A Step of Faith: A Novel Read online

  I love you. I know this. I really, truly, deeply love you. I first realized that I had fallen in love with you about two months after I started working at the agency.

  Of course, I wasn’t alone. I think all the women at your agency had a crush on you. Why wouldn’t they? You were handsome and funny and smart, but most of all, you had a good heart. Truthfully, you seemed too good to be true. You were also loyal to your wife, which made you even more desirable.

  Up until I met you, I thought all men were users and abusers. Then you had to come along and ruin my perfect misandry. You are everything a man should be. Strong but gentle, smart but kind, serious but fun, with a great sense of humor. In my heart I fantasized about a world where you and I could be together. How happy I would be to call you mine!!

  I know this will sound silly and juvenile, like a schoolgirl crush, but I realized that your name is in my name. You are the AL in FALENE. (As you can see, I’ve spent way too much time fantasizing about you!) But that’s all it was. Fantasy.

  When McKale died, I was filled with horrible sadness and concern for you. I was afraid that you might hurt yourself. Seeing the pain you felt made my love and respect for you grow even more. Please forgive me, but the afternoon of the funeral, when I brought you home, I believed, or hoped, for the first time, that someday you might be mine. I didn’t feel worthy of you, but I thought that you, being who you are, might accept me.

  When you told me you were going to walk away from Seattle, I was heartbroken. I was so glad that you asked me to help you, giving me a way to stay in your life. Then, when you disappeared in Spokane, I was terrified. I didn’t sleep for days. I spent nearly a hundred hours hunting you down. I’m not telling you this so you’ll thank me; I just want you to finally know the truth about the depth of my feelings.

  But, like I said, a girl can be pretty deaf sometimes. I wanted to hear you say that you loved me and cared about me as more than just a friend. Yesterday, when I saw how close you are to beautiful Nicole, my heart broke. I realized that I had already lost my one chance of being yours. And there I was with nothing to offer. Not even my apartment in Seattle to go to anymore.

  I didn’t tell you, but I took the job in New York. I needed to get out of Seattle. I failed to save my brother. I failed to save your agency. I failed to make you love me. I’ve failed at everything I’ve hoped for.

  I’m sorry I didn’t finish the task you gave me. I gave all your banking information to your father. He’ll do a better job than I could anyway. I’m so sorry to not be at your side in your time of need, but it is now obvious to me that you don’t need me. I’m just noise in the concert of your life. And this time I need to be selfish. I have to be. The risk to my heart is too great. They say that the depth of love is revealed in its departure. How true that is. I’m afraid that I’m just learning how deep my love is for you, and it’s more than I can stand. I love you too much to just be a bystander in your life.

  Well, I guess I’ve finally burned the bridge. I couldn’t help myself. Please forgive me for being so needy. Please think of me fondly and now and then remember your starry-eyed assistant who loves you more than anything or anyone else in this world.

  I know you will reach Key West. I know you’ll make it and that you’ll be okay. That’s all I need. It’s not all I want, but it’s all I need——to know that you are okay and happy. Damn, I really love you.

  Be safe, my dear friend. With all my love,

  Falene

  I put the letter down, mechanically folding the pages back together. Falene was right. The depth of love is revealed in its departure, because my heart ached. How could I have taken her so much for granted? I had been so obsessed with my pain that I had been oblivious to hers. She had given me her heart and I had handled it carelessly. I had thrown away love.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  Roses can grow in slums just as weeds can grow around mansions.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  Even though we had met in Seattle, Falene and I were both raised in California. Same state, but different worlds. While I was raised in a relatively prosperous suburb of Pasadena, home of the Rose Bowl, Caltech, and Fuller Theological Seminary, Falene was born and raised north of me in Stockton, California, a city ranking among California’s top ten in crime and listed as number two in Forbes magazine’s list of America’s Most Miserable Cities.

  Her home life was as broken as the city. Not that it was apparent from knowing her. The Falene I first met was kind and beautiful, but guarded. It took many months before she revealed any of what lay behind her psychological curtain.

  Falene knew little about her father other than that the last time she saw him was right before her brother was born and that he was of Greek descent, something she was reminded of every time she looked in the mirror. Her mother was an alcoholic. Falene’s brother, Deron, was five years younger than her and her only sibling, though, in many respects, he was more like Falene’s child, as she had been his primary caregiver for most of his childhood. By the age of nine she was collecting shopping carts at a nearby Safeway for a dime apiece, to help buy food. It was all she could do to keep child welfare from splitting up her family.

  How two people raised in the same environment can turn out so differently, I’ll never understand. According to Falene, Deron had started drinking by the age of ten, smoking pot by eleven and joined a Stockton street gang by thirteen, when he began both using and selling harder drugs.

  Falene’s mother passed away from alcohol poisoning when Falene was eighteen. Two days after the funeral, Falene packed what she could in the back of her mother’s Dodge Dart, forced Deron into the passenger seat of the car, and didn’t stop driving until eight hundred miles later when they reached the outskirts of Seattle.

  Falene had chosen Seattle because she had a former boyfriend who had moved there the year before, and even though he was ten years older than her and frequently abusive, he had offered Falene a place to stay while they made a new start.

  Falene was always a little vague (and embarrassed) when she talked about her early days in Seattle, though once, during a difficult time, she told me that before she started working as a model, she had worked three months at a strip club to make enough money to take care of Deron. It was a humiliating secret, and she was certain I would look down on her, but the truth is I admired her for sacrificing so much to take care of her brother.

  Thankfully, Falene was one blessing that Kyle couldn’t take away from me. Even though it was he who had discovered her on a model shoot and offered her the job, she had a battle-earned instinct about men and from the beginning never trusted him.

  Of necessity, Falene was pretty hard in those early days, and I watched her change—first her wardrobe and vocabulary, then her demeanor. She became soft and polished, shedding the skin of her past with the graceful ease of a woman coming to her true self. She was just naturally good. She began studying yoga and the Bible and began asking me questions about God, which I could never answer.

  Falene had been the one to tell me that McKale had been in an accident. She was also the only one on my staff who had stood up to Kyle as he stole my agency, and she’d tried to warn me about his treachery. She had watched over me and taken me home the afternoon of McKale’s funeral when I was in emotional shambles. She had personally overseen the selling of all of my things and put the money in an account to fund my walk. She had always been there, asking for nothing in return. Besides my father, she was the only person I knew I could trust my life to. And when you find someone in your life like that, you’re a fool to let them go.

  Apparently, I was a fool.

  CHAPTER

  Six

  I’ve returned to my childhood home. Little has changed, including my father. I don’t mean this derogatively. In a tumultuous sea a small anchor goes a long way.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  Our flight to LAX was broken up by a layover in Cincinnati. The moment my father and
I exited the jetway, I took out my phone and dialed Falene’s number. It rang once, followed by a phone service message.

  We’re sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service.

  After we’d sat down, my father said, “Falene?”

  “She’s disconnected her phone. I have no idea where to find her.” I looked at my father. “She didn’t leave you any contact information?”

  “No. Don’t you know where she lives?”

  “Not anymore. She moved to New York City.”

  “How hard could it be to find her there?”

  I looked at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.” After a moment he said, “I’m surprised that you didn’t see it.”

  I glanced up at him. “See what?”

  “That she loves you.”

  “I wasn’t looking,” I said.

  My father looked at me thoughtfully. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. I don’t know if you remember, but for Grandpa’s seventieth birthday he went back to Utah Beach to see where he had fought on D-Day. Do you know what struck him as most peculiar about the experience? He said, ‘I never noticed how beautiful the beach was. I guess a million bullets will change your perspective.’ ”

  “No one’s firing bullets at me,” I said.

  “Don’t kid yourself, you’ve had your own war. With casualties.”

  I shook my head. “I just can’t even think about replacing McKale.”

  “No, no one can replace McKale. And trying to do so would only bring misery. There’s only one reason for remarrying.” He held up his index finger. “Just one.”

  “Love?” I said.

  “Joy. You marry because it enhances joy.”

  I thought over his words. “I just feel so selfish. I’ve been so consumed with my pain that I . . .”

  My father put his hand on my knee. “Cut yourself some slack, son. You’re entitled.”

  “To what? Self-pity?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “To your grief. Grief isn’t a luxury, it’s an appropriate response to loss. You don’t just will it away. If you allow it to run its course, it will fade with time, but if you ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist, it only gets worse.”

  I breathed out slowly. “I guess so.”

  “May I give you some advice?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let it settle. You don’t know if Falene will change her mind and come back. And we still don’t know how bad this tumor is. Let’s focus on one problem at a time.”

  “All right,” I said. “That’s good advice.”

  My father looked content. Few things pleased him more than people liking his advice.

  I started feeling dizzy again, so I took a Dramamine and slept through the entire next leg of our flight, which touched down in LAX around six o’clock. We picked up our luggage, then I waited with it at the curb while my father brought his car around. We stopped on the way home at a Jack in the Box. I wasn’t hungry, so my father ordered his meal to go. Then we continued on to the house of my youth.

  Even without her, McKale’s home is still a memorial to my first and only love.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  I hadn’t been back to Pasadena for more than four years. I was surprised by the depth of emotion I felt at seeing McKale’s childhood home next door. The house looked serene and unchanged, as if no one had informed it that its former occupant had passed away.

  My father carried my pack to the guest room. “I think you should stay here,” he said. “It’s bigger than your old room. And it’s got the connected bathroom. This way I’ll be close if you need anything.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Can I get you anything now?”

  “Dad, I’m home. I can take care of myself.”

  “Right. Sorry.” He carried his hamburger into the front room. “I’m going to watch some TV. They’re re-airing the ’74 Ali and Foreman title fight. The Rumble in the Jungle. You’re welcome to join me.”

  Out of habit, I stopped in the kitchen and lifted the lid of the cookie jar, but there was nothing inside. Probably hadn’t been for a decade. “The Rumble in the Jungle?”

  “You haven’t seen it?”

  “Nineteen seventy-four? I wasn’t born yet.”

  “Great. You can bet on Foreman. I’ll give you a million-to-one odds.”

  “That’s very generous,” I said. “Let me put some laundry in first.”

  “Let me—”

  I raised my hand. “I got it, Dad.”

  “I was just going to say I need to empty the dryer.”

  “I’ll take care of it. Eat your burger and watch your fight.”

  I retrieved my pack, dumped the contents on the laundry room floor, then put my whites in the washing machine and went to the front room. A crescent of a hamburger was lying on its wrapper on the end table next to my father’s La-Z-Boy chair and he was eating a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream. In spite of all the internal turmoil I felt, or perhaps because of it, the scene made me smile. My father was a man of habit. He had the same routine when I was a boy—TV and a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

  I got myself a bowl of ice cream, then sat down on the sofa. The fight was in its third round. Truthfully, watching two guys pound each other when your own head is aching isn’t terribly amusing. During the sixth round the washing machine’s timer buzzed and I got up.

  “I’m going to finish my laundry,” I said. “Then go to bed.”

  My father didn’t look up. “We need to leave tomorrow a little before nine. We’re going to hit traffic.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  I moved my wet clothes to the dryer, put my darks into the washing machine, then went to my room. I didn’t sleep well and got up the next morning around 5 A.M. I went down the hall to my childhood bedroom, which looked exactly the way I had left it fifteen years earlier, with my Jurassic Park, U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers posters still on the wall.

  On top of my dresser was a sizable cluster of prom pictures of McKale and me. With the exception of one girls’-preference dance during my junior year, McKale was the only one I had gone with to the school proms.

  I sat down on the avocado-colored shag carpeted floor in front of my bookshelf, and pulled out my high school yearbooks and began leafing through the pages. In my senior yearbook there was a picture of McKale and me eating lunch together in the school cafeteria with a caption underneath that read “Most Likely to Marry,” which, like the “Most Likely to Succeed” nod, is usually a harbinger of future disaster, but in our case was prophetic.

  My father got up an hour later. He went out for his daily two-mile jog, then did calisthenics in the garage. When he’d finished exercising, he showered and dressed, then came out to the kitchen and made oatmeal. The doctor hadn’t said whether or not I should eat anything, so I skipped breakfast.

  We left for the hospital at a quarter of nine. The registration process was interminable, and it was an hour and a half before I met my neurosurgeon, Dr. Schlozman, a bald, skinny man wearing a bright red bow tie. He greeted us warmly as he walked into the room.

  “Sorry for the wait. You’d think that foursome in front of us had never golfed before.” He reached out his hand. “I’m Dr. Schlozman.”

  I smiled. “I’m Alan.”

  “I’m Alan’s father,” my dad said.

  “Nice to meet you both—let’s jump into this.” He turned back toward a series of MRI scans posted on light boxes mounted on the wall. “According to exhibit A, you have a tumor.” He set his finger on a golf-ball-sized mass on the film. “. . . Either that or you’ve got a golf ball growing on the outside of your brain.” He turned back and looked at me. “I don’t know how much they told you in St. Louis, or, with their accents, how much you actually understood, so I’ll begin from the beginning. The twenty-four-thousand-dollar question is, ‘Is this tumor malignant or benign?’ And the answer is, I don’t know. We can’t be certain without a bio
psy.” He turned back to the image, running his finger along its edge. “Meningiomas are classified by where they are located. As you can see, yours is located on the surface of the brain—it’s called a convexity meningioma. If it were located in New York, it would be called a book agent, but we’ll stick with your scenario.

  “Your type of tumor often doesn’t produce symptoms until it gets big, which is, holy cow, exactly what you’ve got going on in your head. I read in the Cliff’s Notes that you’ve been suffering from headaches and dizziness—is that true?”

  “Pretty much every day,” I said.

  “Which is why five out of five doctors would recommend a craniotomy as the next step. The good news is that because of the tumor’s shape and location I believe we can remove it safely in a procedure called a gross total resection, which is appropriately named because it is totally gross. Trust me, you don’t want a souvenir video. The surgery will relieve the pressure on your brain, which should alleviate your symptoms. This procedure has a very high success rate and afterwards you’ll be able to continue on with your life and play the piano.”

  I could tell his personality was off-putting to my father, but I liked him a lot.

  “Will I need radiation or chemotherapy afterwards?” I asked.

  “If the tumor’s completely resected, then there’s no need for further treatments. That’s not to say you’re forever home free. After surgery it’s best that we monitor the area with periodic MRIs. Like crazy ex-girlfriends, meningiomas have a nasty habit of coming back, so it’s best if you have annual scans throughout your life.”