The Good Lie
Page 22
And we need to look at Jonah, too. His story’s been cheapened somewhat into a fish tale, and most people only care about it right up until the point where the fish spits Jonah out.
But the real heart of the story comes after that. The reason God sent the fish to swallow Jonah in the first place was that Jonah was disobeying God and God wanted to teach him a lesson. Jonah was supposed to travel to Ninevah to warn the people there to turn from their evil ways or else God would destroy them the way he had Sodom and Gomorrah. Jonah didn’t want that job. He was afraid.
And so he ran. But you don’t run from God. It’s like a hamster trying to escape by scurrying faster on its wheel. It’s like the fortune teller in my play and the girl in my story trying to outrun their unrunnable fates.
Jonah realized this, too, while he sat there in the fish’s belly pondering his future. He promised God that if He gave Jonah another chance, this time Jonah would do whatever God asked.
Spit. Back on land, Jonah fulfilled his promise and took God’s message to Ninevah, but he still believed in his heart that it wouldn’t make any difference in the end.
But Jonah was wrong. The people of Ninevah humbled themselves and fasted and prayed. And God saw it and was pleased. He turned from his wrath.
Jonah was irate. “See?” he complained to God. “I told you it didn’t matter if I came here. You were never going to destroy them anyway!” He stomped off into the wilderness to pout.
And here’s the last little twist. While Jonah sat in the dirt cursing and whining, God caused a vine to grow up over Jonah’s head to shade him from the sun. Jonah liked that. He felt almost happy again. But the next morning God caused the vine to wither and die, and Jonah became enraged.
“Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?” God asked.
“I do. It isn’t fair.”
“You care so much about this vine that you neither planted nor tended,” God answered. “It sprang up overnight and died overnight, and you grieve for it. But Ninevah has a hundred twenty thousand people in it who cannot tell their left hand from their right. And you think I shouldn’t care about them?”
The story ends there, so we never get to know Jonah’s sorry answer. But you hope he was ashamed. Because it wasn’t his job to decide whether God would show mercy to those people or not. It wasn’t his job to decide what the fair outcome might be. His job was simply to deliver a message. Jonah only had to decide whether to accept the job or run from it. Maybe if Jonah had done his work without balking, God would have rewarded him with shade for the rest of his life. That vine over his head would never have withered.
I have been given certain gifts. I’m fairly smart, I think, good in school (last week I graduated with honors), industrious, able to work hard toward a goal. I can write fairly well and organize my thoughts onto paper. And I’ve got a little money now from the insurance—not a fortune, but if I’m careful it’s enough to send me through college and law school besides. I figured it out. I looked at the numbers. Posie’s plan is feasible.
I have also been given certain experiences, as you can see. I think you have a choice with your life to either blow through each experience and race on to the next one, or to hover above it somehow, and try to see it in a broader context. You try to view yourself as a character in a play. When it’s not so personal—just a story you’re observing—you can sometimes see what you should do next as the only logical step.
I try to look at my father’s story that way, like he was just a character in a play I wrote. I said in the beginning that I thought you could learn things from re-reading a story. That maybe this time you’d see something you hadn’t before.
Maybe my father was just a regular guy—a family man. And his wife left him one day for no good reason or for reasons we may never understand having to do with sex and love and self-respect and a thousand little details that all came together at just the right moment and convinced her to flee. And maybe my father reached out to his kids for comfort—normal, innocent comfort—but he was clumsy at it and didn’t understand how we might take it. He masturbated to Cosmo—okay, that’s true. He wrestled with his son and took showers with him, but maybe that was innocent after all, like jocks knocking each other around on the field then hitting the locker room together to wash off the sweat of the game. Maybe he went to my brother’s room at night to say he loved him and hoped he had a good day at school and that he’d have an even better day tomorrow. My father was lonely, and Mikey was the only person in that house left to talk to.
The lab report—let’s say it was a mix-up. Twice. The letter—perhaps a genuine, though undoubtedly bizarre, attempt to tell the truth after shining a light into every dark cranny of his soul to find out what he could.
Could I have been wrong? As Angela Peligro said, “Certainly.” Posie doesn’t think so. She thinks I was right about my father—about everything. She says she doesn’t doubt it for a second.
And sometimes when I look at the evidence again, I agree with her. Whole-heartedly.
And then other times I’m not so sure.
So for now I’ve decided to stop thinking about it. I’m purposely not thinking about it. Because there’s nothing I can change anyway. It’s done and I can’t take any of it back. And I’m not at all sure that I should.
So that’s where I am.
It’s foolish, I think, to run. And you’d have to be blind not to know what you’re supposed to do with your life. Maybe if I do this—maybe take some of the load off Angela Peligro’s shoulders, or figure out some other way, my own way, to cripple some of the marchers in that endless parade of atrocities out there, then I’ll have done the right thing with my life. I might be wrong about all of this—Lord knows I might—but I don’t see how else to play it. I’m back on dry land now, out of the fish’s mouth, and I see where I want it to end:
Under a vine in the wilderness, with the leaves still shading my head.
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Special thanks to attorneys
Lynne Cadigan
Annette Everlove
Michael McNamara
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Look for more books by Robin Brande:
REPLAY
EVOLUTION, ME & OTHER FREAKS OF NATURE
FAT CAT
PARALLELOGRAM series
DOGGIRL