The Holy Number 12

Alcoholics Anonymous was started in 1935 by two men who desperately needed to be sober. They believed that a set of principles saved their lives. These became the world-famous Twelve Steps. One of these steps is that, to overcome any addiction, we must seek a power higher than ourselves. I embrace the Judaic-Christian way, and my Higher Power is Jesus the Messiah.

God loves the number 12. There are 12 donuts in a dozen, 12 months of the year, 12 tribes of Israel, and 12 apostles. The Heavenly City of New Jerusalem will have 12 gates made of 12 different precious stones.

I divided this book into 12 sections, following AA's outline. I hope My Twelve Steps inspires you for your own journey. Please share your story with me at www.lonnawilliams.com. And may the Higher Power in your life bless you with 12 blessings every moment of your day.

Prologue

Footprints in the Stone

"For He shall give His angels
charge over you,
to keep you in all your ways.
In their hands they shall bear you up,
lest you dash your foot against a stone."
--Psalm 91:11-12

The mountain road veers left, or right, or up. Which way to go? Does meaning linger in the path I choose, randomly, on a spring day bordered by daffodils? Does God's Hand guide my car, the flick of my wrist on the steering wheel, the scrape of tires over fallen pine branches?

Does my life matter?

All this long journey of tragedy, literature, adventure, marriage, motherhood, cancer, miscarriages, dependancy, divorce, exile, romance, recovery . . . does it count for something? Can my blood turn to a balm and heal others? Pain sharper than any pills ever eased, the loss of my children, loneliness that makes me invisible as wind blowing through my windows--can these hold resurrection in them?

I follow the up-road. Scent of cedar mingles with the pithy stench of earth laid bare. Pavement turns to gravel, gravel to dirt. Left, right, left again. Through shaded fir trees, the road winds past cabins I've never seen, their weathered brown wood turned gray and pointing toward the sky. The road breaks free to a cleared ridge. I stop the car and get out. Unfiltered sunlight strikes my eyes. I block the sun with one raised hand and see the panorama laid before me.

Layer upon layer of blue-green ranges, spotted by yellow rocks and evergreens, reach toward the eastern horizon. Up there, a fire lookout towers near the fingers of an abandoned ski slope. Down there, a lake glistens in the sunlight, its waves dancing white patterns like SOS signals to God. I pause, breathe in the air like an old friend's comfort, and scream to the heights,

"Give me words to write this journey! Chisel each of My Twelve Steps in the bedrock of this mountain!"

And then I see, atop a brace of boulders, an empty stone house. Roofless, it raises chimney and open windows high, its golden silhouette a stark reality against a vague blue sky. I drive toward it. Steps arc downward, their centers curved with use and age. I imagine footprints etched forever in such stone.

And when I turn to leave, I notice lilacs, planted long ago, now wildly prancing up those steps like people eager to ascend.

So I will tell my story. Words, like footsteps, will come one by one.

Step One
Awaken the Sleeper

"We admitted we were powerless over drugs--
that our lives had become unmanageable."
--Narcotics Anonymous

"Awake, you who sleep,
arise from the dead,
and Christ will give you light."
--Ephesians 5:14

Chapter One

The Necessary Step

Between the clouds, a nearly full moon drenched the New Zealand hills and valleys of sheep farming country. In the distance, mountains rose in snowy heights, their chasms and peaks so lovely that my eyes were drawn from the road.

"I'm late," I muttered, focusing on the headlamps that illumined the dotted white lines in the middle of the highway. Gabrielle, my fourteen-year-old daughter, sat beside me, silent as I raced down the wet-black road on the left side instead of the right. Her long auburn hair half-covered the birthmark on her cheek, and she clasped her hands tightly in her lap.

It started raining again, steadily and strong, and I turned on the windscreen wipers.

"Be careful, Mom," Gabrielle warned. I slowed down a little and glanced at the glowing face of my cellphone. No reception. The implacable time read 9:28.

"I'm late," I repeated. "They're going to be so mad."

"You can't help the rain," Gabrielle observed. "We went all the way to Timaru to meet with that lawyer and do our shopping. Surely they will understand half an hour."

"Sheila told me to return by 9:00, and Jason echoed the command. I think they've set me up for failure. There was something in their tone when they told me not to be late."

The Bingleys were watching Joseph in the village of Fairlie. He had gone there after school to play with their sons. I knew, when I left their house that morning for a day trip away at the coast, that I would be late.

Weariness clung to me, and my heavy eyelids threatened to close. I had not slept well, worrying about my sudden flight to New Zealand. After 16 1/2 years of a troubled marriage, I had escaped to the other side of the world with my two children. Could I ever get away from Jack's long arm?

I never questioned if I had done the right thing. I had chosen a risky path and would stick to it, hoping the mountains of the South Island would shelter us.

The car hit a patch of water and skidded a little to the left. Gabrielle suppressed a scream, and I eased the tires back to the center of our lane. My eyes were so heavy, and I had finished my cup of takeaway tea.

I had taken my medicine as usual. Perhaps I should not have taken the anti-anxiety pills along with the morphine . . . At least I had carefully refrained from my sleeping pill.

"Mom, watch out!" Gabrielle yelled, her high-pitch voice catching in her throat like a panicked bird.

A lamb appeared in front of the headlights, and I swerved into the other lane to miss it. Tires slipped over water, the car skidded right, and I barely kept it from reeling into a ditch.

God, help us, I prayed as I wrestled with the steering wheel. My breath caught in my throat, and my head pounded. For three long seconds I did not know if our trip would continue.

Finally, the back wheels of the Subaru gripped pavement and straightened out. I eased it back to the left.

"Thank God for all-wheel drive," I joked, my voice too bright for escaping a wet and lonely death. "Good thing not many people live on the South Island, or we might have met someone coming the other way." I could tell, in the dim green glow from the dashboard, that Gabrielle was staring at me, her mouth slightly open.

We drove on in silence, each passing minute jarring my nerves as the cell phone changed the digital numbers of time. 9:31. 9:32. 9:33.

Past the town of Cave, past the pillared gates of sheep farms, past the Avenue of Trees, we finally entered the village. Like a scene from the 1950s, the main street with its quaint stone buildings was deserted. Street lamps showed the streaming trails of rain, and shop windows gaped black and empty.

I turned left on Church Street, then right on Meadow Lane. The Bingley's house was down at the end, by the cow fields.

I parked by the curb.

"Quick, get out," I ordered unnecessarily. Gabrielle already had her hand on the door handle.

The Bingleys had just moved from Christchurch, and their yard was muddy. Instead of a cement pathway to their door, puddles glistened in the porch light. We waded through the thick, gooey stuff, shivering in our t-shirts and heels, for we were not prepared for autumn in April.

Jason and Sheila were waiting at the half-glass door. Before we could knock, they opened it, their faces livid.

"You're late," Jason declared. His blue eyes gleamed with anger in the porch light, and I looked down at my dirty feet.

"I'm s-sorry," I slowly spoke the futile words. "It rained--"

"We specifically told you to be on time," Sheila interjected, her voice sharp as an unexpected slap in the face. I looked up to see brown curls dangling in her eyebrows. She stood in a pink fuzzy night robe, one hand upon the half-open door.

It was only half an hour. What's the big offense? I wondered but did not say. I, the writer and English teacher, could think of no words that could defend me.

Gabrielle, beside me, tried to warm herself with her arms, but I could hear her teeth begin to chatter.

"Won't you invite us in from the cold and the rain?" I asked.

"No," Jason retorted. "We are not your friends. What you did was wrong, taking the children away from their father in California. He sent you this."

He held up a large manila envelope.

"You have been served," he spat, as if I were an obscenity.

He thrust the packet toward me, his body still half behind the door. He made sure his hand did not touch mine, and I nearly dropped the envelope in the mud. I stared at it and turned it over. Black letters in my estranged husband's hand glared out at me. Another slap in the face.

"But it's opened," I observed. "It's addressed to me. You can't read another person's mail!"

"Jack told us to read it," he replied, his voice emphasizing consonants like knives.

"That still doesn't give you the right--"

"He says you are an insane drug addict and need immediate help," Jason interrupted. "That what you did was illegal, taking his children out of America. He's initiating a Hague Convention trial against you."

I slipped legal papers into my wet and trembling hand. In the dim electric light, I scanned the ominous words of an attorney and a judge. Raindrops blurred some of the black letters, and I put the papers back into their envelope.

"Jack abused us for 16 1/2 years!" I defended, my voice shaking. "We finally got the strength to leave him. You know nothing of our lives. You can't believe what Jack writes. He hates me! And I'm not a crazy drug addict. I am a cancer survivor, and doctors legally prescribed me medicine!"

Jason thrust his face toward mine, his eyes filled with a light I did not want to see.

"Even now, you are ON something," he spat. "Your pupils do not look right."

I blinked my eyes and glanced away. Sheila stepped back with a little cry, as if even she thought her husband was too harsh. Only then did I see that my ten-year-old son stood behind her, his curly gold-brown hair like Frodo from The Lord of the Rings, the film that first brought us to New Zealand three summers ago.

"Don't talk to my mother that way," Joseph said, his voice high, his eyes so blue and innocent against the paleness of his face, as he stood with a fireplace blazing behind him, like Frodo in the scene with Gandalf and the Ring. I wanted to cry. I held my hand toward him, and he walked toward me, slipping past Jason and the doorway. He stood beside me, facing my accuser.

"Well, I see I am not welcome in this town," I said sarcastically. I turned and walked through nearly frozen mud, Gabrielle and Joseph close behind me, and the envelope still clasped in my hand.

Back in the car, I turned the dome light and the heater on. Jessica shook with cold, and I reached for a sweater behind the seat. Bags of groceries lined the back , and Joseph sat among them.

"You are my brave little hero," I told him. "All you lack is the golden ring."

"Oh, I have it, Mum," he told me, reaching for the necklace I had given him. An old wedding ring from my jewelry box was looped in the chain. He had worn it with his green cape and burgundy vest, the costume that won him First Place in the ice rink's Halloween contest back home. He held it to the dome light, and it glistened like doom.

"You're crying," Gabrielle observed, her voice still trembling from the chill. She had been silent all the time we faced the Bingleys.

"Yes," I admitted, wiping my cheek with my hand. "I was just slapped in the face by people I thought were my friends."

Was that the only reason? Did I cry for the battle ahead, etched in black type on 14-inch papers inside a soggy envelope? Or did I cry for the words Jason had spoken, words I did not want to hear?

"You are an insane drug addict who needs help."

If that were true, why did they not offer me any? Isn't that The Necessary Step?

I drove back to our rented sheep farm house in silence. Past Main Street, the edge of town, the row of trees looking dismal in the rain. Our headlamps illuminated the dirt road leading to the sheep farm where we rented the original cottage. I followed the muddy road up the hill toward the garage, parked, and walked quickly up stone steps to the screen door that opened hollowly before my shaking hand.

Inside, it was cold and late and dark. I switched on the kitchen light, a bare bulb hanging from a white ceiling, then hunted for matches to start the wood-burning stove. Gabrielle was still trembling, and Jason brought the electric heater from his bedroom. I plugged it in, and Gabrielle sat right on the wood floor in front of it. I swiped a down comforter from my bed, draped it over my daughter's shoulders, and began to pack.

"Wh-what are you doing?" she asked, her teeth still chattering.

"We're not safe in this small town. We're leaving."

"But--" Gabrielle's objection was stopped by my stare.

"They are friends of your father," I spat, clenching my fists in the still-cold air. "They will tell him all about us. I cannot bear to have him drag us back under his power. We must go to a place he will not think of--or have spies to watch us."

The names of possible towns flitted through my mind like wings of birds, but I could not focus on one. It was easier to open closets, haul out empty suitcases, unzip them, and fill them with clothes, toys, boots, jewelry, photographs--all the things we had dragged with us from California.

For all the medication I had taken, for all the time I had been up since early morning to get Jonathan ready for the village school, I could not stop my mind from remembering the things that shaped my life to this point of running away again.

Why do we have to remember sad things? Amnesia seems a blessed, illusive state, much to be desired.

As I folded Jason's jeans and placed earrings into tiny boxes, my past rose before me like someone else's story. That was the only way I could face it, as if I were telling a story not my own. I even gave myself a new name, like a character from one of my novels. Lyssa, not Lonna. Lyssa can tell my story:

"The Handgun"

"Daddy, Don't!" Lyssa screamed a split second before his index finger pulled the curved black trigger. The handgun exploded in light and sound, and her father's head with it.

Lyssa had never heard anything so loud. The shot, though brief as the moment of death and childhood's end, echoed in her mind. She covered her ears and kept screaming, her mother's voice joining hers.

"I told him to go ahead," her mother wailed, over and over like chanting. "I told him to go ahead! I didn't think he would do it . . ."

Blood, tissue, and yellow brain matter was spattered on the white wall. Lyssa, not yet five years old, stared at it as if looking at the monster that lived under her bed. Beneath that spot, her father slumped like a doll carelessly dropped. His upper face seemed normal enough except for a few crimson spatters. His unblinking brown eyes beneath bushy dark eyebrows and lashes stared at her without seeing. His open mouth, though, was a hideous hunk of solid crimson as if he'd eaten seaweed. The back of his head was missing.

He'll never talk to me again, she thought.

And when they buried him days later and for years after, she'd dream of standing by an open hole in the damp red clay. She'd watch, over and over, as the large black box that held her father was lowered into it. Chunks of dirt covered the box slowly, until black was overcome by red, as her father's hair had been by blood. And then, before the box slipped away forever to the earth, her father's hand crashed through wood to pull her her in with him.

She always woke up screaming, the sound the same as on that Christmas night when she was four and three-quarters years old and her father unfathered himself.
*********************************
"Saltcellers"

Grandmother's house was painted gray and white and big as a castle. Two hundred years old, the plantational Southern building rested on a wide slice of land with ancient oak trees. The tallest one, with boughs twisted like old people's hands, had a huge, writhing trunk surrounded by a wooden bench. Lyssa loved to play on that bench, sprawling her body over it while balancing dolls and oak nuts. She loved the shape and color of those nuts, with their braided tan hats over smooth brown oval bodies. She'd put the nuts in her dolls' pockets, take them out, line them in a row, and speak to them.

When her cousins visited, they'd chase her toward the bench, and she'd hide under it, peering out between the gray old slats of wood until her blue eyes glowed like stars beneath blonde curls.

Those colors always caught her.

Once inside, Lyssa would explore the many rooms of the vast, formal house with its polished wood floors and large closets. The dining room was her favorite place, for it held the tall glass case with its shelves of treasures. Unwatched, she'd carefully unlatch the door and pick up a glass saltcellar from England. Its color was deep royal blue, like the sky before black night fell. She'd run her finger over the smooth surface, then hold the object toward the chandelier where rainbows danced among glass prisms and small electric bulbs. The saltcellar had a tiny clear glass spoon with which she'd scoop up salt crystals.

When Lyssa heard a step behind her, she'd return the forbidden object and slide under a rosewood table with lion's feet.

"I'm safe here," she'd whisper to herself. "The Lion guards me."

And though Grandmother could see the child well enough, she'd play the game and let Lyssa kneel on a green rug like African veldt grass where lions truly lurked--until aromas from the kitchen called her out.

And after dinner made by a cook and served by maids, Lyssa would lean back on her grandmother's breast and surrender to the motion of the rocking chair.

"There was a little girl
who had a little curl
right in the middle of her forehead,"

her grandmother would sing to her. After a full day of running outside among leaves and wind, the words would soothe the child.

"When she was good,
she was very, very good,
but when she was bad,
she was horrid."

"What does 'horrid' mean?" the sleepy six-year-old would ask as she stared up at an ebony mask on the floral-print wall, hung next to brown parchment stamped with geometrical black designs--things her grandfather had brought back from Africa.

"Let's hope you don't find out," Grandmother would reply. Lyssa would cluck her teeth like a disapproving hen, and the old lady more accurately answered,

"It means 'very bad.'"

"Where's Mommy?" Lyssa changed the subject.

Grandmother's gray eyes glanced toward the ceiling.

"Upstairs in her room," she sighed.

"Why does Mommy sleep so much?" Lyssa wondered. "It's not even my bedtime yet."

"She's tired," the old woman replied.

But Lyssa knew better. She had seen her mother drink from many glass bottles.

"No; she's enchanted," the child declared. "The magic juice weaves a spell on her, and she needs a prince to come and wake her."

"You say the strangest, truest things," Grandmother whispered.

Lyssa could have grown up in that mansion. But her mother pulled her away too soon, to a gypsy life of cars, suitcases, and rental homes spread across the states of America.
*********************************
"The T.V. Man"

"Why does the T.V. man make you cry?" Lyssa asked her mother who sat in front of the glowing screen and wept. The mother, clothed in a silk aquamarine nightgown, held one shaking hand to the glass screen.

"His name is Billy Graham," the mother replied, her words slurred as usual. She often hid her drinking, but tonight the bottle was in the open, and a coffee mug held its contents.

"He tells me I should repent and be saved."

Lyssa stared at the coffee mug that didn't hold coffee, and then at the black, white, and many-shades-of-gray images behind the lit-up, curved glass of the television.

"Come just as you are," the tall man with wavy hair said, his voice melodic. His eyes seemed to peer into Lyssa as she watched him. "Come to the front of this coliseum. Jesus will meet you here." He lifted one big hand as an invitation, as he stood on a podium in front of a vast crowd of seated people. Music played, a choir sang, and men, women, teens, and children got out of their seats and walked down long aisles to stand in front of the podium. Some knelt. Some bowed their heads. Some cried like her mother was doing.

"See, he can save you too, Sunny!" Lyssa exclaimed, using her mother's nickname to offset tension in the room.

"I don't know why they call me Sunny," her mother commented. "I'm not a very happy person. And I'm not so easily saved." Her voice sounded sad and thin as a distant wind. Red curls from her wig drooped against her long white neck. She wiped her faded blue eyes with a tissue, picked up the green wine bottle, and stared at the liquid that sloshed inside it. Her lips, free of their usual pink lipstick, looked like bruises on her face--or strange red blossoms blooming there.

"Is there--any hope--for me?" she wailed.

"Jesus will meet you here," the man repeated, music swelling like grace around him.

Sunny reached over and turned off the T.V. Its screen went blank as the moment before night falls, the moment before waking turns to sleep--a sleep without dreams.
*********************************
"Hurricane Party"

The wind blew so hard upon high glass windows that the lady in white told Lyssa and her mother to move toward the center of the vast, crowded room. Other people, who had been trying to sleep on cots placed over the polished wood floor, lifted eyes bright with fear. Pupils glittered in the reflected light of oil lamps placed on bleacher steps. Basketball hoops and climbing ropes marked vague corners of the gym.

"The hurricane is beating hard outside," the woman in charge said. "Stay away from the windows so that broken glass will not cut you."

Lyssa stared at the red cross on the woman's arm and felt safe. Why are the adults so worried? she wondered. Aren't they happy to leave their fragile houses in the pounding rain and drive through dark, flooded streets to a shelter such as this?

"It's so exciting!" Lyssa exclaimed, lifting her arms high. She wanted to dance in the electric charge of lightning outside the windows, crackled white and splintered like glass.

"I heard a whole island off the coast was flooded by surge waves, and all the people there were drowned," one mother stated, holding her son close to her.

"Yes, they were stupid enough to ignore evacuation warnings. They were having a Hurricane Party, drunk as skunks when the storm struck," an old man added, holding up the radio he had been listening to.

A tree cracked outside, slammed against the outer wall, and even Lyssa screamed. Then silence fell upon the people, with only the constant drip of water as a soothing sound in the background.

"God is our refuge and strength," an old woman read from a black book. "A very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear." She sat neatly and alone on a cot two rows down from Lyssa. Her white curls were covered by a red scarf, her glasses glinted in the lamplight, and the wrinkles around her mouth moved as she pronounced each word. Once done, she closed the book, looked straight at Lyssa, and they shared a secret.

"We're all safe," Lyssa told her mother who had been furtively sipping from a silver flask. Sunny, whose fear was covered over by burning liquid and flushed cheeks, nodded her head. Lyssa felt like the mother, not the child. And she wondered if the danger sat next to her on a wool blanket, not raging outside in the storm.
*********************************
"The Crucifix"

When Lyssa was little, she loved to go to the big church at the end of Grandmother's street. The ceiling was high like heaven and gilded with arches painted gold. Sunlight blazed through colored glass like jewels, and she wondered,

Where is Jesus?

Was He that large carved figure on the crucifix hung above the altar? Or was He in the smaller bronze crosses carried by white-robed priests as they walked past the aisles?

Her mother did not take Communion with Lyssa--those flat white wafers that tasted like paper in one's mouth. Instead, Sunny wore a lacy black veil and wept, her head down.

"Don't worry," Lyssa whispered, holding her mother's thin fingers tightly in her small hand. "I will find Him for you."

When she was thirteen, her mother married again.

"I met your stepfather at an A.A. meeting," Sunny told her daughter, laughing, tipsy from wine. "I met your father in a bar, and my first husband at a cocktail party."

Lyssa did not understand Irony yet, but she knew a joke when she heard one.

"Doesn't A.A. stand for Alcoholic Anonymous? Aren't you supposed to give up drinking when you go?" Lyssa asked.

That's when her stepfather hit her in the nose.

Lyssa learned to keep silent after that. She felt like a puppet, dragged across America in an old blue Buick, looking for the Promised Land. When not in the car, they stayed in a big gray tent, her parents too drunk to work. Beer cans collected in the canvas center, and the only water was a metal spicket sticking up through sand. Lyssa escaped outside, and walked all day through the desert filled with cactus plants whose thorns attacked her fingers like long, piercing magnets.

She walked through the many campgrounds built on dirt, and once they landed on grass near a vast lake. There she learned to clean off fish scales in big metal washtubs, when strangers invited her to eat with them in neat RVs.

At the campground by the lake, the police finally arrested Lyssa's parents for public drunkenness and disorderly behavior. Not knowing what to do with the girl who tried to hide behind the Buick, they put her in the back of another police car, by herself. She stared at the wire mesh between her and the driver's shiny black cap. She pushed on doors that had no handles, beat the glass of windows that could not roll down. She could hardly breathe.

"Calm down," the officer in the front right seat turned to say.

"White trash," the driver whispered, but Lyssa heard.

She clutched her purse in her lap, and reached inside it for the gold crucifix her mother had given her for her First Communion. She held the cross with a small Jesus figure on it, turned it over, and sunlight blazed through the window and lit up "14K" in tiny letters. She held the cross' sharp edges so hard in her palm that her fingers bled.

"Save me," she pleaded. "Save us all."

Lyssa sat for hours on a wooden bench in the police station with its cold linoleum floor and thick wood desks. She stared at the vast, busy room of uniformed officers and criminals in tattered plaid shirts and jeans. Conversations filled the air like bees buzzing in the Florida heat. A woman with kind brown eyes brought her water in a styrofoam cup. Lyssa hated seeing pity in those eyes, and she pretended she wasn't thirsty, though her throat burned.

Lyssa imagined the black steel bars of a cell, and again she could not breathe. Still she clutched the crucifix, though her hand stung. Does God ever answer prayers at once, or do we always have to wait? she wondered as she watched the black arms of an electric wall clock slowly move from right to left. She imagined the long, dark halls of the foster home her mother had often warned her about. Would she ever see her mother again? Did she want to?

Finally, an officer with a puffy white face, his stomach mushrooming out his uniform, guided her mother and stepfather toward a nearby desk. Looking painfully sober, the two adults signed papers, received their wedding rings and wallets from brown envelopes, and called a cab. The tent with its beer cans waited for them. They packed it quickly, got in the Buick, and drove to Virginia.
There Lyssa's prayers would be answered.
*********************************

I realized I had stopped packing my jewelry into the carryon bag. My hand rested on the old wooden vanity with its ceramic white knobs. I was leaning forward, staring at my reflection in the spotted, silver-backed mirror.

Do I look so different from my mother? I asked, pausing in my desperate flight for three long seconds.

Oh, why couldn't I see the warnings etched in the glass?

The rain stopped, and the moon shone between clouds. It slanted through white lace curtains of the farmhouse's bedroom window and onto the round vanity mirror, illuminating it like a spacecraft.

I paused in my packing, found Joseph and Gabrielle, and led them outside to the sheep fields.

Wet grass rubbed against our legs, the sweet/sour scent of pine trees filled the air, and a warm wind swept down from the North Island.

On the vast South Island of New Zealand, below the equator in a southern sea, where sheep outnumber people and the land has not been ruined with pollution, on a still night after a rain--beauty takes a new name. We stepped up the grassy slope above the house and paused as the sky took out breath away.

The Southern Cross hung above us, bright despite the moon, and even parts of the Milky Way shone between the clouds that wisped across deep blue in white puffs and silver edges.

All around us spread the most beautiful landscape we had ever seen, in layers from snow-covered mountains in the distant north, to deep green slopes of hills below them, silver-surfaced lakes, sheep fields terraced by rows of trees, country roads, and farm houses like gems sewn into a patchwork quilt.

Over all, moonlight shone.

I looked at the faces of my children, in too much haze from medication, but still saw the precious growing beauty in them. I grabbed their hands and lifted their arms toward the sky. For one long, precious moment we stood in a circle as if poised to dance. A nightbird piped a lonesome tune, each elusive note more perfect than a symphony.

On that lovely summit on a lovely night, come unexpectedly after rain, cold, and confrontation, we stared at each other as if we knew how precious was the touch of hand to hand. Their bodies once grew in mine; my blood had flowed into theirs. The bond of generations tied us, as we touched each blade of grass beneath our feet. Every living thing around us lifted voices in the night, and the very stars sang with the breath of God.

The blissful moment passed, and awkward silence came between us, for we remembered what had brought us there.

Oh, why can't we just forget it all and dance? I wondered.

"If we stick up our thumbs, maybe we'll hitch a ride on a spaceship!" Joseph exclaimed. He let go of Gabrielle's hand and raised his thumb toward the night sky.

"But they wore a special ring which transmitted signals," Gabrielle added. She had been reading Douglas Adam's book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and we had seen the silly movie in the musty farmhouse living room.

Laughter, like yawns, is catching. We all started giggling and holding up our thumbs. Nothing passed above us but clouds, the Southern Cross in four bright points, and the occasional curious angel.

I should have been at peace with God and man. Instead, I wanted to escape even this--and the unseen threat that reached for us from America like a giant hand in a starless corner of the sky.

Gabrielle looked at me and said,

"I can see your aura, Mother. You know, I see angels sometimes--good and bad. I saw shadows in the white walls of the farmhouse, too. Something bad is going to happen."

My face was over-bright in the moonlight, burning from chemicals within my body, the pupils of my eyes so large that the blue was almost swallowed. Is that the aura Gabrielle saw in me? A false confidence that things would somehow be OK? That the mountains of New Zealand could shelter us?

"No, no, not more bad things," I cried, fighting back tears of frustration, exhaustion, sorrow. "We must be free. Surely God will have mercy on us."

After all, I still read my Bible daily, went to church on Sundays, and prayed with the children every night . . . the drugs had not erased all. And I had good reasons for taking them, pain still strong in me from chemotherapy and--far worse--the abuse Jack had dealt me all those years . . .

I wanted desperately to be numb, but tears came anyway. No matter how much medicine I took, I could not stop feeling the hurt, could not forget, and here were the eyes of my two children looking at me for answers I could not give. Did they see the weakness in me, the uncertainty of what to do next--after running away to the farthest island of the earth?

I turned away from their eyes that glowed so brightly in the moonlight that I could see the color blue. Oh, such blue that burnt into my soul like the rarest tongues of flame! I looked again to the sky and imagined a spaceship hovering above us in ever-changing colored lights and motion, blurry as a psychedelic haze. Perhaps I saw an angel there, moving in the wisps of wind and dark beneath the stars. God had not forsaken me, though I had wandered far from even Him.

I held my thumb up a little longer, then lowered it. The children had put down their arms minutes ago. They knew a spaceship wasn't coming.

Chapter Four
The Colors of the Cross

Gabrielle shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest, for the wind blew cold again. A deep darkness dimmed the stars, the dark before dawn. We walked back to the farmhouse, and I finished packing while the children slept. Each object I touched brought an unwanted memory as I slipped it in a suitcase. My fingers lingered on my blue leather Bible with its silver-edged paper, thin but strong to the touch.

I opened it and remembered when I first stepped through a door to another world.

I was fourteen and a half. My mother had descended to the third level of alcoholic hell and dragged me with her. She would barricade herself into the upstairs bedroom of our rented Virginia Beach house and drink all day in bed, hardly coming out even to eat, wearing her sheer pink nightgown that made her look thin as a prisoner of war.

I hated the boxes of thin green bottles she hid in her closet. I hated the smell of old wine on her breath, the purple bruises on her yellowing arms, the dry flakes of skin on her bare feet she did not bother to rub with lotion.

I had just started high school and could not bring a friend home to see her like that. That was the biggest reason I hated my mother.

The hatred grew in me. I felt disgusted whenever I saw her or heard her say something in slurred words. The hatred began to eat at me, and I could not escape it. I wanted to forgive her for ending my childhood too soon, for showing me things I shouldn't have to see, for making me the mother instead of the child. But I couldn't find a way.

One night Sunny didn't answer the door when I knocked to bring her macaroni and cheese. I had not seen or heard her all day. With a terrible, dread feeling of finding her dead body, I pushed at the locked door until it opened.

A new smell filled the room, and I walked across the cold wood floor toward the nightstand where a small lamp glowed. I picked up an open bottle of rubbing alcohol--the kind we kept in the bathroom for cuts--and smelled it.

"Oh, God, she drank it!" I spoke aloud. She had run out of wine and found the only other alcohol in the house. Her water pitcher was empty, its matching plastic cup on its side. Why couldn't she drink water?

I leaned toward the figure on the dimly lit bed, holding my breath and feeling my heart beat in my chest. My mother moaned and moved a little, but her eyes stayed shut.

"Mom?" I called. She moaned again, and I reached for the white phone receiver and dialed 9-1-1.

Sirens and red lights filled the night air outside our rented house. Paramedics in blue uniforms came into my mother's room, put an IV into her arm, and loaded her on a stretcher. I stood awkwardly in the room's corner, trying not to get in the men's way. They wheeled her out in front of me. A red blanket covered her thin body, and the dark lashes of her closed eyes contrasted starkly with her white cheeks.

"You did the right thing by calling 9-1-1, one man said to me as they wheeled my mother past. "She was severely dehydrated. She would have been dead by morning. You saved her life."

He reached over and patted my shoulder. I looked into his compassionate brown eyes under thick black eyebrows and remembered the only good photo I had of my father. He stared at the camera, unsmiling, wearing a pinstripe suite. His black hair was curly like his eyebrows and lashes, and his eyes a deep chocolate brown. In one sophisticated hand he held a cigarette, its trail of smoke rising toward the ceiling like his soul had done when I was not yet five.

His absence hit me like a physical blow, and tears came to my eyes that I had not shed for my mother.

"Oh, why couldn't my . . . father . . . be here?" I asked the man as I wiped hot tears from my cheeks with a shaking hand.

"I don't know," he replied, smiling. "But your Heavenly Father loves you and is always here."

In the next second the man was gone, and I was left alone in the dimly lit bedroom filled with the stench of alcohol.

Soon a concerned neighbor would come over, stay with me, and make small talk while my mother fought for her life in the hospital. And later, on a school night, I would lie awake in my bedroom lit by one golden nightlight and stare at the shadows on the ceiling. After awhile they would become moving images, memories of my childhood I wanted to forget: my mother taunting my father to go ahead and shoot (how could she SAY that?); days at grandmother's house while mother hid in her bedroom (why couldn't she get out of BED?); my mother in her sheer nightgown that revealed more of her body than I wanted to see (oh, why couldn't she simply get DRESSED?); the bottles stacked in her closet (as if she could HIDE them); beer cans heaped in a canvas tent (my stepfather was another BAD choice in men); my mother and stepfather keeping me up all night as they yelled at each other with slurred voices (so neighbors called the POLICE); the back seat of a squad car, behind a mesh metal net (was I ARRESTED too?); a wooden chair in the corner of a police station (and hearing the words WHITE TRASH); the night my stepfather left (and my mother WEPT for him as if she had lost a treasure).

Most of all, I remembered the SHAME, SHAME, SHAME of an alcoholic mother who neglected me so that neighbors and local church members took pity on me and humiliated me with the offer of rides in their cars, meals at their houses, and used clothing folded in a cardboard box. Even a teacher at school had brushed my long, thick, tangled hair when my mother did not.

"Your Heavenly Father loves you. He is always here," the paramedic's voice echoed through the night.

    In the ceiling shadows, I saw myself as a little girl again, in the big church, searching for Jesus. Was He somewhere in the high gilded ceiling? On the golden cross? If He dwelled in such holy places, how could He be next to me in this small bedroom? 

    How could I find Him?

    This question haunted me as I finally drifted off to sleep. 

    My mother spent three nights in the hospital and came home looking tired, thin, and yellow. I wanted to say something to her but didn't know what, wondering if she realized I had saved her life. She immediately began drinking wine again, though I had no idea where she got it. Despair welled in me like the flat, stale taste of wine, and I wondered if things would ever change.

    That week a friend from school invited me to a Bible study in her home. Normally I wouldn't go, for I was painfully shy. But the invitation seemed like an answer to my desperate prayer, so I accepted it. 

    I wore my only decent dress, thinking maybe this would be like church. Hayley answered my hesitant knock on her door, smiling, and led me to her living room. I sat down in a corner chair, wanting to be invisible among the other teens and adults (who wore more casual clothes). I clasped my sweaty palms together and sat so straight and tense that I could feel each vertebrae in my back. The room felt charged with electricity like the gray cumulus clouds of a September thunderstorm over the ocean where I would walk as far as I could along a vast, deserted beach, to get away from my mother (but at some point, exhausted, I had to turn around . . .). I held my breath, waiting, wishing for a jagged flash of lightning that would change everything. 

     A man with long hair pulled back in a ponytail stood up. He wore jeans, a faded t-shirt, and red tennis shoes. He opened a large black Bible with gold edges and read a verse I had heard before but never discovered for myself:

    "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."

    Still holding the Bible, he began to explain the Gospel in simple, everyday words I could understand--not the church language that confused me.

    "We have all sinned, and this has separated us from God," he said. 

I stared at his brown eyes that were filled with a passion I did not understand. 

"God knew that we could not obey all of His commandments, so He provided the solution for our sin. The Creator of the universe came down from Heaven to live with us. He became a man. He walked among us. He healed us. He died for us. His blood, stronger than all the animal sacrifices in the temple, covered our black sin to make us white as snow.  He rose again to give us new life, then ascended back to Heaven where we can go and live with Him forever."

The preacher, whose name I never knew, paused and looked into my eyes. For once, I did not sweat or blush.

"Here, let me show you," he said as if to only me. "To illustrate this Truth. God made us people with eyes to see images. That's why He became a man, the Word of God made flesh, so that we could see Him with our own eyes and understand what Heaven in its vagueness could never show us. These are The Colors of the Cross."

He took out a bracelet made of a single leather strap. It had six beads on it, each a different color.

"The BLACK bead is our sin, our emptiness, our darkness apart from God. The RED bead is Christ's blood. It washes us WHITE as snow."

As he pointed to the white bead, I remembered my high school art teacher explaining that black is the absolute absence of color, but white holds all the tints imaginable--a color as bright and mysterious as . . . clouds.

"The GREEN bead is us being born to a new life where we can grow in a real relationship with Christ, not just going to church or empty words, but power to change all that is around us. The BLUE bead is God's Spirit who comes to live within us and helps us grow, and it is the water we are baptized in to show the world our new birth. The GOLD bead is Heaven, where we will go someday to live forever with God, where the streets are paved with gold. There will be no more pain there, or sickness, or sorrow, or death. God Himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes. And He will shine as the only Light, and we will never be alone in the dark again."

How did the preacher know I had laid in my dark bedroom, alone in the house when my mother was taken to the hospital? Had he seen me there? Had my Heavenly Father?

"God offers this amazing gift to you, as I could hand you this bracelet," the preacher said, holding out the beads toward me. "Would you like to accept it?"

His eyes glowed with a Light I had never seen before, as if a little bit of Heaven peeked through. Tears glistened in them, too, and I knew the stranger somehow cared for me, FOR ME, the awkward teenage girl with brown-rimmed glasses, an acne-covered face half hidden by unruly wavy hair, and a faded yellow hand-me-down dress.

He asked everyone in the room, but I felt like he spoke only to me.

And then, I heard another Voice. God called my name. The sound filled my mind like the shout that brings the dead to life. It echoed like thunder through my soul, and tears too long held back sprung to my eyes.

"Yes, I would like to receive the gift," I said. And I surprised myself and everyone who might have known me by standing up in the crowded room. For once, I didn't care what people might see or think. I knew I had to do this, cross the threshold laid before me.

The preacher didn't need to tell me what to do. Somehow I understood that I must move to the center of the room and kneel down in front of everyone. Somehow I knew I needed to repeat the simple prayer he spoke, asking God to forgive me for hating my mother. Asking Jesus to come into my heart, live there, and give me new life.

    God's Spirit bathed my soul as my tears cleaned my face. A great weight of sorrow, fear, and guilt lifted from me. I began to laugh and say, "Thank you, Lord!" over and over.

Others knelt beside me, and something filled the room like wind blowing across waves of the sea. A door opened before me, colorless, air from another dimension shimmering between its archways.

    So many years had passed since then. I had gone to Bible college, written books, married, had teenagers of my own. I had prayed every day, felt God's presence with me, walked away. Now the familiar Blue Bible that preacher in red tennis shoes had given me lay on an antique farmhouse dresser as dawn shone coldly through white lace curtains. I picked up the Bible, slipped it into my suitcase, packed the car again, woke up the children, and drove them into the cold New Zealand dawn.