Chapter 4
Mertie tried to breathe, but her lungs felt like they had a hard metal band around them and refused to expand.
She sat down heavily on a bench in the healing garden, barely noticing the profusion of flowers that bloomed around her, although the soothing sound of flowing water permeated the air and made its way into her mind and heart, relaxing her just a bit.
She closed her eyes, tried to take another breath.
Garnet was here. Here. In Raspberry Ridge, and she had four weeks that she had blocked out of her schedule to be here. He was going to be the new pastor, candidating the next two weeks, leading Bible studies, doing all the things that she, as a Christian speaker and author, would be expected to attend in town.
She wanted to bury her head in her hands, cry, shake her fist at God, and ask why?
But she knew better. First of all, crying never solved anything, and although she had indulged in the luxury at various times in her life, it wasn’t something that she did habitually or even naturally. Naturally, she took the bull by the horns and twisted him to do exactly what she wanted. She didn’t typically sit around wringing her hands and moaning her lot in life.
Lord, why? Why now? Why... Just why?
She didn’t for one second think that it might be something other than God arranging this. But she had worked to put this behind her. Worked to try to forget, to ignore the tug on her heart every time she thought of her daughter. Garnet would have taken care of her like he said he would. She thought he was going to put her up for adoption. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know. Not a soul. It would ruin everything she had planned for her life, if it came out, but Garnet had promised it wouldn’t.
And so far, he had kept his promise completely. She hadn’t heard a whisper, although she had kept her nose to the ground constantly, always afraid that something was going to happen to blow up all the work that she had put into her career, into being a top and influential speaker and writer. It was because she wanted to lead people to Jesus. Because she wanted to encourage Christians, because she wanted Christians to be equipped for the fight that most of them didn’t even know they were in. So many Christians thought being a Christian was about peace and love and joy and what they could get for themselves. They didn’t stop to think about what they were supposed to be doing as a child of God, as a follower of Jesus, as someone whose sins had been forgiven. They wanted to think they were supposed to bask in all the good things and didn’t have to get their hands dirty actually doing anything.
She had found it was her mission in life to preach to them otherwise. That there was no such thing as a Christian who just sat around and rested on their laurels. They were to be engaged in the fight. To shed the light of Christ abroad, so others could come to know Him, so that the world could be a better place.
She was so passionate about what she believed, and she believed with all her heart that her passion had come from the Lord.
Why, God? Why now? Why are You doing this to me? Why did You bring me face-to-face with my past, with everything I wanted to keep hidden?
She didn’t suppose it was a sin to ask God why. But she also wasn’t surprised when He didn’t answer her.
This was where her faith should come into action. She should rest in the knowledge that God had everything under control, and her worrying about things was not going to make a difference. The only problem was, she loved the idea of building a career, of reaching as many people as possible with her message of get into the battle now, fight the good fight, don’t just sit around waiting for God to give you joy and peace and love. Go out and work for Him, look at the harvest fields which were white and ready for harvest as Jesus said.
Maybe she should do more studying on faith, since she was a little embarrassed now in her panic attack. Although she was happy she didn’t have to face her past right away, she knew the day was coming, the time was coming, could even be here today, and she needed to be ready. This was unexpected, but not something she couldn’t handle.
“Do you mind if I sit down?”
Mertie looked up, startled. She hadn’t heard Vera’s approach.
“Sure.” She pulled breath into her lungs, grateful that they expanded the way they were supposed to, for the most part. Her chest still felt abnormally tight. She definitely felt tense, and her mind was still feverishly going over possibilities where she could potentially leave town and never return.
She had already promised her sisters she would be here to help, and she didn’t want to go back on her word. That wasn’t something that a person in her position should do or something any Christian should ever do.
She tried to pull her Christian speaker and writer mantle around her like a protective cloak. She didn’t want to show weakness. Weakness was bad.
But she had known Vera since she was little, and if there was a nicer person on the planet, Mertie wasn’t sure where they existed or how that would be possible.
“Is everything okay?” Vera said, putting a hand over top of her hands which were clenched in her lap. She deliberately loosened her grip but did not move her hands out from underneath Vera’s motherly touch.
“I guess being back here just brings back some memories.”
“Hard memories?” Vera asked, although she probably didn’t need to.
“Yeah. Don’t we all have things we would rather forget?” She didn’t want to go into the past, didn’t want to admit what she had done. But at the same time, it hadn’t been in front of her face like it had today. Not just Garnet, but...her daughter.
That was probably the biggest thing. She had given away a child, a baby, and had tried as hard as she could not to think about that baby again, but at times, especially when she lay in bed at night, she would wonder what happened to her, wonder who had adopted her, what her family was like, if she was being taken care of. There had been a few times where she had wished that she hadn’t given her away and that she could find her, bring her back.
But then it would open that can of worms where her reputation as a Christian speaker would be in tatters.
“I suppose that in your line of work, it’s fairly important that your life be crystal clear and squeaky clean. People probably look at you with a high-powered microscope, trying to find anything wrong, any reason why they could dismiss your work and call you a hypocrite.”
Mertie was surprised. Vera was so astute. “You’re absolutely right. I’m held to a higher standard than anyone I know.”
“That has to wear on you.”
“I guess I love rising to the challenge. I love trying as hard as I can to be as good as I can. I do not believe, not for one second, in works-based salvation. The only way to heaven is through the shed blood of Jesus, like the Bible says. But I want to be pure, I want to be good, I want to follow Jesus and his commands and hear him say ‘well done.’ You know? That’s my only goal.” For the most part. Every once in a while, she would look at the bottom line and have goals related to money and production, but she didn’t see that as a bad thing. If she didn’t aim at anything, she wasn’t going to hit anything. But that wasn’t what she lived for. What she breathed for. What she wanted with all her heart and soul.
“I can kind of relate to that. When I’m designing a garden, I want it to be the best that it possibly can be. Better than anything. The very best that I can do. I want it to give people hope and peace and light and love and make them feel comforted and relaxed and inspired. It’s what I live and breathe when I’m designing.”
“Yeah. That sounds right.”
“I guess it’s the same with being a mom. I have four little ones, and two more on the way, and I want more than I want my next breath to be the very best mom that I can be for them. To teach them right from wrong, and to help them to grow up to love and serve Jesus. It’s what I want. It’s what I live for.”
“I probably would be consumed with motherhood that same way. I’ve often thought that I couldn’t be a speaker and writer and also a mother. I can’t put my heart and soul into both.”
“Yeah. Some people can turn that on and off, be the very best mom at home, then walk into the office and be the very best there, but that’s just not me.” Vera lifted a shoulder and looked around where they were sitting.
Mertie noticed the beautiful flowers, the graceful flow of the water, the soothing nature that was around her, and she remembered reading an article about Vera, and it struck her then. “You designed this?” She lifted one hand, sliding it out from underneath Vera’s motherly touch, and indicated the garden around them.
“Yes. My husband and I built it together. It...saved my marriage.”
Mertie didn’t say anything to that. She’d given plenty of marriage advice over the years, even though she’d never been married herself. To her way of thinking, marriage was just living Christian principles, only on a microscopic, daily basis. If you gave unconditional love, unconditional forgiveness, unconditional kindness to your spouse, and treated them the way you wanted to be treated, putting the golden rule into effect, and if your spouse did the same, there was no way your marriage could be anything but beautiful. Yes, she understood the different genders were given different jobs, but Christian principles still applied. And they had to apply regardless of what one spouse did.
“I’ve done some marriage counseling and some marriage instruction over the years, but since I’m not married myself, I try not to speak on it too much. People want to hear from someone with experience. Someone who’s been in the trenches, so to speak, and that’s not me. Not for marriage.”
“You have different things to talk about.” Vera left that statement rather open ended. Maybe it was an opening for Mertie to tell her what was wrong.
“I do.” She wasn’t going to. She couldn’t tell her. She couldn’t let her know that the issues she had were so big they could blow up her career, and they could ruin her daughter’s life too. There were people who wanted to see Christians fail so badly that they would destroy their family and jump on any attempt to knock those Christians down. She didn’t want her daughter to get hurt in any way.
She never had, but now that she’d seen her, seen how...composed and sweet and innocent she seemed, she wanted to protect her even more.
She owed Garnet a thank you. A huge thank you for raising her daughter to be such a composed young lady.
It didn’t even occur to her that she might be wrong, that the girl she had seen wasn’t her daughter, and that Garnet hadn’t kept her.
She was racking her brain, trying to remember whether Garnet had ever promised that he would actually take her to an adoption agency like she had asked.
She couldn’t remember. She had just known that she needed the “problem” taken care of, but that would not include, would never include, abortion. That idea was unthinkable. Although tempting. Very tempting, because then no one would ever know.
Still, there were some things a person just couldn’t do, and killing an innocent baby was one of them for her.
Making sure that it had a better life apart from her, now that was something she felt was a sacrifice on her part, but something that she did for the benefit of her child and not the benefit of herself. Although now, it would definitely benefit her career to keep the secret.
“I don’t want to push you into saying anything you don’t want to say, but I know for me, sometimes it helps for me to talk about things. My husband and I went through a difficult time after the loss of our son.”
“I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”
Vera shook her head, looking serene and completely unbothered. She took her hand that had been lying over top of Mertie’s and pointed to the crosses that were just over her shoulder.
“That’s what this garden was for. For healing, after our loss. I withdrew into myself, and Dominic threw himself into his work. We drifted apart, because of the different ways we handled our grief and how we didn’t handle it together. I suppose I have no idea what the proper way is for a married couple to handle the loss of their child. Maybe it’s okay to need some time to yourself. Maybe it’s okay to need to be busy. I just know that you can drift apart before you realize it and that it’s really difficult to come back together.”
“I’ve met some people like that. Sometimes, it seems like the wife, especially, blames the husband.”
Vera nodded. “That might have been part of my problem. I wanted to take Trent to the ER, and my husband thought I was worrying too much. I don’t know that his life would have been spared if I had taken him, but I do know that I delayed calling for an ambulance because my husband didn’t think it was necessary.”
“He was there?” Mertie said softly, knowing it would have been hard to call an ambulance when her husband was standing over her telling her not to.
“No. He was away. Working. I was scared, alone, and maybe I tried to downplay it when I talked to him so that I didn’t come off as one of those helicopter moms who panic when their child sneezes.”
She didn’t quite laugh, but she did snort a little. She’d met mothers like that. They practically followed their children around with pillows under their behind, waiting to catch them so that nothing bad could ever happen to them.
“It’s important that children suffer, they don’t understand or learn how to handle it if they don’t. But it’s really hard to know where that line is. Where do you stop allowing them to handle things on their own and start panicking.”
“Right. It was time to panic, and I should have gone ahead and done the full-blown panic, but... I didn’t.”
Vera looked off, staring at the flowing water, as though contemplating a long-ago time and wondering if she might have done something different whether there would have been a different outcome.
“But the thing to remember is, God is in control. He’s in control whether I call immediately or whether I don’t call at all. I’m not saying that God doesn’t sometimes allow us to experience the consequences of our actions, but nothing happens to me that has not been approved by Him first. And that’s what enabled me to not blame my husband. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t mine, either. But it took me a long time to figure that out.”
“Yeah. Sometimes we know what’s right, we just don’t always see it immediately.” Was that what was happening to her right now? God had led her here to Raspberry Ridge at the exact time that Garnet was here with their daughter, and God had arranged it, and instead of Mertie seeing that and going with it, she ran away, not wanting to face whatever it was that God wanted her to stand and face and learn.
Absolutely that was what she was doing.
“I guess I’m doing that now,” she said softly, not wanting to go into the fact that she had a daughter, and that she was here in Raspberry Ridge, and as far as Mertie knew, she had no idea that Mertie was her mom. She didn’t know what Garnet had told her.
“Standing and deliberately not looking at what God wants you to?” Vera asked, and Mertie nodded.
“I guess I just needed you to come and tell me that I might not want to face it, but if it’s here, I have to.”
Vera smiled, a maternal, kind, compassionate smile. The kind of smile that made Mertie want to put her head on her shoulder and lean into her warmth and comfort.
“You know, it hasn’t been that long since you’ve lost your parents. It takes a while to get over loss like that. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
Mertie hadn’t even thought about that. She loved her parents, but they had been very involved in their business and seemed rather distant throughout their childhood. She mourned their loss, more because she mourned the loss of the family unit, but it was not like she mourned the loss of a companion or friend. Since neither of her parents seemed to be that to her. But she did want to stay close to her sisters. Or be close to her sisters, since they hadn’t really been close.
“Thank you for your compassion. I suppose losing one’s parents is an adjustment no matter what your relationship was.”
“Sure. You have to adjust the way you see yourself in life. You’re no longer tied to someone who’s here, but...standing on your own, I suppose. Although, God is never moved, and He’s standing right there, wanting us to turn to Him.”
Mertie didn’t know how many times she had told that exact same thing to someone, and yet it seemed like Christians could always use the reminder.
They sat in silence for a while, with the water flowing, the soothing sound seeming to pour strength and backbone back into Mertie. She needed to talk to Garnet. Preferably without their daughter around, so they could get things hashed out. Make sure that Garnet hadn’t told their daughter anything that Mertie didn’t know, and that they could decide together on exactly how much they would tell her.
“I’m going to go back, but if you need me, my door is always open. It might be a little crazy at my house, but it’s always open.” Vera squeezed her hand and then stood. She took one step away and then turned. “Your daughter is beautiful, just like you are.”
Mertie’s mouth hung open, and she didn’t see Vera walk away, unable to respond to her comment. Even if she hadn’t already decided it would be best to tell the world what was going on, she would have had to decide to actually do it, since there was no way she was going to be able to hide it.