What is he doing?
I’m not ready to discuss my mother and what I saw in the kitchen so long ago, not with anyone, including him, but here he is, his knees nearly touching mine, and I know there will be no escaping this confrontation. I want to shoot myself for losing it last night. Marcus probably wants to shoot me too. He is heading for the kitchen, but Dad asks him to come back and sit with us. He says that unfortunately Marcus has been made part of this family crisis.
Unable to look at either of them, I study my hands, clasped tightly in my lap.
Dad, I know, is studying me, not saying a word—waiting, I finally realize, for the answer to the question he has asked. I had hoped it was rhetorical. Marcus, no doubt about it, will be a mere spectator. He cannot come to my rescue; this is between Dad and me.
Finally I look at my father and answer his question with a question: “Could you forget such a thing?”
“No, Maisey, I couldn’t. Not in the traditional sense of ‘forgetting.’ But your mother and I dealt with what happened and then we agreed not to rehearse it. That helped us forget.”
“What do you mean?”
“We forgot in the sense that we don’t dwell on it or refer to it. We put it out of our minds so it didn’t ruin what we had left, which was quite a lot. But what helped most were the verses we memorized from Psalm 103. We rehearsed those truths about God until they became such a part of us that a researcher might be able to isolate them in our DNA.”
I begin peeling polish off one of my thumbnails, but he lifts my chin, looks into my eyes, and to my amazement, quotes words not totally unfamiliar to me:
“For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.”
“Children of dust, Maisey, children of dust. That’s not an insult to the human race; it’s just a fact. Making mistakes is unavoidable; we are the created, not the Creator. But it’s also a fact that God loves us, despite our frailty. And it’s a fact that life is good when we too choose love and forgiveness.”
I close my eyes against his words.
Dad puts his hands over mine and I dare to look at him.
“These are things worth remembering, Maisey—they really are.”
I study his strong hands covering mine and say nothing.
“I wish you had told us what you saw,” he says, sitting back in his chair.
I’m glad for a little space.
“I wish you had been able to tell us,” he continues while I return to chipping my nail polish. “Then we could have asked for your forgiveness, and you could have rehearsed this Scripture with us and eventually let go of what hurt you so badly. I really believe that you too would have been able to ‘forget.’ ”
“Wait a minute,” I say, looking at him. “Did you say we? Hello, Dad, you didn’t do anything.”
“I wasn’t without blame.”
“Don’t say that,” I snap. “Really, Dad, just don’t say that.”
“Both your mom and I have regrets, Maisey. There are many ways to be unfaithful. I also say we because your mother and I are ‘one.’ Just as I hope you and Marcus will be. Even when things aren’t perfect.”
I roll my eyes.
He leans toward me and grabs my arms. “Stop that! I mean it, Maisey, I don’t ever want to see you do that again.”
My father has never raised his voice to me. Tears spring to my eyes and slide down my cheeks.
“I’m sorry for yelling at you, honey. I understand you’ve been hurt, but it kills me to see what the pain has done to your heart, at least as far as your mother is concerned. If you’ve never heard Psalm 103 before now, I still don’t know how it’s possible you grew up in this house without learning the necessity of forgiveness. It is the most basic tenet of life in God. He is merciful and desires for us to be. Your mother and I brag on your kindness to others, but why is it you have not extended that kindness to the one who gave you life at great cost and has loved you always—deeply and completely?”
“Always?”
I push back my chair, stand up, and look past him at the field beyond the pool. In the dusk, I fix my gaze on the tree line in the distance, trying to isolate the oak that holds the tree house he once built me.
He stands up too and gathers me in his arms. “Maisey, Maisey, what have you done?”
What have I done? Maize is a-maz-ing, he used to say.
I can’t take any more. Pulling away from him, I run to my room.
I hardly realize I’m grabbing a bathing suit from my dresser drawer when Marcus comes in, asking if I’m okay.
“What do you think?” I say.
“Your dad is going to get a pizza; he insists on feeding me. Do you want to come?”
“Are you kidding? I’m going to swim until I sink. But please, you go. I want you to.”
I begin swimming laps before they leave. I don’t stop until I have only enough energy to pull myself up the steps and collapse in this lounger. Shortly after I dove in, Marcus brought out my pink chenille robe. In my peripheral vision I saw him put it on the table. “You might need this,” I think he said. It has been a hot day, and needing that robe seemed a long shot, but I’m finding it terribly comforting at the moment. I hope they’re gone awhile. For the first time in my life I don’t want to see my dad.
Sitting here, wrapped in a fluffy, warm robe, I think of Mother driving home alone from St. Louis with my wedding dress. I’m sure it was nice of her to go, but I would have gone. I would rather have been driving home from St. Louis than listening to Dad’s sermon. It was so crazy to hear him ask me what I’ve been silently asking my mother for so many years: What have you done?
I know why people say they want to drop off the face of the earth.
And I’d figure out a way to do just that, for maybe a year or two, except there’s a wedding in two days and I cannot stand up a man who brings me a robe to wrap up in on a warm July evening. Or would I be doing him a favor? Maybe on their drive to town, Dad’s telling Marcus to pack up and head for the hills this very minute, that he’ll handle the almost insurmountable problems associated with canceling a wedding at this late date.
Oh, dear God, help us.
I need to get inside and up the stairs before Marcus and Dad come home. I want to hide for a while.
When I was a girl, Mother taught me to call God by many names. All of them have come to my aid through the years, but some of them seem perfect for what I need most tonight: Refuge, Rock, Shield—a Hiding Place.
They used to sing an old hymn in the “big” church when I was in Wee Church and came upstairs to sit with Mom and Dad on family Sundays. We usually sang all the verses, and even though when I was so young I didn’t know what some of the lines meant, I loved to hear the congregation sing the song, especially the chorus:
He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock
That shadows a dry, thirsty land;
He hideth my life in the depths of his love,
And covers me there with his hand,
And covers me there with his hand.
I lean my head against the back of the lounger and look up into a darkening sky. “Please, God, would you hide me in the depths of your love? Would you cover me with your hand?”
I close my eyes, and from somewhere in the night, I think I hear, I will.
Kendy
What happened to the sun? And are those drops of rain on the windshield?
I look into the rearview mirror for the tenth time. It is such a relief to see Maisey’s dress hanging securely on a hook, spread across the back seat.
It’s coming, Maisey.
She’s right. The dress is beautiful.
So was my wedding dress, of course, but a contrast to hers, tight only in the waist with a skirt full, light, and billowy. I loved it as
much as Maisey loves hers. When I slipped the dress on the evening of my wedding and swished down the aisle, it was beyond imagining that I would ever betray my husband. Wouldn’t it be nice if this Saturday were my wedding day, instead of Maisey’s? Wouldn’t it be nice to begin again and somehow avoid any heartbreaking mistakes?
Beginning again wouldn’t interest Luke. He likes where we are now, or maybe I should say, who we are, what we have. He says mistakes are part of living. “Children of dust,” he calls us quite tenderly, whether he’s dropped one of my china plates or has told me about an employee arrested for embezzlement. His favorite hymn is “O Worship the King.” I remember standing and singing that anthem the Sunday I could finally believe emotional and spiritual healing were a possibility. A poet had given us words to express our thoughts, including the last verse:
Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
In thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail;
Thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end!
Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend.
One of my favorite Christian artists has an updated version of this hymn with a contemporary chorus added. I like it, but I was surprised this last verse didn’t include “frail children of dust.” I was rather disappointed and wondered why other words were chosen to replace these. Were the original words too archaic? The alternate words speak of God’s “ineffable love” and are certainly beautiful, perhaps part of the original poem. But I’ve wondered if even we Christians are pluralistic at times—knowing we need a savior but refusing to believe or say we are truly needy; willing to be God’s beloved children but unwilling to admit we are children with much to learn— and not the omnipotent, all-knowing Father.
At least the last lines are intact. His mercies are tender and firm to the end. And don’t I love those names for God? Maker, Defender, Redeemer, Friend. I was restored to emotional and spiritual health because he is those things and more.
Which came first? Confessing to my husband or repenting before the Lord? I’m not sure I can remember. They seem rather interwoven. Both took place on the patio in the spring sunshine that was tending me.
But it is logical that repentance came first.
On Easter Sunday I had returned to church, not as an obligation but as an act of worship. The following Sunday our minister began a series of four sermons on the book of Psalms. I don’t doubt the timing was a gift from a good and generous God.
The sermon on David’s psalms of repentance resonated so deeply within me that for weeks I devoured those psalms and the others David wrote, as well as the books that record David’s life. Reading them was a balm for my wounded heart.
David adored God, but he was still capable of committing terrible sins. Even before my crisis, I had read Psalm 51 and wondered why David had said to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned.” He had obviously sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah too. But during this quest for understanding, I began to make sense of his statement. Bathsheba and Uriah weren’t his Creator and Sustainer; they had not protected and honored and loved him; they were not the subjects of countless pleas and as many outbursts of praise in David’s poetry.
The psalms of repentance are full of lament. It seems to me that people respond in a variety of ways to sin and the suffering that comes with it. But only one who loves deeply wrote Psalms 6, 32, 38, and 51. And I like to think that only one who loves deeply can be so affected by them.
I do not look back with regret on the afternoon I sat on my lounger with my Bible in my lap and became vulnerable before God, like David, sharing intimately and honestly, because I no longer doubted he would hear me in his “unfailing love.”
Those were good days.
But bad days were not over.
I was ready to think about returning to work, and Luke came home one day, excited to tell me that he had run into Clay and that he had told him a third-grade position had opened up at my former elementary school. My hesitation puzzled Luke. He was further confused when I told him I had already applied at two districts farther away and had interviews at both schools scheduled for the next week.
“Well, sweetheart, you can cancel them,” he said.
Without any warning, the moment had come to break his heart.
“Sit down, Luke,” I said.
He pulled a chair over and slid into it, his legs stretched out in front of him.
“What?” he asked. He couldn’t have been more unsuspecting. I’m sure he thought the worst days were behind us.
Nothing, I wanted to say. Nothing at all. But I could not escape saying a terrible something.
“I would give anything if I didn’t have to tell you this,” I said.
I took a deep breath. What words would be sufficient for this hateful work? And even if they came to me, how could I possibly utter them aloud?
He jerked out of his slouch and sat up straight. “Good grief, Kendy. Just say it. What could be so difficult?”
Can laughter be both logical and also utterly insane? Be calm, I told myself. Hysteria will not help.
“My depression,” I began, “or desperation, as I’ve come to think of it, didn’t happen just because I lost our baby boy, though that was certainly the catalyst for it. But something else contributed to it.”
I paused and took another deep breath. “Just say it,” Luke had said.
“I can’t return to my old school because I became much too close to Clay.”
That’s how I put it. I looked at him when I said it, and I said it slowly and deliberately. I wanted him to understand what I was saying, but I very much wanted not to say it any more specifically, not unless he made me. I so hoped my few words and my eyes had said all he needed to know.
“What do you mean? What’s too close, Kendy?”
I put my head down. I searched for words, but there were none I could possibly say.
Luke grabbed my hand. “Look at me. Tell me.”
From somewhere came an answer to an unspoken prayer—I was given the ability to look up and meet his eyes, the ability to speak. “We spent a lot of time together, Luke. A lot of time alone.”
I wondered for a moment if he understood what I was implying, and then I saw in his face that he did. He stood up and turned away from me, studying the field he had mowed only yesterday, when he thought he had a faithful wife, incapable of any kind of disloyalty. He looked away from me while the full impact of my words finally detonated, destroying the world he had known. Then he sat back down again, or I suppose it is more accurate to say he collapsed.
“We mainly talked,” I said.
“Mainly.”
“Yes.”
“And what does that mean?”
Mercy.
I took a deep breath and let it out again.
“It means he’s kissed me. We’ve kissed each other. I guess you could say we’ve made out—which sounds so stupid. It was stupid.”
He sat on the edge of his chair, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. He looked at his hands, not me.
“Made out?” He was incredulous.
“We didn’t have sex—technically—if that matters. But I thought I loved him, Luke, and I know what a betrayal that is. I loved you too, or I like to think that. But of course I wasn’t thinking of you at all during that time, or it wouldn’t have happened.”
He closed his eyes. Was he trying to make everything I’d said go away? To make me go away?
“What I allowed makes me sick,” I said, “because I do love you. I’m so sorry it happened. And I’m sorry that saying so helps so little.”
Did we sit there with tears brimming in our eyes for days? Or was it only minutes until he finally got up and walked into the house, leaving me with the task of trying to breathe, leaving me with only a plea in my heart that God would somehow help my husband.
Nine years later, thinking about it still makes me sick. Can I rate the worst moments of my life? I do believe I could come up with a top ten list. Until Maisey’s anguish erup
ted so violently at the dinner table last night, the number-one worst moment of my life by far was the afternoon I told Luke I had been unfaithful.
I’m in the middle of Illinois, driving farther and farther into what is now a horrible storm. Frightening black clouds met me when I drove across the Illinois state line, and now my windshield wipers can’t keep up with the torrents of rain. Unable to see the lines on the road, I pull over and park under an overpass, hazard lights blinking. I stare out my windshield at the apt image. Nature, smiling with me earlier at Mother’s good news, is now weeping with me. She is sobbing.
I dig in my purse for a Kleenex and press number two on my speed dial, hoping for a connection.
“Hello,” Luke says.
“It’s me,” I say. “I’m driving through terrible weather.”
“I can barely hear you.”
I move the phone closer to my mouth, but I can’t do anything about the downpour and the rumble of thunder. “Is this better?”
“Some. There are tornado warnings all over Illinois, Kendy. Marcus and I have been watching the Weather Channel. It’s beginning to get bad here too. You need to get off the road.”
“I suppose. I’m tired anyway. Really tired. I saw a sign for Effingham just before I pulled over. I’ll stop there for the night.”
“Be careful, and call when you’re in a room.”
“I will.”
“Are you crying? You sound like you’re crying.”
“It’s just . . . I’m so close, Luke. I want to come home. I could have been there in two hours.”
“I know, but it really is too dangerous.”
“Okay. I’m just being silly.”
“Call me when you are in a room,” he says.
I slide my phone into a pocket in my purse and tell myself there’s nothing to cry about.
But last night Luke and I lay in the same bed with too much distance between us, and tonight this storm has caused a literal separation.
My memories have made that unbearable.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Maisey
Marcus has gone to bed, so the knock on my door is probably Dad.
He opens the door and peeks in.
Things Worth Remembering Page 19
