Again, even in her cheery invitation, Willow could sense a silent desperation about Annetta, something she hadn’t felt from her since her divorce. This time, Willow paused to make serious eye contact.
Annetta’s brown doll-eyes thwarted the invasion as soon as she saw it coming. She wasn’t ready to share her feelings openly, even if she knew she couldn’t hide the leaks around the edges. A busy hostess agenda distracted her from deeper contact.
Annetta narrated on the way into the kitchen, directing her recruits. Claudia remained silent throughout the last touches of setup, though she did stretch a polite smile whenever face-to-face with Annetta. Though Willow was the famously intuitive one, Annetta was able to see that Willow’s mother was not nearly as comfortable in her skin as her daughter, let alone comfortable in Annetta’s house.
The other guests included Bernie Thurman and his wife. Bernie had retired from the library board just before Annetta retired from managing the new branch. They had served together and had constituted a bridge between working staff and the supporting community. Bernie’s wife, Selma, had become Annetta’s closest friend along the way. Willow had seen Selma and Bernie many times, most often at Annetta’s house. The three of them were always at the top of Annetta’s guest list.
Neighbors from opposite sides of her townhouse completed the party just two minutes after the Thurmans. Ilise Cantor lived next door. Willow had also met her at previous parties in that house. At first, Annetta had invited Ilise because the fifty-year-old unmarried woman always seemed lonely, and the thin walls of the townhouse made it impossible to have guests without her knowing. But, after those first few guilty invitations, Ilise simply became another default guest for almost any party Annetta would throw. From down the row a few houses, new residents Chung and Megan Dae-Ho, joined them for the first time. They kept Willow from being the youngest one at the party by at least ten years. Annetta gravitated toward mixed-race couples as strongly as Claudia was discomforted by them. Claudia was, however, relieved to hear Chung speak with no accent at all. Even the average Caucasian from Colorado stretched Claudia’s ability to translate everything they said into her rural plains twang.
The tension evident in her mother’s mask-like face, and the cloaked tension of Annetta’s uncomfortable retirement, would have driven Willow insane, if she allowed herself to remain logged into the feelings of both women. Instead, she opted out, concentrating on getting to know the Dae-Hos and reconciled to the prospect of an early exit with Claudia.
Hors d’oeuvres and drinks in hand, and several conversations going at once, the getting-acquainted energy still in the air, Bernie suddenly stopped talking and began to look nauseated, his medium brown face turning a shade of green. When Willow saw him, she wondered if he was allergic to something in the food, feeling instantly sorry for Annetta. But then Bernie pressed the back of his hand to the left side of his chest, his wine glass still held by that shaking hand.
Selma reached up and took the glass, even as her face betrayed more panic than that self-conscious act would imply. To Willow’s surprise, it was Claudia who spoke up. “Someone dial 911!” She broke everyone else out of paralysis. Chung was the quickest to his cell phone and was already listening to the dial tone when Selma and Ilise helped Bernie slip down onto the rug near the fireplace. He was wincing tightly and making a small moaning sound that reminded Willow of the low noise a cicada makes when it has had its say for a while and begins to wind down.
Annetta came back into the room at this point. She stood with a tray of fresh hors d’oeuvres, her mouth open and eyes wide. Willow took control of the situation, even as Chung spoke to the emergency response people on his phone.
“Annetta, come and help me,” Willow said, kneeling next to Selma. Ilise took the cue to get to her feet and move out of the way. Most people in the room assumed Willow was setting up for CPR, but Annetta had an idea that Willow was planning something else.
“Put your hands on him,” Willow said authoritatively.
Annetta, who had made it to her knees with surprising speed, put two hands on Bernie’s chest. He had stopped his low buzzing moan and just breathed irregularly, as if he was about to start sobbing, but never actually getting there.
“I command this heart to begin to beat regularly right now,” Willow said, her two hands next to Annetta’s.
Bernie seemed to relax a little, but maintained the grimace on his face and still breathed unnaturally. Willow’s and Annetta’s hands rose and fell with his round torso.
Willow said it again. “Heart, you begin regular beats right now.”
This time, Bernie opened his eyes. His breathing settled, and he looked at Willow. He started to smile.
The rapid transition from that grimace to that smile caused the new couple to feel as if Bernie was just playing a joke, a very odd thing for a seventy-some year old man to do at a party.
Willow, however, was smiling even bigger than Bernie. Annetta straightened up and looked exhausted. She put a hand to her own heart, to check if it had resumed business as usual.
Selma lay her head on Bernie’s chest in her best impression of a hug, given the awkward circumstances.
“Oh, you scared the life outta me, old man,” she said with far less inhibition than she generally showed at one of Annetta’s parties.
Chung was still holding the phone. “The ambulance is on the way,” he said, his thin black eyebrows curled in confusion.
“What just happened?” Megan asked, feeling that she and her husband had missed something.
Ilise helped Annetta back to her feet, a process that took ten times longer than the reverse, and an effort that seemed as if it might not succeed for a second. Finally standing up straight and receiving the hors d’oeuvre tray from Ilise, whose fit waistline made retrieving it from the floor an easy maneuver, Annetta let out a big sigh. “Just about ruined my party, is what happened.”
Everyone but the newcomers laughed. Willow recognized the depth of their confusion. She returned to her feet and explained.
“I’m pretty sure it was a heart attack. The EMT’s can check him out to make sure he’s okay. But I think he’s been healed of the main symptoms at least.”
The young couple looked at Willow as if she had lapsed into a foreign tongue.
Annetta tried to translate. “If you hang around this lady very long, you’re gonna see things you just can’t explain. That’s all there is to it.”
Willow demurred a bit and nodded at Annetta. “She’s the one with the healing gift. Maybe now she’ll believe it.”
Annetta shook her head, her eyes half closed, as if she had heard it all before and was not inclined to listen. “We all know who the miracle maven around here is,” she said, placing the tray on the coffee table a few feet away.
And that was the end of that conversation. All attention turned back to Bernie, and whether he was okay to get up off the floor, and how he was feeling. By the time he was in a chair, they could hear a distant siren drawing closer.
After the exam from the EMT’s, Bernie insisted on staying at the party. The paramedics didn’t try very hard to convince him otherwise, and the evening continued.
Surprisingly, Claudia seemed much more comfortable after all of that commotion, and Willow didn’t leave nearly as early as she had expected. She even had time to corner Annetta and see what was going on with her.
“You gonna tell me what’s wrong now?” Willow said, when they stood alone in the kitchen after dessert. The new couple had left, and the others were moving slowly in that direction.
“You know exactly what’s wrong,” Annetta said in a subdued version of her usual sassy reply. Her age and her weight seemed to be deflating her voice. The excitement that evening had also sapped much of her energy.
“So what are you gonna do about it?”
Willow knew that Annetta was having a hard time adjusting to retirement. She also knew that her question was like a ball that she and Annetta passed back and forth, wheneve
r some problem arose. It was Annetta’s turn to answer.
“Suppose I should go on the road with my healing ministry?” she said, joking out of the side of her mouth, while concentrating on wrapping up leftovers for the Thurmans to take with them.
“You probably did save his life, ya know,” Willow said, still trying to get Annetta to be serious about her gift.
Rolling her eyes as she looked up at Willow, Annetta’s face suddenly changed. “Hey, if I saved his life, you think he’ll let Selma come over and see me more often?” A half grin and raised eyebrows accompanied her joke, or at least half a joke.
“You could invite Claudia over. She’s bored most days,” Willow said.
At the beginning of the evening that suggestion would have been another joke. But after the bonding experience of Bernie’s heart attack and healing, Claudia had loosened up considerably. She was delaying Ilise from leaving at that very moment by grilling her about her job at the water company, testing for impurities. Prone to believe conspiracy theories, Claudia had been trying some of these out on the shy chemist. Earlier, she had grilled Selma about her upbringing in Alabama and then Chicago, sounding like she was doing a documentary for public television with all her questions. The other guests were sufficiently gracious to overlook Claudia’s prejudices and awkwardness, which led to a good time for all.
Annetta nodded and shrugged her shoulders slightly. “I may as well give it a try. I’m getting’ too old to hit her, so you wouldn’t have to worry about that.”
Willow laughed. “I’m gonna be away one weekend early next month,” she said. “Maybe mention that to her when you call.” Then she added an afterthought. “She can go to church with you.”
This made Annetta cackle as loudly as she had any time that night. They were both trying to picture pugnacious and prejudiced Claudia at Annetta’s all-black church. The prospect was more humorous than horrifying after Claudia’s thaw that evening. But they both knew Willow was just kidding.
After hugs in the kitchen, and more in the living room, along with many thanks from Bernie and Selma, Willow began to put on her coat and hat. Claudia already stood by the door. She had exhausted her store of questions before she had exhausted the patience of her fellow guests, and now she was ready to go home.
“I’m sure glad you were here,” Bernie said, when he hugged Willow. “I ain’t ready to go see the pearly gates just yet.”
Selma echoed his thanks but added a bit of humor of her own. “I don’t think that new couple is gonna be comin’ back any time soon. I think you scared the hell out of ‘em.”
Annetta piped in. “But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
Everyone laughed, carrying their mirth with them into the shadowy gray cold hovering along the streets and sidewalks.
Standing on the Water
That Sunday afternoon Willow had some time to herself, as usual. She curled up by the fireplace, wool socks on her feet and a cream-colored oversized sweater sagging off one shoulder, only to reveal two more layers beneath it. The worship service that morning had put her in the mood for a visit with her heavenly lover. It only took her a minute and a few deep breaths to leave her cozy living room for a place so near that she could get there in a breath, yet so far that she could never reach it by plane, train or automobile.
She was back at a familiar meeting place. And he stood there before her, just as she remembered their last meeting here. Of course, he smiled at her. He always started with a smile so true that it concealed no more than you could hide in a crystal glass. He was clearly glad to see her, wherever they met. He seemed playful and on the verge of laughter from standing with her here. His head rose and fell slowly as Willow focused on his eyes, her own body rising up and rolling down at the same rhythm but not in unison with him.
They stood facing each other on top of the ocean, perhaps. The water was graphite gray, and the waves rose between one and two feet. This was no stormy encounter, just a place to be alone and to learn about faith.
Her lover looked down at the waves beneath her bare feet. She never wore shoes in these encounters and had given very little thought to who selected her wardrobe. She didn’t do anything to suit up for her times with him, and she assumed he dressed her in what would please both himself and his beloved.
In her vision, Willow could feel the cool water under her feet, as if she were standing on a stiff bowl of gelatin, fresh from the fridge. Someone was gently rocking the bowl, if that’s what it was. But all this was peripheral. His eyes kept her attention. She watched him as a faithful retriever watches for her master’s slightest signal, and she did so with her own playful smile in place. She had not aimed at this meeting spot; it just happened. But she knew that she usually landed here when she had a faith stretch coming and needed a reminder from the one who crafted faith inside her soul.
“Is it about the psychic convention next month?” she said, never needing to introduce a topic with him.
He just chuckled, because, as soon as she asked, she knew the answer. Why else would she guess that this was the reason she needed her faith to increase?
Then he grew a bit more serious, stepped forward and put an arm around her waist. And they began to walk as he talked.
“It is ironic that they invited you to speak at their convention because they identified with the way the police treated you, how they mistrusted you. The people at that convention know that feeling of mistrust. And here you are mistrusting them as well, worried what they’ll say or do if you just speak honestly.”
Willow hadn’t put it all together that way by herself. She had debated for a while whether she should accept the weekend trip to Southern California, to speak at the gathering of occult readers and psychics. Anna Conyers’s magazine article about Willow’s incarceration had intrigued the organizers. In their milieu of openness to almost everything, they heard in Anna’s words and saw in what they imagined of Willow’s actions, a kindred spirit; though perhaps the more realistic among them detected the solidly Christian explanation of what Willow had done, quoted in her own words. Excluded from the published article, cut by Anna’s editors, was Willow’s reiteration that she wasn’t a psychic, but only a believer that God can speak to his people.
The expedition had finally taken shape, recently, to include a booth on the convention floor for Willow and people from her “group,” the organizers said, unable to utter the word “church” in that context. Willow thought she could hear the woman grimace over the phone during the hesitation over how not to address the ways in which this invitation defied all precedent, and most sense.
“You want me to just say what I feel, to hold nothing back, right?” Willow said as they slowly strolled up and down the waves.
“Hold nothing back?” he said, clearly offering her a chance to reconsider that construct.
She looked down at the waves briefly, then back at him and nodded. She understood that restraint was appropriate, but not constraint. They both stretched little smiles, mirroring without even looking at each other.
Then the topic changed. “I thought I was getting better, until he came into my life,” Willow said.
Jesus knew she referred to Scott.
“I was feeling more and more that freedom, that lightness that you had taught me about. Translucence for my soul,” she said, reminding him of what he, of course, would always remember.
That discussion had been one of the first times they walked together on the water. The waves were bigger that day, and instead of two lovers walking arm-in-arm, they resembled much more a drowning person clinging to a buoy. The struggle to trust was, of course, part of the lesson.
He had also showed her something, those years ago, that had reshaped her life. “Your spirit is where I live inside you. It is what hosts my holy presence. Your soul is the thoughts and desires with which you filter, and often host, the world.” She remembered his patience, allowing Willow to switch between trying to relax in that precarious place and listening to his impor
tant teaching. Then the two came together.
“What you’re feeling now, that urge for safety, for a firm place to put your feet, comes from your soul. You have many urges and desires that come from that part of you. It’s where most people live their entire lives, caught between their wants and the pain of never really getting anything that truly satisfies.” Willow had paused her steps, and he had let her go just briefly, standing an arm’s length away for just a moment. She stepped toward him, like Peter fresh out of the boat. Willow, unlike Peter, clung to him and ignored the tossing and splashing waves. For a moment, it felt as if they might start one of those close, eye-to-eye dances she loved so much. But he wanted to continue the lesson.
“So, what you did, testing that urge, and deciding what to do with it, that is what I want you to do every day, with every desire of your soul, every thought and will.” And this is where he painted for her the image that carried her forward toward what he had in mind. “Your soul was designed to be translucent, to allow the light of your spirit, united with my spirit, to shine out to the world. But your soul, like the soul of everyone else that you know, is opaque. It’s the light that is my point,” he said. His hair whipped in the wind, but always stayed out of his eyes, so she could read his heart there.
“My soul blocks the light of your spirit. It’s supposed to be,” she hesitated, getting acquainted with the word, “translucent, letting the light through.”
He had nodded to acknowledge her understanding. “And the things that make you opaque are those desires and thoughts that preoccupy your world day in and day out. What you need, what you want, what you deserve, what makes you feel safe, what makes you feel comfortable,” he said. “Your devotion to those things will always obscure my presence inside you. You are mature enough now to peel away the layers of those soulish desires.”
Feeling like a half-drowned child in his arms on those rocking waves inspired some doubt in Willow’s soul back then. Even as she met with him, spirit to spirit, her personality remained; her soul still made itself known.
The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2) Page 22
