Matters of Faith

by Kristy Kiernan

  For a moment, I was shocked. She’d not asked, as Sandy had, to speak to her. She’d not gotten the lowdown on treatment or expectations from me yet. Maybe I didn’t want her yelling at my daughter. But following quickly on the heels of my shock was a vast relief. Good. Yes, let Meghan hear as many people around her as possible demanding that she return.

  A good child, who followed directions, that was Meghan. I’d always told her that following directions might save her life one day. But maybe I had been wrong about how that would come about. Maybe I needed to stop asking, and start telling her how to do it. Maybe I needed to give her directions to follow.

  Tessa Barker turned to me next. “Tell me.”

  And so I did. I told her more than I should have. I told her about my fears while pregnant with Marshall, I told her about Ira, and about Cal’s family, and even about my family. And she just sat there and listened. She never took her eyes off me, and she never interrupted. When I paused, she simply waited, when I choked telling her about seeing Meghan on the boat she just gazed at me, when I told her about Rhoades and Hernandez she made notes without looking at her notebook, and when I finished she was silent until she was sure I was done.

  “I talked to Charlie this morning,” she said. “He says he thinks Marshall skipped town.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hoped he was just at a hotel or something. He hasn’t called me back, but I imagine he’s scared. I don’t know where to look, and I can’t take much time away from being here.”

  “Okay. What do you think I can help you with?”

  I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t really know. I just felt as though I was being railroaded into indicting my son, making him take the blame for this, and I wanted to know how I should talk to these detectives.”

  She leaned forward in the chair, her sharp elbows on her hard little knees. I wondered if all that bone meeting bone hurt. “Why don’t you blame, Marshall, Chloe? What if someone you didn’t know did this? What if some guy, who you barely knew, purposefully gave Meghan a peanut butter cookie?”

  I am not an idiot. Perhaps these people thought I was, to defend my son, to defend the person who was, I admit, partially responsible for this. But the fact was, he wasn’t some guy I barely knew. He was my son, as surely as Meghan was my daughter, and how did I choose which one to protect? Were they not both worthy of my protection? Was that not my most important job as a mother? To protect my children?

  “But he’s not,” I said. “He is my son, and I can’t understand this sudden objectivity everyone seems to have about that. As if that’s changed. How many children do you have, Ms. Barker?”

  “Owen is my only child,” she replied.

  “And how old is he?”

  “He’ll be five this summer.”

  “And do you love him?”

  She looked at me with distaste. “Do I love him? What kind of question is that? He is my world.”

  “Of course he is,” I said. “And I think that for parents of an only child it might be hard to imagine that you could possibly love another child as much, with that same intensity. But you do, it just happens, you can’t help it. They both need my help right now, and I couldn’t possibly choose between them. And I don’t see why I should have to.”

  She nodded. “I can see that, but aren’t you angry with him? I don’t know if my love could overcome my anger at seeing my child like this.”

  “Of course I’m angry. I am so furious with him it scares me. But no, it doesn’t change my love for him. What would change your love for Owen?”

  She looked at Meghan and didn’t answer.

  “What is he allergic to?”

  She rattled off a list long enough to daze me, and when she finished I felt like crying. I knew what she was facing, trying to let this child live in the world at large, trying to get him through the school system, trying to make his friends—if he could develop any—and their families understand, the fear whenever he was out of her sight.

  “What are you going to do about school?” I asked her. She shook her head.

  “I’ve gone to three kindergartens so far. I’m considering homeschooling.”

  “Do you worry about his social life if you homeschool?” I was always curious about this. I had wanted Meghan to be as fully integrated with society as she could be, and, in truth, I had not trusted myself or Cal to be social enough to give her the interaction she needed to become a happy adult. Though she was an outsider at school already. Perhaps what I had given her instead was a massive inferiority complex.

  “Of course,” she said. “But what can I do? When I explain the extent, the number of things he can’t come in any contact with, they just look at me in horror. I can practically see their brains working out how they can possibly get all of their teachers and students and employees to change their lives around one little boy.”

  I was nodding along with her as she spoke. We’d gone through it all, and Meghan wasn’t allergic to half the things this little boy was.

  “And things are bound to start getting litigious over this stuff. Look at what’s happening right here,” she said. “It’s not going to be much of a leap from a criminal case to a civil case, and once schools and individuals start getting sued, nobody’s going to want to deal with it.”

  It was my turn to not know what to say. I couldn’t think of anything that would make it easier on her. All I could think about was trying to make things easier on my own family, and me, and I hadn’t been able to come up with a single idea to accomplish that.

  “Is Owen’s father in the picture?” I asked, simply to make conversation, cover the awkwardness. And how funny was that? In most situations, asking about an apparently absent father would create an awkward conversation. With us, it served as a pressure valve.

  She shook her head. “No, not really.” She left it at that and I didn’t push it.

  “And how do you know Mingus?”

  She smiled. “His son is in the same day care as mine. It’s just five kids, so all the parents know each other.”

  There was no question that there was interest there, and even in the middle of everything happening, in and out of this hospital room, it brought a smile to my lips. Nothing changed, not really. There is always romance, there is always sex, there is, and always will be, attraction. And in the beginning, it is so lovely, even when it’s not you that the loveliness is happening to, even when what is happening to you is the very opposite of loveliness.

  “So, tell me again,” she finally said, “what can I do for you?”

  “Well, I’m nervous about talking to these people by myself.”

  “So you just want someone beside you whenever you talk to anyone about Marshall and Meghan?”

  “Yes,” I said firmly.

  “Marshall’s lawyer could do that,” she said.

  “I want someone objective. I want someone who has my entire family’s best interests at heart, not just Marshall’s.”

  She looked at me searchingly and took a long look at Meghan again.

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll do it. Do you have contact information for—” She consulted her notes. “—Hernandez and Rhoades?”

  I riffled through my purse and handed her their business cards. She copied the information down and gave them back to me. “I’ll contact them and let them know that if they want to talk to you they’ll need to make an appointment with me. Now, I’d like to ask you to do something for me.”

  I nodded. “Of course. What is it?” I asked, expecting her to lay down some rules, some instructions that would protect my family and me.

  She looked at Meghan. “I don’t know anyone else with a child with food allergies. I belong to an online forum and have gotten some great information there, but to talk, really talk to someone who’s been through it, it’s different. Could you keep me posted on what’s happening here? And, could I call you once in a while? If I had a question, or something.”

  Does it make me a bad person that I wanted to say no
and then curl up in a ball and go to sleep? I couldn’t, of course. But I wanted to. After all, I was asking for her support, but it was her job and I was paying her. What she was asking was, would I be her friend?

  And a friend was a responsibility. One I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on right now. Sandy was different. She was a friend I could lean on, while Tessa was asking to lean on me. I couldn’t imagine that I was going to be able to support that particular weight now, or anytime in the near future.

  But at least she was asking outright. At least it wasn’t taken for granted that I would, the way the added peripheral responsibilities of wifedom and motherhood eventually turned into silent assumptions.

  It was nice to be asked. And so I said yes. She gave me several business cards, and before she left she held Meghan’s hand for a moment and told her that it had been nice to meet her, and that the next time she saw her she was looking forward to seeing what color her eyes were.

  After she left I went down to the chapel and tried Marshall again, unsuccessfully, then called Charles Mingus and left a message on his machine that I’d spoken with Tessa, and he was right, I did like her. I sat gazing at the dove for a moment, acknowledging the fact that I was able to leave Meghan’s room without pause now, acknowledging the grief that came with that . . . and that was then so quickly gone.

  I sat in the cafeteria to eat my lunch and made notes about Meghan and her treatment while I ate a bean sprouts and turkey sandwich. I would have liked to complain to someone about the food, the way you complained about airline food, as common a conversation as any. But, in fact, the cafeteria food was delicious. Different every day, fresh, a surprising variety, and incredibly reasonable.

  If I worked close by, I thought I would probably come to the hospital cafeteria by choice for lunch, but then a man who had to be in his seventies shuffled by me on a walker and fell heavily into a chair just a table away. He pulled out a cell phone and fumbled with it, sighing in frustration, before finally making his call and telling the person on the other end that things didn’t look good.

  A reasonable lunch was not worth the contagious misery and grief. I was not here for a pleasurable lunch break. I finished my sandwich, tasteless now, and gathered my notes.

  Meghan had been shifted when I returned. I checked my notes and remembered my idea to give her directions, and began my self-devised treatment in the same no-nonsense voice I had used when we taught her how to use her EpiPen. First I shut off the lights and closed the blinds, making the room nearly as dark as it was at night.

  I pulled the chair as close to her bedside as I could get it and took a deep breath, silently said a short prayer, and believed. I had broken down the steps the same way I broke down colors to their individual components in order to make a perfect match in a fifty-year-old painting. What is the base, what is the tone, the tint?

  And we began.

  “Okay, Meghan, I want you to think about waking up. I know it feels good to sleep, it feels good to keep your eyes closed, you think it might hurt to open them. But things are nice and dark and cool in here. It’s not going to hurt to open your eyes. It’s already mid-afternoon and you’ve slept too long, but there’s lots of time to just laze around in bed. Wouldn’t it feel good to stretch, and to get something good to eat? I’m going to make pancakes, and you’ll get lots of butter and maple syrup.

  “There’s a television right at the end of your bed, and all we’re going to do is sit here together and watch some TV. So, do you feel your eyelids twitch? Right there. Feel that?”

  I reached out and gently pushed up the outside corners of her eyes with my index fingers, fluttering them.

  “See, it’s not too bright in here, it’s not too bright.” I brushed my fingertips across her eyelashes, tickling her eyelids, in truth, trying to irritate them open. If she couldn’t open her eyes, then maybe she’d lift a hand, a finger to brush me away. I lightly tickled across her cheeks, the end of her nose, hoping that she’d feel me as if I were a swarm of no-see-ums flying about her face.

  “Raise your eyebrows,” I commanded her. “Come on, raise your eyebrows and your eyelids will follow. You can open your eyes. I need you to open your eyes now, Meghan.”

  Nothing made any sort of difference. No muscle twitch, no wrinkle of her nose, no crease in her forehead. Nothing. I kept trying and didn’t bother stopping when the nurses came in. They indicated a sort of silent approval, slight dips of their heads, and then quickly left me to it when their jobs were done. One even said, “Good,” before she left.

  When Cal arrived, I was taking a break, as tired as if I’d been working on a painting all day. He came in with a large bag from an electronics store in town, and after greeting me quietly he began to unpack it, making little comments as he pulled each item out.

  First was a small CD/DVD player, followed by Meghan’s stack of Winona Ryder movies, then brand-new CDs in their maddeningly secure shrink wrap.

  “I thought that maybe, I don’t know,” he said as he unboxed the DVD player, “if she’s listening, maybe she’d like to listen to something besides doctors and nurses and her parents talking about her.”

  I was ashamed that I’d not thought of anything like that myself. The only items that could be called personal in the room were my purse and books and the quickly wilting arrangement Sandy had sent.

  I immediately made a mental list of other things I could bring in, but realized that none might be able to reach my daughter the way the things Cal had brought could. As he got it all set up, fitting headphones on his head first to adjust the volume and then gently finding the right spot for them on Meghan, I realized that perhaps this meant that Cal had rethought his conviction that our daughter would not wake.

  As if sensing my thoughts, Cal got Beetlejuice set up in the machine and then sat down and spoke softly. “Good trip today. These guys knew what they were doing already, didn’t need much from me but a boat, so I got to fish, got to think.”

  He stopped and looked down in his lap, rubbing his hands together as if applying lotion. I could hear his rough skin rasping, remembered its feel on my own smooth skin and wondered if I would ever feel it again.

  “You know, I kind of thought: Does it matter?”

  “Does it matter?” I repeated. “I don’t know what you mean.” I did not want to assume anything, because what I was already assuming was not only not flattering, but was raising my all-too-familiar flags of anger at Cal. Does it matter?

  “Don’t get me wrong, yeah, it matters a lot that she’s here, that this happened at all. But, even if I’m sort of having a hard time with . . . whatever, hope, I suppose, should what I’m willing to do be any different than if I wasn’t?”

  I had to take apart what he was saying. Cal could be willfully obscure at times, but the times that he spoke of the important things in our lives, he was obscure without malice, his words caught in his feelings like a bird in fishing line, and I had to slowly, carefully unravel things if I wanted to get to his meaning and intent.

  I had often felt like a detective in our marriage. And that was not a complaint. I enjoyed the slowing down of our altercations, the time it forced me to take to understand each word, the time it gave me to formulate my own responses. In our home, fights were quick and then quickly over, whether they were resolved or not.

  But the discussions, the real ones, they were often slow enough to last until the early morning hours. And in most cases, by the end of them we, or at least I, felt as though we had reached some new level of understanding of ourselves and each other and how a marriage, our marriage anyway, worked. We hadn’t had one of those discussions in a very long time, and I did not know why, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it might have been at least fifty percent my fault.

  It was another example of the loss of “try” in our relationship. And I realized, as I untangled, and sorted, and considered, that he was acknowledging that too, only with Meghan. Perhaps he did not believe, but he was willing, perhaps even needed, to a
ct as though he did.

  I nodded. “Okay. Good. I started really working on her to open her eyes today,” I said. “Maybe between us we can get something.”

  He nodded, and we had sealed something new. Our differences over Marshall were still on the table, as was our marriage, but on Meghan, we seemed to finally agree in some basic way.

  “So tell me about the trip,” I said, leaning back and closing my eyes. I hadn’t asked for a fishing story in a long time. I used to ask him to tell me about his day every night when we climbed in bed, falling asleep to his deep voice vibrating through my pillow the way my father’s bedtime stories of Euclid and Aristotle used to.

  And I did fall asleep in my recliner, the lights on bright overhead, with images of Cal, shirtless, fishing rod in hand. He was doing the thing that he was meant to do in this life, coming to epiphanies, decisions, resolutions, surrounded by the things he loved most, birds and fish and gators, mangroves and cypress and water.

  He didn’t spend that night on the boat, but stayed with me after I woke, and we watched Winona Ryder movies with our daughter, hoping for a movie ending, and holding hands across her still body, ignoring everything outside her room.

  MARSHALL

  Dinner had been quiet, all of them exhausted with sun and fishing, and Marshall was embarrassed when he fell asleep on the sofa and woke to hear Ada and Grandmother Tobias talking softly at the dining room table. He wasn’t sure he wanted them talking so much.

  He felt his pocket, grasping the edges of his cell phone. It felt like a time bomb. He knew that when he turned it on this time the calls from his mother, and perhaps some from his lawyer—or his former lawyer—would no longer be mildly concerned. They would be angry and demanding, and what would he do then?