Kayla wanted to draw that face, she wanted to paint his portrait. She wanted that more than anything she had ever wanted in all her artistic life.
And he just stood there watching her. His eyes looked so intelligent, she could tell that he was reading her thoughts, waiting for her next word, her next desire.
The fragments of her bright and agile mind began to reassemble themselves. She suddenly regretted pulling her hands free from his. She raised her arms back to the position in which he was holding them before, chest high and out to the side, as if preparing for an embrace. The motors that returned her to that position were probably trying to reverse her hasty withdrawal from his touch. But he stepped between those raised arms.
With the same gentle hands that stroked her arm just a minute before, he reached up to her face and held her shaking head still.
Kayla sighed. It was the release of breath you hear when you remind someone to be calm, to just relax.
Then, he said her name. “Kayla.”
He seemed so happy to see her, that Kayla was confused. How could he be so happy to see me? She was thinking about him as if he were not real, even though she could feel his hands. It was as if she were watching a movie of Jesus and herself. Not all of her mind had joined in just yet.
Then, she wanted to say his name. “Jesus.” Why, she couldn’t explain. Perhaps it was an exchange, her name for his. Perhaps it was the only greeting she could form out of the puddles that used to be solid and identifiable thoughts.
He smiled even more broadly.
Kayla had seen her mother smile at her like that, when she came home from college, for the holidays or the summer. It was the kind of light that filled his eyes, and the stretch of his mouth. She thought he was going to kiss her, like her mother did, like her father did when she returned home. At the same time, she recognized that a part of her was uncertain, uncomfortable. And she knew that he was aware of those hesitations. He held back.
“Oh, my God,” she finally said. This was not a phrase she normally used. She was not practiced at profanity or blasphemy, and generally only spoke of God when she meant it. But somehow, that’s what escaped from her lips, the only thing she could say besides “Jesus.”
Like a higher gear on a car, something in Kayla’s mind engaged. She began to calculated how disoriented this was making her feel, how hard it would be to explain to anyone else, and how uncomfortable she was, even in the middle of it. Instinctively, she closed her eyes. In her mind she said, “If I just keep my eyes closed, and relax, this will all go away.” She breathed in through her nose and felt the touch on her cheeks fade.
When she finally opened her eyes, and Jesus was no longer standing there, a wave of relief washed all around her. But beneath that wave she could hear a tiny cry for help, panic at the loss of that soft touch, and that firm eye-contact, that she had wished away.
With the lack of self-consciousness of a major accident victim, Kayla plopped down onto the floor, her legs akimbo, her hands loose in her lap. And she began to weep. These tears would not stop until they were done. She seemed to have no control over herself for several minutes. And that seemed like half an hour.
Sucking air through soggy sniffles, Kayla opened her eyes again, rubbing at them with the backs of both hands. She resorted to lifting the hem of her light blue shirt and darkening circles of it with her tears and other fluids. Propriety and consequences seemed foreign concepts for those moments of first recovery.
Then the questioning began. Why was she crying? Even that question came not as four clear words, but as a whole pallet of uncertainty. Was she sad that she could no longer see Jesus? Was she happy that she had seen him, that he had touched her? The emotions themselves muddied the question by standing alone, away from color categories such as happy or sad. These tears seemed to flow out of a well of color for which she had no name.
Her inability to articulate the source of her catharsis, did nothing to halt the tears, or the spasmodic inhalations that followed, or the long warm sweep of feeling—just feeling, not a good or a bad feeling, but new measures of raw feeling, perhaps waiting to be explained and categorized later.
Kayla Stivers sat on the worn oak floor of Frank and Ella’s studio, amid the dots of paint and dust of clay. Her face was pale, except for flaming red eyes and nose. She couldn’t think of any time in her life that she had cried that hard. Her favorite grandmother had died when she was twelve, and that was lots of sadness and tears, but lacked this intensity, at least through the long filter of memory.
Once again, she swung into a swirling square dance of whether to tell Jason about what had happened. But the prospect of not telling him was just as unreal as the possibility of going home from a square dance with a different man, just because she spun past him in that quad of couples. Of course, she would tell Jason. And he would look at her with those big dark eyes, and he would love her. This thought triggered the image of Jesus looking at her eye-to-eye.
The tears began again, and again she couldn’t articulate what was happening. Every inkling of an explanation felt like a strained effort, like trying to fit into a skirt that she already knew she had outgrown last year. For a few seconds, she let go of the inhibition inherent in attempting to assess what was happening to her, and her tears flowed like a garden hose, only these were warm tears out of warm emotions, whatever they were called, and wherever they had been stored all this time.
Kayla was at work. She was supposed to work until at least 2:00 p.m. She considered surrendering the field and retreating to Jason, but that felt cowardly and immature. She pulled her legs up beneath her, pressed her fingertips to the slightly dusty floor, and stood up, even taking a moment to pat her backside free of some of that dust. She wanted to work. They needed the money. And she would have a hard time explaining taking this as sick day.
Her jaw clenched tightly most of the day, Kayla stayed at work in the studio, even driving the Morrison’s car to the post office to send the paintings. But she broke down and cried six or seven more times, during that long and delirious day. The tears and sobs became less abundant and intense, with each new round, but nothing else was linear about this experience.
Not once did she consider the possibility that Jesus would speak to her like that again, or that he would appear to her again. She assumed that her encounter with him had been a peak experience, the oft-touted, but never-experienced, mountaintop. Certainly, nothing in her life before could count as more than a foothill, in comparison to this particular spiritual encounter. Nothing in her experience, nor in the lives of the people around her, had conditioned her to expect anything like seeing Jesus face-to-face; and, having had that experience now, did not change her expectations of the future.
When she considered this later, it seemed a strange way of thinking.
Chapter 5
A Corroborator
Jason lay on the living room couch, his left arm over his eyes. Kayla could judge his expression only by his lower lip and chin, the latter covered with a sparse beard, about a quarter of an inch long. The arm over his eyes was indicative enough, she knew. But she liked to see his eyes.
When they had started the conversation, he was sitting on the arm of the couch, with his hands around her waist, and she was leaning her forearms on his shoulders, enjoying the slight height advantage, for a change. Jason had not collapsed directly from the arm of the couch to that prone position, hidden under his own forearm. His journey had been more of a decline than a collapse.
Much like Kayla’s difficulty identifying why she was crying at the Morrison’s studio earlier that day, Jason could not explain the stormy angst that had eventually pinned him on his back. Though he could hardly articulate it to Kayla, he was jousting with fear for his wife’s sanity and, simultaneously, with jealousy at her extraordinary experience. As dissatisfied as this condition left him internally, Jason didn’t dare to include Kayla in his imbalanced grappling. How do you explain what you can’t understand yourself? But, then,
he knew Kayla was in the same position. He suddenly wanted to be together with her in that.
When he removed his arm from over his eyes, he found Kayla sitting on the sturdy oak coffee table, her elbows on her bare knees. She resembled a woman attending her spouse’s death bed. He smiled at her, even as he waited for his eyes to recover from the pressure of his arm so recently lifted from his face.
Kayla slid off the table, onto her knees, and lay her face in the crook of his neck. Jason wrapped both arms around her. He decided to share half of what he was feeling.
“I’m so jealous that you got to see him,” he said in a gravelly voice, that seemed to imply tears that he had not actually released to that point.
Kayla snorted and raised her head in surprise, surveying his face from south of his nostrils, a fairly familiar angle for a diminutive woman married to a man easily over six feet tall.
“Jealous? Really? I thought you were afraid I’d lost it.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I am afraid of that. But, at least your delusion is really cool.” He grinned big, to reveal the unintended joke in his disclosure of the other half of his mind.
Kayla shook her head slowly and looked just above Jason’s head. “It really was the most awesome thing…” She reconnected with Jason’s eyes and bent a sideways grin in apology for her failure to find profound words fit for her reality-altering experience. Now Jason snorted a laugh.
He reached up and pulled her back into that tight embrace. He dared not run away from her, or from her insanity. Embracing her, and embracing it, was all that remained.
Jason had long ago rid himself of that third option that so many men of his father’s, and his grandfather’s, generation favored—avoidance. All of his life, Jason had known his father from a distance, even though he lived in the same house. It was as if his father was the star of a weekly TV show. Jason could see him, could follow the story, and count on another episode next week. But there was very little real contact, only that occasional bump past each other on their way to see someone else, on their way to become someone.
For Kayla, a harvest of relief filled up that hug. She stopped fearing that Jason would start yelling, something he was very unlikely to do in any circumstance. She stopped picturing him running out the door, calling her some unforgivable name and not looking back. And she started wondering why any of that had entered the fearful part of her mind, the scared part of her soul.
Warm in that embrace, starting to perspire ever so slightly, she heard him say. “I believe you. I just realized. I believe you.” And he laughed so that she bounced with the surging of his chest. And she laughed too.
Kayla pressed up slightly to get a look at his laughing face. She loved how he looked when he laughed, a small boy peering out of a hiding place, believing he would not be found until he wanted to be found, confident in his success at escaping the world, only to jump out and surprise it big.
“And I’m really mad, that it was you and not me,” he said, serious now. “But I know why. And I have no problem accepting it for you. I’m just mad that I’m cut off, like I’ve always tried not to be.”
Now that little boy looked like he would cry. Kayla feared those tears. She would not know how to live past them. She had never seen her young husband really cry. And these would be deep tears, if he surrendered to them.
The concern on her face stopped the forecasted torrents. Did she do that? Did she stop him from crying? Did she have that kind of power? Could she really wish Jesus away? Why would she? And why would she forbid Jason washing his soul with a well-hidden store of tears, that had bubbled to the surface, in spite of his efforts?
Slowly Kayla pushed up from the couch, found her feet to perform that balancing trick that roboticists have failed to emulate, and she rose to standing above her man, looking down at him with her hair a tangle of vines, from which she watched him. But she felt uncovered—Eve in the garden, aware of her nakedness, and knowing that the man was feeling the same, and that they could not go back.
The one thing she knew she wanted to reverse, was wishing Jesus away. And Jason, sitting up now and running both hands through his hair—an action that made very little difference, as usual—could tell what she was regretting.
“Maybe he’ll come back,” he said.
“Why would he?”
“Why did he show up the first time?”
Still looking down at him, her hair hanging in front of her eyes, Kayla knew she had to find the answer to that question. She thought of Mary, her freshman roommate.
These days, Mary was studying in the graduate school, family therapy or something. But when they were each eighteen—pretend adults far away from home for the first time—Mary had been the most Jesus-obsessed person Kayla had ever met. While Kayla came from a file-in-file-out kind of padded church, Mary had done what she called “carpet time” at her church, or some other church that she snuck away to when she wanted an overdose of the Holy Ghost. Maybe she didn’t actually say it that way, even then, but that’s how Kayla remembered it. She used to fall asleep at night afraid that the Rapture would come and Mary would be taken, leaving Kayla behind to suffer for her complacency.
Though she had never intended to make anyone feel like a spiritual wimp, Mary had that effect on lots of people that first year. She learned how to tone it down as she matured, but that was only a case of digging the well deeper, not draining all of that dark and shining water.
When Mary responded to her email, Kayla persuaded her to come over to their apartment with this account: “I saw Jesus.”
Evening was pink and gray in the sunny two-bedroom apartment, the gray promising to subdue the pink, eventually. Mary arrived, looking a full grown woman, an observation that reminded Kayla of how long it had been since they had seen each other. The girl in braids, freshly free from braces, had become a woman with a mane of hair the color of autumn, an effect enhanced by a box from the store, no doubt, but one that fit Mary as she had grown up and set sail on life.
“Kayla!” she said, singing her greeting and extending her arms for a hug. As prone to arm-entangled greetings as her generation is, Mary was more so. After the quick rocking hug, Mary leaned back and surveyed her old roomie. She looked like a mother checking to see if marriage had changed her little girl. Mary had become more motherly, more believable as someone’s wife. But she was still single, as far as Kayla knew.
“It’s been too long,” Kayla started, looking up at the taller girl, recalling those green eyes in a rainbow of contexts and moods. “But I just had to talk to you after what happened to me. I knew you would understand.”
Mary grinned. She was relieved to not have to pry the story from her more reserved old friend. She loved Kayla, but she loved Jesus more, and she wanted to hear all about their encounter. On the other hand, the part Mary had heard when Kayla emailed her, didn’t lead Mary to assume that she would be able to explain what had happened, or why.
While Mary and Kayla sat in the living room, sipping tea and eating cookies, Kayla told the whole story, starting with the voice.
Meanwhile, Jason sat with his laptop lit in front of him, on a long table, at the college library. His hands poised over the keyboard, his eyes fixed on the screen, a hasty passerby would have assumed he was working. A brief focus on Jason’s posture, and they might have assumed he had paused a moment to think. But he hadn’t pressed a key so long that his laptop screen went to sleep. Part of his brain registered the change of circumstances, but refused to sound an alarm, knowing that there wasn’t anything to see on that screen anyway. It may as well go black, he wasn’t even seeing it.
Instead, Jason was picturing Kayla in the studio at the Morrison’s house. He had seen it a couple of times. Once, he was there for a party and she had showed him where she worked. Another time, he came to pick her up on the way to the airport, a trip over Spring break, to see her parents. That time, he sampled the tension with which Frank so often filled that studio, not to mention other rooms in the house
. Frank was upset that Kayla was leaving without finishing framing some new paintings he was going to show at a local gallery. But the plane wasn’t going to wait for her to finish, and Jason’s insistent silence was enough to stand in for the demand everyone knew had to be granted, even if it annoyed Frank.
Standing with Jesus in that studio must have been the opposite of standing there with Frank, who was the antithesis of the Prince of Peace. Though he liked to think of Kayla as the poet and the mystic, the emotional one, Jason was now melting into a pool of raw feeling, like the wax nearest the wick of a big, round candle. None of it had leaked over the sides yet, all still contained, but there in the hot center it was liquid, and ready to spill at the slightest provocation. It was the willful effort to contain those emotions that kept him from finding the energy and focus for finishing his final paper for Early Church History.
Where the screen going into power save mode didn’t break Jason from his empty stare, the fan in the laptop gearing up to cool the processor awakened a sigh and a sharp shake of his head. Then he heard it.
“I’m here for you, as well.”
Instead of casting about for the source of that voice, Jason sat perfectly still, as if he balanced a plate on the top of his head. Concealed from himself, deep inside his brain, was the recollection that Kayla had sent the voice away by one impulsive decision. Jason leaned hard in the opposite direction. “Don’t move, and you won’t scare him off,” he told himself.
“I am never scared,” said the voice, in answer to those unspoken, and unedited, thoughts.
Now Jason’s silence, his museum diorama stillness, came from focus and concentration. A part of him alerted his reflexes to relax, so he could absorb the meaning of the two brief phrases he had heard. These were precious words, precious thoughts, religious relics of contemplative truth. He needed to sit there and ingest what he had heard, because it might be the last thing he ever heard from that divine source. That’s what inspired his prolonged pose.
Sharing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 3) Page 4
