Shot? He tried to remember, but he could only think of the syringe shooting something into his veins.
“They gave you a very high dose of horse tranquilizer, honey. Then they tried to make it look like Zeke shot you.”
He shook his head. “No, he was dead before …”
“We know.”
He frowned and tried to lift himself, but pain stopped him. “My side hurts.”
“You were shot through your ribs and your lungs. Kent saved your life. You’ve had surgery, and the doctors say you’ll be okay.”
“Throat hurts,” he whispered. “Water.”
His mother held up his glass, and he sipped through the straw, the liquid cooling the burning in his throat. Horse tranquilizer? A gunshot? Who would believe that?
“Jordan?” he whispered.
“She’s fine too,” Emily said. “So is the baby.”
He dropped his head back down with relief. Then fear gripped him again. “Kent?”
Barbara stepped away from the bed, and he followed her with his eyes. Kent lay on a hospital bed beyond the open curtain next to him, his shoulder braced and bandaged.
“How ya doin’, buddy?” Kent asked.
Lance managed a smile. “Not so good,” he slurred.
“Tell him about it,” Emily said. “He was shot trying to save your hide.”
Lance peered at him. “You too?”
“The bullet cut through bone,” Barbara said. “Shattered his rotator cuff. He had surgery too.”
It seemed like a miracle. Someday Lance would share it all with his grandchildren, and he wouldn’t even have to embellish the story to get gasps. “Thanks, man,” he said. “I was hoping you’d come.”
Kent gave him a grin that belied the pain he must be feeling. “No problem, kiddo. Glad to do it.”
Chapter 63
The next day, Emily pushed Lance in his wheelchair to Jordan’s room, so they could support Jordan when she gave Grace to Madeline and Ben. Jordan put Grace into Madeline’s arms, and Madeline melted into tears. Ben’s face was awestruck as he cupped her little head.
Jordan couldn’t stop weeping after they left. She rebuffed their efforts to comfort her, and covering her face, she walked out into the hall.
“Come on,” Emily said, turning his chair around. “Let’s go after her.”
“No, let me,” Lance said. “I’ve got this.”
Emily stayed in the room and Lance rolled himself after Jordan, following her to the window at the far end of the corridor, where she stood looking out into the night.
He rolled up beside her, facing his reflection in the window. “You okay?” he asked her finally.
She wiped her face with the sleeve of her gown. “Yeah, I’ll be all right. I just … wish my mom wasn’t in jail. That none of this happened.”
“She’s not there because of you.”
“If I hadn’t got pregnant, if I hadn’t had a baby …”
“Then your mother and Zeke wouldn’t have been able to use you that way. But they would have found other illegal ways to get money. Neither of them wanted to hold a job, but they both wanted to do a lot of drugs. How can you miss her?”
Jordan expelled a life-weary sigh. “It’s not that I miss her. I just miss the idea of having a mother who cares what happens to me. Like, maybe if she got sober and her head cleared … she might be more like your mom.”
Lance understood. “When they shot me up with that horse tranquilizer, I felt my life slipping away, like I would just fall asleep and wake up in heaven. I saw my mom standing beside my casket, grieving again. I was sick that I hadn’t saved you. I’m glad it was a dream.”
Jordan nodded. “God listened. He sent Kent and the police to save us.”
“He did,” Lance said. “Kind of makes me want to be a better person now, you know?”
“I know.” She wiped her face and drew in a deep breath. “Sorry about the tears in there. It was just so hard.”
“We knew it would be.”
“But watching Madeline and Ben with her, I couldn’t help thinking, some day I’m gonna be a parent like that.” She lifted her chin. “I’m not just a junkie.”
“Nope, you’re not. You risked your life to save your baby. You put her first. You’re not like your mother at all.”
“She’ll be happy, won’t she? She’ll have a good home with Madeline and Ben. She’ll get to be a happy little kid. I hope she never has to hear about those traffickers — people trying to sell girls into a life of horrible things …”
“By the time she’s old enough to understand, they’ll have rounded up everybody involved. They’ve got a real good start already. Kent told me they’ve had two girls come forward with information. They’ve made several arrests.”
She smiled. “That’s good.”
Lance looked at her reflection in the glass. “So have you decided what you’re gonna do next?”
“I’m going back to New Day,” she said. “You were right that day on the street, before Zeke got us. I can choose. And I choose to get better and have a better life.”
“See? You’ve already broken the cycle. You made the right choice … did the right thing.”
She breathed out a laugh. “Who woulda thought?”
She turned back and looked up the hall. A nurse was coming out of a room wearing scrubs, a stethoscope around her neck. “I was thinking maybe I’d be a good nurse. I don’t know if they’d take me with my background, since I’d be around drugs and stuff. Maybe I could be an X-ray tech or something. Do something important that helps people.” She breathed a laugh. “I like the idea of wearing scrubs to work.”
“If you put your mind to it and get clean, you can do anything you want to do.”
“That stuff New Day told me about the damage meth does to your brain. You think I have too many holes in mine to make anything of myself?”
“Nope,” he said. “I think if there wasn’t a God, maybe that would be true. But He has a way of filling in holes, healing hurts, setting things right.”
She smiled through fresh tears. “At New Day, I learned what Jesus said. ‘He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ I think that was written for me.”
Lance smiled. “At church they used to sing this hokey song about beauty coming from ashes, and I never understood what it meant. But now I do. You may never be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon, and neither will I. But you can have a good life and be smart and raise healthy kids. You can have a husband someday who loves you.”
She met his eyes. “Somebody like you?”
“Somebody a little less stupid, hopefully.”
“You’re not stupid. You’re brave.”
He wanted to believe that. But he’d gotten into so much trouble lately. He’d been to jail, and now he could no longer say he’d never used drugs. Even though he hadn’t chosen to use, he still felt tainted, damaged. But if he believed what he’d just told Jordan, God would overcome that. Still, he didn’t like what he’d seen. Gunfire … dead bodies … his own veins being shot full of a lethal dose of drugs.
Salvation had new meaning. Jordan had risked her life to save Grace. Kent had risked his life to save Lance … just as Christ had done for all of them.
It didn’t make sense.
Yet it was true.
Chapter 64
The night Lance was released from the hospital, Barbara made a special dinner. Kent’s arm was outstretched in a brace to keep his shoulder immobile, but he tried not to complain. He wanted Lance to be the celebrated hero, the center of attention. He and Barbara laughed through the meal as they told stories of their childhood, and the kids talked about what they wanted to study in college. Lance was more certain than ever that he wanted to go into Criminal Justice and be a detective. He’d already taken a bullet, after all.
Afterward, Kent took Barbara outside, and they sat on her backyard swi
ng under a jasmine-covered arbor. She laid her head against his good shoulder as they swung, clearly allowing herself this moment of unhindered joy.
And then he ruined it. “I guess I have to go home tomorrow.”
She met his eyes. “I don’t want you to go. Why don’t you stay here and let me take care of you?”
He smiled. “That’s nice to hear. But I have bills to pay.” He kissed her, then gazed down at her. “There’s still that job opening, though.”
Barbara was silent, and his heart sank. Didn’t she want him to stay? He didn’t know how to respond to her silence, so he pulled his arm from around her shoulder.
She touched his back. “I don’t want you to give up your job and come here,” she said. “I don’t want to take you away from everything you’ve built. You have a life in Atlanta.”
“Not much of one, Barbara.”
She slipped her arm through his, laced her fingers through his fingers. “The thing is, I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s not such a good idea for us to stay here.”
He squinted, not sure where this was going. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, there are a lot of bad memories here, and a lot of triggers for Emily. Lance … I don’t know. He’s been exposed to some bad stuff. I feel like I need to get him out of here and start over clean.”
His heart locked. “Where would you go?”
A soft smile changed everything. “Emily talked about applying for school in Atlanta. So maybe we should think about going there. I have a lot of reasons.”
He looked into her smiling face and realized he was one of them. Suddenly, his throat was tight. Swallowing came hard. “I hope you can tell how crazy I am about you.”
“Really, I can’t,” she teased. “Why don’t you tell me in words?”
Tears stung his eyes. “I’m absolutely in love with you.”
“I know,” she said. “I love you too.”
“Then we can move forward with this relationship and not just try to do the long-distance thing?”
“I hope so,” she said. “If I were to move to Atlanta, get a house there, get Lance into school and Emily into college, maybe I’d have more opportunity to get back into the interior design business. It’s a bigger city with more opportunity. You and I could date … see how it goes.”
“We know how it’ll go,” he said.
“Then let’s let it go that way. We’ll take a little time to see if you can stand having me around more often.”
“And you can see if you can tolerate me. Especially as I heal. I can be pretty grumpy.”
She shook her head. “I know how I’ll feel about that. Having you around is always a joy. I’ve never felt so safe or so loved.”
“Yet every time I’m around, you or your kids are in mortal danger.”
She laughed. “Does seem that way. But it’s not because of you.”
He sat back, pulled her against him, and kissed the top of her head. “Lance isn’t gonna like it,” he said.
She shook her head. “No, he won’t be happy about moving away from his friends. But he’ll be happy about being around you more. He needs a man in his life, and you’re his hero.”
“Then you’ll call the realtor tomorrow?”
She laughed. “I called her today.”
A Note from the Author
If you’ve read many of my books, you know some of the life issues I struggle with on a regular basis. There are times when I feel life coming at me in unwarranted and inexplicable ways, offering crises where my best-laid plans had promised only peace. As a Christian, I often try to make sense of those times, searching for God’s purpose among the fallout of my shattered plans, struggling to understand how God will use this one day.
As part of my never-ending quest to find those answers, I take Bible courses to help me better understand the nature of my Creator, and His interest in my life. But sometimes the more I learn about Him, the farther away He seems, and the smaller and less significant I feel. However, in a recent lesson about the dimensions in which God lives, as opposed to the dimensions I live in (width, height, depth), I began to understand that God isn’t bound by those dimensions or by time or by gravity. He lives in many more dimensions—some which my mind can’t even comprehend. He can go through walls and fly across the universe; he can hear everyone’s thoughts at once; He can know us before we’re even knit inside our mother’s womb. He is the One who builds and breaks down nations across the world, rescues desperate and war-torn refugees, makes the sun come up each day, and keeps our feet on earth’s ground by maintaining the perfect gravitational force to keep us from hurling into outer space … and still He cares about the prayers of a child in his bed.
God is not bound by time or space, as I am, so my thinking about God’s dimensions is limited by my own experience. He can be everywhere at once and attend to billions of problems at once. He can be touching me and also touching you. He can be so close that His breath is sweeping my skin, yet He can be that close to you as well, even if you’re across the world from me. He can hear all my prayers and not just give me what I ask for, but thankfully, He can assess what’s best for me given His purpose for my life and the desires of my heart.
I find this comforting, especially when I pray for things and can’t see immediate answers. If I think of my life in human terms, as a parade, for instance, and God hovering over it in a helicopter, able to touch down at the beginning and the end and any point in between—seeing the end from the beginning, and the beginning from the end, and the end from the middle, then I can trust that all my prayers have been answered at some point in that timeline. My frustration at what I see as unanswered prayer is unwarranted, because He has already sent those answers even though I may not have caught up to them yet. Daniel prayed for Israel and his prayer was answered immediately, but it took three weeks before the angel came to tell him.
No one living in America can deny that our culture has changed. The drug culture alone is killing our kids. In times like these, it’s easy to throw up our hands and declare that there must not be a God, that if there were, why would He allow people to suffer this way? Why would He allow children to be born into dysfunctional and dangerous homes? Why would He allow substances on earth that destroy us? Why would He allow such evil to hold us in bondage?
But if you see this life as a training ground for a greater purpose that has everything to do with eternity, and if you see that Jesus came to offer us an escape from the hell that was calling to us and threatening to swallow us whole, by taking the consequences of our dysfunctional, dangerous choices (which he calls sin), and enduring our punishment so that we could emerge whole and flawless, then you’ll see how everything has meaning. Everything has a purpose. You are an important part of God’s plan, and you have a purpose in His eternity. If you understand and accept that Jesus Christ took away your sin by taking it on Himself, then you too will someday live in a sinless heaven of miraculous, immeasurable dimensions—where human limitations are taken away, and nothing inhibits us from living up to our eternal purpose.
Just imagine …
Thinking that way makes my parade a lot more joyful, even when I’m at a place on the timeline where things aren’t going like I’d hoped. This place in time is not all there is to my life … or to yours.
There’s so much more.
Terri Blackstock
For more information about this concept of God’s dimensionality, read “The Extra Dimensional Nature of God” at http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/xdimgod.html. (I haven’t read everything at this site so I can’t vouch for it, but I agree with this article.)
Books by Terri Blackstock
Predator
Double Minds
Soul Restoration
Emerald Windows
Intervention Series
1 | Intervention
2 | Vicious Cycle
A Restoration Novel Series
1 | Last Light
2 | Night Light
/> 3 | True Light
4 | Dawn’s Light
Cape Refuge Series
1 | Cape Refuge
2 | Southern Storm
3 | River’s Edge
4 | Breaker’s Reef
Newpointe 911
1 | Private Justice
2 | Shadow of Doubt
3 | Word of Honor
4 | Trial by Fire
5 | Line of Duty
Sun Coast Chronicles
1 | Evidence of Mercy
2 | Justifiable Means
3 | Ulterior Motives
4 | Presumption of Guilt
Second Chances
1 | Never Again Good-bye
2 | When Dreams Cross
3 | Blind Trust
4 | Broken Wings
With Beverly LaHaye
1 | Seasons Under Heaven
2 | Showers in Season
3 | Times and Seasons
4 | Season of Blessing
Novellas
Seaside
Other Books
Miracles (The Listener/The Gifted)
The Heart Reader of Franklin High
The Gifted Sophomores Covenant Child
Sweet Delights
ZONDERVAN
Vicious Cycle
Copyright © 2011 by Terri Blackstock
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EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-310-28920-3
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