“It was a calendar that the Chamber of Commerce in Houston put together—Houston’s eligible bachelors. I was August. For a couple of years, people recognized me wherever I went. I had women lined up. I even got fan mail.”
She wasn’t impressed. “And are you better for the experience?”
He thought for a moment. “All I know is I didn’t have a scar down my face, and my baby blues were intact. Small things, I know, but they meant a lot to me.”
The catch in his voice reminded her how hypercritical it was for her to pass judgment on his vanity, when she had lost so little in comparison. “They’re not small things, Jake,” she whispered. “It’s got to be a trauma. But you know, don’t you, that no matter what your face looks like under that bandage, they can do plastic surgery? They’re doing great things now. And artificial eyes look real.”
“Yeah,” he whispered without conviction. “I keep telling myself that.”
She was about to name all the celebrities she knew who’d had false eyes when the door opened, cutting off her thoughts.
“Good morning, Jake,” the doctor said, coming into the room followed by an entourage of others. “Are you ready to get that bandage off?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Great.” The doctor was too cheerful, and Lynda wished he would make this a little easier, acknowledge Jake’s suffering, offer him reassurances. As the doctor approached, she started to step away from the bed, but Jake caught her hand.
“No. Stay here.”
“Okay,” she said.
The doctor sat on the edge of the bed and got the scissors out of his pocket. “Jake, I’d like you to meet Dan Cirillo. He’s the one who’s going to be making your eye.”
Jake shook his hand.
“Have they explained to you that you shouldn’t be shocked when you see your eye, Jake?” Dan asked.
“Yeah, they warned me.”
“It’s not going to be pretty, but we’ll put a patch over it until we can put a prosthesis in. After that, you’ll be almost as good as new.”
“Unless TSA has changed its policy about pilots having vision in both eyes, I won’t be good as new.” Turning back to the doctor, he said, “Let’s get this over with.”
Lynda held her breath as the doctor began to work the tape off Jake’s face. She felt his hand tightening, and she squeezed back, wishing there were more she could do.
The doctor got the tape off and slowly began to peel the gauze away from Jake’s face.
She saw the gash down his eyebrow, the black, blood-caked stitches that had been cleaned and sterilized with yellow iodine whenever the bandage had been changed. Now it was clear just how deep the gash on his face had been, deep enough to require several layers of stitches, and deep enough to destroy his eye.
“Yes, that’s healing nicely,” the doctor said in a pleasant voice as he worked the bandage further down. “When I saw that gash originally, I didn’t know how well we’d be able to repair it. But this looks very nice.”
But Lynda knew Jake’s heart was going to be broken. The doctor uncovered his damaged eye, and she saw the small scar down the center of his eyelid, where it had been severed.
“Can you open that eye now, Jake?”
Jake opened it slowly, and it came only halfway up. In the socket was a pinkish-clear implant that looked nothing like an eye.
Perspiration beaded on her temples, and she tried to fight the tears threatening her. She couldn’t cry. Whatever she did, she had to be positive. She had to smile.
The rest of the bandage peeled down easily, and finally, the doctor rolled it up and handed it to a nurse. Then, leaning in, he examined the gash. “Let me take these stitches out before I let you have a look,” he said, reaching for another pair of scissors the nurse handed him. As he snipped, he kept talking. “The healing looks good, Jake. If you opt for plastic surgery later on, after it all heals, you can do a lot to get rid of this scar. For now, though, it looks like you lost a bad fight.”
He finished snipping the stitches, pulled them out, and then cleaned the scar. “What do you think, guys?” the doctor asked. “Better than we expected?”
The others in the room concurred with scripted enthusiasm, but Lynda was silent.
The doctor got up, and Dan took his place to examine the eyelid.
Jake’s hand still clung to hers.
“Most of this swelling should be gone in a couple of weeks, Jake. When that happens, you can come by my office, and we’ll make you a new eye.”
Jake looked up at him. “Come by your office? Will I be out by then?”
“Oh, you’ll be going home in a few days, Jake,” the doctor said as he made a notation on his chart. “You’re doing fine. You’re sitting up now, so there’s no reason we should keep you here. You’ll have to come back every day for therapy, of course, but there’s no reason you have to stay here.”
Ambivalence was written all over Jake’s face. “Doc, I can hardly get around in that chair. Do you really think I’m capable of going home and taking care of myself?”
“Dr. Randall seems to think so, and he’s ordered Allie to start concentrating on that a lot in the next few days,” he said. “And we certainly don’t mean to send you home alone. You’ll need someone with you at first, to help you, and of course, you can’t drive yourself back and forth to the hospital for therapy.”
Lynda saw the emotional struggle on his face.
“So this is it?” Jake said. “You’re accepting that I am like I am for good? You’re not going to give me any more hope of getting better—or any more help?”
“There’s plenty of hope, Jake, and we’ll be helping you every day. We haven’t given up on you.”
She saw how desperately he struggled not to let go of his tenuous emotions, and finally, he looked up at Dan again. “So is this eye gonna wander all over the place? Are people going to know which eye not to look at when they talk to me?”
“It shouldn’t,” he said. “Artificial eyes have come a long way, Jake. They tend to move pretty well, especially if the initial surgery is done right. It looks like this was.”
“Pretty well?”
“They satisfy most people who have them,” he said. “But there are some methods to get more precise movement with the other eye. Most people don’t think they need them after they see how well the eye moves, but for people who are on television, or say, models, we might go that extra mile and install a peg in the back of the eye that helps kick it around. Either way, the eye is going to be very similar to your other one. Most people won’t realize you have a prosthesis.”
Jake wasn’t buying any of it, and Lynda had to admit that she wasn’t either.
“So—are you ready to see?” the doctor asked.
Jake let go of her hand and took the mirror the doctor offered him. Slowly, he brought it to his face.
For a moment, he showed no expression as he saw the scar cutting down his face, the still-swollen socket where his eye used to be, the red conformer in the place of his eyeball, the black-and-blue bruising covering his forehead and most of his cheek.
“Not bad, huh?” the doctor asked.
Jake couldn’t speak.
“It’s not finished, Jake,” Lynda whispered. “You have to give it time.”
She saw the tear forming in his swollen eye, and felt some relief that he could still make tears. His face began to redden, and she realized that he was about to break down. She turned back to the doctor and the others. “Can you give him a little time alone?”
“Sure,” the doctor said, patting his leg. “Jake, you give us a call if you have any problems. Lynda, here’s the eye patch. It’s easy to put on. Ring for a nurse if you have any problems with it.”
Jake stayed silent as they left and kept staring blankly into the mirror.
“Do you want me to go, too, Jake?”
He didn’t answer her, but his face grew redder, and he began to tremble.
“Jake?”
His face twisted, and his knuckles turned white as he gripped the mirror’s handle. Suddenly, he hurled it across the room. It crashed against the wall.
“Stop it, Jake!” Lynda shouted.
But he didn’t stop, and when he reached out and turned over the table beside his bed sending a cup of water, a plastic pitcher, a box of tissues, and the telephone crashing onto the floor, she covered her ears. “Jake, I know you’re upset, but—”
His face still raging red, he scooted to the side of his bed, pushed his legs off, and acted as though he would stand on them and walk out on sheer anger.
“Jake, stop it!” she said, trying to hold him back, but he shook her away. “You know you can’t do that! Jake, you’ll fall!”
Gritting his teeth, he tried with all his might to stand on his feet, but they only hung there limply, brushing the floor without life.
The rolling tray of food sat next to his bed, and he swung his arm and sent it toppling over, too, his breakfast spilling onto the floor with a crash that reverberated throughout the room. Righting it, Lynda began to cry. Finally, she swung around to him, her hands in fists at her side. “Who cares about your stupid face!” she screamed.
He froze then and brought his tormented gaze up to her, staring at her with greater, deeper pain than she’d ever seen in anyone. Catching her breath, she cried, “It’s not what matters, Jake! There’s so much more to you!”
“That’s easy for you to say,” he said through his teeth. “Your face was only bruised!”
“And yours has a scar! It’s not the end of the world, Jake! Your face has nothing to do with who you are!”
“Get out of my room,” he said, trying to pull his legs back up. She reached over to help him, but he pushed her away again. “Just get out!”
Muffling her sobs, she ran from the room, not knowing what to do, where to go, how to help. For now, any help she offered was futile. Jake was hitting bottom, and there was nothing she could do to pull him back up. Not now. Not yet.
Instead of going home, Lynda found refuge in the prayer room and prayed that Jake’s heart, so freshly broken, would start to seek God’s face, instead of his own.
Jake couldn’t remember weeping as hard as he wept that day. Now he knew the meaning of “gnashing of teeth.” His teeth were gnashing, his heart was bleeding, and he didn’t know where to turn.
No one could comfort him. No one. He would never be comforted again.
He wept over his distorted face and the legs that refused to move and his life that had been so prosperous and busy and content before. He wept over his loneliness, his isolation, despite how self-inflicted it was. And he wept over having no place to go even though he would be released in a few days. Where would he go when he couldn’t even walk, and his face might frighten strangers? Was there a halfway house for maimed invalids?
Not for the first time he wished he’d died in the crash.
Jake Stevens, who always had so much control over his life, who was unfettered and uncommitted, who had all the money he needed, and who won friends and influenced women wherever he went, was now broken, alone, and homeless.
And there was no hope.
From the depths of his despair, from some place he didn’t know existed inside of him, he cried out to God in fury. I don’t even know if you’re up there, God, but I need a miracle.
Did God hear him? He didn’t know. But in that faithless moment of brokenness when he’d been sure that he was talking to thin air, he decided to believe that God had indeed heard him. He had no other choice.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
* * *
Jake wore the patch the next day, even though he was despondent and still refused to eat. He put forth little effort in therapy. He had determined that he was going to die even if it took every ounce of the strength he had remaining. Nothing mattered any more.
When Lynda knocked on his door, he was surprised. After yesterday, he had expected never to see her again. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
She stayed in the doorway, leaning against the wall. “I wanted to see how you are. I worried about you all night.”
“I’m still here,” he said. He swallowed and struggled with the apology on the tip of his tongue. “I figured I scared you off yesterday. Thought you wouldn’t come back.”
She started slowly toward him. “I never even considered staying away,” she said. “You’re not going to run me off just because you have a bad day.”
“All my days are bad,” he said.
She came to his bedside where he was sitting up. “You know, the way you reacted yesterday wasn’t surprising. I might have done the same thing.”
“Would you?” he asked sarcastically but without much fervor. “I would have thought you’d take it real philosophically. It’s just a face, they’re just legs, it was just my life.”
“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t have felt that way at all. I’d be as mad as you were. I might not have the strength you had to throw things and knock things over, but I’d have been just as mad. You know, for somebody who has to stay in one spot, you sure did a lot of damage.”
“Yeah,” he said without humor. “Funny how much strength you can come up with when you don’t care anymore.”
“You do care, Jake. You know you do.”
He fixed his sight on the ceiling. “Nope. That’s where you’re wrong.”
Crossing her arms as if warding off his chill, she got up and stepped closer to the bed. “Well, anyway—I kind of like that patch. It gives you an air of mystery.”
He kept staring at the ceiling. A tear fell to his cheek and rolled to his chin. “I’m gonna give little kids nightmares and old ladies heart attacks everywhere I go.”
“No, you’re not, Jake. They’ll be fascinated, especially when you tell them the scar is the result of a plane crash.”
He met her eyes directly for the first time that day. “Do you think the artificial eye is going to look just like mine?”
“I think so, Jake. They said it would.”
“How can it?” he asked helplessly.
“I don’t know how, but it can. Trust them.”
He wiped the tear off his face and looked at the ceiling again. “I wonder if this is as good as it gets.”
“Of course not. There are still several layers of stitches in there. There’s a lot of swelling.” She reached out and touched his injured cheek with her fingertips. “It’ll go down,” she whispered. “When these bruises clear, you’ll see.”
He took in a deep breath and caught her hand in his fist. Another tear dropped out, and he whispered, “No one back home would even recognize me. Not even my mother.”
Lynda was confused. “Didn’t you say your parents had both died?”
He let go of her hand then and covered his face, and a sob overtook him, then another, and another, until he wilted against her.
She sat next to him on the bed and held him, and she felt his arms closing around her, felt the despair, the loneliness, and the regrets wash out of him as he wept.
“I have a mother,” he whispered. “I lie about her. But I have one.”
“Jake, why haven’t you told me? She should be here. I would have called her.”
“She wouldn’t have come,” he said with certainty. “There’s a lot of bad blood between us. She hates me.”
“She can’t hate you,” Lynda said. “Mothers don’t hate their sons.”
“They do when their sons go years without seeing them, pretend they don’t exist, and are too stingy to give a dime to help them out.” He caught another sob, and his body shook with the force of it.
She pulled back to search his face. “But, Jake . . .”
“I’m being punished,” he said, pointing to his injured face. “That’s what all this is about. Before the crash, there was a lot of ugliness inside of me. Now I’m wearing it on the outside, too.”
Lynda just held him tighter.
“I’ll call your mother for you, Jake,”
she offered softly. “I’ll talk to her. Does she know you’re here?”
He shook his head. “She doesn’t know anything about the crash. As far as she knows, I’m still living high, looking good, and trying to forget where I came from.”
Someday she wanted to know just where that was, where Jake Stevens came from, but for now she was more concerned with where he was right now.
“Don’t call her,” he said. “I’ve got enough scars to last me a lifetime. I don’t need any more.”
“You need your mother, Jake. I’d give anything if mine were still alive and could be here with me one more time. There’s so much I’d say to her.”
“She won’t come, Lynda.”
“She needs to have the chance to decide that for herself.”
“Fine, then,” he said. “Call her. You’ll see. She’s the only Doris Stevens in Slapout, Texas. Just don’t get your hopes up. Her tongue can slice right through you.”
“I’ve survived worse,” she whispered. “And so have you.”
He crumpled in tears again and breathing a deep sob, shook his head viciously. “No, I haven’t. I haven’t survived. Not at all.”
And as they clung to each other, Lynda searched for a way to make Jake see that it wasn’t the end, it wasn’t the worst, and he wasn’t alone.
She would be here for him no matter how bad things got because in a strange way that she wasn’t able to understand just yet, his despair had become her own. And she was determined to find a way to change it into joy.
May I speak to Doris Stevens?”
The woman who had answered the phone didn’t respond but just put the phone down, and Lynda hoped that she had gone to get Jake’s mother. It hadn’t been easy to track her down. First Lynda had called information, only to find that they didn’t have a listing for Doris Stevens, so she had tried the Slapout post office. The postal clerk knew Doris and had explained that she was listed in the phone book under her initials, H. D. Stevens. Graciously, she gave Lynda the number then told her to try Grady’s Truck Stop if she wasn’t home. That was where Doris worked, she said.
Now she waited, listening to the noise of the crowd in the background, and hoping that Doris would be able to hear her. She had practiced all the way home from the hospital what she would say, but now that the moment had come, she had forgotten all of it.