To Be Where You Are

by Jan Karon

  She was pumping her own gas and her back was to me. I prayed and got out of the car and approached her.

  Excuse me, I said. It was a whisper, really, and I realized I was ‘trembling like a leaf,’ as Mama says.

  She turned and looked me straight in the eye and I found I could not speak! I was literally struck dumb. It was Eva—and yet it was not Eva.

  She threw her head back and gave me a scrutinizing look.

  Eva? I managed to say.

  Eva passed in ’79, she said. And then she smiled.

  I tell you before God, Timothy, that it was Eva’s bright and inquiring smile! And yet the eyes were different, and the way the face was modeled.

  I’m Eva’s sister, Lucille, she said. And who are you?

  I’m the man who loved her beyond all reason, I said without thinking. What a ridiculous statement! I had humiliated myself with a bold and private truth.

  She took my hand then, and there were tears in her eyes and she said, You must be Henry Winchester.

  We stood there shaking hands like two politicians, albeit with true feeling. We couldn’t seem to stop shaking hands in the most solemn and wordless manner. And finally I had to go for my handkerchief, at which point we both laughed for no reason at all. The amazement of it, brother!

  I felt like someone had sloshed a tub of warm water over me, I was drowning in happiness.

  I spent the night with an old friend and the next day drove southeast to Tuscaloosa, roughly four hours from Memphis.

  Lucille told me how to find the house where she and her late husband lived when Eva came to them from Philadelphia. It was a humble place, now empty. I walked around it several times, though bullied by a neighbor’s dog. I managed to find the spot where all those years ago, Eva had planted a little garden as her goodbye to this world. Lucille says the long months before her passing were very hard and that Eva spoke of me to the end.

  After that, I went out to the little churchyard, a visit which I described in my previous letter.

  Lucille lives in Memphis and teaches voice. I feel I have been reunited with a close family member and she feels the same. Her nine grandchildren are her mark of success, she says.

  Lucille and I are exchanging letters and rose catalogs, eager to launch our beautification project during the first warm days of spring.

  As for the home front, our vegetable garden is cleaned up and ready for the spade in March. I will have Conrad send you a photo of Mama with the gourd she grew this year. It is better than three feet in diameter! A covey of schoolchildren came out to see it.

  With abiding love in Him Who loved us first, to you and Cynthia and the newlyweds and young Jack. Mama and Sister pray for you and the family faithfully as does

  Your grateful brother,

  Henry

  • • •

  Before going up to bed, he checked his email.

  >Dear Father,

  >I have been waiting with baited breath to catch sight of you. Have not seen you in ages tho I hear you have lunch some days at Feel Good. Because Harold likes lunch at home since he retired, I have not had lunch out in two years!

  >I have just read the most disturbing news. Did you know that depression and stress occur in wives whose husbands have retired? They call it RHS—retired husband syndrome! Retired husbands do not get out of the house enough. Are you aware of this? I hear you cleaned out your garage awhile back and were seen standing in the driveway, but that is NOT getting out of the house! Ha ha.

  >It says that wives of retired husbands need an emotional playbook, but it did not explain what that is. Anyway, I hope you are not depressing poor Cynthia, who is such a bright, upbeat person, and that you will GET OUT THERE as often as you can as much for HER mental health as YOURS.

  >Just a friendly reminder!

  >Snickers sends love!

  >Emma

  He could count on more than death and taxes. He could count on Emma Newland to meddle in his life for the rest of his days.

  He was shutting down the computer when he noticed the message blinker on their house phone.

  But there was no message. It was merely the sound of . . . what? Someone hanging up.

  Caller ID, Connecticut.

  12

  MEADOWGATE

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 19

  Sunrise.

  ‘I can have th’ bike with sixteen-inch wheels or I can have th’ pony?’ He was checking again. To make sure.

  Jack had come down in his pajamas and joined them at the kitchen table.

  ‘Yes. Only one present for your Name Day,’ said Lace. ‘One present that we all agree on.’

  ‘You have a choice,’ said Dooley. ‘Choices can be hard sometimes, because your choice affects everything. A pony is a lot of responsibility. The stall has to be kept clean. He’ll have to be fed and watered every day, and ridden regularly and given shots. Just so you know, a bike is easier.’

  ‘An’ I have to wear a helmet?’

  ‘You do. House rule.’

  ‘You’ll also need to take care of a bike,’ said Lace.

  ‘You can’t throw it down or beat it up. A bike is a big deal,’ said Dooley. ‘You need to keep it out of the weather; keep it clean, keep your tires inflated . . .’

  He remembered his own first bike—it was red—and how diligently he’d cared for it. His dad had put it under the tree the first Christmas after he moved to the rectory; it had been everything he ever wanted. A bike was a life-changer.

  Without telling his dad, he had wheeled out of Mitford and bombed down the mountain in frigid weather to find his mom. All those curves, all that traffic, all those miles, pre-helmet. And his dad going nuts with worry and the police investigating. But God had taken care of him.

  Mostly what he remembered was the windburn. It was so bad that his face peeled for a week. He’d been completely, totally crazy, desperate to find his mother.

  ‘It could be a bike,’ said Jack, who looked worried about choices.

  ‘Could be or will be?’

  Jack pulled up his pajama top and covered his head. ‘I’m hiding,’ he said.

  ‘Why are you hiding?’

  ‘I’m prayin’.’

  ‘Take your time,’ said Dooley. He and Lace exchanged a look.

  Jack pulled his pajama top down. ‘A bike! With sixteen . . . ’

  ‘Got it. Red? Blue? Green?’

  ‘Red!’

  ‘Are you in?’ Dooley asked Lace.

  ‘I’m in.’

  ‘Are you in, buddy?’ Their boy was about to bust.

  ‘I’m in! Are you in, Dad?’

  ‘All th’ way. But if you change your mind, there’s still time.’

  ‘I won’t change my mind!’

  ‘Sixteen-inch wheels,’ said Dooley. ‘Red. Done!’

  High five.

  Jack jumped off the bench and did his boogie dance.

  But he hadn’t found his mother. He went to the place she worked and the manager said his mama had a message for him if he came looking: Go back to the preacher.

  The house trailer they’d rented, had barely been able to hang on to, was empty. He had pedaled down the dirt road and stood on a cement block and looked in the window. A squirrel ran across the kitchen floor.

  He had five dollars and three Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He bought a burger combo at Wendy’s and put half the fries in a napkin in the pocket of his yellow windbreaker. Counting the time he slept in the woods and grunted his bike up half a mountain and hitched a ride in a truck with an old couple doing thirty miles an hour, it had taken a night and a day to get home to Mitford.

  • • •

  The gessoing was finished.

  Harley had been a big help; the rest was up to Lace Kavanagh.

  She would let the canvas dry and begin the application
of the wash. Harley could have helped with this, too, but she needed to be one-on-one now, with the great runway of her canvas. The wash would be the approach before the wheels touched down.

  While Lily and Jack baked cookies, she put on her jacket and scarf and walked out to the October morning, awake to the chill air in her lungs, the ache in her roller arm.

  Heavy dew this morning. Cirrus clouds creeping west to east. She leaned against a fence post.

  ‘My dad is in Cameroon,’ she said, ‘near the Nigerian border. I worry a lot about his heart issues. Plus there are waves of suicide bombings and people burning villages and always the endless trauma surgeries. Malaria, too. There’s always malaria.’

  Her mom said they were to pray for the people her dad and his colleagues were treating, pray for his sound health and safekeeping, and trust God in everything. She knew such wisdom in her head, but complete trust was, as her mother said, ‘yet to build a station in her heart and erect its flag of undisputed possession.’

  There were things she couldn’t say to Dooley right now. For example, she didn’t bother him with the innumerable details of the mural because he had innumerable details of his own. Like twelve beautiful Flemish Giant show rabbits that had tested positive for Pasteurella, a serious upper respiratory disease that can be passed to dogs and even children.

  ‘The sketches on paper are clumsy,’ she said. ‘They look like a prep for a first mural. Which of course they are. Did you know that Adele, the famous singer, throws up before she goes onstage?

  ‘Right now, the whole thing seems a joke, something I can’t possibly bring off.’ She shoved her cold hands into her jacket pockets. ‘I want to give children an image they can walk into, a sense of place that will engage and expand their imaginations and be real to them.

  ‘And I wanted to say that you’ll be in it, okay? The girls will be in the midsection near the clump of cottonwoods. And you’ll be in the lower right-hand corner in the foreground. Almost life-size—sort of the star, really.’

  The whole time she talked, he had listened, doing what James Herriot described as ‘that slow, lateral grinding that means contentment and health.’

  On the other side of the fence, Choo-Choo was chewing his cud.

  • • •

  And we’ll put the pond here.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘That’s not where th’ pond is!’

  ‘It’s not where the pond is in real life, but it’s where the pond must be to fit in the picture.’

  ‘Everything should go in th’ right place.’

  Whiny, tired; up too early this morning and too confined the last couple of days. Too much time with his antsy mom in an attic room smelling of paint.

  She had eaten half a sandwich at two o’clock and continued with the roller. The wash was nearly finished; her right arm and hand were aching and stiff; she transferred the roller to her left hand.

  ‘Go find Harley, please, and see what you can do to help.’ Harley and Willie were picking up pecans today and working around the other nut trees.

  ‘But I want to help you!’ He gave her his best pleading look, palms upturned. ‘When it’s time, I could paint a cow or a chicken, I could do it.’

  The fan whirred against the odor of acrylics. She looked out the open window to the oak hanging on to its leaves. Since the chill of morning, the air had turned soft and sweet. Jack needed to boil off energy. She needed to boil off anxiety. This project was swallowing her whole.

  She stood away from the wall, feeling the pull of the deadline, the pull of her child, the pull of the clinic and its daily tribulations.

  She hadn’t run in months. She had run regularly in Atlanta and Chapel Hill, but only a few times on their hay road or around the pond where Harley always mowed a path for her. She was stiff, sore, cranky; she needed complete solitude to do this huge thing. No music, no interruptions, just the work. But that was not going to happen and she had to get used to it.

  ‘Why don’t we go for a really fast walk? Out by the pond and back again. Really, really fast. Would you like that?’

  ‘Will I get my new boots dirty?’

  She placed the lid on the paint can.

  ‘New boots need to get dirty.’

  • • •

  Walking fast. Breathing deeper. Charley barking. Jack running. The sun warm on their backs.

  And there was their old pond, temporarily populated by a couple of mallards passing through to warmer climes.

  Two and a half years ago, she and Dooley had gone on a call for Hal—an injection of antibiotics for a pony—and there was Jack, two years old, squatting at the edge of a farm pond in nothing but a diaper. The weather had been cold, she was wearing her fleece jacket and running toward a child who was leaning dangerously forward, looking into the pond. Anything might have happened.

  Charley dove into the water, startled mallards flew out, and there was Jack at the pond’s edge.

  ‘Don’t!’ she called, running to him. ‘No!’ she said, pulling him back. ‘Never to the edge. Okay? Never.’ Her heart pounding.

  ‘Why?’ he said.

  ‘When you learn how to swim, then you may go to the edge. But only then. And only with Dad or me or Harley. Okay?’ But wait, Harley couldn’t swim. ‘Just with Dad or me, okay?’

  Insulted duck cries fading south . . .

  ‘Okay,’ he said, close to tears. His mom had scared him.

  Tired. She realized suddenly how tired she was, how the loss of sleep had chipped away at her resources.

  ‘Let’s sit a minute.’ They sat on a decaying log, mired in leaves. She could sleep for weeks, right here in the October sun beneath this gnarly oak.

  And there came Charley bounding up and shaking pond water from her shaggy coat and delivering ardent kisses.

  Jack covered his face. ‘No, Charley, you stink!’

  Just a moment to close her eyes . . .

  Then Charley’s screaming yelp and the snake winding itself out of the dry leaves and racing toward the pond.

  Copperhead.

  Stunned, she saw herself as if from above, picking up Jack and running.

  ‘We’ve got to get her to Dad! Call Charley. Call Charley!’

  ‘Come, Charley!’ he screamed. ‘Charley, come!’

  The crazed, high-pitched yelping.

  ‘Charley, come!’

  Running hard, Jack clinging to her, and looking for holes that could catch her feet and send them sprawling.

  ‘Run, Charley! Home, Charley!’

  The snake was young. Some say the deadliest bite comes from the young . . .

  Jack crying, Charley howling, their voices shredding the calm of the afternoon, her heartbeat hard against the weight of her son. It could have been Jack, it happened right where they were sitting, or it could have been her—the venom working so fast she couldn’t have run for help. Hold yourself together, Lace, help us, God, thank you, God, Charley, Charley, run, Charley!

  Run.

  They couldn’t go in by the crate room filled with contagious rabbits. They made it through the front door, her chest on fire. Charley sprawled at Amanda’s feet, howling and desperate for air.

  Amanda ran for Dooley and Blake who came with a gurney.

  She followed the gurney. ‘Take care of Jack,’ she called to Amanda.

  Two clients in Reception looked on with alarm.

  Charley on the table, the frantic whistling of breath in and out of constricted lungs.

  Dooley nodded to Blake. ‘No antivenom.’ His knees were shaky; not a good thing, but this was Charley.

  What was likely the full load of the juvenile’s venom had been injected into the left front leg by two rat-eating teeth, a forest of bacteria . . .

  Pain meds. Then Blake setting up the IV and Dooley drawing blood to check clotting. The sixty seconds it took to test
for clotting seemed to wind into eternity. She watched the hands on the wall clock. It was all passing in a blur. Clotting! Yes! Thank you, God. Charley whimpering, pawing air against the grinding pain.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked Dooley.

  ‘She’ll need IV fluids for twenty-four hours, to flush out and dilute the venom. And a few shots of buprenorphine to manage the pain.’

  Amanda at the door. ‘How’s her breathing? Jack needs a word.’

  ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’ He didn’t want to lie, but he didn’t really know. The chances were good, but nothing was guaranteed.

  ‘After the pain med,’ he said to Blake, ‘ampicillin every eight hours plus IV fluids, and more pain management through the night. What do you think?’

  ‘Good,’ said Blake. ‘And we’ll check the clotting again in twenty-four hours.’

  His knees were fine now. They had a plan; he knew where this was going.

  Dooley glanced at Lace and saw the whole scenario mirrored in her face. He needed to see her there, praying, backed into the corner as if for refuge. This had to work; this was Charley.

  The IV pump he bought on eBay for $250—worth every dime. He needed all the help he could get.

  • • •

  Jack did not want to cry in front of people, but he couldn’t stop. He crawled under Amanda’s desk where he wouldn’t be seen and tried to understand why part of him felt missing. While the people were talking to each other, Amanda crawled under the desk, too.

  His dad was with Charley, right? And with his mom and Blake, and everything would be okay?

  Everything would be okay, said Amanda, and she held him and made him blow his nose.

  He took a deep breath and realized something new and amazing.

  When he grew up, he would not be a dump truck driver. He would be a vet like his dad and save lives.

  • • •

  She can’t sleep by herself,’ said Jack. The usual big eyes; palms lifted in supplication. ‘She will need me!’

  ‘We’re figuring it out,’ said Dooley.

  The rabbits would be released on Wednesday, after which everyone at the clinic would don masks and gloves and disinfect the crate room. In the meantime, a Persian was boarding in his office and the Havanese recovering from electrical burn was housed in the break room.