Read Online The Heaven Trilogy by Ted Dekker - Free Book Online

was more serious than just some severe case of food poisoning? They would have to cancel Paris.
    But that had not happened, had it? He’d read once that 99 percent of people’s fears never materialize. A man who internalized that truth could add ten years to his life.
    Kent eased himself into a chair and glanced at the flight board. His plane left in two hours. Might as well catch some sleep. He sank deep and closed his eyes.
    SPENCER SAT next to Helen, across from the pastor, trying to be brave. But his chest and throat and eyes were not cooperating. They kept aching and knotting and leaking. His mom had gone upstairs after seeing Dad off, saying something about lying down. Two hours and an exhaustive run through his computer games later, Spencer had called through the house only to hear her weak moan from the master bedroom. His mom was still in bed at ten o’clock. He’d knocked and entered without waiting for an answer. She lay on her side, curled into a ball like a roly-poly, groaning. Her face reminded him of a mummy on the Discovery Channel—all stretched and white.
    Spencer had run for the phone and called Grandma. During the fifteen minutes it took her to reach their house he had knelt by his mother’s bed, begging her to answer him. Then he had cried hard. But Mother was not answering in anything more than the occasional moan. She just lay there and held her stomach.
    Grandma had arrived then, rambling on about food poisoning and ordering him around as if she knew exactly what had to be done in situations like this. But no matter how she tried to seem in control, Grandma had been a basket case.
    They had literally dragged his mom to the car, and Grandma had driven her to the emergency room. Dark blue blotches spotted her skin, and he wondered how food poisoning could bring out spots the size of silver dollars. Then Spencer had overheard one of the nurses talking to an aide. She said the spots were from internal bleeding. The patient’s organs were bleeding.
    “I’m scared,” he said in a thin, wobbly voice.
    Helen took his hand and lifted it to her lips. “Don’t be, Spencer. Be sad, but don’t be afraid,” she said, but she said it with mist in her eyes, and he knew that she was terrified too.
    She pulled his head to her shoulder, and he cried there for a while. Dad was supposed to be here by now. He’d called from the airport at six o’clock and told the nurse he was catching a 9 P.M. flight with an impossible interminable layover in Chicago that wouldn’t put him into Denver until 6 A.M.Well, now it was seven o’clock, and he had not arrived.
    They had started putting in tubes and doing other things to Mom last night. That was when he first started thinking things were not just bad. They were terrible. When he asked Grandma why Mom was puffing up like that, she’d said that the doctors were flooding her body with antibiotics. They were trying to kill the bacteria.
    “What bacteria?”
    “Mommy has bacterial meningitis, Honey,” Grandma had said.
    A boulder had lodged in his throat then. ’Cause that sounded bad. “What does that mean? Will she die?”
    “Do not think of death, Spencer,” Grandma said gently. “Think of life. God will give Gloria more life than she’s ever had. You will see that, I promise. Your mother will be fine. I know what happens here. It is painful now, but it will soon be better. Much better.”
    “So she will be okay?”
    His grandmother looked off to the double swinging doors behind which the doctors attended his mom, and she started to cry again.
    “We will pray that she will be, Spencer,” Pastor Madison said.
    Then the tears burst from Spencer’s eyes, and he thought his throat might tear apart. He threw his arms around Grandma and buried his face in her shoulder. For an hour he could not stop. Just couldn’t. Then he remembered that his mother was not dead, and that helped a little.
    When he lifted his head he saw that Grandma was talking. Muttering