ferry. No sports talk. It was August, and the Cubs held the best record in baseball after having swept the Marlins at Wrigley. Benjamin didn’t even mention it. My old friend was wound tight.