Believe Page 18

  The crowd grew bigger. Closer. Angrier.

  I wanted to run, get out of here—I wasn’t helping Miriam. I didn’t want to fight with Samantha. I wanted to go home. “I’m sorry about your tree,” I said, looking for a way out.

  She didn’t. She swiped at my dress and balled some of the hands up in her fist. She pulled so hard a couple of them tore off. “People like you … you’re so disgusting. You always have to be the star.”

  “That’s not true. I’d give anything to be anonymous.”

  She laughed. “Then why are you here? In that?” I heard more laughter. Saw a few mean-spirited gestures. She tore off another hand and stomped on it like it was a cigarette butt.

  Abe finally spoke up. “Samantha, that’s not fair.” Which was not an effective statement. None of this was fair.

  But I got it—they had to blame someone. And that someone was going to be me.

  Before I could walk away, something cold and wet hit my back and dripped down the skirt. I was afraid to look. Abe said, “I think you should get out of here.”

  Samantha added, “I guess you underestimated how many people care about this place.”

  This was weirder than my wooden hands dream. I accepted that I was a bad friend. I didn’t blame Miriam for not coming over here to hear my apology. But how many of these people cared about this farm? How many of them were just here because the cameras were, because the story was, because there was nothing else to do? I was not the only villain.

  From off to one side, someone hurled dirt at my dress. Then some leaves that had grown wet and cold sitting in the gutter. From the back of the group, Dan stepped forward. He was wearing my favorite shirt—a pink button-down. Guys think pink is a girly color, but pretty much universally it does great things for their eyes. I wondered if he was going to help me out, but he stood back. He said, “Don’t expect anyone here to feel sorry for you.”

  Now I was scared.

  I looked around for a friendly face. For sympathy. For help.

  Emma would tell me that she experienced faith when times were at their worst. She would tell me that it wasn’t always important to be the one in front of the camera, that sometimes the person behind the curtain could get her way, too. If she were here, I knew she’d tell me that God showed Himself to her when she needed Him most.

  Well, I needed help now.

  Maybe she had something, because just when I was sure they were going to pelt me with dirt, the crew fired up the chainsaws even louder. Everyone turned around to watch. This was the moment they had dreaded. They stood still as stone, and watched the men take the tree’s remaining limbs.

  A few people cried.

  Miriam stayed as far away from me as possible.

  When the great arm of the tree hit the ground, smaller branches scattered. It was like that old story, The Giving Tree. Tons of people sent that book to me when I was in the hospital, which sort of shocked me. It might have been a famous book, but it was also pretty morbid.

  In the book, the kid basically killed the tree. First he took the branches and the shade. Then he took the trunk. When the tree was no more than a stump, the boy came back as an old man and took the only thing the tree had left to give—a seat. The first time Dave read it to me, I thought the old man was scary. Lo called it a representation of a vicious one-sided relationship, disguised as a book.

  I would bet that Miriam thought I was that boy, but that wasn’t who I wanted to be. I wanted to be like Emma: humble. I knew that was the only way to make things better was to help my friend.

  I tried to convince her how sorry I was. “I wish you could have saved it.”

  No reply.

  “I didn’t want to desert you. Can we go somewhere and talk?” I took her hand. “I know I’ve been selfish. I never meant to treat you this way. I had a lot on my mind. Can you just let me explain?”

  Unlike Miriam, Samantha was no good at the silent treatment. “Let me guess. Your problems are bigger than ours?” She told me that Miriam wanted nothing to do with me. “Go find your followers, your believers. Let them take care of you for a while.”

  When I started to walk away, Miriam finally stepped away from Samantha, but it wasn’t to apologize. “You know, some girl was here. She seemed sort of desperate to find you—she said that something terrible had happened. I told her not to care so much, that you disappoint people all the time.”

  Emma.

  “Will you come with me?” I asked. “We can go to Dave’s. You need to meet her and hear what she has to say. And then we can talk. You can let me apologize.”

  She turned back. Now the tree was just one tall trunk. The crew helped one of the men stand up close to the highest third of the trunk. From here, it looked like he was hugging the tree. The men on the ground told us that the trunk was too big to take in one piece. They had to dissect it.

  Miriam said, “It won’t be long now.”

  Moments later, the worker turned on his chainsaw and began to remove the top of the trunk. Miriam looked at me like it was all my fault. “You don’t get it, do you?” she shouted over the noise. “I needed you. I needed your help. I needed you to be there for me the way I’ve been there for you.”

  I could have said, “I didn’t mean to blow you off” or “I feel really bad about the tree” or “I’d do everything differently, if I could,” but none of that would be true.

  We both knew that.

  I waited for the crew to dismantle the top third of the trunk. “I was selfish,” I said. “I know it. But I want to make it up to you. I want to rebuild the tripod. Come with me. I think you’ll really like Emma.”

  “No.” The crew lowered the man to the next section of the trunk. At the same time, farther away, others loaded pieces of branch and trunk into a machine that turned everything to mulch.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Alone, I ran.

  I swung my arms and pressed through my feet. I ran as fast as I could. I had that feeling in my gut.

  Something was wrong.

  When I got to Dave’s hotel room, I was covered in sweat. I banged on the door. “Where is she? What happened?”

  He told me to come inside. “You need to see something now.” He turned on the TV, and we sat down on the couch. “At first, I thought she was joking. But before she left, I watched it. She invited us to make a statement.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Roxanne.” He struggled with the remote control.

  I shook my head. “I’m not making any statements.”

  He cursed a few times before a fuzzy image of a house appeared on the screen. “Just wait. You might change your mind.”

  It was a fuzzy shot of a white house with black shutters, probably taken from the other side of a fence. There was a red car in the driveway and a picnic table on a brick patio. I was about to ask if he queued up the wrong disc when Brian walked into the middle of the yard and said, “Hey, Mom. Come on out and watch this.” Then he dropped to the ground and counted out twenty-five push-ups.

  The whole thing seemed a little weird. Whoever took this was hiding, but the film wasn’t anything special.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  His mother walked outside and said, “Show me.” She wore cute yoga pants, a down vest, and a T-shirt from Dave’s mission. The camera caught some random patches of snow as Brian performed more push-ups and sit-ups. Then the phone rang. Brian’s mom walked inside.

  I was bored.

  Dave wasn’t. “Watch now. This is the killer.”

  When she returned, she had the wheelchair. “Hurry up. He’s on his way.” Brian jumped up, sat down, and popped a wheelie. He cried about being paralyzed, about how much he missed his legs and being able to run and jump and go to a regular school.

  It was confusing until I looked at the date. “I don’t believe it. That liar.”

  The video was from two months ago—when Brian was supposedly paralyzed—when his mother was already following Dave and praying for a miracle.
I said, “They made the whole thing up.”

  “It gets worse.” First, Brian pretended he was walking for the first time. Then, his mother coached Brian on how to look weak. She said, “Do it again. Praise God. Tell the world that you were healed by prayer.” Then they burst into laughter. She might as well have said, “Let’s take that idiot for everything he’s got.”

  “Turn it off. What are you going to do?”

  He paused the show and dialed Roxanne on speakerphone. She picked up immediately and thanked him for calling so quickly. She said, “I’m interviewing Ted—Brian’s dad—tonight.” She chuckled, then got serious. “As you might imagine, he has a lot to get off his chest.” Roxanne explained that this was no longer about faith. She shrugged it off. “We canned the whole thing.” Now the segment was about what people were willing to do to be famous. She told us that Ted had blackmailed his wife with this tape, but after she filed for divorce, he wanted more. When that didn’t happen, he called Roxanne. She said, “I had a hunch your story was going to lead to something big, but this …” She laughed. “This is big.”

  Dave said, “She told me she was an abused woman.”

  Roxanne asked if he would put that on the record. She said, “I found some old footage of her from one of those early wives’ reality shows. She spent most of her time on camera screaming at the other women—calling them whores and liars and drunks—making fun of them behind their backs. I called the show’s producer, and he said that the woman tried to sue him when he didn’t extend her contract.”

  Dave googled her while Roxanne talked. I stared over his shoulder at the iPad resting in his lap. There she was—a housewife looking for fame. The mother of one son—a perfectly healthy young man.

  I asked, “What about the doctors? Didn’t you say you met them? Let’s talk to them. If they were fooled, then you won’t look so gullible.”

  Roxanne said not to bother. “When I looked them up, I couldn’t find them. Their credentials were fake.” She sighed. “I should have checked. An oversight I’m sure to hear about.”

  Dave watched the video a few more times. I couldn’t—it was torture. The worst moment: when Brian stumbled on purpose, and the two of them anticipated Dave’s reactions.

  “He’ll praise God.”

  “He’ll thank the Lord.”

  Brian picked up a Coke bottle and held it like a microphone. “I’d like to thank my mother for believing in me all this time.” Then he burst into laughter.

  A week ago, I wouldn’t have been shocked. But now I felt sad, guilty, mad. For a moment there, I had thought maybe … what if …

  For a moment there, I’d almost believed.

  Dave sat down. Suddenly he looked older, a little weak, his hair not so shiny. “Usually I can tell when someone is taking me for a ride, but she was so convincing.”

  “You mean you had a thing for her,” I said.

  He didn’t deny it. “She told me she believed in miracles and healing. She said she believed in me. When she first encouraged me to reach out to you, it seemed spontaneous. She didn’t push. I didn’t think twice. The timing was perfect. She knew my position—she’d watched me on TV long enough to see I would buy her story. In this world, we need faith. We need hope. Without it …”

  I stared at my hands, my ugly, deformed, useless hands. “She fed you what you wanted to hear.”

  Dave walked to the window. He paged through his Bible and recited a few quotes, none of which made sense to me.

  I said, “It’s just a story.”

  He didn’t argue. “That’s not the only problem.” He didn’t need to explain. “Roxanne is ambitious. She could keep digging.”

  Now I really was impatient—he was acting like a baby. I asked, “What would she find? Did you coerce them to do this?”

  “No. Of course not. Janine—you know me.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I knew you.” This was my reality now. I didn’t know my mother, and I didn’t really know him. “I knew you once. But not so much now.”

  At “not so much now,” Emma walked in. She said, “Janine, did Miriam tell you I was looking for you? I wanted to surprise you—to see what you made.” She was the first person to notice I was covered in dirt. “It looks like you fell in a puddle.”

  Dave told me to leave. He needed to talk to Emma. “Alone.”

  I got up, but Emma asked me to sit back down. “I saw what they were doing to that tree.”

  Dave urged me not to say anything, but I didn’t see the point of waiting. She was my friend. I wanted to tell her. “He wants to talk to you because we just found out that Brian was faking. He could always walk. His recovery was staged. Tonight Roxanne is going to interview his dad.” I rolled my eyes. “No doubt, the story will go national.”

  I waited for Emma to offer the bright side—that all this wasn’t really that bad—that he obviously wasn’t a real believer and miracles could still happen. I expected her to tell me that faith and community were what was important—that every day she found a new reason to believe in God.

  At the very least, I expected her to laugh it off.

  But she didn’t. Not even close.

  Instead, she turned stiff, like a statue. She looked at Dave. “All this time, Brian could walk?”

  He turned on the footage. “Yes.”

  “He was never paralyzed?”

  Dave flicked on the tape. Onscreen Brian jumped up and made a double biceps pose.

  I said, “It’s not the end of the world. Maybe you don’t know how this works. At worst, Brian will be big news for a couple of days. Then something else will happen, and everyone will forget. I’ve seen this happen a million times. It’s big news for a week. Then no one will care.”

  Emma asked, “Are there pictures of me?” That was an odd question. When Dave said he couldn’t be sure, she picked up a glass bowl. It caught the light, creating a beautiful rainbow of color across the wall. But she wasn’t looking at the beauty. When I looked at her eyes, I saw Emir, the boy with the bomb. I saw his eyes in hers.

  Threatening but still.

  Calm and determined.

  Willing to die.

  That day, I looked up at him and he looked down at me. I was just a little girl—I didn’t understand what it meant to be afraid for your life—but even so, I sensed something was wrong. I could not have known that something terrible was about to happen—it was so far outside my knowledge or experience. That day, I said nothing. In that moment, what could I have known to say?

  But now I knew—I knew what eyes like Emma’s meant. And this time, I wasn’t going to stay silent. “Emma, what is wrong with you?”

  It was too little, too late. She hurled the bowl hard, and when it hit the wall, it shattered in all directions. I felt shards of glass hit my face, my hands, my legs. Without explanation, Emma turned around and ran upstairs in tears.

  “Let her go,” Dave said.

  I dropped to my knees and started picking up the glass, one sharp piece at a time.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Dave looked very uncomfortable. “I should have told you right away.”

  “Told me what?”

  He told me to sit down. “Emma first joined the mission six months ago. She had just found out that her leukemia had returned after a year in remission. The prognosis was not good.”

  My mind reeled. “What do you mean, not good?”

  He didn’t say. “After many weeks of prayer and discussion with me and some very good doctors, she decided that she didn’t want to undergo any more treatments. Instead, she put her trust in God and faith.”

  Now I was on overload. “What does that mean? Are you helping her die?”

  “No,” Dave said. “On the contrary, I believe I’m helping her live. I’m helping her free herself from the torture of treatment. And every day, she seems more alive. More committed. She grows stronger, she looks healthier. She says she’s never felt better in her life.”

  There were so many things wrong with
this. “You’re encouraging this?” To me, it sounded more like suicide.

  He grabbed me by the arm and forced me to sit down. “She thought you might see it that way. But no matter how you feel about faith, it’s a viable choice. It is her choice. She decided to live the life she was given with dignity, and we have to respect that.”

  This would be fine for an old person, but we were talking about Emma. She was seventeen. She had her whole life in front of her. “What about her parents? Don’t tell me they gave her the green light to kill herself, too.” Then I figured it out. “Did you come here so that I could make her better? When were you going to tell me that? How long were you going to wait?”

  He didn’t answer my questions directly. “When I was invited to come here, of course—the first thing I thought of was that I wanted you to meet her. And not just because I thought you might help her. I thought you’d be good for each other. And then we got the news about Abe. And we began to wonder. And hope. I was sure that providence had brought her to you. And then more miracles happened. You started to trust me. Brian walked. You came here on your own.”

  I couldn’t understand how he could play games with Emma’s life. “And what were you going to do when I couldn’t make her better?”

  He shook his head. “That was never a consideration. She believes that God has a plan. She isn’t looking for guarantees.”

  “And now?”

  He grabbed his Bible and said nothing for a long time. “I think this is a test. Brian and his mother are God’s way of testing me. If I can stay strong, she will be fine. She will get better. We just have to stay strong.”

  If there were another glass bowl, I would throw it at him. He was acting like me, believing that this was about him as much as it was about her. “Dave, you have to make Emma go to a doctor.”

  He went to the door and opened it. “Go home, Janine. That is not going to happen. Emma will not go back to the hospital. She wants no more painful treatments.” He told me that, now that I knew, I had to be discreet. “You can’t tell anyone what you know. She’s in hiding, Janine. She didn’t run away from her parents just to go back into that hell.”