Chapter 8: Friday Afternoon

Hey, Doctor K. You know how I’ve told you I’m learning high school math out of a book? Well, I’m learning how to solve all sorts of weird problems with algebra. It’s really exciting. A typical problem goes something like this: A girl starts running at a speed of 21 feet per second. Two seconds later her older brother who is twice her size and about one and a half times her age starts chasing her at a speed of 27 feet per second. How long does the girl run before she gets caught? The way you solve this is to make x the unknown quantity. In this case, the unknown quantity is the number of seconds from when the girl starts running until the brother catches up with the girl. You put together an equation with x in it and use the speeds of the girl and her brother and a couple of steps later you get an answer.

I love how simple the whole thing is. It doesn’t matter what numbers you start with. You simply go through the same few steps and you get an answer every time. It’s like baking a cake. You finish up with something totally different from the ingredients you started with but you can be confident that, if you follow the right steps, you’ll get there every time. I love how reliable it is. It makes me feel – I don’t know – comfortable – because it shows that the world makes sense. Do you understand?

In this case, the answer turns out to be nine seconds.

Nine seconds!

If I ever really run away from home, I hope I have a plan that would give me more than nine seconds of freedom. I guess when I ran away from Dad I didn’t really have a plan. I panicked, I reacted, I ran. I was wearing a dress and boots with heels – not exactly the best outfit to wear if you want to run anywhere. I figure Dan would have taken less than two seconds to react and start chasing me. He should have caught up with me in nine seconds.

He didn’t.

See, the algebra equations don’t take into account the possibility that the older brother might realize that I had nowhere to go so he and Dad decide to stroll after me at a casual walking pace of – I don’t know – maybe 5 feet per second. If you do the math with those numbers then the answer would be never. They would never catch up with me. But that is based on the idea that I keep running at the same speed for ever. The truth is I would get tired and slow down and eventually stop. I’m sure there are algebra equations you can use to find out the answer for when the speeds keep changing. I think I’ve seen Dan doing stuff like that but I haven’t learned how to do it yet.

Another down side of panicking and running away is that I didn’t actually think about where I was running to. I was in a strange suburb and I hadn’t been paying much attention as we drove in so I knew practically nothing about the area. I knew about Faith’s house but that was locked when we all walked out the door. And I knew there was a church down the street and around the corner. And I knew that was where the girls had gone.

Some part of my brain must have been aware of all that because when I ran away from Dad, my brain chose to run in that direction. I didn’t stop running until I got to the door of the church. I’m pretty sure it took more than nine seconds to get there and the fact that nobody had caught up with me by then was my first clue that nobody was chasing me. It was the first clue I noticed, anyway.

The church was all modern lines and angles – concrete blocks and steel and glass. The front doors were glass with a little dove painted in the middle. I opened them and found myself in a foyer facing a table with a vase of flowers and a scattering of pamphlets about youth groups and counseling services and Bible study groups and so on. To my left was a door leading into a hall with a small stage and a scattering of play equipment and toys that suggested the hall doubled as a child-care center – or maybe the children played in there while their parents attended church. On my right, more glass doors opened into the main part of the church with long padded bench seats and an altar in the front. A large plain cross hung on the wall above the altar.

I slipped quietly through the door and slid onto one of the bench seats near the door. I looked around while I tried to regain my breath. The girls must have arrived only moments before me. They had stopped beside a short column supporting a large arrangement of flowers. A board fastened to the wall out the front announced that today’s reading came from Matt 19 v13-15.

On the other side of the altar, a large sheet of white paper was attached to the wall with strips of tape. It had “Jesus Loves Me” written in the middle with a big red marker. The remaining space on the paper was filled with a large number of children’s drawings in bright colors. I had to tip my head first to one side and then to the other to look at the pictures because they were all drawn facing in towards the middle of the page. I had a mental image of the paper being laid out on the floor of the hall behind me. The children would’ve been lying around it on their stomachs, packed together in a row like sardines in a tin – except the row circled the paper with their heads pointing in. On the outside their feet would’ve been waving in the air like a ring of Nike shrubs laden with small but ripened fruit.

Faith came over to me with a single yellow calla lily in her hand – I think it had fallen out of the large arrangement the girls had been admiring.

“I thought you were going to talk to your father,” she said.

I shrugged.

“Well, do you want to join us in front? Danielle wants to do her thing. Or you can sit where you are for a bit if you’d prefer.”

“Is it okay if I sit here?”

“That’s fine. A church is a good place to be if you want to sit and be quiet for a time.”

She gave me a warm and friendly smile and held out the lily.

“Here, this is for you. Consider the lilies of the field and all that.”

I took the lily from her and smiled at her in thanks. I sniffed at the lily as she walked back to the others. The scent was faint but distinctive.

There was a footstep beside me. I turned and watched as Dad moved between the seats and sat beside me with a sigh. Some bumping from my other side told me that Dan was making his way in to sit beside me as well. They had me trapped between them. I guess I deserved that after running away like I did. I glanced at Dan and then went back to looking at Dad. He was sitting silently and looking toward the front of the church.

Dan’s arms wrapped around me and his lips brushed against my cheek.

“Are you okay?” he whispered in my ear.

I shrugged.

“In the olden days, a church was a sanctuary,” I said quietly. “People could go into a church and nobody was allowed to chase them in there – not the police, not the army, nobody.”

“Are you claiming sanctuary?” asked Dan quietly.

“Do I need to?” I asked Dad.

Dad didn’t respond. He sat silently next to me and kept looking toward the front of the church.

“Promise me, Princess,” whispered Dan. “Promise me you’ll talk to Dad. No more running away.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes. Like I had a choice – about running away I mean.

There was silence for a moment.

“Maybe I should leave you two here to talk,” said Dan in a slightly louder voice.

“I’ll be down the front with my friends.”

Dan glared at me and then he glared at Dad.

“Talk!” he said. I’m not sure which of us Dan was speaking to.

Dan stood up and made his way out from between the seats and down to the front of the church. He greeted Pearl with a hug and a quick kiss and stood talking with the group. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but their voices came to me as a continuous murmuring that seemed to drop from the ceiling like the voices of angels sitting up there in heaven.

Dad didn’t react to Dan leaving. Neither did I. We both stayed sitting side-by-side and looking towards the front.

After a moment of sitting quietly, Dad shifted and glanced at me. Then he went back to looking forward.

“I stopped outside and wondered if I should come in,” he said in a quiet voice. “I haven’t been inside a church since I was a child. I decided way back then that I never wanted anything to do with churches again in my life and I’ve stuck to that up until this moment. I was about to send Dan in to bring you out so we could talk. Then I said to myself, Peter, this is silly. What’s more important? Sticking to a personal rule you made up when you were a child or sorting out what’s bothering your daughter. When I thought about it like that the answer became obvious. And look! It’s just a large room with four walls and a ceiling like any other room. I don’t know why I was being so stubborn. So here I am, ready to sort things out.”

I looked at the large wooden cross on the wall in front of me. The same wooden cross that Dad was looking at while he talked. Yeah, right! Four walls and a ceiling – exactly like any other room – and Buckingham Palace is a big house just like any other big house.

And Dad was being stubborn because he is stubborn. It’s one of his best features – except it’s annoying, sometimes.

I looked down at my hands where they rested in my lap. They both wrapped loosely around the lily Faith had given me. I rolled the stem between my fingers, feeling the texture of the stem. I watched as the flower turned – admiring the way the different curves were revealed and then hidden by the turning movement.

“I really am sorry,” I whispered.

There was a moment of silence.

“Well, I’m really sorry too,” replied Dad. Then he hesitated.

“But if we’re going to play the sorry game then we should play by the rules. You can’t just say sorry – you have to say why you’re sorry.”

He paused for a moment and looked up at the ceiling. Then he twisted in the seat and lifted one knee up so that he was sitting sideways and looking straight at me.

“I suppose I should start. I’m sorry that I let things get to the point where you were so afraid that you needed to run away from me.”

I opened my mouth ready to answer but then I closed it again. I thought for a moment and tried again. I didn’t turn and look at him. I kept facing the front. I could see him out of the corner of my eye but I didn’t look at him.

“I didn’t run away because I was afraid of you or anything. I ran away because I hurt you.”

Again, there was a moment of silence. Silence between us, I mean. Those angels still murmured up there in heaven.

“It hurt when you ran away from me like that. How else have you hurt me?”

“You know.”

“You have to say it. That’s the rule.”

I rolled my eyes. I think Dad was making up the rules as he went along.

“I hurt you last night.”

Saying it forced a tear out of my eye. It dribbled slowly down my cheek until I brushed it away with a knuckle.

Dad sighed and glanced down and then back up again.

“Last night you helped me face up to something I’ve been avoiding for a long time. You showed me that I was wrong about a number of things. That wasn’t a nice thing to go through at the time but in the end you gave me a priceless gift. You showed me that I could hug my little angel and have it mean nothing more than how much I love her. You don’t have to apologize for that.”

I still couldn’t look at Dad. Dan and the girls had walked to the front of the church and now stood in a small group in front of the altar.

“But that wasn’t the end,” I said to Dad in my quiet little voice. “It wasn’t over when you hugged Angie.”

I looked down at the lily and rolled it back and forwards a couple of times.

“Because of what I did you had nightmares last night. You were screaming and yelling. Then you couldn’t let anyone touch you – not even Mum.”

I had to stop and swallow a lump that had gotten stuck in my throat.

“I saw you. It really scared me. And it was all my fault. I’m sorry I did that to you.”

The last part came out as barely more than a whisper.

“Ah!” said Dad. “I thought you slept through that. I didn’t know...”

His voice trailed off into nothing.

Down front, Dan and the girls were holding hands in a little circle. Danielle was saying something. I couldn’t make out the words but I knew what she intended to say. She was thanking God for giving her friends who support her and love her and accept her as she is. I’m fairly sure she wasn’t thanking God for her own family. Why do families have to be so complicated?

“Honey, look at me,” said Dad.

He grasped my wrists in his two big hands and tugged gently until I turned to face him. My hands still clutched the lily that Faith had given to me. I looked down at the lonely yellow flower and wondered why it was shaking.

“Honey, look at me.”

Dad used a single finger to lift my chin up until I was looking into his eyes. It was exactly the same move Dan has used on me so often. I wondered if Dad had learned it from Dan or if Dan had learned it from Dad.

“I’ve been having nightmares on and off for my entire life. You didn’t cause them. They are not your fault.”

He stopped and looked deeply into my eyes.

“Bec, I want you to say, Your nightmares are not my fault!“

I stared back at him.

“But last night’s one was. Last night’s was because of what I did to you.”

He sighed and then shrugged. “It was a small price to pay. Do you know that this morning your mother made me pick up Angie and give her another hug? And I did it. Just like that. To feel her little arms around my neck – I’d put up with a hundred nightmares to feel that. You aren’t responsible for my nightmares.”

He stopped and sighed. He looked over my shoulder into the distance. I don’t think he was looking at anything – just away.

“You know why I have them. You know more than I would prefer about why I have them. You’re too young to be knowing about such things.”

He stopped and looked down. Dad was holding my wrists and now he lifted them so that the lily I held came up to his face. He sniffed and then sniffed again.

“Does this have any scent at all? Are you sure it isn’t plastic?”

I gave him a little half-smile. “It’s real. The scent is faint but it’s there.”

He sniffed again and shrugged. “All I can smell is strawberries and I’m fairly sure that isn’t right.” He sniffed at my hands. “Have you been eating strawberries?”

“I ... I kind of had a shower at Faith’s place and she had a strawberry-scented body wash – I think.”

The corners of Dad’s mouth lifted in a tiny smile. “I’ve been living with women for my entire life and I still don’t understand the fascination with bathing in fruit salad.”

I rolled my eyes. “You like us to smell nice, don’t you?”

He grinned at me and tilted his head slightly to one side.

“You still haven’t said it.”

“Said what?”

“I want you to say, Your nightmares are not my fault! I’m not going to let you off the hook.”

“You’re the one who changed the subject.”

“Say it.”

I sighed and said the words. And as I said them something clicked inside my head and I understood them. My entire melt-down last night had been because I had assumed Dad would blame me for the nightmare. How crushingly stupid. I’m usually so good at understanding other people. Why do I always get it so wrong when it’s about me? I hate being so stupid.

I sighed and said the words again.

“Your nightmares are not my fault.”

This time I meant them.

Dad nodded and thought for a moment. Then he nodded again.

“Is that why you ran away last night?” asked Dad. “When you saw me having the nightmare, did you panic and run away?”

“No! I don’t know. Maybe!”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t really run away. I was dreaming. I thought I was dreaming. Maybe I did. I don’t know.”

“It really frightened us – that you did that. Anything could have happened to you. We’re so lucky that...”

He trailed off into silence.

I hung my head. “I know,” I said to my lap.

He lifted my head up again.

“I’m trying to decide if it’s likely to happen again.”

“I hope not.”

“So do I.”

“Maybe you should lock me in at night. Put a lock on the door or whatever.”

“We can’t do that. What if there were a fire?”

I sighed. I didn’t have any answers. Not any good answers, anyway. But Dad seemed to want something from me.

“I’ll try not to do it again. I didn’t like it very much – waking up in the middle of the street and having no idea where I was. It wasn’t much fun. I don’t want to do that again.”

He looked at me for a moment.

“I suppose that’s the best I can ask for.”

I nodded and looked away.

Faith and Danielle were walking with linked arms up the aisle towards where we sat. Dan and Pearl followed with their arms around each other. All four of them had relaxed and easy smiles.

“How’s it going, Mr Freeman?” asked Faith.

Dad smiled and nodded in response but didn’t say anything.

“We’re done here so we’re heading back to my house,” said Faith. “You’re welcome to stay here for as long as you need. I’ll leave the door locked from the outside so all you have to do is pull it closed. We’d love you to join us for coffee or something back at my house.”

Dad glanced at me and then back to Faith.

“I think we’re done here, ourselves.”

Dad stood and held out a hand for me. I put my hand into his and he helped me stand up. I kept my hand in his as together we filed out from the seat and joined the others.

We walked as a group towards the door but then Dad stopped.

“Actually, is it okay if I stop in here for a moment?” asked Dad.

“Sure, Mr Freeman. Like I said, pull the door shut when you finish.”

Dad turned to me.

“Bec, will you go with Dan? I’ll join you in a moment and then we can get you home to your mother.”

I nodded at Dad and let go of his hand.

As I was about to follow the others out the door I stopped and looked back at Dad. He was standing where we had left him. He was staring at the cross with his hands on his hips. I gestured to Dan to indicate that he should go with the others and I would stay with Dad. He scowled at me but I flicked my fingers at him to tell him to leave. He shook his head at me but he left.