Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [50]
Four miles down the road he ran his car off the road and wrapped it around a sycamore.
He remembered very little of the actual accident, except for the panicked realization that he was trapped. He did, however, remember waking up in the ER, feeling the shock of being completely sober for the first time in four years.
He was twenty-three, a college dropout and an addict. He went the only place he knew to go.
When Jenny opened her door and found Eli standing there, duffel bag in hand, face battered by the accident, she began to weep. She had been as affected by the years: Since he’d run away she’d lost her husband to a heart attack and the better use of her right hip to an icy curb outside her church. She had never fully recovered from either.
“You smell like the devil,” she said, and welcomed him back into the house.
Jenny informed him he could stay if he worked. With only a high school diploma and a stubborn refusal to cut his hair, his job opportunities were limited. He could easily have worked full time as a bartender, but Jenny wouldn’t allow him within arm’s reach of alcohol. He worked part time at a custom car design factory where he showed marked skill with a welder, supplementing the physical labor with another ten hours at a family-owned grocery where he stocked shelves and mopped floors.
His aunt kept a regimented life. She woke every day at seven, kept lists, and had not missed a church service for fifty years. But she gave Eli his freedom, providing he stayed away from bars and attended Wednesday night prayer meeting. The structure of her life was a refuge for Eli, whose tyrannical cravings and unpredictable temper had left him without any sense of stability. She lived for his stories, humored his mood swings, and fueled his emaciated body. She never asked for an explanation of his past behavior and she made it clear she did not condemn him for it.
His conversion to the faith was as slow and methodical as the fight for his sobriety. On his days off he sometimes drove to the art museum to sit and mediate on the Crucifixion paintings that he had first seen as a child. He studied the rivulets of blood running the course of the dying Christ’s body, fascinated by the idea of a suffering Savior, seduced by the liquid flow of paint. He copied pictures of the painting for hours. Church was far less interesting, but he went, he listened, and then he took what he’d heard and turned it in his mind while he sat studying the face of Christ. Over a Saturday breakfast of eggs and toast he tried to articulate to his aunt how his love of art and his love for Christ would be forever overlapped in his mind, irrevocably intertwined. She worried he was perhaps idolizing the paintings even as he explained the difference between the worship of an idol and the appreciation of an icon. He was not as good at talking about art as he was at making it. She only nodded, and prayed, believing God was good enough to honor this young faith however peculiar its inception.
They lived in shared quiet routine for two years until Eli began to talk of school. She didn’t laugh when he said he wanted to study sculpture. That was all the encouragement he needed.
He was accepted to the art academy on academic probation, a cautionary action that proved entirely unnecessary. He excelled. In his painting class he met the first person who could replicate on paper the tattoo he described from memory. She drew the pattern on his arm and sat with him at the parlor while the tattoo artist carved the image into his skin with blood and ink.
He unveiled the tattoo to Aunt Jenny at Christmas. When she recovered from the sudden onset of heart palpitations, her only complaint against the tattoo, which her church and personal faith expressly forbid, was that it was “so big.” Had he needed one so big?
When he explained that the tattoo was meant to remind him of the angels who had pulled him from the wreck, who had kept him from getting burned, she went as far as to be flattered that he’d thought of her—she was glad that at least he hadn’t done something