The Space Between Words Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR MICHÈLE PHOENIX

  “Emotionally gripping . . . In The Space Between Words, Michèle Phoenix invites the reader to experience the beauty—and sometimes raw and real struggle—of daring to imagine a rebuilt life. Written with vivid imagery and authentic detail that anchors past to present, France vies to become an eloquent scene-stealer, but it’s the very real characters grappling with faith, fear, and the aftermath of loss that manage to capture the heartbeat of the story. An unforgettable portrait of courage and reclaimed hope that hits close to home.”

  —KRISTY CAMBRON, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE ILLUSIONIST’S APPRENTICE AND THE HIDDEN MASTERPIECE SERIES

  “Brimming with crisp, authentic European locations and details, Michèle Phoenix gives us a story that combines an intriguing mystery focusing on a little-known aspect of French history with unexpected modern day plot twists and a warm heart.”

  —RACHEL HAUCK, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE WEDDING DRESS ON THE SPACE BETWEEN WORDS

  “This book should be required reading for every wife and husband in the mission field who is trying to do God’s work . . . This is a book that will take a reader out of their comfort zone but will also leave readers with thought-provoking questions long after reading. Well done!”

  —RT BOOK REVIEW 4-STAR REVIEW ON OF STILLNESS AND STORM

  “In this fine novel, Phoenix realistically captures the deep struggles enveloping a missionary family.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ON OF STILLNESS AND STORM

  “Phoenix’s gutsy novel brings attention to the plight of missionaries’ kids broken by the sacrifices their families make to answer the call.”

  —CBA MARKET BOOK REVIEWS ON OF STILLNESS AND STORM

  “This novel juxtaposes sometimes dueling desires—fulfilling a ministry and meeting family needs—and shows the difficulty in striking a true course between them.”

  —WORLD MAGAZINE ON OF STILLNESS AND STORM

  “A poignant, cautionary tale that peels back layers of the soul. This beautifully written, heart-wrenching journey takes us into both the familiar and unfamiliar, reminding us that no one is perfect or immune to life’s harsh realities and challenges. Raw and real, yet infused with hope, the beauty within [Of Stillness and Storm] book will touch your heart and stay with you long after the last page is turned.”

  —CATHERINE WEST, AUTHOR OF THE THINGS WE KNEW

  “This moving story of one family’s struggle with the human cost of following God’s call will resonate profoundly. As is so powerfully illustrated in Of Stillness and Storm, sometimes the sacrifices we make for God can cause others to suffer in ways He never intended. Like Michèle Phoenix, I am an MK and am passionate about protecting children. I urge you to read this gripping cautionary tale, listen for God’s voice, and take to heart what is so close to our Father’s heart—caring for every precious child He has placed in our path.”

  —DR. WESS STAFFORD, PRESIDENT EMERITUS, COMPASSION INTERNATIONAL AND AUTHOR OF TOO SMALL TO IGNORE: WHY THE LEAST OF THESE MATTERS MOST AND JUST A MINUTE: IN THE HEART OF A CHILD, ONE MOMENT CAN LAST FOREVER

  “You will be captivated by this story of heartbreak and triumph. Of Stillness and Storm is an important book for anyone who has heard that still, small voice saying this is not right—and mustered the strength to make a change. A must read.”

  —ANITA LUSTREA, PODCASTER, SPEAKER, MEDIA COACH, AND AUTHOR OF WHAT WOMEN TELL ME

  “The Poisonwood Bible for a new generation, stark yet with a subtle hope. Michèle Phoenix’s hauntingly beautiful prose depicts a family in deep turmoil as they try to follow God’s will. Of Stillness and Storm is a disturbingly poignant look at how godly people can become dangerously dysfunctional. This novel touched deep places in my soul, as a thirty-year-veteran missionary in Europe who works in Member Care. Michèle got it right and unabashedly shares the horrors one family descends into as they seek God’s will. A must-read for those contemplating missions and for all those who pray for missionaries and their children (MKs) who are scattered around the world.”

  —ELIZABETH MUSSER, AUTHOR OF THE LONG HIGHWAY HOME

  “In Of Stillness and Storm, Michèle Phoenix bravely tackles what appears to be a great paradox in Scripture—that Jesus says we are to follow him despite the cost to self or other relationships, yet later we read that those who do not care for their families are worse than infidels. How can both principles be operative at the same time? Through a beautifully written and compelling account of one family’s struggles to understand the implications of these statements within the context of ‘real life,’ Michèle causes us to take a fresh look at our own stories as well. You will be both challenged and encouraged as you read this gripping tale.”

  —RUTH E. VAN REKEN, INTERNATIONAL SPEAKER AND CO-AUTHOR OF THIRD CULTURE KIDS: GROWING UP AMONG WORLDS

  Copyright © 2017 by Michèle Phoenix

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Phoenix, Michéle, author.

  The space between words / Michéle Phoenix.

  Nashville, Tennessee : Thomas Nelson, [2017]

  Epub Edition July 2017 ISBN 9780718086459

  LCCN 2017013000 | ISBN 9780718086442 (trade paper)

  LCC PS3616.H65 S63 2017 | DDC 813/.6–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013000

  Printed in the United States of America

  17 18 19 20 21 22 /LSC/ 6 5 4 3 2 1

  When the Paris attacks occurred in November 2015, the fabric of my spirit felt bloodied. This was the nation that had cradled my childhood—that still flows through my veins like its meandering Seine and rises in my memory like its towering Eiffel. From infancy to adulthood, France has seeped its essence into the marrow of my identity. Depicting the events that brought the country to its knees was an act of love and prayer.

  For France.

  CONTENTS

  Acclaim for Michèle Phoenix

  Prologue

  Part 1: Endure One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Part 2: Persist Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  An Excerpt from Of Stil
lness and Storm

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  1695

  Gatigny, France

  My name is Adeline Baillard, and my life may end today. Or it may stretch its final throes into another dawn. Existence is a flimsy thing. I savor its fragility with every breath I take.

  I made a promise weeks ago, the night my family tore apart, to trace the winding path that led us to the brink of our extinction. So I begin to write these pages from the shadows above the forge, because Story is sacred, insurgent in its power to unravel tangled roots.

  Two generations warned us of the wrongs we face today. My grandfather passed on to us the tales his father told. The August night when the streets of Paris ran red with martyrs’ blood. The savage slayings of Saint Bartholomew’s three thousand. The wave that surged over city walls and seeped its crimson into provincial soil with tens of thousands more raped and branded, tortured and murdered for refusing to exchange their faith for the king’s.

  Their offense was being Protestant, believing in a God who needed neither pope nor priest to make himself known. Their sin was challenging the church and its fearmongering, its clergy and their profiteering. Their transgression was daring to dissent with a Crown whose authority depended on its people’s docility.

  The battles raged for decades, undeterred by truces and edicts. The wealthiest of the Protestants, named Huguenots, escaped to safer lands, often leaving everything behind, while the poor and courageous took to fields, caves, and dried-up riverbeds to worship and read from Bibles banned by the king and his court.

  When the Edict of Nantes promised safe cities to the Huguenots, its “perpetual and irrevocable” protection ensured by the Crown’s garrisons, my ancestors found asylum in places like Privas, a Rampart of Reform defended by its walls, its Protestant Seigneur, and his courageous men.

  But the reprieve was short-lived, and the Huguenot church found itself, by time and power, stripped of the liberties the king had granted it. His forces rescinded our ancestors’ freedoms with patient persecution and savage oppression, and we began to lose our way in mutinous revolts. We matched the soldiers’ weaponry with zeal, their threats with desperation. We fought for our survival as they fought for our submission, some of us without conscience. Without mercy. Without God.

  Privas fell in 1629. Those who had fled to higher ground before the siege began left only the old, the lame, and the brave behind. They listened, aghast, to the roar of fighting men, the cries of terrified children, and the wails of women forced to watch the torture of their kin. My grandfather was just a boy hiding in the hills that day. He saw his city burn and his brother marched off to the galleys, then he escaped with his mother into the mountains of Boutières.

  His family settled on the outskirts of Gatigny, a village nestled in the heart of the Vivarais. We lived there for two more generations, beside the stream that ran among the mulberry trees of our modest silkworm farm. Harvesting the filaments and spinning them into thread was at the center of our lives, an intensive craft supported by the water-powered throwing machines my father invented and built.

  We lived a good life on our farm, my brother, Charles, and I, then sister Julie when she came. My mother taught us every day a reverence for the written word, imprinting on our minds the call to tell God’s story well. And Father taught us honesty, nobility, and strength, repeating and embodying the principles we live by to this day: endure with courage, resist with wisdom, and persist in faith.

  PART 1

  ENDURE

  ONE

  THE ALARM WENT OFF AT EIGHT ON THE DAY MY LIFE IMPLODED.

  The springs in Patrick’s couch clanged as I reached for my cell phone to turn it off. Vonda stretched and groaned on her thin mattress on the floor, then lifted the edge of her sleep mask to squint at me.

  “Too early.” Her voice was morning rough.

  “Come on—get up. It’s our last day here, and we’re not sleeping it away.”

  I slipped off the couch and went to the windows, opening them wide to fold back their wooden shutters.

  “Tell me it’s sunny,” Vonda mumbled from under her pillow.

  “It’s sunny.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “It’s Paris in November, Vonda.”

  She groaned again and forced herself to sit up, patting down the hair she’d dyed jet-black before our trip to Europe. “Those sirens are weird,” she said as a police car navigated the narrow street two stories down. But it wasn’t just French sirens she considered “weird.” The traffic, the stares from strangers, the potency of the coffee, and the overcrowded Métro cars—all weird to the girl from Santa Barbara whose most exotic world exposure had, until this trip, extended only as far as LA’s Chinatown.

  Back home in Denver, the three of us shared a townhouse—or we had until Patrick had headed to Europe for a semester of art classes at The American University of Paris. It came as no surprise to those who knew him that he’d decided to further his education at an age when most men were focusing on their children’s academic ambitions. But we all knew that his studies, though earnest, were merely a pretext for living in a place where treasures hid in plain sight in attics, dumps, and flea markets.

  Patrick’s passion for picking was a galvanizing thing. It had led him to open Trésor three years ago, his eclectic store of vintage old world objects tucked away in a gentrifying neighborhood of Denver. The discovery of three rare, Napoleon-era coins in the lining of a corset he’d acquired from an online auction had financed the fulfillment of his lifelong dream to study abroad.

  They called picking chiner in France. Patrick called it treasure hunting. And somehow—between his classes and homework—he’d found the time to travel the French countryside in his thirty-year-old Citroën 2CV, which the French lovingly called a deudeuche. The common knickknacks he’d bought for a song in roadside shops and village fairs would be worth many times more back in his Denver store.

  “Grab a shovel and believe in gold!” he always declared as he entered promising places. Given the impressive number of antiques he’d collected since his arrival in France, I could only conclude that his imaginary shovel had served him well.

  Patrick and I had been a bit surprised by Vonda’s decision to come along on our French adventure. She was nearly ten years younger than we were, and her interests diverged from ours in almost every way, particularly when it came to “digging for gold.” But as opinionated, outspoken, and utterly without caution as she was, a quirky sort of friendship had evolved in the ten months we’d lived in the same home.

  So she’d cashed in her vacation days to fly with me to the City of Lights. And since I’d left one job and had a few weeks to spare before starting another, I’d emptied the “Paris or bust” savings account I’d started on impulse seven years before, never really believing such a trip would actually happen.

  But it had. Every morning for nearly a week, with Patrick wrapping up classes at the university and Vonda sleeping in, I’d strolled to my favorite café in Montmartre and sipped an espresso while watching the panache of city life pass by. The Seine and its quais were no longer foreign to me. I knew the churn of its bâteaux mouches and the hum of traffic on the clogged streets above its shores. There was a spot on the tip of the Île de la Cité that I particularly loved, and though the temperatures were in keeping with France’s winter season, I’d bundled up on one occasion to sit there with a book and feel utterly, as Patrick put it, “Ooh-là-là chérie”—whatever that meant.

  I felt drawn to France in a powerful way. Its vibrancy and history livened my senses and captured my imagination. I sensed the vastness and depth of its survival—the brutality of its mutinies and the surety of its rightful place as one of the world’s most hard-won democracies. There was a homeness to Paris that felt both stimulating and soothing, unique and universal.

  Patrick was in his element here, an art aficionado and self-proclaimed “clipster” who brought his own brand of class to the hi
pster movement. His confident exuberance was a natural fit in the fast-paced, artistically inclined city. I was a bit envious of the easy rapport he’d established with neighbors and commerçants during his four months in Paris. His interactions were effortless and genuine. They greeted him like a friend as he engaged with them in French. The pace and drama of his speech sounded fluent to my ears, though he assured me he still had a long way to go. Perfecting a language he loved had been just one of his motivations for moving to the City of Lights.

  Patrick and I had met only four years ago, when I rang the doorbell of his Denver townhouse in answer to the “roommate wanted” ad I’d found on an online bulletin board. I was convinced that securing stable lodging would allow me to relocate to the city more permanently from the small town of Lamar, where my dad owned a body shop, my mom managed a grocery store, and everybody knew both who and whose I was. I’d moved in and out of their home so many times in the twelve years since college that I hoped a more distant location would prevent yet another embarrassing return.

  It had taken me a few false starts to find the kind of employment that would finance such autonomy. After earning a pre-dental degree from a low-cost community college, I’d decided that cleaning teeth wasn’t really my thing. I worked as a receptionist for a medical office for a while. Then I tried my hand at being a barista, followed by stints as a teacher’s aide and finally an insurance agent. The job wasn’t inspiring, but it felt stable and grown-up enough for me to move to Denver.

  I was nervous but determined the day I answered Patrick’s ad. “I’m here about the room for rent,” I said when he opened the door, bow-tied and smiling. “I called you earlier . . . ?”

  He gave me a once-over, and his blue-green eyes seemed to linger on my scuffed, utilitarian shoes a bit longer than warranted. He cocked his head when he looked up. “No drugs, no drunken orgies, and no messes in the common areas. You cool with that?” The words were blunt, but his expression was friendly.