Vinita Hampton Wright

by Dwelling Places (v5)

  Mitchell looks startled when he opens the door to her wild knocking. “Kenzie.” His voice is flat. Kenzie goes inside. She hugs him, and only after a moment does he return the hug.

  “You shouldn’t be out here now.” His eyes are dull.

  “You don’t want me here?”

  “Sure, I want you here. But what about your folks?”

  She tells him the events of her day, working backwards from Grandma being at the hospital and Dad in town. She is ready to unleash all the wants that she wrote about in her journal, but the look on Mitchell’s face stops her.

  “Are you okay?” she says.

  He winces a little. “It’s been a bad day, Kenzie.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  She waits for an explanation. He slumps at the kitchen table and looks at her tiredly.

  “Nothing?” she asks.

  “Nothing.” His expression tells her that he considers this answer significant. Then he leans toward her a little. “That’s it. Nothing. Nothing happened today. Nothing came. I couldn’t work on anything. I couldn’t think anything. It’s like my system is shutting down.”

  She doesn’t know what to say. She thinks that maybe the world will just end tonight. That would be convenient. It would spare her figuring out what to do about all the people in her life. She is totally disappointed at the reception she has received.

  “I’ve got to get out of here, Kenzie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I need to leave. The oppression is coming. Maybe it’s here already. I can’t live through another siege like this. I can’t go through days and days of nothing.”

  It is quiet, and Kenzie notices how cold the house is. She wonders why he hasn’t turned up the heat.

  “I’m going to Reverend Francis’s retreat center. I know I’ll be better there. The demons can’t get me there. I’m not strong enough here.”

  “When will you go?” It feels as if her life is just leaking away.

  “Soon. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  He looks at her, and his eyes clear for a moment. “Oh, no. I can’t take you there.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re fourteen.” He says it as if he despises her suddenly.

  “That’s never mattered to you before. I thought you said we’re meant to be together.”

  “We are, but I can’t take you with me, not now.”

  She is too tired to fight the tears. Her hands on the table blur in front of her. She was expecting comfort, not this. She has come to this safe room, but it’s as dark as the rooms she just left.

  “Mitchell, I need you. You’re my only real friend.” She can barely talk for crying. To her surprise, she hears not sympathy but a frustrated sigh from across the table.

  “Go home. This isn’t good, you being here now. Just go.” He gets up and lifts her out of the chair. She tries to hang on to him, but he twists her around to face the door. He pulls her jacket around her.

  “Don’t leave, Mitchell! I need you here. I can’t fight the battle by myself!”

  She is standing on his porch and listening to the door shut behind her.

  She stumbles down the road to home in the pitch dark. She doesn’t care, because her tears keep her from seeing anyway. She sobs and she shouts. “Jesus! What are you doing to me? Why are you taking my friend away from me?” She huddles behind the garage to finish crying. Then she sneaks around the house and sees that Mom’s bedroom light is on. The front door has been locked; for some reason Mom locks that door but not the back one. Every night before bed she turns out the kitchen light, then locks the front door. Kenzie steps in the back and up to her room.

  She undresses in the dark, and the tears start again. In the pale reflection of the yard light, she sees her journal on the desk, next to Pallie. Her first impulse is to turn on the light and write this fresh, pain-filled prayer to Jesus. But it hits her that she is so tired she can barely stand. She puts on her nightgown and cries into her pillow for possibly five minutes before falling asleep.

  Mack

  He debates with himself the whole drive to see George. He trusts the man, but how much should he tell him? What’s important to tell?

  Well, hearing voices would probably be significant. But that really just happened a couple of times, and there could be lots of explanations—a radio from a passing car or something.

  The other things are probably coincidences too. The memory of Pop coming through so clearly the other day, so clear it was like having Pop there in the truck with him. The day he happened to look up as he passed a sign on the highway that read: LIFE BEGINS TODAY. It was put there as some sort of pro-life message, but what’s troublesome is that earlier that morning Mack had gotten out of bed feeling too weary and sad to go to work. And out of the blue he’d said those very words to himself, a little pep talk as he drank his coffee. Of course, he must have seen the sign sometime before but not thought of it consciously, and it came out of him that morning, and then he noticed the sign for the first time half an hour later. There’s always an explanation for these things.

  The sky has that hard, white look of snow waiting to fall. It will likely storm tonight. Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to travel forty miles from home. He can go back now and call George and postpone at least until next week.

  That would be a whole week for him to try to reason with himself about voices and coincidences. He ignores every feeling he has, ignores the sky, and grips the wheel.

  “Well, I’ve finally gone round the bend.” He sits in his spot and looks straight at George. May as well get right to it.

  “Round the bend? As in going crazy?”

  “Yep.”

  They look at each other, George’s eyebrows at attention.

  “I’m hearing voices.”

  George nods slowly, as if he understands, has been expecting this. But his face remains a blank.

  “I didn’t used to hear voices—even in the worst times, even when I was playing with guns out in the barn. There were never voices.”

  “But there are now. When did they start?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “What was happening prior to your hearing these voices?”

  “Nothing. I was driving home from work.”

  “And the voices came then? What did they say?”

  Mack looks at him. “Does it matter? Seems to me that the main thing is that I’m hearing anything at all.”

  “Well, I’m interested to know the content, the message.”

  “‘Everything is working out,’ or something to that effect.”

  George looks at him, presses his lips together, and grunts, “Hmm.”

  “And another time I was in the parking lot loading up groceries, and somebody said, ‘Love is always the last thing standing.’ I’m sure somebody must have said it, but I couldn’t see anybody close by.”

  “That’s quite a statement. ‘Love is always the last thing standing.’ I like that.” George pauses. “Anything else?”

  Mack is trapped. He started this mess, and it doesn’t make sense to hold back now. “I’m just…noticing things. Coincidences…but they feel like they have purpose behind them.”

  George waits.

  “You know, remembering certain things at the very moment I need to—something my dad said twenty years ago in a whole other situation. Highway signs that all of a sudden have some kind of personal meaning. And two days ago, it was the strangest thing…”

  Mack plays with the unbuttoned cuff of his sleeve. “I hadn’t walked into the Beulah museum in I don’t know how long. But my daughter and I went there so she could return some props she’d used in the school play. And I’m wandering through all these piles of junk—old clothes and tools—and on this shelf at eye level is a pair of work boots. And they’re exactly like a pair Pop had when I was a kid—same laces, soles, leather, fasteners—exactly the same
boots, only I know we burned Pop’s years ago when we cleaned out the shed.”

  Mack stops to take a breath. He feels George’s attention, quiet and focused.

  “And this memory just flashed across my mind, clear as anything. When I was about nine, I went hunting with Pop—for rabbits. There were several inches of snow on the ground, but no sign of more coming when we took out across the fields. We’d been out about an hour when the temperature dropped and a storm blew in. A blizzard—God, we couldn’t see, and the wind was practically blowing me over. We were in the open—no place for shelter—so Pop said, ‘We need to just walk. We’ll either reach the road or the house. But we can’t stay out here.’ He had me grab the back of his jacket and walk right behind him, and he said, ‘You step right into my tracks. That’s all you need to do. Hang on and walk in my tracks.’ And we got home that way. I’ll never forget watching those big old boots one step ahead of me.”

  He realizes that he’s close to tears. He stares up at George. “And I’d forgotten all about that—hadn’t thought about it for years. But those boots on the shelf—it’s like they opened me up. I just stood there in the aisle, couldn’t talk or move.” He shakes his head.

  “Objects have a way of jarring memories loose. It’s astounding what you can remember when you’re triggered just right.”

  “I suppose that’s normal enough, having something come back to me like that. But I took a different meaning from it this time—stepping in his tracks.”

  George nods slowly. “Following in his footsteps.”

  “That’s right.” He studies his sleeve again. “But this hearing voices stuff—I was afraid to even tell you about that. Good way to end up in the hospital again.”

  George lets out a sigh. “Gee, Mack, it sounds like a pretty sane voice to me.”

  “But where is it coming from?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s me going crazy at last.”

  “No, no, no. That’s too easy. Just think about it. Where might such helpful, positive thoughts come from?”

  “Feels like it’s from outside me, not like I’m talking to myself. If I were still religious at all…” He avoids looking at George. “There was a time when I would have interpreted all this in a more…religious way.”

  “Such as, maybe it’s God’s voice, interrupting your calm afternoons?”

  Mack laughs nervously. “Something like that.”

  “But you don’t look at it that way now.”

  “No. My daughter claims to talk to God all the time. But she’s a kid and into this religious kick right now. I’m worried about her, frankly. But I don’t…”

  “You don’t pray?” George gazes at Mack the way he often does, even when Mack isn’t looking at him but knows he’s being gazed at. “You’ve told me what a religious family you come from, how you’ve been churchgoing most of your life, even recently.”

  “I go for the family, mainly.”

  “Mack, what if God is talking to you?”

  Mack meets The Gaze in spite of himself.

  “Can you be absolutely sure that God would never talk to you in a voice so clear it seems audible? After all, is it telling you to do anything destructive? Is it telling you lies? Is it outside the realm of possibility?”

  “God has nothing to do with me—hasn’t in a long time.”

  “Since when?”

  “I don’t know…when I stopped believing everything I heard in church.”

  “What about outside of church? What did God have to do with you in everyday life, back when you believed?”

  Mack thinks for nearly a minute. The words gather slowly, and the pain gathers with them.

  “Well,” he says, his voice hoarse, “out in the fields, I guess. Nature—you know. I used to feel like God was part of it—the way things worked, the seasons.” He has to stop, but after a second forces a harsh laugh. “I actually thought of me and God as being partners.” His voice breaks again, and tears began to trickle from his eyes. He wipes them away. “Way back when I believed stuff like that.” A sob escapes him suddenly, and he puts a hand over his trembling mouth.

  “And when did you stop believing stuff like that?”

  “When Pop died. Whether it was an accident or intentional, it was too high a price.”

  He cries freely now. George passes him the box of tissue that has remained unused through all their previous sessions.

  “What if you consider that God may have been out there, in the fields and the seasons?”

  Mack looks at his hands. “If that was God out there all those years, then I’m mighty disappointed in him for letting us lose all that we have.”

  As Mack drives down the highway, he squints against the sun that has broken through the dense layer of clouds. It seems to him that the horizon might slant out of kilter or the truck might take its own path. Just as his life’s landscape has run off somewhere or been broken into pieces and scattered. Just as the steadiness of God’s provision has been auctioned off with the combine and the hay truck. Nothing can be counted on to stay in place. The plain is buckling into dangerous jags, the stream is flowing to other lands. God’s geography has changed.

  But the sunset begins sweetly, a soft pink-yellow that flows down the ledges of clouds and spills into a lavender pool above the fields. Fields he does not own or tend. Yet they shine as Mack has always believed Heaven would shine—golden with light even in the cold of death.

  The layers of color glimmer upon the tears that fill and refill Mack’s eyes. The voice is coming from inside him now, from a profound location that is his alone: Everything is working out. It will keep working out. And love grows and fails and grows again.

  God’s geography has changed. Now it is everywhere.

  PART FOUR

  DECLARATION

  10

  FACING TRUTH

  Cease, ye pilgrims, cease to mourn, press onward to the prize;

  Soon thy savior will return, to take thee to the skies:

  Yet a season, and you know happy entrance will be given,

  All our sorrows left below and earth exchanged for heaven.

  —“Rise, My Soul, and Stretch Thy

  Wings”

  Jodie

  Mack appears so determined as he gets out of the car and walks up to the back door that Jodie’s impulse is to run upstairs. Has he found out about Terry? What else would make him look like that? But she leaves her hands in dishwater and doesn’t move a foot, even when he comes in the door and stands near her.

  “Jodie.”

  She turns to him and waits.

  “I think I’ve done all the thinking I’m going to do out there at the house.”

  “Oh? Is that good?”

  “Yeah, I think so. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to move back.”

  “Sure, babe.” She knows that a hug or kiss would be appropriate, but she can’t get herself to take the two steps toward him. She resumes washing a bowl in the sudsy water.

  “That’s all right?” He sounds so unsure. She wishes he’d just announce that he’s going to do it, and not leave the approval up to her. But she makes a point to smile. “I wasn’t crazy about you being out there in the first place.”

  He goes outside and gathers some things from the truck. She opens the storm door and calls, “You need help?”

  “No, I’ve got it.” She holds the door open for him, because both his hands are full. He comes into the kitchen, then turns to her. “I’ll understand if you’d rather I take the spare room, at least for a while.”

  She doesn’t know what to say. He looks nervous, standing there with his suitcase. Is he trying to take the pressure off both of them, or is he saying he’s not ready yet to be intimate with her? “Do whatever makes you comfortable.”

  “Does it matter to you?”

  Another loaded question. How is she supposed to answer that? But his eyes are steady, his posture questioning rather than defensive.

  “It m
atters to me that you feel at home, babe. And I never asked you to leave, remember?”

  He takes a step and kisses her cheek. “I’ll move into our room then.”

  It is Saturday, and the kids are somewhere else. Jodie continues to work around the house while Mack moves in. He finds her in the laundry room a while later.

  “I’ve got a job over at Danson’s place today—probably be back by suppertime.”

  “Okay.” It’s good to see him busy. Since being at Hendrikson’s, Mack gets a good deal of freelance work. She’s glad he has something to do, that he doesn’t have time to sit and think too much. Although he’s had plenty of time to do that by himself in the woods. Maybe time to think was exactly what he needed. Time to think without other people interrupting. Maybe Jodie’s main fault is that she interrupted too much, trying to help.

  Young Taylor troops through the house an hour later. “I’ll be gone tonight.”

  “As long as you’re back by curfew.”

  He shrugs. “I won’t be here for supper.”

  “Your dad just moved back.”

  “Really?” Young Taylor contemplates that. “So he seems all right?”

  “Yes, he thinks it’s time.”

  “Cool.” Then he disappears upstairs.

  She tells Kenzie the same thing when the two of them prepare supper. She wants to tell their daughter before Mack walks in the door. Kenzie barely makes it in time to set the table—youth group gets more demanding all the time.

  Kenzie’s response is more measured than her brother’s. She’s happy enough that her dad is moving back, but Jodie expected more enthusiasm.

  “Is he still taking all those medications?”

  “Yes, until the doctor thinks he doesn’t need them.”

  “Do you think the doctor really wants him to stop?”