Chapter 96
Chapter 96
S he laughed. “Good.” Then she pressed her cheek to mine and stared with me at us.
“And now?”
“I see us again.”
“Where do you end and I start?”
“Tough to tell.”
“Good answer.” She took the framed mirror from me, set it on the table, took my hands, and then did that little twirl dance move she liked to do when she was happy. Then she wrapped one arm around me while placing one hand on my heart. “David Bishop?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re not alone. Not ever. Not even when you feel it and the darkness tells you that you are. You’re not. You carry me with you. I’m yours. I’m with you. Where you go, I go. I’m not leaving. I’m not tapping out. No matter how much it hurts.” I was struck by how, once again, my incomparable wife was fighting for my heart. Truth be told, she was a better fighter than me. “We are in this thing together. In this frame forever. If you ever look in this mirror and my face is not alongside yours, then something is wrong in the universe.” She wrapped both arms around me. Her heart was pounding. My drumbeat. Once again calling for me. “You picking up what I’m putting down?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m not kidding.” She stiletto-poked me in the chest. “You’ve come through a hard place. One of the hardest places. First Marie. Then Bones. I wasn’t sure how much more your heart could take, but we’re still standing. And while we’re standing, I want you to know this. This one thing.” She held my face in her hands. “I’m yours. I’m all in. I’ve got you. You’ve got me. And...” It was here that she teared up and choked back the emotion that had been building. “If the darkness comes for you. If he rears his ugly face. If he so much as lays a finger on you, I will remove his head from his shoulders and post it on a stake outside the city walls. I’m not playing. He can’t have you. I am the repairer of the breach. Standing guard on the wall that is us. And if the darkness comes, he’s gonna have to get through me, and when he does, I’m gonna tell him...”
Oh, how I loved this woman. A hundred and thirty soaking wet, and here she was taking on all of hell. Standing between me and anything that threatened to drown me.
“Repairer of the . . . ?”
“Breach. It’s a break in the—”
“I know what it is. I just wanted to hear you say it again. I like the way it sounds when you say it.” I pulled her closer. “Just what are you going to tell him?”
She was getting hot now. “I’m gonna tell him he can pound sand. He can go back to hell where I hope it’s hot and the maggots eat his face off.”
She was really fired up. “Summer?”
“Yes.”
I reached in my coat pocket and pulled out a small wrapped package. About the size of a man’s wallet. Shiny blue wrapping. White ribbon. Neat corners. The works. She eyed it with suspicion. “What is it and where’d you get it?”
“Honey, gifts are surprises. It’s part of the reason we give them. Some of the joy is in not knowing.”
She palmed her face, holding the gift in her other hand. “And you’ve had this in your pocket the entire time?”
“No, I just flew to Jerusalem real quick while you were storming the gates of hell, wandered the streets of the Old City real quick, and came back.”
She raised both eyebrows and contorted her lips like she was thinking. “Well, somebody has to. And I’m not playing.”
“Are you going to open it?”
She slowly unwrapped the package that had taken me over an hour to wrap. “Who wrapped this?”
“Me.”
She examined the corners. “No way.”
“Honey, I have parachuted out of planes in the middle of the night over countries I’m not supposed to be in. I can wrap a gift.”
Evidently I was making good points and I had impressed her, in that she thought she was the only one who remembered this room and what this little moment had meant in our life. But I’d had a feeling she might pull me aside after the wedding and before the reception and sort of run the same play a second time. Contrary to popular opinion around Freetown, I am not totally romantically ignorant. I do have a few things to say.
She pulled off the paper and sat staring at the small box. She shot a glance at me and then lifted the lid, where she found a single smooth stone. Like something you’d find in a stream. Polished from eons in the water. One of several trillion on planet earth but unique with its own size, shape, polish, and color. She hefted it and let it rest in her palm, waiting.
“It’s a two-part gift. First, it represents a moment. I was in Jerusalem. We were meeting with Ariel. Nighttime. Walking the streets of the Old City. Moon was high. And I stepped over this roundish, oblong thing that caught my attention. I stooped down, picked it up. A simple rock. How many people had stepped over it? How long had it been there? The more I held it, the more the dust wore off and the more it shone. Actually, it had a high polish. Meaning, it had spent its life under constant pressure. Constant wear. Bumping up against other hard things had worn off its jagged edges.”
She raised an eyebrow. Not impressed with my pet rock. Having a difficult time believing I’d come to this realization on my own. “And you want me to do what with it?”
I laughed. “Remember, I said it’s a two-part gift.”
She waited.
“If you’ll reach beneath that table there, you’ll find part two.”
Now I really had her guessing. The idea that I’d planted a gift in this room, anticipating that she’d bring me in here, was blowing her mind. She never expected that I’d one-up her. It had never crossed her mind. She thought she was going to give me the mirror, kiss me, get her point across, and then we’d attend the reception. And I loved her for that. But I wasn’t a corpse. I did have a pulse. And my heart actually did beat—always for her and her alone. So that’s what this was about, and she was about to realize I’d been thinking about this moment for a little bit longer than the last five minutes.
She reached below the small table and found a second perfectly wrapped box. This one wrapped with brown paper. The box was about the size of a ream of paper. Because it was. Unable to hold both, she handed me the pet rock and held the second gift on her lap, awaiting further instruction. I smiled and set the rock on top of the gift. “It’s a paperweight.”
For a split second, I saw the confusion set in. Then it cleared. And when it did, her eyes lit and she realized what she might be holding, but the thought was almost too good to be true, so she was afraid to hope it.
So I fed it a little. “A long time ago, when I was in pain, I found that if I could ‘write it out,’ it didn’t go away and it didn’t really hurt less, but something happened in the writing. It’s like God used my own pen to probe the wound. A scalpel to get rid of the dead stuff. Then He sutures up what remains. Something happens in the writing. Something I can’t quite explain. So I did. I lived by that then. I live by that now. So”—I tapped the package—“I did that here. And given that you are David Bishop’s number one fan, I thought maybe you’d want to read it first.” She was about to rip open the package when I placed my hands on hers. “Sometimes I think I live in a strange world where, whether I like it or not, I hold the power of life and death in my hands. After so much death, I needed life. And this”—I tapped the manuscript she held once more—“is life. And you, Summer Bishop, breathed life into me when I could not breathe.”
Tears trickled down her face, and she started bouncing. She didn’t know whether to kiss me or rip the paper off the box. And the fact that I’d done all this was still blowing her mind.
We spent the next day at the Eagle’s Nest. Summer reading. Me watching her read. She laughed, shook her head, tucked her knees into her chest, tapped her teeth with her fingernail, huffed, and sat amid a pile of scattered sheets of paper. It was a beautiful read. And when she finished, finally reaching the last page, she set it down, took off her readers, shook her head, and placed her palm flat across my heart. “I don’t know how you do it... only that you do.”