Forsaken (23 page)

“No, I would have despised myself for that too. You’re not a Christian. You just don’t understand how serious it is to do what I did.”

“Hey, I’m a Christian. Just not a good one.”

He put his hands in his pockets and leaned back against the fireplace mantle. “I didn’t mean that. I just meant that you don’t have the background to understand the seriousness of this.”

“So what you’re saying is that no matter what you would have done, you were doomed?”

“I suppose that sums it up.”

“You’re not being fair to yourself.”

“Fairness has nothing to do with it. I’m just telling you how it is.”

“So that’s it? If you don’t preach, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

I set my mug on the end table. “You
should
think about it, and for at least a month or so. You may not feel the same after some time passes. You’re still only a couple of days past one of the most extraordinarily difficult situations a man could ever face. This probably isn’t the best time to make a life-changing decision.”

He nodded. “That we can agree on. I’m not going to do anything rash. I’ll give it some time. But right now, I don’t see myself ever going back to preaching. Maybe I can coach or something.”

A door closed in the hallway. A few moments later Kacey and Meg walked into the room.

Simon smiled. “Look who’s back. Someone call the Entertainment Channel.”

“What are you doing standing up on that ankle?”

He gave his sister a sheepish look, then hobbled back to his chair and sat down.

Meg put her hand on Kacey’s shoulder. “As much as this one wants to act like Superwoman, she’s not. We’ve been talking. She’s feeling a little scared about staying in her room alone tonight. I offered to stay, but she doesn’t think I would be much help if a terrorist crawled through the window.”

Kacey smiled. “No offense, Aunt Meg.”

“None taken, honey.”

Kacey looked at me. “Would you mind sleeping in my room again tonight? You’ve got your own twin bed. It can be practically like home.”

I glanced at Simon. “I don’t know, Kacey. Your father
asked me to keep an eye on the outside of the house for a while. I can’t exactly do that from inside your room.”

“Can’t some of your other people watch the house for a few nights?” Simon said.

“I suppose so, sure. But what about the tabloids? Don’t get me wrong, but they could have a field day with a young single woman staying overnight at your house.”

“Not if I’m here,” Meg said. “I’ll stay for a few nights until Kacey settles in. That should satisfy them.”

Even though I tossed out some quick objections, in reality I was thrilled. “It’s okay with me, if you’re all right with it, Simon.”

He shrugged. “Honestly, right now I don’t care much what they write about me. If it will help Kacey, it’s fine with me.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “Let’s see, I’ll need to run home again to get some things for the night. I can be back in an hour. Robert is out front watching the house. I’ll just ask him to stay. I’ll have my cell phone on if you need me.”

“We can put on some popcorn again.” Kacey grinned.

“Nothing I’d like better.”

As I walked to my car, I debated for about thirty seconds whether staying at Simon’s house was a wise thing to do. For the rest of the drive home, I daydreamed about the impossible:

What it would be like to stay there for a long, long time.

THE NEXT MORNING AT nine, Kacey and I sat on the love seat in the living room and watched through the bay window as Elise walked out onto the front stoop. Simon followed her on his crutches. In one hand he held a folded sheet of yellow legal paper that contained the notes he and Elise had been working on since 7:30. Reporters and camera operators packed the yard, having jockeyed since before sunup for any open spot they could find among the live oaks.

At the front of the stoop stood a loudspeaker microphone flanked by several television microphones. Elise stepped up to them. “Thank you all for coming. Reverend Mason is going to make a brief statement.
I think you can understand that he and Kacey have been through a lot. As you can see, he’s still dealing with his injuries. He will not be taking any questions.”

Simon used one crutch to pivot over to the microphones. He looked out at the crowd and gave a weak smile. “Thank you for coming today.” He unfolded the sheet of legal paper and looked at it for a few moments. Then he folded it back up and put it in the pocket of his corduroy pants. He cleared his throat and leaned toward the microphones.

“Saturday night I did something I felt I had to do to save Kacey’s life. I understand that my actions and the things that I say can influence people who look to me for leadership in issues of faith.” He leaned back on his crutch and ran his hand over his head. “I’ve never felt worthy of the attention my ministry received, but for whatever reason, God blessed me and my preaching. I’ve been able to reach many people around the world, and I hope I’ve done some good. But Saturday night I did something that I am sure caused great harm, aside from the effect it had on me.

“To save my daughter’s life, I denied my faith in Jesus. I did it with words only; I did not deny him in my heart. I would never deny him in my heart. Jesus is my Savior. He died for my sins and the sins of all of us. He rose from the dead so that we can live forever. His love conquered evil. Evil men can still cause us pain. They can still do cruel things and cause us to suffer. They cannot, however, win. Because evil has already
lost. Jesus made sure of that. Evil is doomed, in this world and in the next.

“I am sorry for what I had to say to save my daughter’s life. But I am incredibly happy to have Kacey back home and safe.” He paused and looked over at the window where Kacey and I were watching. Then he leaned into the microphone again. “Kacey is the light of my life. Jesus is the light of the world. Thank you again for coming.”

He steadied himself on his crutches, turned, and walked back into the house.

ONE THING I LEARNED from my experience with Simon is that boring is good.

After his press conference we had a brief interlude of easy, calming, boring, everyday life. During that time I learned that I love boring. In fact, I had been looking for it all of my life, I just didn’t know it. In many ways boring is what family life is all about. It’s the presence of loved ones and the absence of crisis—a real blessing, to my way of looking at things.

The day after Simon’s press conference, every news channel in America ran a clip of him leaning on his crutches and saying, “Kacey is the light of my life. Jesus is the light of the world.” Editorial pages applauded him
for his handling of the ordeal. Then, just as he predicted, within a couple of weeks the news world moved on to the next big story. Even the tabloids lost interest, running only an occasional photo of Simon walking Sadie down the street, or Kacey sipping a latte in the Starbucks near the SMU campus.

Though the Mason story faded fast from the news, it had a much longer shelf life in the entertainment industry. Because of the publicity from the kidnapping, Simon’s previously published books locked down six of the top ten spots on the
Times
nonfiction best-seller list. A handful of publishers and movie producers contacted Elise with proposals for books and movies about the kidnapping. Agents clamored to sign Simon and Kacey. The Masons would be financially sound, even if Simon never returned to preaching.

As for me, I grew comfortable in the Mason home. They kept asking me to stay longer, and I was happy to do it. Kacey and I loved being roommates. For some reason I was the only one who made her feel secure, and she seemed convinced that my life possessed an element of glamour that I, for one, had never noticed. I was concerned that she’d romanticized my self-defense capabilities to the point where she thought I was indestructible. I explained to her that if the huge man in the Hawaiian shirt hadn’t had his back turned to me, he probably would have overpowered me. I’m not sure she believed me. I’m not sure I wanted her to. It’s intoxicating to have someone look up to you. She was the closest thing to a little sister I’d ever had.

It soon became apparent that Kacey had more emotional fallout from the kidnapping than she’d initially let on. In addition to her fear of being alone, she had little appetite and was losing weight quickly. Despite her protests, Simon insisted she see a faith-based psychiatrist every week. In return for going, she extracted Simon’s promise to let her learn to shoot a gun. He assigned me to teach her.

I bought her a used Ruger Mark III, twenty-two-caliber pistol. Since she’d decided to take a leave of absence from SMU for the remainder of the semester, we had plenty of time to practice. We went to the range three times a week. She quickly demonstrated natural talent—a steady hand, a cool head, and a serious competitive streak. Even when she was just beginning, it was obvious she wanted to become good enough to beat me.

The days I spent at the Mason house were my happiest since Dad died. Having lived alone for so long, I was initially anxious that having someone around all the time would drive me crazy. What I found was the opposite. I felt I’d become part of the Mason family: Meg as the mother, Kacey as the daughter, and Simon as . . . well, his role with respect to me was less clear. I wasn’t sure whether he viewed himself as a father, a big brother, or something else.

Many evenings, while Meg was at her house and Kacey was in her room, Simon and I lounged in the family room with a Rangers baseball game unfolding on the television. I would read a magazine while he watched
the game. Sometimes he headed out to his wood shop in the corner of the garage for an hour or two. I would hear hammering or the faint buzz of an electric saw, but he always came back for the last couple of innings.

Simon liked having me around, I was certain of that. Our relationship, though, hadn’t moved beyond a certain easy comfort at being together. On many subjects we thought alike, from our contempt for tardiness to our geekish penchant for solving math problems in our heads. But each time I thought one of our talks was about to lead to something more, he pulled back. I attributed his standoffishness to his feelings for Marie, and I was jealous of her. No one can compete with a ghost. I wondered if Simon wouldn’t benefit from a few sessions with Kacey’s counselor. After all, at some point didn’t a man have to let go?

As for Elise, she had faded to the background— somewhat bitterly, as far as I could tell. To Simon’s discredit, when it came to her emotional attachment to him, he had a tin ear. It seemed inconceivable that he hadn’t recognized it, but he was, after all, a man. In my experience that meant nothing was to be assumed in the feelings department. Whether Elise blamed me for his indifference, I was never entirely clear. We didn’t spend a lot of time chatting.

After a month or so, Meg began to nudge Simon back toward his ministry, but to no avail. He shuffled around the house for days at a time, doing nothing but watching baseball and reading newspapers and magazines. Granted, in the beginning it was difficult for him
to leave the house without photographers and reporters hounding him. As time passed, though, those problems evaporated. Soon his choice to stay at home all day was just that—a choice. Meg, however, had no intention of letting her brother quit on his life. She came up with a plan for what she termed an “intervention.”

She invited an old family friend—Thomas Carston, the long-time minister at the largest Baptist church in Dallas—over for coffee to talk things out with Simon. She asked me to attend, which I thought odd. When I asked her whether my presence would be appropriate, she said Simon insisted. That set me thinking in earnest about what exactly our relationship was.

The morning of the meeting with Reverend Carston, I pulled Simon’s Bible out of the corner of Kacey’s closet. I had wedged it there the day I moved into the Mason house. It was the Bible he left on the podium at the Challenger Airlines Center. I’d fantasized that, at just the right moment, I would hand it to him and say the one thing, the right bit of wisdom, that catapulted him back into his ministry. Most of these fantasies ended with Simon pulling me toward him in gratitude for having shown him the way back, not just to his ministry, but to love and companionship and . . . what?

I wasn’t sure.

In these visions I never made it all the way into his arms. The image always blurred to nothing just at the point where our feelings for one another would have become unequivocally clear. I was content, though, with the thought that dreams of any sort are rarely perfect.
Despite the incomplete nature of mine, I filled many hours picturing that emotionally pivotal moment.

Standing in Kacey’s closet, I flipped slowly through the Bible’s pages as if I were about to say good-bye to an old friend. Though I’d never opened it to read, Simon’s Bible had kept me company by stimulating visions of a life I long ago abandoned any hope of finding—a life with a family of my own. A life that did not include the word
alone.

As I closed the Bible and turned to leave the closet, I allowed myself one final image of Simon pulling me toward him. I was so focused on my fantasy that I forgot to pay attention to what I was doing. I slammed my funny bone into the door jam. To keep from yelping, I bit my lip. The Bible slipped out of my hand and bounced off a shoebox before coming to rest on its side, propped against a teetering stack of romance novels that Kacey kept on the floor.