Book of Days_ A Novel - James L. Rubart [126]
A man in a white T-shirt, his back to Cameron, sat on the stern of a sailboat, sun streaming down on him, wind whipping through his thick dark hair.
A shiver shot down Cameron's back as the man spun to face him. It was his father. Young. The way he looked when Cameron was a little boy. A massive grin broke out on his dad's face, and he threw his arms wide and spoke to the sky.
"All my memories, You've stored them for me, Lord." His dad was so full of joy it seemed to shake the rigging. "Draw Cameron to Yourself. I long to see him in eternity. And let him know I'm so proud of him, okay?"
Cameron shuddered as tears threatened to spill onto his cheeks.
The scene shifted and when the images came back into focus, he again looked at the top of Mount Erie in midsummer. But the colors were brilliant, too full to be from earth.
A woman sat with her back to him, looking out over the farmland and lakes and Puget Sound to the south. The wind tousled her hair, as if fingers were lifting it off her shoulders and setting it back down.
Jessie.
She turned and her gaze seemed to be searching for him, her eyes like diamonds, throwing off light. Was she older or younger than when he'd last seen her? Both maybe. Cameron couldn't tell. She laughed and somehow he heard it in his head.
"When I come to You and he remains, tell him it's okay. In a way he won't doubt. Let him know I'm where I'm supposed to be. And that I want him to join me. Not now. Not for a long time. But in time. Help him to seek, to choose life in the years that have been recorded for him on earth, and might he always love. Always and forever."
Jessie's face melted into the water and only the mirror image of the mountains surrounding the lake remained.
Cameron slumped back off his knees to the ground.
"I'd forgotten. Every one of them. She'd been trying to tell me all along."
"Are you okay?" Taylor stood next to him.
"I don't know. Maybe. Yes, somehow . . . How can I not be?" He looked up at Taylor.
"What happens if the memories of Jessie fade again?"
"It doesn't matter. She's right. It's okay." Cameron smiled as he cradled the back of his head with his hands.
"I think there's more for you to see." Taylor motioned toward the water.
The reflection of the mountains melted into another mountain, a different one, bathed in early morning sun. A climber clung to the side of it, too far away to tell if it was a man or a woman.
The view moved in.
Could it be?
Yes, it was Ann, laughing as she scaled the sheer face of a cliff, which ended in a domelike rock.
He knew the spot. It was Liberty Bell, right off the North Cascades Highway in northern Washington. Just a few days earlier Ann and he had talked about how she'd never been there and that they should climb it together. The view widened. Twenty feet below her was another climber. Male. The scene moved and he was now looking at a profile of Ann and the other climber. Himself.
Adrenaline filled his body; it felt like he was floating as he watched himself pull up toward Ann, a smile plastered on his face.
The image of Ann and he climbing Liberty Bell—was it the future, already recorded in God's book? Her future with him in it? Two weeks from now? Two months? A year?
But why would he do that to her? It wouldn't be right to burden her with his disease. No, maybe God had written it down, but Cameron would rewrite future history just as Taylor had.
The water swirled and he stared at a New York skyline as if from a plane. The view zoomed in to Ann sitting at a dark wood table at a restaurant with a man who toasted her and laughed. As she raised her glass, Ann's mouth smiled but her eyes didn't.
The scene shifted again and Ann sat in her car staring at a picture of Cameron taped to the dashboard. She sighed and yanked the picture free and stuffed it in her glove compartment. She dabbed her eyes with the backs of her hands and shook her head.
Another shift and Ann lifted an Emmy above her head.
The water changed again and