Matters of Faith

by Kristy Kiernan

Mingus stood, obviously surprised, and Tessa looked at me questioningly. “You okay?” she asked. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “Oh, I am,” I said. “Thank God he’s safe. At least I know where both of my children are. Thank you for coming to tell me.” I was waxing formal again. Something in Charles Mingus brought it out in me and I clung to it now, nodding calmly at both of them, a beatific smile curving my lips as if I were the mother of the bride thanking guests for coming.

  As I drove home, I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, imagining what I would find. Would Marshall be obviously upset, perhaps even crying, in his messages? Or would he be defensive, demanding that I come get him? I let up on the gas when I noticed I was going almost fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit. Then I looked in the rearview mirror, didn’t see a car in sight, and floored it.

  I didn’t care what he said or what tone he said it in. I wanted to hear my child’s voice. I hadn’t heard either of my children in over three weeks, and I craved it the way I’d craved Cal’s voice in the early days of our relationship. I careened into the drive, creating ruts as deep as the cop cars had in the crushed shells, and ran up the steps.

  As I hurried to get into the kitchen, the screen door didn’t just nip my heel, it caught it at the top, just where my Achilles tendon was its most tender. I fell into the kitchen, the pain in my heel in screaming competition with the pain that exploded from my right wrist when I tried to break my fall on the unforgiving tile.

  I cried out, trying to roll on my side and curl into a ball around my wrist, but the screen door held my foot and I kicked out in rage against it, succeeding in freeing my trapped foot, but at the expense of most of the flesh on my ankle. I pulled into myself and moaned as the pain bloomed, and finally screamed at the screen door, “God dammit!” and lashed out to kick it again and then again.

  I finally stopped and lay there gasping for breath, eventually sitting up, cradling my hand and wrist against my chest as I tried to determine the damage. It looked as though my ankle was the real concern, the skin raw and starting to ooze blood, but as I used the hand I was supporting my wrist with to reach out and touch it, fresh pain shot through the side of my wrist and up my arm and I clutched it again, completely forgetting about my ankle.

  Once supported it felt better, and I held it tight while I gently rotated my foot to see if it, too, would be shockingly painful. But aside from the tattered skin it seemed intact, and I struggled to my feet while trying to keep my arms from moving. It was not nearly as easy a maneuver as I would have thought, but I finally managed and hobbled over to the table, scooting a chair out with my undamaged foot so I could sit down and gingerly lay my arm on the table for further inspection.

  It was already swelling, and I grimaced when I saw that there was definitely something off in the shape of my wrist, a hump of sorts, like the top of my wrist had suddenly turned into an old hunch-backed crone. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to breathe steadily. This simply couldn’t be good.

  I carefully picked my hand up, trying to keep it as motionless as possible, and limped upstairs to my bathroom, where I pulled the cupboard open with the side of my good foot and toed out the plastic basket I used for various medical supplies. I sat on the floor and pulled a tightly rolled ACE bandage out and managed to wrap my wrist, with slightly more skill than I had hoped for.

  Getting the top off the Tylenol bottle was a little more tricky, and I scattered the pills across the floor when I finally ripped it off with my teeth, but luckily several landed near me and I swallowed them dry and tucked a few more in my pocket.

  I had intended to go through my records in the office to find the information on Marshall’s car, as well as gather some other things I thought might be helpful to Meghan based on Cal’s printouts, but I simply did not have the energy anymore. I managed to make it down the stairs and checked the messages at home, hoping the sound of Marshall’s voice would make me feel good enough that I could forget about my wrist for a few moments.

  But there was only one message, and it was Cal’s voice that came out of the speaker, not Marshall’s. It was brief enough, but not unkind. He told me Marshall had called, he was at his mother’s, and he was heading out to pick him up, to call him on his cell when I got the message.

  I stared at the machine in disbelief when it told me that was the last message. I played it again and then deleted it, and checked again for messages. Nothing. That was it. If Marshall had called, he hadn’t called home. I turned on my cell phone and it rewarded me with the horrible piercing notes that meant I had a message.

  Same thing. It was Cal, and Cal only.

  I scrolled through the missed calls feature. Nothing. Marshall had not called me at all. His father had been his first choice, the one parent who was least likely to support him. I dropped it back on the counter, wondering if there would ever again be a time that I thought I knew my son.

  I checked the clock and then called Cal.

  “Chloe?” he answered, AC/DC loud in the background. “Hang on.” The music stopped and then he was back. “Hey, did you get my messages? Did Mingus get you? Where have you been?”

  “Yeah, I just got the messages. I couldn’t sleep so I went back to the hospital last night. I forgot my cell phone on the counter. Where are you? What did he say?”

  “I’m about an hour away. It was a hell of a surpr—”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He sounds okay, but—”

  “What did he say about Ada?”

  “Chloe! It was a short conversation. If you’ll be quiet for one second, I’ll repeat it to you word for word.”

  I was silent.

  “Okay, I was already on the boat but the party hadn’t showed up yet. He, obviously, called my cell, and I nearly dropped it in the water when I saw it was him. I swear, I thought . . .”

  He stopped, and I heard him put the phone down.

  “Cal? Cal, what’s going on? Are you okay?” I had a sudden vision of him being upset and running the truck off the side of the road, into some canal God knew where, or having a heart attack because of all the stress. And it almost felt right. Yes, sure, why not? Why not? Why shouldn’t it all go ahead and finish exploding?

  Just as I started to really panic, he picked up the phone.

  “Chlo?”

  “Oh my God, what happened?” I cried.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I got upset, I had to put the phone down for a second.”

  I had to think to recall what he had been saying before he stopped talking, and then remembered. “You’d thought what, Cal?”

  He sighed. “I thought he’d been hurt or something, in an accident, I don’t know. I saw his name on the caller ID, but I didn’t think when I answered the phone that it was going to be his voice.”

  So I wasn’t the only one imagining the next level of devastation. Nothing is ever the worst. There is always something more out there, to make things just a little more horrible, and I had no idea when it would stop. Perhaps you are only allotted so much joy in life, so much luck, and I had used it up on my childhood with my worry-free days playing with friends, my evenings of interesting discussions with my parents, and my nights of falling asleep within seconds, safe in my double bed with its white eyelet coverlet.

  In fact, I had fallen so easily into this mode that I had to believe that it was a natural state for humans. I knew people who never seemed to acknowledge that anything could be a good thing, there was no reason for optimism, ever, and they used to exhaust me. I searched for a reason why I had not become that person, and, astoundingly, I found it.

  “Cal!” I said. “I almost forgot to tell you. I think something happened with Meghan.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “She moved her hand. I was talking to her, and she moved her hand. It was just a second, just a little twitch, but it moved.”

  “When? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you—�
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  “What the hell?”

  I knew he would be irritated at first, but I hadn’t imagined this anger in his voice. “Hang on, I know how hard you’re working, Cal. And I—I appreciate it. I know you’re the one making it possible for us to pay our bills right now. I was going to watch the clock and call you as soon as I knew you were up, but I fell asleep, and Tessa is the one who woke me up to tell me about Marshall.” I took a deep breath, and for the first time in a long time, made the first move. “I’m sorry, Cal. It was such a small thing the doctor didn’t even come in, but it’s a good sign.”

  I could hear him breathing erratically and knew he was trying to process, trying to balance his anger at me not telling him immediately with the fact that it was good news and my apology.

  “Tell me about it?” he asked softly.

  I tried to do the story justice. I did not embellish, I didn’t want him to think it was more than it had been, but I tried my best to give him every nuance of the feeling of seeing life in your child for the first time in weeks. He’d gotten Marshall’s voice, yes, but I’d gotten Meghan’s hand, and perhaps we simply both needed to be thankful that either of those things existed at all.

  “That’s amazing,” he said when I finished, and then it was my turn. He told me about Marshall’s call, and I could tell he tried to wring as much life from it for me as I had for him. But the fact was, the conversation had been as brief as he said.

  He’d called, said hi, I’m okay, I’m at Grandmother Tobias’s, I don’t have my car, could you please come get me. And Cal had been in the truck within minutes.

  “So,” I asked, “he didn’t say anything about how he decided to go there? How did he know where to go?”

  “I have no idea. I was going to ask you if you’d told him about her, maybe thinking you were doing the right thing?”

  “No, Cal, I would never have done that without talking to you first,” I protested. But that wasn’t necessarily true, and we both knew it. It is quite likely that had I believed it was in Marshall’s best interest, I might have put them in touch. Luckily, I didn’t believe it was in his best interest, but the fact remained that I had felt no qualms about those things falling under my domain.

  And suddenly, I realized that Cal was going to see his mother for the first time in over fifteen years. “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, and I could picture him shrugging. “I made my peace with this stuff a long time ago. I’m going to pick up Marshall, not have a family reunion.”

  “I’m sorry, Cal,” I said. And I was, terribly. Something about our separation had allowed me to see him at a distance. And what I saw was not a man who had slowly come to ignore my needs and passively let me assume the leadership role of our family, but a man who had to come to terms with the fact that he had no family left from childhood, and had quietly, without fanfare, taken care of the family he’d created in the less obvious and yet just as important ways.

  We were a “traditional” family, no matter our politics. I made some money, yes, but if I were honest, if we put it down on paper, I knew that the bills were paid by Cal. Why it hurt for me to admit that, just to myself, especially to myself, I didn’t know. He allowed me to do the work I loved—but that would never pay our mortgage—without ever making me feel as though I were handling less of the load.

  And in that same traditional sense, I did the majority of the housework and the child rearing, yes, but I didn’t do it quietly. It was all front and center and well-known, as if my contributions were more important. And perhaps I needed to feel that way because I didn’t feel that I had anything tangible, cash, to point to. Dust-free floors didn’t pay the bills, and a part of me resented that, and so I had made sure everyone knew that the dust-free floors were work, dammit.

  And while I didn’t think I was wrong for that, somehow the work that Cal did got pushed to the back burner of the appreciation stove. It frustrated me that nobody ever said thank you for the clean toilets, but, except for just a moment ago, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said thank you to Cal for getting up at four o’clock most mornings and working a twelve-hour day to pay our bills.

  Cal never demanded appreciation, while it had become my currency. And I realized that this must have been at least partly why Marshall had called his father rather than me to pick him up.

  I wondered if Cal saw me differently now, but no longer felt I had the right to ask.

  “Thank you,” I finally said, the only thing I could think to say.

  “Thank you for being there with Meghan,” he replied, and for a calm, quiet moment in our lives, we were on the same page.

  “What’s your plan?” I asked, my wrist beginning a slow, warm throb.

  “I’ll get there, probably have something to eat, thank her for taking care of him, try to not get in a fight, and then turn around and drive home. Did Mingus tell you what we have to do?”

  “Yes. I understand what has to happen. I’d like to ask you a favor though.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’d like to see him before you take him in.”

  He sighed. “Chloe, I want you to see him. But I don’t want him at the hospital.”

  “Call and leave me a message when you’re on your way back. I’ll meet you at home, and . . . we’ll take him in together.”

  “Are you sure? You don’t have to do this, Chloe.”

  “I’m sure.”

  MARSHALL

  Fry oil and expectation hung heavy in the house in the afternoon, coating his nose and mouth and skin, and he finally burst out of the back door and into the backyard to gasp fresh, if humid, air. He’d not been out there for more than twenty minutes—inspecting the grass where he and Ada had tussled, looking for evidence that she had once been there, that a girl, a woman, had once been a part, a sexual part, of his life—before he heard the steady, well-maintained thrum of his father’s truck.

  His heart hammered in his throat, and if his bowels had been loose before, now his entire body was clenched tight. He wanted to walk through the tiny walkway into the carport and out to the courtyard, but his legs refused to move and he remained still, barely breathing as he heard the truck gear into park and then the engine fall silent.

  Nothing in the world moved. He didn’t hear the truck door open, he didn’t hear his grandmother open the front door, and he certainly wasn’t moving enough to make a sound. He envisioned them all frozen—he in the backyard, Grandmother Tobias in the kitchen, his father in the truck looking through the windshield at his childhood home—and knew he was going to have to be the one.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, the disk of the sun black on his lids, and just as he took his first step he heard Grandmother Tobias move inside and the latch of the truck door engage. The three of them formed a sorry triumvirate of wary, weary, and worried when they stepped into the yard from their respective hiding places, but Marshall saw that his father only had eyes for him.

  His own eyes immediately filled with tears, and what he wanted to do more than anything, more than see Ada again, more than forget that any of this had ever happened, was to fling himself across the yard and into his father’s strong arms, sobbing “Dad!” as he ran, and be enfolded, lifted up, and held tightly to his chest the way he’d been as a child.

  And after a second of locking eyes with him, to his mortification and relief, he did just that. He somehow managed to keep the “Dad!” from flying out of his mouth, but when he reached him his knees went so soft that his father did nearly have to lift him just to keep him upright.

  “Okay,” Cal said. “Okay, it’s going to be okay.”

  And for a few astonishing, pristine seconds, Marshall let himself believe that. This was all that faith was, all that God was, every religion in the world searched for this, this little bubble of time in his father’s arms in which he was assured that everything was going to be okay.

  It had to end, of course, and as soon as he felt his dad test h
is stability he stiffened his knees. The support was drawn away by degrees, until they were standing a foot away from each other, Marshall looking at the ground, his father looking over his head to study his mother on the front porch.

  “Don’t make me come down those steps with my knees, Calvin,” Grandmother Tobias called, and Marshall saw the resignation on his father’s face. Marshall had gotten used to his grandmother’s rough voice, her accent, her aggressive style, but he heard it now as if for the first time, grating on him, making him wonder how he, how his father, could have come from this.

  He didn’t just want to go home, he wanted to leave here, and for a moment he entertained the fantasy that he would leap into the truck and he and his father would strike out across Florida, leaving everything behind them on a cross-country father/son road trip.

  He didn’t know what his dad was thinking, but in the part moan, part sigh that he made he thought it must have been something a little similar. Marshall stayed by the car and watched him walk across the yard and up the steps, saw his father’s head swivel as he took in the rotting boards along the edge of the rough concrete, the chipped edges of the steps, the slab of the front door.

  He looked away when his father bent to give his mother a one-armed hug and a brief kiss on the cheek, and then glanced away again when he saw his grandmother clutch at him, just as desperately as he himself had just a minute ago. He felt the weight of all that desperation like a solid force touch on him, and wondered how his father remained upright throughout his life with so many people depending on him.

  Maybe he didn’t want a family after all. Maybe it was better to just do what his uncle had done, take off, not with a girl, not for love, but alone, to make his own life without the constant tugging on a conscience. He knew he was going home now, knew he was going to have to face some unknown consequence, but it wouldn’t last forever.

  And when it was over, well, maybe he would say his good-byes and start over somewhere he’d never been before, someplace it got cold in the winter, maybe with snow, Colorado, the Dakotas. He filed this plan away, next to the childhood plans he and Ira had made to be cops, the high school plans he’d made with his parents to graduate from college, the pseudo-adult plans he and Ada had made to live their lives together seeking redemption and light.