“What did you wish for, Alex?” Carla asked.
“I’m not sayin’, Aunt Carla!” he answered, grabbing a party favor and blowing into it, uncoiling it’s snake-like paper tongue rapidly into the side of Charlie’s head. “I’m not ’posed to say, right?”
“That’s right, Alex!” Ian said, drawing a broader smile from Carla. “Don’t tell her.”
“Alex probably doesn’t want to open his presents while we eat cake,” Brooke teased.
“Yeah, I do, Mom!”
“You sure?” Brooke asked.
“And Charlie is gonna help me open them, huh, Charlie?” he said, turning to Charlie just in time to see Charlie’s cheeks puff on his own party favor and launch his retaliatory strike-off of Alex’s small chin.
“Get him, Charlie!” Brooke yelled.
Alex squealed and took off running, Charlie lumbering behind. As Brooke sliced the birthday cake, Pastor Jim came up beside Zach. “There’s something here you should see.” He handed him a folded newspaper, the morning’s Carlson Herald.
Zach lifted a brow and took the paper from the pastor, wondering if the media had finally heard about Alex. He probably wants me to be ready, Zach thought. He could see the future frenzy of reporters in his mind, gathering in front of the hospital or this little house at St. Thomas. What will Macey say? What will I say? How did one explain it, other than as a miracle?
That’s all I’ll say, he decided. God did what we could not.
Zach excused himself for a moment and stepped quietly back into the living room. He unfolded the paper and his eyes widened, immediately recognizing the battered Ford F-150. He quickly read the article under the photograph.
Driver Missing from Train Crash
CARLSON—Investigators are looking for the driver of a vehicle that was struck by a northbound train early Friday morning.
Carlson police said the crash was the first in over forty years at the Old Gibraltar Road central crossing, despite the site’s not having crossing gates to protect drivers.
Police said, “Early indications lead us to believe that a collision occurred shortly after 3:00 a.m. with an unregistered 1996 Ford F-150 that was heading east toward Gibraltar. It is believed, at this stage, the truck was forced some 220 feet north into the old McLouth Steel property. The locomotive engineer has confirmed the truck was moving across the tracks prior to impact, leaving us to believe it was occupied. We are extremely concerned for the welfare of the individual operating that vehicle.”
Anyone who may have information regarding this crash is being asked to notify the Carlson Police Department.
Detroit-Access Rail was not available for comment.
There were no other witnesses.
“No other witnesses,” Zach whispered. “We’ll see about that.”
His eyes climbed up the page to the photo of the mangled F-150 lying next to a telephone pole in a dark ditch off of Old Gibraltar Road. Behind it, two train cars were visible, covered with graffiti. And then he saw it. The two words, in blocky tagger printing. He laughed aloud and glanced out the window and up the hill at St. Thomas just in time to see three deer prance playfully around the front corner of the church. They slowed near the cross. He remembered the first time he’d seen the cross and how hopeless he thought it was. But it had risen. It had been made new.
Zach looked back at the photo one last time and the words on the boxcar.
He closed his eyes and thought about those words and what they meant to him. About how he’d come to know love, true Love, and all that had helped him overcome. When he finally opened his eyes, he wiped away a tear and looked up again to the cross. It was there that his life had truly begun.
“And where I’ll stay,” he promised in a whisper, nodding. And then he said the two words that had been so neatly painted on the side of the train.
“Only believe.”
EPILOGUE
Someone is here to see you, Timmy.”
He didn’t feel like answering. Even if he did, she wouldn’t be able to hear him. The old bat couldn’t hear half the things he said from five feet away, so why bother answering now?
“Timmy?” she yelled from the base of the stairs.
Her voice was warbly, and he figured with the disease that made her shake all the time, that white-haired head of hers was probably bobbling all over the place. What a pain she was becoming.
“Timmy? Are you asleep?”
Not anymore, you idiot.
He could hear the creak in the stairs. Must be important, because she was on her way up. He glanced at the clock. It was 11:39 a.m., and he knew with that miserable back of hers, it would take her just about forever to get up to his room. I’ll just grab a little more shut-eye before she gets here . . .
There was a knock on his door and Tim Shempner woke back up, startled. I actually did go back to sleep, he thought with a laugh under his breath. He rolled over in bed and looked at the clock. It was 11:43 a.m. It took her four minutes to get up the stairs. He hoped it hurt, so she wouldn’t bother to do it again.
“Timmy?”
“Not now, Grandma!”
The door handle turned, and Shempner could see those crooked blue fingers that were holding the side of the door as his grandmother struggled to push it open over the carpet, against a mountain of dirty clothes. Even though it was her house, she had a lot to learn about respecting his privacy.
“Someone is here for you,” she said, giving him that disappointed look that was really starting to get on his nerves. She shook her head, and it was the shake she actually had control of. “Timmy, honey, I asked you not to smoke in the house. Are you smoking up here again?”
“No, Grandma.”
“What do you want me to tell those men downstairs?”
“Who are they?”
“I’m worried that they may be the police. Are you in trouble again?”
“No, Grandma. Tell them I’m sick.”
“I’m not going to lie,” she said. “I’ll tell them you are tired.”
“You do that, Grandma.”
She grimaced as she pulled back on the door and suddenly stopped. “Do you think that you could get around to cutting the grass today?”
No, but I might get around to hiding your heart medicine.
Shempner covered his head with the sheet and ignored her. She finally gave up and closed the door.
He sat up and reached for his pack of cigarettes on the nightstand. It was empty, but there was a good half of one, a little bent up but still smokable, resting in the ashtray. He lit it and looked out the window.
Things had to get better.
It had been pretty close to a year since Carla had the big retard attack him at The Pilot Inn. Between the restraining order that drunk whore put on him and the constant humiliation from everyone in town, he figured his best play was to get out of Dodge for a while and come out to Arizona and mooch off Grandma for a bit.
Though it was normally a couple hundred degrees in this hotbox she called home, it hadn’t been that hard for him to make ends meet. She didn’t charge him any rent, he ate for free, and between his unemployment checks and the occasional ten- or twenty-dollar bill he’d lift out of her purse while she dozed off in her chair, he wasn’t in any real hurry to get a job.
Grandma had also told him that she’d decided to include him in the latest version of her will. It wasn’t but a couple weeks ago that he’d actually thought she’d punched out in the middle of one of her naps. He had already been counting the money as he held a mirror under her mouth to see if she was breathing. She practically gave him a heart attack when her eyes popped open and she asked him what he was doing.
It was all good, though. She was eighty-seven and hopefully it wouldn’t be much longer. If this heat keeps up, it’ll help, he thought. Old people died in the heat all the time. And Tim had been encouraging her to save money and keep the air-conditioning off . . .
He thought he heard a man’s voice. Apparently, Grandma w
asn’t going to be able to fend them off. He snubbed out his cigarette and put his jeans on to go see what they wanted. He figured it probably had something to do with not paying his court costs and fines back in Michigan, but wasn’t quite sure if they could even issue a warrant out here for that.
He went downstairs but only found Grandma, sitting in her chair. He shoved back a wave of irritation. He’d gotten up for nothing? “Were they cops, Grandma?”
“I asked them if they were the police, and they said no.”
Shempner sat on the couch. “Then who were they?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “There were three of them, and the one who did all the talking left something for you. I put it in the kitchen.”
Good thing it wasn’t the cops. He needed more legal problems like he needed cancer.
“What did they leave me?” Shempner asked. A pile of tickets? Court paperwork? “They made you sign for it, right?”
“What? No. Oh, Timmy, it’s beautiful,” she said. “You just have to see it.”
Shempner shook his head. Getting a straight answer out of the crazy old coot was like pulling teeth. He stood and made his way into the kitchen.
He immediately saw it and stopped.
Shempner squinted, and his mouth opened slightly. The side of his neck was becoming uncomfortably warm, and the strength was pouring out of his legs. He swore under his breath. What’s happening to me? He leaned heavily against the refrigerator, but his hand slid slowly down the cool stainless steel of the refrigerator door as he sank to his knees, that warm feeling attacking every inch of his body.
He tried to lift his arms. He couldn’t.
He tried to look away, but the whole time he was in the kitchen, he just couldn’t take his eyes off it.
Over on the table.
It was the single most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
It was perfect.
It was an apple.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Two little red wagons . . .
I can vividly remember walking down a hallway at a Detroit hospital back in early 2004. To say that things needed to be put in perspective for me at that time may be the greatest understatement of my lifetime. I had just gone through a divorce, I was in the middle of some activities that were hurting a lot of good people—activities that would ultimately lead me to federal prison—and my oldest daughter had just been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. I guess I was more than a little self-absorbed, and found I was drowning in the middle of my own pity party.
That’s when I saw the first one.
A young boy—I’m guessing maybe two or three years old—was being pulled in a little red wagon. He was wearing superhero pajamas, and his hair had fallen out. He looked awful. Both his mother and father were clearly exhausted and experiencing a level of stress that to this day is something I can only imagine. At that time, I had no idea that I was looking at Ian, Brooke, and Alex. I can still see that little boy looking up and smiling at his parents, and when they smiled back, nothing else in the world seemed to be happening. Their exchange was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I wanted those smiles to be a result of something—of anything— and I wanted them to last, because in too many cases, they don’t. That’s when the idea for this book danced through my head.
Like so many inspirational moments, the promises I made to myself that day didn’t last. I still couldn’t be the better person I wanted to be. I had arrived at another one of those proverbial forks in the road and had somehow convinced myself that I could dig my way out of an enormous hole that I had created. I made the same terrible choices over and over again, and as I tried to fix a problem, I inevitably created more.
I continued to head in the wrong direction over the next few years and brought a lot of unknowing participants with me. In the middle of that destruction, I had somehow managed to scribble here and there writings to the tune of over one thousand pages about a stranger who shows up at a hospital in the small town of Carlson, Michigan. I guess I wanted him to do more than fix sick little kids—I wanted him to fix me. The problem was that I really didn’t have the faintest idea who this stranger was, so I ended up tossing the story in a drawer.
In May of 2007, while on pretrial for wire fraud and money laundering charges, I was allowed to visit an uncle of mine in North Carolina. I had gone down there with a friend, and we were sitting in a restaurant just south of Asheville, waiting for my uncle to meet us for breakfast. He was going to lead us through the winding roads into the mountains where he lived.
That’s when I saw the second one.
There were a few rows of booths in that restaurant, and in the row to my left, there was another young boy who was sitting in another little red wagon. He had a full head of hair and had one of those piercing laughs that came from nothing other than pure joy and an appreciation of being alive. I initially found it a little odd that his mother was spoon-feeding him. The kid continued to laugh and didn’t seem to have a care in the world. He also didn’t have any arms or legs. I didn’t say anything about the little boy to my uncle or my friend, and I suddenly realized I had spent my whole life worrying about the wrong things. I was a little over six months from heading off to prison, and I felt like the luckiest man in the world. Needless to say, I thought about the kid in Detroit again and about my unfinished story. The book and its author were about to get a three-year overhaul.
On December 4, 2007, I reported to the United States Penitentiary–Hazelton, in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. Prison is something I would never wish on anyone, but at the same time, there are few things I would trade for the experience. It was a much-needed “time-out” that gave me the opportunity to not only figure out who I really was but also to figure out what was important— and what was missing in my life. The same thing that was missing in my life was also absent from the earliest version of the book, and I started to make some changes. When I refer to something missing, I’m talking about that “buzz” that Kaitlyn Harby felt. There is no doubt in my mind that the Cause of that buzz is, in fact, very real and isn’t just there when you need it—it’s always there. You just have to be open to it and trust that it doesn’t have to be found in a prison, a cemetery, a little bar, or the parking lot of a hospital. It can be found anywhere. I hope that makes some sense.
When I was released, I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity and the time (a word I now respect more than ever) to take all the changed pieces and try to put them together. The one thousand pages (despite adding a few characters) quickly became eight hundred. I was fortunate to be able to work with editor Chris Cancilliari, who helped me knock it down to the five hundred pages that ultimately went to the publisher to become what you are holding. Chris—how many phone calls and e-mails did we exchange? I never knew the difference between three dots and an em dash, but I hope to harass you more in the future. Thanks for tolerating my OCD and for turning my drivel into something that made sense. It was truly a lot of fun, and I hope to do it again.
I have a lot of other people to thank. This book has been on a journey, so please be patient with me.
Thank you Ginny Simpson, Norm Fenton, and Jack Kelly—I couldn’t have done this without you.
Brooke, thanks for your help with Carla’s character and for explaining what love is and isn’t.
I also want to thank everyone that read the earliest version of the book, particularly: Bob Deragisch, Kim Falkowski-Lewis, Debbie Vendlinski, Rich and Leann Hedke, Judi McNair, Liz Zeller, Jacqueline Lynch, Rose Williams, Helen McCord, Lorene Miller, Dawn Overstreet, Aunt Paulette Pedigo, Cousin Susan Shelton, Ray Johnson, Uncle Bill Sirls, Janet Krust, Yvonne Cancilliari, Kathy Marcum, Kimberly Brown, Jim Steere, Patti Hogue, Mike Stedman, Tom Ayers, Russell Bradley Fenton, Tim Cooke, Brian Noble, and Mark Drew. Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees, and you guys were incredible.
A very special thanks to Chris Sonksen, lead pastor at South Hills Church in Corona, California. I appreciate the guidance y
ou gave me on the book and for sharing your thoughts on the twentythird Psalm. It was the single most amazing sermon I have ever heard.
Thanks also go to the team at Westbow, including Joel Pierson, D. Spindler, Jamie Brazel, Megan Schindele, Andy Mays, Stefanie Holzbacher, Jeremy Weddle, Amanda Parsons, Richard Robertson, Shelley Rogers Landes and Chris Bass. Professionalism and good people are a great combination.
I can’t forget my buddy with the English accent, Alan Bower, from Author Solutions. Alan is in the publishing business for the right reasons. He loves publishing and loves authors. Thank you for your advice, voice of reason, and your friendship. Thanks also go to his better half, Erica Dooley-Dorocke. What a difference you two truly do make.
I want to thank my friends from Thomas Nelson. I remember when Allen Arnold called me and asked me if I would be interested in talking about Thomas Nelson publishing The Reason. When this happened, I felt like I was ten years old again, wearing a brand-new ball glove, playing catch in the backyard with my dad, and boom, the New York Yankees were on the phone, wondering if I wanted to go pro. It was an incredible feeling knowing that the story would be in the best possible hands it could be in, and I am truly blessed to have met and worked with Allen and the rest of the team at Thomas Nelson. Thanks to Allen, Ruthie Dean, Katie Bond, Ashley Schneider, Eric Mullett, Ami McConnell, Amanda Bostic, Becky Monds, Jodi Hughes, and Kristen Vasgaard. You guys are seriously an amazing group of people, and it is so easy to see God working through you to both entertain readers and bring people closer to Him. Please keep doing what you guys do.
Pete Nikolai. Thank you for handing a copy of the Westbow galley to Marjo.
Marjo Myers. I can’t thank you enough, so I’ll do it again here. I’m thankful that a copy of the book somehow landed on your desk at Thomas Nelson. And I’m thankful you read it. Who knows what it will lead to?