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Being with her made him feel, at least for snippets of time, whole. As he’d never felt that way in his entire life, Kevin desperately clung to those fragments, hoping they’d extend into something lasting. Something better than long spaces of dark abyss. Maybe even eventually they would completely overtake the other feeling. The one of broken emptiness and rejection.
No one else could ever do that for him.
Helen had to take him back. There was just no other way he could survive this life.
Say you’ll stay with me . . .
Emptiness engulfed his heart as his years-old plea echoed. Kevin squeezed his eyes shut as a volatile concoction of desperation, humiliation, insufficiency, and frustration rushed into fill that bleak vacancy.
He’d thought marrying Helen would fix it all.
It hadn’t.
Was he going to feel like this forever?
Hopelessness whispered an insidiousyes, foreverjust as he opened his eyes.
Up ahead was the Scurve in the road. It followed the bend of the river, which ran some fifteen feet below the highway, a rocky embankment separating the two. Kevin knew it was there.
But he didn’t turn the wheel.
Oh God!Through the scorching pain knifing through his brain, Kevin’s heart cried in horror and agony to a being he didn’t even believe in.
He’d done it on purpose.
He’d not turned on purpose.
Chapter Four
(in which Helen is wrong)
Thedrivedownthemountain was filled with silence. Helen kept it that way. No radio. No one else in the car—she’d insisted her boys stay back in Sugar Pine. Sent Matt and Ty back home. Called Brayden and told him not to fly in just yet.
This was between her and God right now.
Fear had a way of holding praise ransom—and by extension, her soul. Even in the midst of crisis, Helen wanted to be free of it. Otherwise she would be taken under, held beneath a suffocating layer of panic and hopelessness. Many years ago she’d learned freedom in hope—and it had been a hard-fought lesson. One she and Kevin had battled for with everything they had.
And the hope was this:Christ in me.And her anchor,in all her ways, every moment of every day, knowHim.
Life was uncertain, but God was unchanging. He was always good and always able. Tomorrow could bring joy or sorrow, ease or pain—sometimes both at once. But God’s love never failed. And she and Kevin were held safe in that abiding love, hidden in Christ with God.
God had brought them through such a rocky beginning. He’d delivered her from hopelessness and Kevin out of the claws of addiction. By His love and grace, He’d blessed them with seven boys. Seven! Through every crisis that had come up after that—and there had been more than a few—God had provided.
Even so, as she faced Kevin’s possible heart surgery, Helen’s heart trembled.
With both hands, she gripped the cool steering wheel as she blinked against the streams of tears. Here, in the shelter of her vehicle, when it was just her and her Savior, she could let the rivers flow.
It’d be forty years that Christmas Eve. Forty years as Kevin’s wife—and most of them good.
As she rejoiced in that unlikely fact, Helen considered how different this moment of crisis was from the one so long ago. How, though her heart ached and she did ask God for more time—for Him to let Kevin live through this—she didn’t do so with such despair as she had back then.
Or with a disturbingly divided heart.
Thirty-some years ago that had not been the case. When she’d picked up the phone at the diner near the end of her shift, certain it was her babysitter calling, but had instead heard Dave’s voice on the other line, she had been plunged into such a myriad of confusing emotions that she couldn’t even put them to words.
She hadn’t wanted Kevin to die.
But how could he be so stupid—driving drunk? She didn’t want their marriage to fail—but she couldn’t see them lasting either. Not the way they were going. She didn’t want her boys to not have their father. But she wasn’t going to raise them with a drunk dad around.
