How the Light Gets In

by Jolina Petersheim

  Ruth left the party early. She hadn’t seen her girls much over the past two days, and she was surprised by how much she missed them and the identity of motherhood that helped offset the identity she’d lost. She found them in the bathroom. Sofie and Vi were in the bathtub, filling measuring cups with water. Mabel sat on the closed toilet seat with the Eloise Wilkin Stories, which Ruth had packed, open on her aproned lap.

  Ruth stood in the doorway, listening, as Mabel read:

  “Somebody else lives in this house.

  He is very tall

  And he walks with long steps.

  He goes out to work in the morning,

  And sometimes he brings Terry a present

  when he comes home at night.

  Guess who it is!”

  Sofie stopped pouring water. “I don’t like that story.”

  Mabel turned the page, and Ruth knew the words she found there: It’s Terry’s father.

  For years, Ruth had mindlessly read classic stories to her children like Guess Who Lives Here and We Help Mommy. Many of the stories the same ones her own mother had read. But now, the mindless had become a reminder. Mabel closed the book and set it on the floor. She looked down, her part cleanly dividing her scalp, her black lace-up shoes braced against the porcelain commode. Her shoulders rose and fell as her ample chest heaved.

  Ruth could fully predict how this scene would play out if she did not intervene. She stepped into the narrow, chilly bathroom, knelt on the worn towel beside the bathtub, and leaned over to touch Mabel’s knee. Mabel startled and then reached out to clasp her fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I didn’t think.”

  Ruth smiled and mouthed, “It’s okay.” Turning back to Sofie and Vi, she said, her voice effervescent with false cheer, “You girly girls ready to get out?”

  But that was another thoughtless reminder. Girly girls—the nickname Chandler, their father, had coined. Sofie looked at her mother. Her black hair was slicked back; the tips of her ears pink; her fingertips, holding the three-quarters cup, pruned. “Mom?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Is Dad never coming back?”

  Ruth dropped her eyes to the soap bubbles floating on the water’s surface. She had no idea how to address this. No idea how to be clear and concise without patronizing or causing pain. Death should come with a manual. “No, sweetheart,” she whispered. “He’s not.”

  In one movement, Sofie slid down the back of the bathtub until only her nose and lips peeked out. Vi scrambled back from her sister, toward the faucet, and wrapped her arms around her bruised little knees. Ruth leaned across the bathtub and pulled Sofie up, the girl’s black hair streaming. The sleeves of Ruth’s borrowed cape dress were soaking wet. Ruth held Sofie’s small chest between her hands and felt her heart beating like a wild, caged thing. “Sofie, Sofie,” she said. “It’s okay, my baby. It’s okay.” But it wasn’t. Sofie leaned forward against her mother’s hands and cried. She sobbed from deep within, and her heart beat harder.

  Ruth let go of Sofie’s chest and took Sofie’s face in her hands. “Sof,” she said. “I need you to look at me, sweetheart. I need you to breathe.” Sofie didn’t seem to hear her. She just shook her head as the sobs rose and rose and rose without any promise of descension. Ruth braced herself and pulled Sofie out of the bathtub, all legs and arms and splashing water. Ruth held the six-year-old on her lap like a newborn. The force of the movement and the cool air shocked Sofie enough that her eyes unclenched and she looked at her mother. Ruth kept her eyes focused on her daughter’s and breathed with her, breathed with her like that Colombian nurse had breathed with her while she was laboring with Vi.

  Ruth broke eye contact to check on her other child.

  Vi’s knees were still pulled up snug against her chest, but she looked interested, not alarmed. How much easier it would be, Ruth thought, if both girls were too young to understand.

  Ruth adjusted to place Sofie’s back against her chest, the girl’s bare legs splayed over her own. Water covered the tile floor. Mabel remained on the toilet seat with tears pouring down her face.

  For the first time in months, Ruth prayed: Oh, God. You’ve got to help me salvage this.

  Ruth whispered in Sofie’s ear, “Daddy’s always going to be with us.”

  Sofie’s chest rumbled with one word: “How?”

  “He’s a soul, Sof. Just as you are. You have a soul right in here.” Ruth tapped Sofie’s chest. “It never dies. It lives forever and ever, and so that part of Daddy will always be with us.”

  “Where do souls live?”

  “In heaven,” Ruth said automatically, though, in truth, her theology was strained.

  “Daddy’s soul’s in heaven right now?”

  “Yes,” Ruth said. “But I also believe he’s with us here, in our hearts.”

  Sofie reached up and pressed a hand over Ruth’s hand. “I want to be a soul too.”

  Ruth’s breath caught. She looked at Mabel and saw she’d stopped crying and was now watching them with compassion and perhaps a bit of shock. Mabel had no doubt assumed she and Chandler were raising their girls in a Christian home, where concepts like “soul” and “heaven” were part of their everyday environment. Now, Mabel knew they had been so focused on making a temporal difference in the world, the eternal world had become opaque.

  Ruth said to Sofie, “It’s not time for you to just be a soul. God’s got a plan for you here.”

  Sofie turned to study her mother’s face. “It’s not time for you to be a soul?”

  “No,” Ruth said, kissing her temple. “It’s not time for me, either.”

  Reassured, Sofie nestled in the comfort of Ruth’s arms, and Ruth held her there until the cold forced them to rise and get Sofie and Vi dressed.

  In their bedroom, Ruth squeezed toothpaste onto Clifford toothbrushes—red for Sofie, yellow for Vi—and dipped them in a fresh cup of water since they’d forgotten to brush their teeth downstairs. Sofie studied her mother as she lazily brushed her top baby teeth and then her bottom, thrusting her pink tongue through the gap her missing tooth had made. She’d recovered from the bathtub episode to be her normal precocious self, and Ruth’s cheeks reddened as Sofie didn’t avert her gaze. Ruth passed Sofie an empty cup, and she expertly spit.

  Wiping her mouth on her pajama sleeve, Sofie asked, “Can we stay here forever?”

  “No, Liebe,” Ruth said, trying out the Pennsylvania Dutch endearment she’d heard Laurie use. She took Sofie’s toothbrush and tucked a strand of damp hair behind her ear. “We’re just staying here until we can figure out our next step.”

  “But I don’t want to go back to Grandma’s, even if she does have a TV.”

  Cathleen Galway was a far cry from Mabel Neufeld, who read books, dressed dolls, made play dough and cookies from scratch all while the girls tore the house apart. “They’re only children,” she’d said. “They’ll have to clean up after themselves soon enough.” And yet Ruth grieved that Cathleen would never get to redeem herself by mothering her granddaughters the way she’d never mothered Ruth. Ruth reached out and touched her older daughter’s beautiful face. “Do you like staying here, with Oma Mabel?”

  Sofie nodded. Vi, rosebud mouth foaming toothpaste, nodded too. The room glowed with lamplight that softened the threadbare quilts piled on the bed and the German Bible on the nightstand, the gilt worn off the deckle-edge pages from so much use. The scene affected Ruth like a satisfied sigh. She felt safe here, safe in a way she hadn’t felt in her life.

  “Oma Mabel loves us,” Sofie said, one of the simplest ways children categorize acceptance.

  It was true. Each day, in every gesture, Mabel declared her love so openly, it was impossible for the children’s pliable hearts not to accept that love and respond in kind. Gratitude for her impetuous, and incredibly naive, mother-in-law made emotions stop up Ruth’s throat. Swallowing hard, she helped the girls into bed, remembering how she and Chandler had put them to bed in Bogotá: the long,
drawn-out ordeal of baths, jammies, hair-brushing, and shallow cups of water or milk; how the girls would snuggle up with their blankies and whatever stuffed animal they’d confiscated from the toy chest downstairs, and then Ruth and Chandler would sing to them.

  A custom version of “Edelweiss” was their favorite.

  Chandler and Ruth’s duet could’ve never rivaled The Sound of Music, and yet each of them found a pleasing harmony as the off-key notes rose and fell. Ruth’s chest ached as she now began to sing her first solo in eight long months: “Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow, bloom and grow forever. Edelweiss, Edelweiss, bless my Sofie and Vi forever.” At the end, Ruth’s voice cracked, and the tears flowed, dampening her hair, which she had twisted and pulled back into a bun as if she belonged here, a Mennonite. The concept was laughable, but she cried. Ruth continued to lie there, crying, until her daughters’ breathing evened, and then she sat up, dried her face, and pulled out the bobby pins trying to tame her unruly hair.

  Ruth left her room and went downstairs, toward the sound of someone in the kitchen. It was Mabel. Squinting against the kerosene light, Ruth asked, “What’re you making?”

  Mabel said, without turning, “Cookies.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ruth crossed the floor. Sugar gritted like sand beneath her feet. Flour dusted the countertop. Mabel glanced over, and Ruth saw she’d been crying as well. Mabel turned and pulled a tray out of the oven. Steam curled around her face, deepening her color and tightening the strands of her loose hair. Using a metal flipper, Mabel scraped the cookies off the tray and arranged them on a plate. She set the plate before Ruth. Ruth looked at Mabel, and Mabel looked at Ruth.

  Both their eyes filled.

  Mabel’s voice was choked. “I think you earned some comfort food, after tonight.”

  Ruth nodded because that was all she could manage. The countertop pulled Ruth as her exhaustion surged. She finally succumbed to it and rested her head on her crossed arms, sobbing as fiercely as Sofie had sobbed. Mabel said nothing, just came over and stroked her hair with floured hands. “Shhh, shhh,” she soothed, as if this time Ruth could let her worries all go and simply be a child. Meanwhile, the scent of cinnamon and molasses filled the room.

  CHAPTER 6

  RUTH DID NOT GO UP TO BED after she and Mabel ate half a dozen cookies, drank a quart of milk, and Mabel retired to her room. Instead, she cleaned the kitchen with Zeus lying at her feet, his tail thwacking the floor as Ruth swept and then slowly washed and dried. But even when the pans and bowls were all returned to their cupboards, Elam had not returned. Zeus’s nails tapped wood as he followed Ruth into the living room and then past the bath toward Elam’s room. Ruth turned around before she reached his door and went back into the hall. Zeus whined as she opened the front door. She stroked the coarse ruff of his neck and snapped her fingers for him to lie down. He did so, reluctantly, looking up at her with sorrowful eyes. As strange as it was, Ruth felt better knowing he was here with the girls, even though Mabel was here as well.

  Blades of light pierced through the barn slats as Ruth approached from the lane. She slid open the door and found the barn empty, so the earlier celebration seemed from a dream. The couples were gone, tucked side by side in their cozy marital beds. The church benches were gone, more than likely stacked in someone’s wagon and hauled back to the church for the next Lord’s Day. Boxes of cranberries took up the space where the food used to be. Elam stood at the end of one table. By lamplight, he inspected the berries in his hands.

  “Good harvest?” Ruth asked.

  He glanced at her. “Hey,” he said. “Didn’t hear you come in.”

  Ruth remained at the entrance of the barn, a few yards away.

  “The harvest does look good,” he said.

  “Glad to hear it. You had quite the turnout today.”

  Elam looked directly at her for the first time. “It’s tradition,” he said. “Year in, year out.”

  Frustration clipped his voice. It was a tone Ruth recognized because she’d once heard it every time she spoke. Ruth moved closer. After a moment, she asked, “You happy, Elam?”

  His eyes shifted back to the boxes. As if by force, he lifted his head and turned toward her. Light, from the few candles that remained, wavered as wind blew through the barn. “I was,” he said. “As strange as it is, as simple as my life may have been, I was happy.”

  Ruth didn’t say anything for a while, just stood before him in her thin borrowed dress. She was more uncomfortable wearing it than when she’d stood before him in a fitted fleece and shorts. But the clothes themselves didn’t bring discomfort. It was the realization she had been looking for Elam, and she didn’t know what to do or say now that she was here.

  Sugar swam through her blood from the cookies she and Mabel had consumed. Ruth wondered if this was what emboldened her to eventually ask, “Why aren’t you happy now?”

  Elam leaned against the table. “It . . . it’s ever since Chandler died.” He folded his arms, bracing himself. “I guess it made me take a good look at my life and see all the dreams I haven’t fulfilled. I’m thirty-nine years old, Ruth.” He looked at her. His voice was ragged as he murmured, “If I don’t do them now . . . when will I?”

  “We all have unfulfilled dreams.”

  “Really?” His eyebrows rose. “What are yours?”

  Ruth wished she hadn’t spoken, but it was unfair to ask Elam to bare his soul while concealing hers. “I have English and art degrees but haven’t written or painted in years.”

  He smiled gently. “With two young children, I think it’d be rather hard to find the time.”

  “We can always find time for the things we love. I just haven’t made it a priority.”

  Her mind echoed with what she hadn’t said: Ruth hadn’t made herself a priority.

  But she had never once gone hungry; she had never worried about having a roof over her head; she had never once feared for her safety or her children’s, so why did she feel like the past six years of her life consisted not of living but of . . . survival?

  Ruth wasn’t comfortable with this subject, or at least when the subject revolved around her. She asked, “What about you? What dreams haven’t you fulfilled?”

  Again, his eyes moved from hers.

  She added, more softly, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  He nodded but cleared his throat to speak. “I’ve always wanted . . . a family.”

  Elam’s answer forced Ruth to take a closer look at hers. She wanted more time for herself. More time to paint, read, and write without the unending interruptions and demands of two small children, who gave her an often tiring and yet love-filled life. But here was a man whose greatest dream was what she had and sometimes took for granted.

  It was a dream Chandler had taken for granted as well.

  “That’s a beautiful dream,” she said. “To want a family.”

  Elam shrugged. “It’s like what you said, though. You can always find time for your priorities. I just never took . . . the time.”

  His loneliness was so palpable, it pained her to look at him. Ruth moved closer because she knew what it was like to have people truly see you and then turn away. “I’ve not been here long,” she said, “but I don’t think you don’t have a family because you never made it a priority. I think you’re so busy making sure you’re providing enough work to sustain the community’s families that you never found time to build your own.”

  “That’s kind of you,” Elam said. “To give me the benefit of the doubt. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve never been able to let people in.”

  Sighing, Ruth turned and leaned back against the sorting table so they stood facing the empty barn. A crumpled paper cup was abandoned on the floor. “You’re not the only one,” she said. “I’ve often wondered if going through hard things hardens us.”

  He glanced over. “You mean, you don’t let yourself fe
el so you won’t feel pain?”

  “Something like that. I guess, when faced with hard things, we can either choose to embrace the pain or let it reinforce our defenses.”

  “I won’t, if you won’t,” he said. Ruth looked over at him, and he grinned. One of the first times she’d seen him smile since the party.

  She reached out a hand. “You promise?”

  “Mennonites don’t take oaths.”

  “Then it’s not an oath, Elam. Just a handshake.”

  He looked down and then up at her. He extended his hand. The tips of his fingers were stained with the cranberries he had labored over during the past two days. Her fingertips were stained the same. Their stained fingers touched as their hands clasped. In the background, one of the lamps sputtered and then burned out. Ruth’s eyes struggled to adjust to the dimmer light. When they did, he was still looking at her. Elam put his other hand on top of theirs and held it there.

  DECEMBER 7, 2015

  Dear Chandler,

  Tonight, I sat on the couch and watched you dance with our daughter. The instrumental version of “Bittersweet Symphony” was playing on Pandora, and Sofie walked up to you, batted those big brown eyes of hers, and asked you to dance. I batted my eyes in similar fashion the day we wed, and you—who never dance—danced with me in front of all your staff, the volunteers, the children, and Director Janice. I don’t remember very much about that moment, as my head was swirling with all that would take place that night. And yet, I will always remember how we rocked back and forth: your hands locked at the base of my waist, and the only dress shoes you owned (scuffed, ugly things you’d probably had since college) trampled the hem of my white cotton dress.