Crossover Crossroads (The Kell and Maille Story)

Trust

061: Trust

It took two days of intense practicing for Shawn to master the chords she taught him, the strums and the basic picking. But he was diligent, and Maille worked him hard, coming every day twice a day and listening to him, helping him. Sometimes he concentrated so hard he seemed to be in a different world, and sometimes he was angry with her, especially when it came time for her to leave. 

Sometimes he let her glimpse inside him.

"Are you scared, Shawn?" she said softly once while she sat behind him on the bed, leaning against his pillows. It was easier to position herself directly behind him as he played, so she could correct him.

His strumming didn't stop. He didn't answer.

"I would be. I think. Even though I know there's nothing to be afraid of, and that all my relatives and friends will be on the other side waiting to greet me. I still think from this side of it all I would be afraid." she said, contemplating how she might feel in his shoes.

"l don't have any relatives and friends." he said.

"Well, you do and you just don't know them. But once the veil is lifted, you 'II recognize them. It'll be Hey, grandpa, Hey, grandma, Hey Uncle So and So!" she leaned over and placed her hand above his on the neck, showing him the placement of the fingering he was missing.

"How do you know? Maybe there will be nothing. I'll just be gone and no one will ever know I existed."

"Right." Maille scoffed. "I'm no one. I never knew you existed."

"You 'll forget me too.''

''Nope. I brought a camera, to take your picture. I 'll never forget you. I 'll stick it up in the bathroom and every morning when I put my makeup on, there you will be watching me smear my mascara."

That got a laugh. A chuckle. "But you don 't know what it will be like. There probably isn't another side. We just float away into nothingness."

"Nothingness? Why would God bother to go to all this trouble if that's all there was? Nothingness?" she rubbed his painfully thin bony shoulder. "I can tell you that He planned it all better than that, Shawn.."

"God?"

"Yeah, you know, the Big Guy Upstairs. God." she heard him stop playing and turned to look at her with those pale watery eyes.

"I don't believe in God."

Maille scoffed. "Fine. But I bet you have no basis for your belief and I could prove it to you in no time flat because you haven't really spent any time studying about it. Look at this guitar. See how it fits together? What if the neck weren't connected to the body, the frets weren't marked and the strings were all loose on the ground? If I stood up on the bed and dropped all the parts on the ground do you think they could assemble themselves into the guitar that you're holding?"