The Book of Alternate Endings

I only met her once before she died. Rachel, with her duffle bag slung like a shield and storm clouds in her gaze, somehow found her way to the threshold of the parsonage. I often had visitors, but no one knocked, let alone knocked hard five times. So, her entrance stood out. I was close to burnt out and felt I couldn’t handle one more thing. But there she was, like a dark, unbidden angel.

It was a cloudless Friday afternoon, the day she arrived. The clock hands ticked pokily above a porcelain coffee cup that stayed warm for hours, wafting a bouquet of fresh-baked sugar cookies and waxy, buttered cream. The ambient “Dumbledore’s Office” track played with soaring choral flourishes and harp strums, while I prepared the week’s sermon. As a former drug addict, I prioritized peacefulness. But I might be in the wrong line of work.

Time dozed like an elderly man reclining after a morning of exertion. Time first steadied itself on the bookshelf, then slumped down onto the recessed couch in the corner, and finally cradled a verse-inscribed white throw pillow, before snoring rapturously as he dreamt.

“Michela said you take boarders,” she had said, chewing cherry-smelling gum and smacking lips that were smattered in pink rose lip gloss. I nodded and sized her up. My former live-in interns, like Michela, sent other lost people to our humble church in Beach Haven on Long Beach Island all the time, but I couldn’t take them all. I wanted to say, ‘I’m tapped out.’ Rachel was already lying to me, by omission at least, as to why she’d left.

Sgt. McEvoy said the chances a missing person would be found after two weeks dropped precipitously, and after a month, the odds were “Damn near nil.” That was how he put it. She was presumed dead. But not known to be dead. The police had not found the body. I’d asked McEvoy if it wasn’t possible she was on the run from something. He’d said that if that were the case we were probably dealing with a fake identity.

It all happened while I was away. By the time I returned, she’d been gone for a week. Sgt. McEvoy took all of Rachel’s identifiers and entered them into NaMus: a database for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed persons. Which in my professional opinion, might as well be shorthand for The Book of Life. The regular round of interviews ensued, without yielding a single actionable clue. The detectives were good enough to issue an Amber Alert that religiously popped up on all our devices dozens of times for the first day, and then not at all. The interviews included her parents, who never once called us. Sgt. McEvoy’s detectives, of course, checked and re-checked her last known whereabouts, the last time her credit card was used picking out some shades and a tumbler at Ron Jon’s Surf Shop, and every person she’d texted, pinged, @’ed, or spoken to from cell phone records.

I’d had Abby send out a prayer request e-mail to the entire church and the elders had the whole congregation scatter with photographs along Route 72, into Manahawkin, by where she was last caught on CCTV tape pulling out of Ron John’s.

It was hard to accept that she appeared and vanished so quickly, like an angel with a message, who breaches the Great Divide with apparent ease, but just as easily becomes inaccessible forever once the message is delivered.

It was that stubborn sloe-eyed gaze that execrated the indignity of victimhood, denying the label. But, on that first night, her eyes and lashes unblushingly panted like a puppy in a rescue, who begged in plaintive, trembling yips for adoption. I wondered if it was a winged-thing or a horned-thing I was letting in. I guess the sides don’t matter when someone is in pain. I knew that look. I’d stood at a door once with the same look in my eyes.

“My parents disowned me for professing faith in Christ,” she said, laying that gaze on me. “So that went worse than expected.” I don’t know if she meant for me to, but I felt personally blamed.

“I’m so sorry, that must be really tough,” I said, in a well-practiced tone.

“Michela was the first person I met in Jersey.” I noted that I hadn’t seen Rachel in church. I know Michela would have invited her.

“You are a lucky girl.”

“Oh, the luckiest. Michela let me sleep on her couch, but only for a couple of nights. Anyway, she told me to come here. That you’d have a place for me, long-term.”

“You’ve come to the right place. I just need you to fill out an application form and there’s a pledge you have to sign. And we’ll get you all set up—”

“—An application?” she asked, leaning back in her seat, hands moving from her knees and reaching around her stomach.

“It’s just a formality. You know, name, rank, and serial number. A W2 for your wages. House rules. That kind of thing.” I handed her the form.

She took what seemed like forever to fill it in. She wore the expression of a perpetrator writing a confession against her will.

“You read the Bible?”

She produced a copy from her bag, and then she said the strangest thing I’d ever heard. “You ever think why God is always going around renaming people? Rewriting their stories?” Then she held up the book and shook it. “This is the book of alternate endings.” I just stared at her in amazement. “But what I’ve always wondered,” she said, “Was if we can rewrite our own stories.” That, right there, was when she won me over.

“Hey,” I said. She looked up at me. “What’s the longest you’ve stayed in one place since leaving home?”

“Not long enough to be missed,” she said with a smirk.

“Let’s see if we can change that,” I said, thoughtfully. “You know you can tell me if you’re running from something.”

“Good to know,” she said.

The rest of the night was magical. Abby invited Rachel to sit down for a fun Friday dinner of tacos and enchiladas and displayed her flight of signature mild, hot, and ghost pepper taco sauces. Peyton, my twelve-year-old, prepared Michela’s old room for her, putting down pink sheets and pillows from her room. And Dylan, my son, studied her every curve and feature like she was an exotic creature from a fantasy realm. We all laughed while we watched funny YouTube videos of people falling and cats being startled off ledges. We even played an impromptu game of Pictionary. Peyton showed Rachel to her room before bed and then Peyton practiced a new song on her piano that night before bed called “Graves into Gardens,” by Brandon Lake.

I left for Ukraine the following morning. I was away the whole month on a mission trip, so I only had that one night with Rachel.

After Rachel went missing, and once I was finally home, Peyton, my twelve-year-old daughter, came into my study, where I was reading a new book called, of all things, The Book of Alternate Endings, by Chester Timpleton. Peyton never disturbed me in my study. Her dilated eyes dripped with tears overflowing the rims. “She can’t be dead,” Peyton had said before running over and grabbing me around the waist.

A month. That’s all it took. That was long enough for Rachel to become Peyton’s idol. Peyton was greathearted in front of the piano. But in a group, she was mousy and hushful. Almost mute. She suffered for years with tics.

Not around Rachel. When Rachel was making dinner, humming, boiling pasta, stirring the sauce in the saucepan, and baking her famous pizza bread with a mystery cheese surprise, Peyton would hover beside her and play at being her little helper. Or so my wife, Abby, told me. The two were inseparable. Peyton had started wearing lip gloss and styling her hair in a ponytail like Rachel. She learned all of Rachel’s favorite songs on the piano. And they practiced singing them together before church and hummed them together in the kitchen at dinnertime. But most especially, they gossiped, and talked, about everything.

One day, Rachel was helping Peyton with her spelling homework, and she stumbled on the word “Concatenation.” Peyton giggled. “That’s like you Rach,” she had said. “You are just a long chain—a concatenation—of friendships.” Abby told me that Rachel’s eyes turned distant at the mention of chains.

But Rachel was more than that. Rachel could be a lot of strange words. For me, she was a syzygy. A celestial object in a chain of nested orbits. Like the moon. That reflected the love of a father to a daughter in a way he never could.

Rachel’s disappearance was like an inexpungible eclipse.

* * *

The title of The Book of Alternate Endings could summarize Christianity in five words. But it was a secular book. I’d picked up my copy at the LBI Book Swap. Trudy Yanger and Ellen Jessup both placed it on the “Staff Favorites List.” I was instantly hooked.

Matilda died. Juliet lived. Pip shook Estella’s hand in parting and Great Expectations ended with the world’s most disappointing missed connection. Charlotte didn’t die at the fair. Atticus Finch got the verdict against Tom Robinson reversed on appeal. Charlie’s intelligence didn’t fade. Goodman Brown got a hopeful verse on his tombstone.

It seemed to me, there is something innate about accepting how things end. But Timpleton was sacrilegious. He rewrote endings. Opined about how things might have gone differently. Which had me wondering if finished things were maybe not as final as they seemed.

Sgt. McEvoy called to tell me they were calling off the search.

“Did anything ever come back on her prints?” I asked.

“Partial match. Possible breaking and entering. Suspected drug-related. But we don’t think she’s good for it.”

I decided to go out and play fetch with Cooper by the Barnegat Light.

I needed to forget about bad endings.

* * *

Cooper and I had been having a time of it. He’d been jaunting about the beach playing fetch like a champion when the allure of the swooping white birds overpowered his will. Cooper rushed after a gathering of gulls by the inlet, and I called after him. “Cooper! Back here, boy.” But my voice was drowned out by the sounds of the storm.

Dark clouds rolled in like rumbling locomotives careening on their tracks. The cracked thunder was the toot of their horns, and the slithering lightning was the screeching breaks straining on their rusty tramline. “Here boy!”

The gulls danced to catch stragglers from the shoals of tiny minnows careening around the foaming tidepools. They feasted on herring and soft baby crabs, jostling for sustenance in the turbidity of the coming storm. Darting in frenzied loops, they enjoyed a banquet in the choppy surf before the time came to disappear and seek out shelter from the coming storm.

And Cooper sauntered after them, into the undertow. And with one crashing pull of the Atlantic Ocean, that great troller’s net, Cooper was gone.

Just like that, we were plunged into another search and rescue.

Peyton, Abby, Dylan, and I scattered along the shore. The animal rescue people flew drones over the Bay. Church members blew dog whistles and combed the beach. We stayed at it until long after dark, but Cooper was nowhere to be found.

All of us slept in the living room, listening to the storm, huddled in blankets. None of us knew what to do. Dylan kept saying he’d be alright, that he’d find his way home. Peyton was crying and having some of her old tics and she kept saying, “It’s so cold. He must be so cold.”

Before turning off the lamp, I took the book from my satchel, tore out a white page in the back, and wrote an alternate ending where Cooper came home. It was so late, and I was so tired, that I didn’t remember doing it until I stumbled on the page the next day.

Abby woke me, from where I’d fallen asleep in my lounge chair by the door, waiting for Cooper to return. “Sandy called.”

“Coffee first,” I said.

“Sandy called,” she repeated.

“Okay, what is it?”

“Now don’t overreact, because we don’t know anything, but she heard what happened to Cooper and there was a stray dog found that was out in the storm, and they’ve got it at her house at the Northern tip of the island.”

“I’ll get my coat,” I said.

Driving the mile and a half to Sandy’s, Abby kept saying, “It has to be him.”

“Hun, the island is eighteen miles long. It’s like sixteen miles from Barnegat Light to Beach Haven.”

“I know, but I have a feeling it’s him.”

“Come on, babe. Think about it. You’ve run a half marathon. Unless he washed up and got lost, there’s no way he could have swum that far. It would have taken him all night.”

“Let’s just see.”

But it was Cooper. It was a miracle. We brought him home wrapped in blankets and Peyton and Dylan didn’t leave his side. He slept and shivered all Friday evening, all day Saturday, and all of Sunday morning, only taking water, before he was even strong enough to eat. And then he got up, shook off the exhaustion, and jumped in my lap like nothing had happened.

All of the things we were taught were impossible are available to us. There are no absolutes. Some dogs that are left for dead swim the length of an island. Sometimes a father gives his daughter her deepest heartfelt wish.

Maybe alternate endings were for real.

I couldn’t account for how he made it back.

* * *

That afternoon, sitting in my study, I stared at the page I had scribbled in a barely legible script the night before. Had I rewritten Cooper’s ending?

I thought about the clues. Rachel’s parents had cut her off. She kept her past a secret. The partial prints. The manipulation. These were all signs of drug addiction. Something I knew all about.

Let’s say I want to write a happy ending for Rachel, for Peyton. How would it go? How would it end?

Peyton was at the piano playing the new Billy Joel song that just came out, called Turn the Lights Back On. The song had a line, “And I’m tryin’ to find the magic, that we lost somehow.’” Then Peyton stopped playing suddenly right at that part. And she came up. Peyton handed me the alternate ending she had written for Rachel. But her hand was shaking.

“What is it, Peyton?”

“It’s just like the song, how it’s open-ended. I just hate it. I hate not knowing the ending.”

“I know. I know. But she’s out there somewhere. Go help your mom with dinner. I’ll read it before heading back,” I said.

“Dad,” Peyton said, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. “It’s hard to write an alternate ending when you don’t know the real one.”

“Maybe we are all living our alternate endings, and don’t have any idea.”

“If this alternate ending is the one where Rachel dies, I want the real one back.”

“I know, darling.”

Then I remembered the application Rachel filled out that first night.

There was a P.O. Box on the application. I took the page I’d written, Rachel’s alternate ending, and drove down to the UPS Store in Ship Bottom.

Bridget was at the counter.

“Do you still have this UPS Box as active?” I asked.

She took a minute to say, “Sure do. As a matter of fact, somebody came by and picked up yesterday around this time.”

A hint of hope crept through the fog of the gray afternoon.

“Can you put this in there?” Then I stopped, “Wait.” I wrote on the back Come on Home, -Pastor Dave. “Okay, now it’s ready.”

* * *

When I walked back in the door, Cooper jumped up and licked my face, inside my nostrils and all. Abby said, “Dinner will be in ten minutes.”

I sat down in my lounge chair. Peyton was upstairs, still playing that song. I could hear Dylan dribbling on the basketball court outside. I was a lucky man. But my family was heartbroken. This magical creature had appeared in our lives and showed my daughter what it was like to be her own woman. She showed my son what to desire in a partner. Maybe, she showed me how to believe when unbelief clouds out the sun.

“Dinner’s ready,” Abby yelled.

Peyton skipped down the stairs. Dylan came in with a damp forehead and his basketball under his arm and went to wash up. Abby was chopping fresh tomatoes and cucumbers on the cutting board. I placed the tongs for the spaghetti on the table. I placed the dishes and silverware. Then, I finally sat down at my spot at the table. Cooper posted himself by my side, licking his lips and whimpering. We were all there.

But something was missing. “Father, we pray for Rachel, who is out there somewhere, lost and alone, but there are people here who love her. Please watch after her and keep her. We ask that you bless this food to our bodies…”

I heard five loud knocks on the front door and bolted up from my seat.

Standing on the stoop was a girl with a sloe-eyed glaze.

“Am I too late for supper?”

I threw my arms around Rachel and wept on her shoulder.

“It’s never too late for a rewrite,” I said.

“I stayed too long,” she said. “Now you’re stuck with me.”