This Side of Salvation

CHAPTER 33

NOW

I row for another hour and a half while Mara reads aloud from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which she heard was a good road trip novel. The book makes little sense to me, and I sort of hate the bratty son who doesn’t appreciate that his father actually wants to do stuff with him.

Not even the bold cut of green mountains against blue sky, and their competing reflections in the silver lake, can distract me from my fears about my parents. As much as I want to know they’re safe, part of me dreads our reunion. After all, their last memory of me is my abandoning them in the middle of the night.

Then again, that’s also my last memory of them, so I guess we’re even.

While it’s still light, we pull over into a little cove with a decent clearing for a campsite. I can barely raise my arms after hours of rowing (apparently it uses different muscles than pitching), so Mara sets up the tent on her own.

We don’t bother building a fire, since we have nothing but protein bars and cold, soggy hush-puppy remains. Sandy warned us we should eat only in the boat, not the tent, to avoid attracting bears into our bed.

I slip on a sweatshirt I bought at General Store. It says “Bass Man” under a picture of a fish.

“Classy.” Mara shines the flashlight on my chest as she climbs into the beached boat and sits across from me.

“It was either this or ‘Master Baiter.’ Or freezing to death.”

“Or, you know, planning ahead.” She gestures to her own thick blue sweats she brought from home.

“I wish Bailey were here. Then she could sleep between us and we’d all be warm.”

“No offense, but I’d rather have Sam. Assuming he ever speaks to me again after I’ve been avoiding him all week.”

I guess she didn’t trust him—or any of her friends—with our secret the way I trusted Kane and Bailey. “We need a plan of attack for tomorrow. What do we do when we get to Almost Heaven?”

“They’ll probably have lookouts.”

“I bet I could nail a guard with a rock.” I mime hurling a projectile, then wince at the rowing-induced pain. “Ow.”

“That’ll get us off on the right foot,” Mara says. “Injuring one of their people hours from the closest hospital.”

“So we should just row up and say, ‘We come in peace. Take me to your leader’?”

“We do come in peace.” Mara tears open a chocolate coconut energy bar. “It’s leaving again, with Mom and Dad, that’ll be the big problem. Think about it. Sophia’s pretending publicly that the Rush really happened. If Mom could only send us one secret text message, that means Sophia doesn’t want them to have contact with the outside. That means she’ll do anything to keep us from taking our parents home.”

“And we have no leverage.” I remember how Mara convinced Sandy to help us. “Maybe if you cried a lot.”

“Shut up, it did work once.” She shakes her head. “I doubt Sophia will be as easy as Sandy. She’s got a lot more at stake than a rowboat.”

“Maybe we could appeal to Sophia’s sense of decency. Who would want to separate parents from their children? What if we promised her that if we can take our parents home, we won’t tell anyone about Almost Heaven?”

“David, you are so naive sometimes. Why would she believe us?”

“Because it’s true. The Rushers are there by choice.”

“Their kids aren’t. You heard what Ezra said about Eve. She wasn’t even ready to go to heaven, much less some heavenly knockoff out in the sticks with no friends and no Internet. Can you imagine how she felt, especially since her brother got to stay behind?”

“She probably felt kidnapped by her own parents.” I crumple the protein-bar wrapper and shove it back in the ziplock bag. Still hungry, I fish out the last package of cheesepuffs. A nearly full moon rises over the lake.

“As pretty as it is out here,” Mara says, “I can’t imagine Mom agreeing to live so far away from civilization.”

“Maybe she’ll open her own Starbucks so she can get a decent French roast.”

Mara laughs. “Then she’d feel like she could cross off the ‘Almost’ in Almost Heaven.”

“Dad, on the other hand, must feel totally at home.”

“Getting back to his hillbilly roots.” She brushes the crumbs off her lap. “I’m going inside the tent to read, where it’s warmer. You coming?”

“In a minute. Don’t use up all the flashlight battery.”

She leaves me alone with the lake and the mountains and all the chirping, tweeting, splashing creatures.

In this setting, God seems close enough to hear me unamplified. I don’t need to raise or fold my hands, or hear the “Let us pray” introduction. Here we can just talk.

Rapture or not, I know this earth won’t last forever. Billions of years from now, the sun will swell into a red giant and swallow our part of the solar system. This lake will boil and these mountains will melt. I know it won’t be pretty, but I do pray that the earth gets to die of natural causes. I pray that it doesn’t get cut down in the prime of life, by you or us or some combination thereof.

That’s probably a sin, right? I should be praying for you to come back tomorrow, or the next day. If I really love you, I should want you to show up now. Nothing personal, God, but . . . you’ve made something good here. I think you should see it through to the end. The natural end, not the one humans have written.

Amen. No, wait. PS: Help me and Mara—let’s face it, probably Mara—figure out a way to get our parents back. Amen again.

I zip up our food bag, place it in the storage compartment, and carefully step out of the boat onto the bank.

Inside the tent, Mara is already asleep, the book on her chest and the flashlight fallen to her side, its beam pointed at the ceiling. The sleeping bag is folded out to create a mattress. A thin flannel blanket is our only cover, sadly, since a second sleeping bag wouldn’t have fit in the boat.

I switch off the flashlight, then slip under the blanket, shivering at the sudden warmth. My head rests on a solid surface I recognize as one of the life vests. Nice.

I drift off to sleep, feeling strangely at peace.