“I know this is strange for you,” he said.
Then, something occurred to Gladys. “But it doesn’t seem strange at all to you?”
Jesus shook his head slowly. “I was serious about what I said last night. I really am with you all the time. I’ve just come out now to let you get a better grip on that.”
Gladys thought about this, without responding immediately. After a few seconds, she began to appreciate the way Jesus waited so patiently for her to respond. No one in her family had ever allowed her so much time to think. Then she remembered something he said last night.
“You said this was like when you converted Muslims by appearing to them in countries where Christianity is illegal,” she said. “I don’t see how.”
His eyes said, “I appreciate your question, but I’m also happy to just sit here looking at you.” After an extra-long pause of his own, he said, “I don’t appear to them to convert them. They have to decide that for themselves. I appear to them to confirm what they know deep in their hearts, that I’m real and readily available to them.” He smiled slyly. “Apparently, I’m pretty convincing, because a lot of them do convert.” He paused again to grin more broadly at Gladys. He knew that she hadn’t tied those pieces together into an answer to her own question yet, but he didn’t seem anxious to do that for her.
He took a deep breath, still watching her with a peaceful bent to his eyes. “You’ve been worried lately about whether you’re forgetting things. And you know Patty’s worried, as is Bill. But you and I know that you’ve been forgetting about me for much longer than these dementia concerns have been around.”
A feeling, like having her slippers on the wrong feet, stirred up that anxious stomach of hers. A brief flicker of doubt wondered whether this Jesus might be some kind of imposter. But then Gladys looked at him, observing her so patiently.
“I’m real,” he said. “And I am who you know I am.”
For the first time in this brief encounter, and indeed the first time in her adult life, Gladys felt electric chills up her spine and into the hair on the back of her head. Before she said anything, Jesus responded.
“I’m excited about it too.”
Gladys didn’t know she was excited. If she had been younger she would have been thinking freaked out was more like it. Though she, of course, knew that phrase, her more mature mind simply wondered if this whole experience was inappropriate.
“You don’t think I should be doing this?” Jesus said, responding to her thoughts.
Rerunning the past minute, Gladys wanted to make sure that she hadn’t spoken, and that Jesus was really listening inside her head. Again, it felt odd and invasive. To her own surprise, she put her feelings into words.
“I don’t want you here like this. I don’t like this. It makes me feel strange.”
He nodded, his lips tight, his smile faded. “I know. And I’m willing to go invisible if you want me to. But I won’t be leaving. Not ever.”
More flustered than she had ever been in all her life, Gladys said the only thing she could think clearly. “I want to get up and get dressed. Can you give me some privacy?”
Jesus stood up. “Of course. Take your time. I’ll wait in the living room.”
If Gladys had tried getting dressed wearing a blindfold and mittens, it wouldn’t have been more awkward. She kept drifting off track into pretzel-twisted questions. One of the most irksome was Jesus saying that he would never leave and yet willingly waiting outside her door. A careful and receptive mind could have reconciled those two statements, but Gladys’s brain had launched into panic, after a holding pattern around confused.
Did she really tell him she didn’t like having him in her house? It was what she was feeling when she said it, but should she have said it? Asking herself why she felt it, was a giant step beyond her usual mental game of solitaire.
When she came out into the living room, resisting the urge to fix both bra straps in front of him, Gladys looked at Jesus, who stood by the front door, as if preparing to leave. She was trying to decide what to say, to guess how much she had to retract, or whether to just let things stand. Jesus spoke first.
“Do you think you’re crazy, Gladdy?”
“Crazy?” she said. “I been trying to convince the kids that I’m not losin’ my grip. I don’t think I’m crazy.” She paused a moment, and then said, “At least, I didn’t used to think so.” She looked hard at him, a feeling rising in her that she had just discovered something, though she wasn’t yet sure what.
Their eyes locked on each other, Jesus let a smile rise up from his bearded lips to his playful eyes. Simultaneously, Gladys’s brow sank and her mouth puckered.
“Why do you call me ‘Gladdy?’”
“I like it,” he said simply. “It fits who you really are.”
Gladys wondered something. “You do know why Harry called me that, don’t you?”
“Of course. It’s from when kids used to make fun of you in school, pronouncing your name Glad-ass.” Jesus paused for his words to settle and her painful memory to percolate.
Gladys looked horrified, her lips an inverted smile and eyes wide. She didn’t approve of that language coming from Jesus.
“And I didn’t approve of it coming from them either,” Jesus said, responding again to her nonverbal reaction.
Then she returned to that other agenda. “I’m not crazy, am I?”
Jesus shook his head. “Though, I have to admit, if you were crazy, asking your hallucination for a psychological evaluation might be a bit questionable.” He let out a big laugh. Stepping up, as if to embrace her, but settling for a pat on her left shoulder. Her recoiling neck and raised hands signaled her discomfort at his approach. Gladys wasn’t ready to just laugh and make up.
“What would my kids think if I told them I could see you here like this?”
Jesus inhaled and tipped his head slightly to one side. “You can guess the answer to that pretty well, I think. But does that really matter? You don’t have to tell them.”
Gladys was aware of this last point, of course, but felt as if it missed the mark. “I would know, and they would figure something was up,” she said.
“And then?”
“Then they would put me away, like they did my cousin Leah.”
Just like Gladys, Jesus could remember the day when she heard the news that her cousin had been sent to the hospital. Thirteen years old at the time, Gladys could only think of physical illnesses when her mother broke the news to her. She and Leah had been friends since toddlerhood. Their family farms were only three miles apart, so they played together more frequently than Gladys did with any of her other relatives.
Leah had been the most imaginative person Gladys knew, ready to invent new games with innovative scenarios and roles to play. Gladys loved to follow her cousin, a year older than her, into the worlds she created. But there were those times when Gladys would tire of a game and try to persuade Leah to go hunting for hens’ eggs stowed around the yard, or go catching frogs by the creek behind the house. If she wasn’t ready to quit, Leah would answer only from within their make-believe world, as if she couldn’t get out. While it seemed on the surface that she might just have been acting stubborn, a crawling fear lurked behind Gladys’s eyes, fear that Leah was unable to free herself from her fantasies.
“You think you might just be imagining me, like one of Leah’s games?” Jesus said.
Seeing Jesus inserting himself again into her past like that, gave Gladys a bit of vertigo. She sat down in Harry’s chair, just four steps from the front door. It was not the impossibility of what she was hearing that sent her head swimming, it was the possibility, even the reasonable likelihood. If Jesus is real, and if Jesus does accompany people through their lives, then why not hers? Why not her childhood games with Leah? Why not the loss of her favorite cousin?
Gladys watched as Jesus approached. He seemed to garner permission from her look, to kneel down next to her there in the chair. He asked for fu
rther permission.
“May I put my arms around you?” he said.
Her head turned forty-five degrees to look at his face, she realized she wanted him to put his arms around her, and she also realized that this desire disturbed her. The intense juxtaposition of that desire against her discomfort froze Gladys in place.
Jesus didn’t move either, seeming to possess infinite patience and feeling no need to be anywhere else doing anything else.
Chapter 5
RELIEVED
Gladys hadn’t had breakfast yet. She rarely made good, steady decisions without breakfast first. She knew she couldn’t make a leap into an abyss of uncertainty until after her toast and juice.
Jesus sat at the kitchen table, at the opposite end of the room from the big window that looked over the back yard. He read the obituaries to Gladys, as she shuffled around the room preparing her toast, and some for Jesus as well. She couldn’t imagine eating while he just sat there watching. And he, apparently, couldn’t refuse carefully-made toast and orange juice served in Gladys’s kitchen.
“What was that name again?” Gladys said, after Jesus finished the obit of a woman five years older than Gladys.
“Marjorie Kline,” Jesus said.
“That does sound familiar.” Gladys’s voice tailed off. She pulled the margarine from the refrigerator, the light from the open door casting a glow to her eyes and cheeks for a brief moment.
“You want me to remind you how you knew Marjorie?”
Gladys stopped in the middle of the room. The first thought that scampered across her mind was, “Is that allowed?” That one seemed to flush out another that said, “But my, wouldn’t that be handy?”
“You would do that?” she said aloud.
“Sure. I remind you of things all the time.”
“You do?” Gladys saw the toast beginning to burn at the edges. She swept in, turned off the toaster and popped the door open, flicking each piece of toast off the little metal rack onto a dinner plate set there for that purpose. The plate, with its twirl of pink and blue flowers around the edge, was part of the set she received at her 25th anniversary, from her mother and father.
Back to the conversation with Jesus, though her hands stayed on task, she said, “You mean you normally do that when you’re not. . . I mean when you’re . . .”
“Inside you?” Jesus finished her thought.
Gladys stopped scraping the margarine across the third piece of toast and looked at Jesus. She wondered at how this conversation seemed familiar, like she had, in fact, heard that same voice finish her thoughts before last night.
She nodded, and Jesus didn’t seem to need a verbal response to his question, or the one before that either. “You and Marjorie were both on the bake sale committee to raise money for the addition to your church, back in 1996. That was before her husband died and she moved over to Wauwatosa.”
The recollection unearthed by Jesus’s spadework slipped Gladys away from her struggle with the insane hallucination now sitting at her table. Her mind dropped into a path through faces and events that had long lost a place in her gallery of conscious memories. She recalled the way Harry used to look when he bit into one of her seven-layer bars, his eyes just beginning to roll back into his head, as if the sticky, sweet dessert might induce a seizure of delight. She chuckled when she remembered his hoot at the sight of all those bars, four batches, along with all the other treats that she baked for that sale.
She could picture her stout husband of thirty years, by then, a bit more tan in the face after their recent move up to Wisconsin, and a backyard with enough sun for flowers and vegetables. When she thought of his smiles, she thought of the word “jolly,” though it felt like a word for a chubbier person than her Harry. She loved to induce one of those jolly smiles with her cooking or her teasing, or sometimes a kiss on the lips.
All of that collage of memories came from the mention of Marjorie Kline, and a bake sale almost twenty years ago. Gladys looked at Jesus, who had stopped reading the paper and seemed to be reading her instead. For a moment, Gladys felt the warmth of his smile seeping into her own face, into her own heart. Then the voice of her daughter, Patty, seemed to squawk in one ear and Gladys was back to worrying that she had lost her mind.
Setting a plate of toast in front of Jesus, she also set one in her usual spot. From there, she could see both the big window over the sink and the smaller one over the counter with the spice jars, four dozen jars all arranged in a wooden rack built by her father for her mother, sixty years ago. Lowering herself into her metal and vinyl chair, she realized too late that she had left the orange juice on the counter. Before she could say anything, or begin to stand up again, Jesus stood up and stepped over to grab the two glasses, setting one down in front of Gladys and one by his plate.
“Oh, thank you,” she said. The sound of her words reminded her that she hadn’t said anything for a while, lost in her thoughts.
“You’re welcome, Dear,” he said, regaining his seat. He looked at Gladys who had lifted a piece of toast, but stopped midway to her mouth when she saw him watching.
A brief flex of her brow asked what he was doing.
“You gonna say thanks to my father?”
Briefly, Gladys felt like she was sitting across from Bill, her son, now in his mid-fifties, six years older than Patty. The reference to Jesus’s father stirred this confusion. Then she was back in touch with the current time and place.
“I really am having trouble thinking straight,” she said.
Jesus nodded. “It’s true. But I’ll make sure things don’t stay that way.”
Gladys tipped her head, dropped her toast on her plate, and then dropped the anticipation from her face.
“Here I am getting reassurance that I’ll be okay from a hallucination,” she said, about half seriously.
Jesus laughed at the joking half of that confession. Then he sobered.
“Is God imaginary?” he said, picking up his toast and taking a bite.
As she pondered whether this was a trick question, Gladys was struck by the sound of Jesus chewing the toast, his crunching as real as anything she had ever heard. She reached up with both hands and covered her ears. It occurred to her that, if Jesus were just a ghost residing in her imagination, then stopping her ears wouldn’t silence the crunching. But it did. She pressed on the little shutter-like pieces of cartilage which stopped her ears when she pushed them in. The sound of Jesus chewing came and went with her pressure on those God-given stoppers. He took another bite and smiled a merry smile at her.
“You remind me of Harry,” she said, surprising herself.
Jesus nodded and continued chewing with his mouth closed, apparently aware of modern table manners, regardless of his outdated attire. Gladys remembered how hungry she was and took her first bite. For a minute or two, they simply harmonized, biting their toast, chewing politely but audibly, and sipping their orange juice. Jesus smacked his lips after the first taste of the sweet and tangy juice, but refrained after that, when Gladys looked up at him, a bit of disapproval framing her surprise.
“I should probably tell you how this works,” Jesus said, when he had finished his second piece of toast and washed it down with a big swallow of juice.
Gladys stopped chewing and nodded her head, her eyes looking much like they had when her mother informed her that she would be taking piano lessons with Mrs. Peterson, a privilege Gladys cherished as much as a dental appointment.
“You should know that no one else will be able to see me, the way you’re seeing me now. I’m just making myself visible to you for a while, only you.”
Again, the feeling of a dubious privilege filled the space where words might have popped out of Gladys on any other day, ever the wise-cracking, chatty grandma.
Then she found her words. “Only me?”
“That’s the plan right now,” Jesus said, sounding to Gladys as if he were still working things out with some invisible committee somewhere.
&n
bsp; “They will think I’m crazy then.”
“You don’t have to tell them, remember?”
“Hmmm.” Gladys knew she wasn’t very good at keeping secrets.
“You worry too much about what Patty thinks,” Jesus said.
Gladys finished her toast and ruminated on Jesus’s observation.
Surprising herself again, Gladys said, “She reminds me of my mother.”
Jesus chuckled. “Yeah, I know what you mean. But neither of them know how to be you as well as you do.”
Following the spaghetti loop of that bit of wisdom, Gladys sat back in her chair and tipped her head. “You seem to know a lot about me and my family, and you’re not afraid to say what you think,” she said.
“And that reminds me of someone else in this family,” he said, his face one big silent laugh.
“I’ve been pretty tongue-tied since you showed up,” Gladys said, a complaint and an apology holding hands and jumping out together.
“I caught you by surprise,” Jesus said, sympathetically. “I know you never liked surprises.”
“Ha,” Gladys said, nearly rolling her eyes. Then she remembered something. “Except the time the kids did all the dishes and cleaned up the house while I was in the hospital with the first knee surgery.”
Jesus grinned and stood up, taking both of their plates over to the sink. “Yeah, that was a really good surprise. But I think you weren’t completely surprised that time. I think you knew they could do some of it and that Harry would put them up to it.”
“I thought he might, but I didn’t know for sure.” Gladys laughed, suddenly welcoming someone to talk to, someone to share her memories with. And she forgot, for a moment, to be afraid what others would think of her sanity.
“I remember the look on Bill’s face when he realized that there was actually a brush he could have used for cleaning the toilet?” Jesus said, sensing Gladys’s willingness to dive deeper into the reminiscence.
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 4
