“Jack, trust me.” I stepped closer to him.
He took one step back, looking me dead in the eye. “There’s no going back once I tell you.” He pounded his chest. “The weight of this has been drowning me for years. I’m in a dark place that you will never be able to pull me out of.”
What in the world? Genuine fear struck me then. “Jack, you’re probably right. If you’re in a dark place, drowning, I can’t pull you out of that. But God can.” I hated to turn this into a preaching session, but it was true. Now that I saw how much he was hurting, I wanted to help.
He looked up at the cross that stood atop the church and then back at me. “I murdered my mother, and I went to prison for it,” he blurted out.
I gasped, stumbling backwards and away from him as my hand came up to cover my mouth.What did he just say?Pure shock ran through me, and Jack looked at me, horrified and broken. Of all the things I’d dreamed up in my head that he felt guilty for, none were that sinister.
“See? You’re scared of me now.Good. Hannah, I came here for closure. I’m not good for you. You’ll just drown with me. So this is my goodbye,” he said and then turned to walk away.
Follow him.The two words came from that still small voice inside me, and I knew that God was pushing me to find out more.
“Wait.” I felt bad for reacting the way I had, but I hadn’t expected in a million years that he’d murdered his mother! There must have been more to the story there.
He kept walking, so I chased after him.
“Jack. Give me a minute to process this,” I begged him as we walked across the dark parking lot. “I want to know what happened. I know you. You wouldn’t just murder someone in cold blood. You’renota killer.”
Whatever had happened must have been an accident. But would someone go to prison for an accident? Maybe. If a gunwent off or something and he hadn’t meant to aim it at her…I was scrambling to think up reasons. The Lord was pressing on me that this was an accident, but I needed to hear it from him.
He spun on me, tears welling in his eyes. “Yes, I am. I am a killer,” he said, his chest rising and falling as he breathed raggedly. “I got engaged young, and a month before our wedding, I found out she was cheating. I took it badly. I went to the nearest bar and got really drunk. Then I grabbed my keys and drove home.”
No.I clasped my hands together.
“My mom had been worried about me, so around one a.m., she got in her car to go looking for me.”
“No,” I said aloud this time, shaking my head.
He nodded. “Yes.I hit her car head on coming down the street to her house. I was going there to sleep it off.”
No. No. No. It was too tragic.
“She bled out in my hands.” He held his hands up to drive his point home. “And then I blacked out and woke up in jail. The blood test registered that I was four times the legal drinking limit.” He shook his head. “Why I thought I could drive home, I’ll never know. Why she happened to be coming down the same street at the same time as me, I’ll never forgive God for that. Had he delayed her by a minute, she’d still be alive.”
I nodded, tears running down my face. “But you might not be.”
He frowned. “What?” There was anger in his voice, so I had to tread lightly.
“You might have hit a pole, or a parked car, or a house.Youmight have died. God could have not spared you.” I tried to look for the positive.
“I didn’t want to be spared!” he screamed. “I want to be put out of my misery.”
My heart broke for him. He shouldn’t have been drinking and driving, but it wasn’t the cold-blooded murder he’d portrayed it to be.
“Jack, don’t say that. It was an accident. It wasn’t murder.”
He laughed sarcastically. “That’s not what my felony conviction says. Vehicular manslaughter. Murder by car.”
My heart absolutely shattered for him, but now it all made sense to me. The reason he was the way he was. Why seeing his mother’s name on the waitress’s name tag had sent him into a spiral. Why he gave to charity out of guilt. He was holding on to a great burden. A horrific accident.
I stepped closer to him and reached for his hand, but he took two giant steps back.
“I don’t want your pity.”
I frowned. “It’s called compassion, Jack. Not pity.”
“Well, I don’t want that. I just want you to know who I really am, and I wanted to say goodbye.” He cleared his throat. “Because I liked you too. But I don’t have any room in my life for that. Because every good thing in my life dies or gets ruined and I don’t want that to happen to you. Goodbye, Hannah.”
